A potpourri of thoughts on above comments ….

1. Not to scare the kiddies, but they are not going to be launched into a world of unchallenged American supremacy. They are going to be competing economically against a billion or so Indians, Chinese, and other youngsters who have been raised to do one thing, and one thing above all else — SUCCEED. (“I drink your milkshake!” … anyone?) Much as it may seem unfair that the brave new global economic world will be some version of “American tots” vs. “Asian bots,” that’s what it comes down to … taking the stakes seriously. And the stakes are not merely how the individual does, but how that individual’s progeny does, and ultimately how the nation does.

Funny enough, some of the current immigrants to the U.S. and virtually all of the past-gen immigrants had this sense of great urgency — that it was going to take a lot of bare-knuckles, back-breaking work, and a rigorous no-nonsense education, to launch their kids into the dog-eat-dog American system. But they believed in the system. Instead of wanting to dumb-down the competitive standards, they wanted to elevate their kids to where they could compete and flourish.

Is America serious about education, really? Do people grasp the connection between this generation’s curriculum content and work ethic, and the United States’ productive & economic health 20 or 30 years from now?

2. LOTM @ 60 – I happened to be in grad school when the “critical thinking” fash hit the English Dept at my university. They replaced “English 101″ with “Reading and Writing Across the Curriculum” and “English 102″ with what amounted to a lit version of critical thinking. The approach had its pros and cons. The gist was to make that freshman-level English class more relevant to the non-English majors (the vast majority of students).

But the biggest indicator of what a kid got out of the course, IMO, was the teacher he/she happened to draw … and most of the teachers were us grad students. Some of us were pretty good. Some of us were furchtbar. I still remember the incident where a parent lodged a formal complaint when their freshman came home reporting that they had been learning the Freudian interpretation of “Ode to a Nightingale” in their English class (the phallic “i,” blah blah blah), just because one of our more odious grad students (a double major in philosophy & English) had taken it upon himself to lay bare the truth about the crypto-fascist Western culture to his 18-year-old charges.

“Critical thinking,” like much else in the academy, can be interpreted in any number of ways depending on the semantics. “Thinking that is critical of America and the West” is frequently how it is interpreted, unfortunately.

But at its plainest, just teaching kids to compare and contrast various pieces of information from multiple sources, and to think critically about those sources and their motives (including who funded the study), is enough of a battle. This is the information age, after all. Young people are awash in an ocean of it. But where do they learn discernment? How to filter out the noise, take in what is potentially useful, separate the accurate from the inaccurate, and, finally, to synthesize the accurate into a personal judgment (oh that word!) … THAT is the kind of critical thinking our kids need desperately to learn how to do.

But you are right that, without a worldview that holds that there are such things as “facts” to begin with, and without an education system that teaches facts, there is no foundation for the higher level skills of critical thinking.

3. On proselytizing … anyone who has hung around Christian (esp. evangelical) churches long enough will have heard the sayings, “You are the only Bible most people will ever read” and “More is caught than taught.” The emphasis of evangelizing is put on LIVING the gospel, not just talking it.

I have a personal observation to add, which is, that problems seem to frequently arise when Christians “relate by evangelizing, rather than evangelize by relating.” Not like I’m a paragon of anything myself. But one can’t exactly blame an unbeliever for being suspicious of his Christian neighbor’s motives if his experience of Christians has been that he’s more or less viewed by them as a potential notch on the belt.

4. I find myself thinking often about that John Adams quotation: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for the government of any other.”

I take a couple of lessons from this.

First, that the Constitution deliberately asserted individual liberties and proscribed government behavior … rather than attempting to proscribe individual behavior (or, God forbid, asserting government liberties). Why frame the Constitution this way? Well, a couple reasons. (1) You recognize your task as a drafter/framer of the Constitution is the limited one of articulating a vision of government, not humanity. IE you are trying to formulate a just government, not a perfected human being. (2) You do not attempt to lay out a plan for the perfection of humanity in the US Constitution for one or all of the following reasons: (a) there are enough strenuous quarrels amongst the conventioneers already, and if you want to get home before the turn of the century you need to stick to the limited task, (b) you believe man is a sinner and therefore imperfectable in this world anyway, and any attempt to create a perfected society is a fool’s (or tyrant’s) errand, and (c) the degree to which humans *can* be “improved” is not the task of a national government, but of other institutions such as church, family, and civic organizations.

Second … was Adams giving us a warning? If America as a nation is no longer “under God,” will the Constitution then be inadequate as a governing document?

Have we reached that point?