To the editor:
Here is a fundamental question: who should teach morality to our children, parents or the government?
The proper domain for schools is facts, the four R’s — reading, ‘riting, ‘rithmatic and Republic. The first three are factual. Reading (in English) says that “Spot can run,” “‘riting” unequivocally says that “green” is the color of grass. No one can dispute that one plus one equals two.
What about the Republic? This is also factual: what our government is and how it got to be this way. Evidence today suggests that our children are not being taught how our Republic came to be. More than 245 years ago, our Founding Fathers were dissatisfied with the way England was treating them.
Thomas Jefferson, and others wrote: “When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. We hold these truths to be self-evident …”
The role of government is to secure the God-given rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
To that end, the Founding Fathers created the Constitution of the United States: 4,543 words. Soon after that, James Madison and others wrote the Bill of Rights clarifying the Constitution: 652 words.
Over the next couple hundred years, 15 amendments were added (two canceled each other). The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights and the amendments are remarkably a concise foundation for the governance of a free people.
In short: “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”
Most people today, especially the younger ones do not know or appreciate the wisdom of our Founding Fathers.
The United States is not a democracy, but rather a constitutional republic. The supreme law of the land is the Constitution, not the people.
In this wisdom, the Founding Fathers created three major branches of government, the legislative, the executive and the judicial. Specifically, the judicial branch is non-legislative and is intended to provide protection from the “tyranny of the majority.”
There were at least two other controversial, but brilliant ideas written into the Constitution. The first, which limits the “tyranny of the majority,” is Article II, Section 1, Clause 2.
The second, Article I, Section 3, Clause 1 was intended to limit the federal government’s power over the states.
There has never been a government on this planet that has valued “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” more than ours. And while we have made a few missteps along the way, there is none better. This is the history we should be teaching our children, not the false narrative of the 1619 Project or the racism of Critical Race Theory.
Cecil C. Ogren
Lynnfield United
