Educating Citizens with Kirk, Kass, and Guinness

by Robert Woods

In addition to a desperate need for a revival of the Great Books to bring back some life in the barren world of modern education, the United States of America has been in trouble regarding political and a general civic ignorance. Historian Thomas Cahill once quipped that Rome fell when its people forgot what it meant to be citizens.

I wrote last year on the amazing book edited by Leon and Amy Kass What So Proudly We Hail. If one were to take this wonderful volume, add to it Russell Kirk’s The Roots of American Order, The Will of the People published by The Great Books Foundation and Os Guinness’s The Great Experiment, all of these, with the exception of Kirk’s brilliant work, are readers of primary sources with the kinds of questions that engage thought and call for action.

Dr. Kass and others have gone the extra mile in offering the kind of civic education that behemoth government would rather its people not learn. Uncle Sam hopes the people merely yield to what may ultimately become the first democratic republic that quietly acquiesces to tyranny – a tyranny enabled by social and political propaganda misleading the masses.

When Civics was replaced by American Government, we lost something central to our education. Now is the time for a return to a civics education that shapes citizens, not just consumers, and minds shaped by the media. Let me urge all who read this blog to get these books and make your way through them. Encourage others to read, learn, converse and live as citizens. You can also benefit tremendously by the free curriculum

Kass and others have assembled. Here is a free education wisely informing any who would learn about the potential fullness of being a citizen in this nation for the time one resides in this nation, while there is a nation.

Books mentioned in this essay may be found in The Imaginative Conservative Bookstore. Essays by Robert Wood may be found here.