Tea Party Movement and Education

The original Tea Party was about throwing tea into the Boston harbor in protest of taxation without representation. The goal of that protest was accomplished when the British government gave in. Today, we must conduct a similar Tea Party by protesting the present government’s efforts to tax us without our voices being heard.

Regardless of the political strategies we use, as we approach the 2010 election, our short-term goal must focus on exerting the peoples' responsibility to be the final check against government tyranny. Short-range strategies for the Tea Parties can involve a number of approaches. For instance, we can merely let the Democrats and Republicans fight it out for our support. By refusing to give either party our support until they start advocating Tea Party principles we can move them more quickly into promoting our views in government.

But in considering a long-term strategy, we must recognize that it took decades for the progressives to obtain the control they have today. Their main source of power is the universities and our public educational system where they have been indocrinating our children for over a century. To stop the advance toward a virtual communist dictatorship, we must launch a long-term educational strategy that will bring a new philosophical movement dedicated to freedom, capitalism and the Constitution. We must end the era of progressivism.

Why is Education Important?

The progressives have been running our educational system for decades. In this climate, the idea of citizenship has been joined with the philosophy of self-sacrifice; with the principles and ideas of the Founders totally ignored and/or denigrated. The anti-capitalism of the writers of our textbooks, not to mention their philosophical influences from such thinkers as Hume, Kant and Dewey have served to create a citizenry that is barely able to mount an opposition to the progressive agenda. The progressives have "un-educated" our children and the door is now open for dictatorship. This situation must be corrected.

In order to educate, we need more competent voices for freedom and we need time. We must buy that time by stopping the advance of progressive ideas politically; then implementing a strategy that will ensure the establishment of proper ideas that support freedom. Because the universities and educational establishment are dominated by pragmatists and progressives, it will take time to undo the damage they have done and to begin the philosophical movement that can sweep them out of the universities. As a starting point, we must seek four major goals for education:

1. Educate voting age individuals through discussion of the issues on philosophic grounds – show them that there is a different and credible "other" view that they should consider.
2. Educate our school age youth by teaching them that today's educators don’t always teach the truth and that there is another credible view which they have a responsibility, as aware citizens, to discover.
3. Challenge the Universities in the Universities. This is a long-term approach but it should be waged by our getting university degrees and challenging the monopoly of the left in the universities. We must challenge the idea of tenure, the growth of pseudo-science and the corruption in our peer-review processes.
4. Challenge the ideas taught in the Universities. This, at the present time, must be waged wherever it can such as the media, the Internet, word-of-mouth and more. Later, we must take on progressive thinkers directly in the universities by offering a credible alternative to students.

We can start by educating ourselves about the Founding Fathers, the principles they espoused and why. We can study the history of the Enlightenment and how the ideas that influenced the Founders came about. We must ask the questions about how our rights are defined and discover their philosophical sources; and we must debate among ourselves about that source. This debate strengthens our voices and makes us better presenters of the ideas espoused by the Founders.

We can work with other organizations and individuals seeking to bring a better understanding about freedom and capitalism to the universities. We can work to ensure that science and not pseudo-science is advanced in the technical professions and we can exert the political pressure necessary to open the universities to alternative political persuasions.

We should also educate ourselves about the false arguments of progressives. This so-called “educated” group of progressives thinks that it is superior in intellect to the Tea Party protesters, most of whom merely work for a living. In fact, progressives are quite uneducated in the sense that all of their fundamental ideas are false and harm society. For decades, they have refused to question their own most profound premises and this has caused the economic harm (and the destruction of individual rights) being done today by their proposals. It is progressives ideas that must be challenged by a group of people who know what works: capitalism, and what makes it possible: freedom.

More than this, we must recognize that there is only one way to propagate correct ideas and that is by appealing to reason. Reason is man's means of survival. Reason looks at facts and brings about certainty...and it is certainty and moral conviction that will win the day. We must learn, beyond a doubt, why unalienable rights are unalienable.

It is our responsibility to be right about what we propose for this nation. It is our task to educate our children on why individual rights are superior to the rights-destroying ideas offered by progressives.