Thomson Jay Hudson (1834-1903)
There was a golden age in British and American thinking and writing that spanned, roughly, the end of our Civil War through World War II, wherein intellectual integrity and genuine human genius shined through the works of inquiring minds. I have often wondered why and how we got so many great books and great thinkers from that era. Perhaps it was because education necessarily consisted of the Trivium: (oppressed) students were expected to clear basic hurdles of math and literature and history before they could be graduated, as opposed to the soft-soap idea of not wanting to discriminate against . . . . someone. In the days before children were educated to the work house (an idea championed by the common dolt of today as a matter of professed self-interest), per John Dewey's reforms, they received a university education, per John Henry Newman. I am frequently reminded of two things I grew up with:
1) A teacher and mentor from the Forks High School system whose uncle in the Montana Wilderness lived in a sheeper cabin lined, wall to wall, with books on language and history and Indians and Hebrews and Optics and Science and Music and . . . . an "uneducated" man who could hold his own on almost any topic, with grand flourishes thrown in for sport; and
2) the comment my father frequently made that the math we we struggled with in junior high they had to know to advance to the fourth grade. My father could speak to that, as he was held back one year!
To give you a flavor of where our country has traveled in this regard, here is a quote from marxists.org about John Dewey:






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