In a recent column, I commended the Texas Board of Education for its efforts to improve the state’s public school social studies curriculum, adding some conservative counterbalance to the prior liberal tilt.
This apparently incurred the ire of one Cleon Roberts, a Hereford, Texas social studies teacher – who made his own liberal tilt only too obvious – in a condescending dismissal of my views in his Denver Post guest column. Cleon disputed the school board’s terminology of our system of government as a constitutional republic, asserting that, “Pretending the United States is not a democracy is foolish.” I guess that makes our founders foolish. “A republic, if you can keep it,” responded, Benjamin Franklin, when asked what the Constitutional Convention in 1787 had produced.
In Federalist # 10, James Madison says, “democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they are violent in their deaths.” Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall proclaimed, “Between a balanced Republic and a Democracy, the difference is like that between order and chaos.”
Yes, politicians, including presidents, use the term “democracy” loosely and rhetorically. You can accurately say that our constitutional republic includes some democratic institutions, but we are most certainly not a democracy. The word democracy appears not once in the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution, where Article 4, Section 4 clearly reads, “The United States shall guarantee to every State in the Union a Republican Form of Government.”
In crafting our constitutional republic, the founders created some distinctly anti-democratic features to protect individuals from the excesses of direct democracy and the tyranny of the majority. They include representative government; federalism; separation of powers; checks and balances; the presidential veto; the Electoral College; equal representation of all states in the Senate, regardless of population; and the indirect election of senators.
You’d hope a social studies teacher would know this. Even more embarrassing, was Cleon’s citation of a single sentence in his “dictionary” to prove his shallow claim that our country is a democracy. Volumes – nay, entire wings of libraries – have been written on this subject, and he comes armed with twenty words from a dictionary?
Cleon went on to sophomorically contrive a straw-man argument, equating critics of excessive regulation of business with those who would “scrap the Food and Drug Administration.” And then he belittled the board’s directive that Nobel laureate, free-market economist Milton Friedman be included in the curriculum, complaining that students don’t “need more names of economists added to the mountain of facts” they’re required to learn. It not about memorizing his name, Cleon, it’s about learning of his ideas.
But that was just warm up for Cleon’s big finish. This was his concluding declaration, presumably aimed at me and the Texas school board: “Give the kids a break. Butt out, and don’t let government interfere with teaching.” What a dumbfounding statement. Public school teachers are government workers. They’re paid with tax dollars collected by government to educate those kids in government schools. The Texas school board is democratically (isn’t that ironic) elected to make public-school policy. I’m the guy that wants less government in teaching by empowering parents with vouchers so they can take the dollars allocated for their kids’ education to the private school of their choice.
What Cleon seems to be saying is that teachers and administrators should have a free hand to dictate, without public interference, what our children will be taught in a monopoly of taxpayer-funded government-run schools. If Cleon’s guest column is any indication of his intellect and agenda, it’s both maddening and frightening that he’s a schoolteacher, miseducating young people.
Mike Rosen’s radio show airs weekdays from 9 a.m. to noon on 850-KOA. EDITOR’S NOTE: This is an online-only column and has not been edited.
