Every American kid “ought to understand how glorious the Bill of Rights is, and particularly the First Amendment. And we know that kids don’t know any of this.” When he first ran for Senate in 2014, a poll found that “something like 40% of American college students thought the First Amendment was dangerous, because you might use your freedom of speech to say something that hurt someone else’s feelings.” That is “the whole freaking point of America—that you can say something that hurts someone else’s feelings because words are not violence and violence is not words.”
The 250th anniversary “is a big opportunity, but it’s obvious that our schooling structures are failing on a massive scale. Right now, the bureaucratic lethargy is to maintain the school structures that we have as a works program for the adults who work in the schools, not to serve the students through these schools.” Our civic collapse is “a subset of a larger coming-of-age collapse. But our educational institutions are in freefall.”
Does that mean Mr. Sasse is pessimistic about America? He says he isn’t, but his optimism is guarded: “Our constitutional structure is still the greatest inheritance that anybody’s ever received.” As a nation, we are still able “to exercise our freedom to choose and pursue the good, and to seek virtue.” He wants the nation to reflect on the things that he’s asked his own son to understand: “self-restraint and self-discipline and self-control.” That’s a father’s bequest to his son, and a public servant’s to his country.
——
More.