Education without integrity only makes irrational, morally bankrupt individuals more arrogant and more vehement.
Today is the anniversary of the 1742 birth of Revolutionary War hero Gen. Nathanael Greene, one of George Washington’s trusted commanders. Greene looked to the future as well as the present, and the role learning would play in ensuring America’s success. “Learning is not virtue but the means to bring us an acquaintance with it. Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, and knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful. Let these be your motives to action through life, the relief of the distressed, the detection of frauds, the defeat of oppression, and diffusion of happiness,” he said.
All the Founding Fathers valued education, because a good man who knows is more powerful the more truth he knows. On the other hand, as Alexander Pope said, “A little learning is a dangerous thing.” Or rather, mere education is not sufficient to ensure virtue, and can even actively encourage vice.
For example, look at all the schools and universities run by wokies. Our education system in America has been going downhill, deliberately ruined by elites, for quite a while, but it has particularly plummeted in recent decades.
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As of January, the Nation’s Report Card showed continued declines in pre-high school students’ reading scores, a trend particularly marked since the Covid-19 lockdowns, which of course were educationally catastrophic. Likewise, as of the end of 2024, American students’ math and science scores were trending down — in fact, the declines were described as “steep.”
The educational model based on “diversity,” critical race theory, hyper-elaborate educational jargon, excessive administrative paperwork, lowered standards, self-esteem, and Marxism has failed utterly. Education degrees, government funding, and racial quotas are worse than useless — they’re destructive. The education Abraham Lincoln and Laura Ingalls Wilder received in one-room shacks in the wilderness was infinitely superior to most college degrees today. There are PhDs who haven’t read the Constitution, Shakespeare, Vergil, or Euclid, but invent a new “gender identity” every day and hysterically support genocidal jihadis.
But we all know how corrupt the system is. The problem is that the solutions are often as bad as or worse than the problems. One root cause that we cannot avoid, although most people want to because it involves such a difficult and long-term solution, is the lack of integrity. Americans overwhelmingly reject Judeo-Christian morality, if not in words than in actions. Until we change our culture to value life, liberty, justice, self-sacrifice, chastity, and personal responsibility again, our education system will continue to be corrupt.
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The very good news is each of us can control to some extent how this changes. By developing integrity ourselves, and encouraging others to do so, we can be part of the solution. As John Adams observed, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
