One of the great misapprehensions of modern conservatism, among its least pardonable sins of omission, is its persistent inclination to play defense in the culture wars, none more consequential than that which rages in our schools. We protest. We expunge. We denounce the presence of prurient literature, the imposition of gender metaphysics, the catechisms of Marx. Yet we fail, rather unforgivably, to supplant the void we have created with anything of durable value. We uproot the weeds, yes, but offer no seed of our own. This is not conservation. It is abdication.
Education, in the true and noble sense, is not merely the rote instruction of grammar and arithmetic, though Heaven knows we could do with a revival of competence even on that front. It is, properly speaking, the acculturation of the young into the responsibilities of liberty. It is the transmission of civilizational confidence. The classroom, whether we wish it or not, is a stage upon which values are rehearsed. It is never neutral. And if the conservative declines to play the role of instructor, the progressive will happily assume the mantle of moral architect.
The Left, for all its misguided premises, understands this dynamic with diabolical clarity. The progressive does not approach the schoolhouse as a place for imparting knowledge, but as a laboratory for social alchemy. The child is not a vessel to be filled but a soul to be reengineered, liberated from the allegedly parochial strictures of parents, church, and country. It is indoctrination, no less real for being disingenuously labeled “education.”
Conservatives, meanwhile, in their slavish devotion to the fiction of neutrality, have conceded the ground. They cry out: let the schools refrain from politics, let them concern themselves with facts and not values. But this, I regret to say, is arrant nonsense. The selection of texts is itself a declaration of allegiance. Assign Marx but not Friedman, Zinn but not Sowell, and the student absorbs not neutrality, but an ideology, an ideology dressed in the academic robes of progress but animated by the old ghosts of envy and resentment.
We must, if we are to endure, cease being merely subtractive. We must begin to build. The response to pedagogical decadence must not be the vacuum of inaction but the construction of an alternative edifice, one founded not only on conservatism, but on competence, coherence, and civilizational pride.
Let us then teach:
- Financial literacy: so that our youth might escape the chains of debt and dependence, and understand the compounding miracles of thrift, investment, and initiative.
- Civics: not merely the bureaucratic diagrams of government, but the philosophy of self-government, the architecture of liberty.
- Rhetoric and communication: the lost art of persuasion, which is the currency of both democracy and dignity.
- Professionalism: the manners and mores of adulthood, too long deferred in an age that worships adolescence.
And let us reacquaint the rising generation with the ideas that built the West:
- Thomas Sowell, whose intellectual clarity exposes the economic illusions of the egalitarians.
- Milton Friedman, who taught that liberty and prosperity are twins joined at the spine.
- C.S. Lewis, whose moral imagination rescues the soul from relativism and rootlessness.
- Ayn Rand, for all her deficiencies, reminds us that the individual conscience is not the enemy of virtue.
The progressive complains of book bans, but curiously never of the exclusion of these thinkers. Where in the state curriculum is Buckley? Will? Hayek? Chambers? To speak of indoctrination as a uniquely conservative vice is to confess one’s own amnesia. When the public school canon consists exclusively of grievances, identities, and historical self-flagellation, it is not an oversight. It is a conquest.
The values we must inculcate are not innovations. They are the accumulated wisdom of millennia: self-reliance, personal responsibility, reverence for order, devotion to truth, curiosity, civility, and gratitude. These are not partisan slogans. They are the underpinnings of civilization.
We must no longer tolerate the abstraction that education is about “learning to learn,” a phrase which means everything and therefore nothing. Education is about learning to live well. The Left teaches children to see themselves as victims, to view America as an abomination, to regard their parents with suspicion and their heritage with contempt. We must teach them to become adults; capable, grateful, and free.
Yes, it is true that conservatives are by temperament preservers rather than revolutionaries. But what is conservatism if not the vigilant stewardship of those institutions that give life meaning and liberty shape? To defend them properly is to advance them proactively. The cultural tide is against us, and sandbags will not suffice. It is time to build dams.
A curriculum grounded in the treasures of Western thought is not indoctrination. It is emancipation: from ignorance, from cynicism, from the petty tyrannies of identity and resentment.
So run for school board. Those are usually non-partisan elections anyway. And when you get in, bring your values, and your books with you. Let the Left pull down their statues and erase their past. We shall build libraries, restore the inheritance, and teach the truth. And the truth, as someone quite notable once said, shall set us free.
You may also be interested in:
