Philosophical Friday: Post to ponder while I'm unplugged for the day

I'm currently reading A Thomas Jefferson Education by Oliver Van DeMille.  There are some days we get bogged down in the day to day lessons and start to lose the big picture of why we are homeschooling in the first place.    James gets bored and would much rather be doing something else, mother stops being a mentor and starts being a task master and soon we are both dreading lessons.   I picked up TJE some time ago but it got lost in the shuffle as things naturally do.  I'm enjoying reading it and getting a fresh perspective, a reminder of why we are doing this.   I came across a section yesterday that just jumped out at me so thought I would share it.

"Our modern {educational}  system is a fairly recent development.  Only in the past seventy years has it become the predominant system.  In the history of education, the current American model is very non traditional, very different from what has been done for generations.  Almost everybody in America is getting the kind of education that has typically been reserved for those who simply had no other options.  Where this used to include the poor and lower classes, today it has become almost universal.


What happens when a society does not prepare leaders?  We get managers and professionals leading in areas they have no training for, such as government, and we get a nation of followers who see no problem with that because they have no experience with anything else.  In a nation where the government is supposed to be the servant of the people, it is easy to see that our traditional form of government and its cultural underpinnings will deteriorate beyond repair if the citizen neglects to fit himself for leadership; eventually the result is widespread specialization complemented by arrogance, pride and general ignorance.  This is the legacy of German in the 1930's - a highly trained but undereducated people easily swayed by Hitler. (pg 36)

A Thomas Jefferson Education in a nutshell.