A Virtuous Citizenry

 I am used to reading from conservative thinkers that the Founders had it in mind that the public should be educated at the taxpayer's expense. They had certain assumptions that drove this wise public policy.

1. Humans are born frail, and fallen. For the necessary formation of generation after generation of Americans to be trained and reared up as a virtuous citizenry, they must have been taught the right values by their parents, their schools, their community and their extended families. Their education must teach them civic virtues as well as skills to to be competent citizens of honesty and deep integrity.

2. Only the citizen as an individual can think. On the citizen as a virtuous citizen can exercise the self-control to ensure that he can handle freedom. If he cannot control himself, the state must control him, and that leads to tyranny and the loss of individual rights and liberties, which the state was erected to guarantee and protect, not attack and deprive a subjugated people of. It is the educated, smart, logical, virtuous, patriotic citizen that understands, appreciates and insists that liberty is his lot in life as a citizen and private person. He became virtuous, rational, self-disciplining citizen and adult in order that he would be worthy and ready to take his place as an mature American enjoying his liberty and rights under this constitutional republic. His liberty is about the dearest thing in life for him, and he will resist and even rebel should government turn tyrannical and seek to wrest that liberty from him.

3. The educated, virtuous, rational, patriotic citizen understands and insists that his remain unfettered by the government or the mob from in expressing his personal freedom whilst pursuing life, liberty, property and happiness. His exercise of his personal, unalienable and legal power as a citizen is his share of societal power, not to be denied, infringed upon and centralized under a bloated, federal Leviathan, aiming to grab all power to itself, corrupting it and the entire society, absolutely.