Thomas Carson

“I have also frequently heard people question the faith of Thomas Jefferson. However, in his 1781 notes on the state of Virginia, he wrote, “God who gave us life gave us liberty. And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with His wrath? Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that His justice cannot sleep forever.””

“After the political success of the anti-DDT crusade by environmentalists, the banning of this insecticide was followed by a resurgence of malaria, taking millions of lives, even in countries where the disease had been all but eradicated. Rachel Carson may have been responsible for more deaths of human beings than anyone without an army. Yet she remains a revered figure among environmental crusaders.””

“At time of writing, the National Education Standards and Improvement Council, set up by the Clinton Administration,61 is due to prescribe what students in grades five through twelve are supposed to know about American history. Not a single one of the thirty-one standards set up mentions the Constitution. Paul Revere is unmentioned; the Gettysburg address is briefly mentioned once. On the other hand, the early feminist Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments receives nine notices. Joseph McCarthy is mentioned nineteen times; there is no mention of the Wright brothers, Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, Robert E. Lee; Harriet Tubman receives six notices. The Ku Klux Klan is mentioned seventeen times; the American Federation of Labor comes up with nine appearances. The role of religion, especially Christianity, in the founding and building of the nation is totally ignored; the grandeur of the court of Mansa Musa (King of Mali in fifteenth-century Africa) is praised, and recommended as a topic for further study.62 Such standards are linked in the minds of many with “outcome-based-education” (OBE). If the “outcomes” were well balanced and not less than thoroughly cognitive (though hopefully more than cognitive), there would be few objections. But OBE has become a lightening-rod issue precisely because in the hands of many it explicitly minimizes cognitive tests and competency skills, while focusing much more attention on attitudes, group conformity, and the like. In other words, granred the postmodernism that grips many educational theorists and the political correctness that shapes their values, this begins to look like one more experiment in social engineering.””