“If a free people is going to be reproduced, it will require watering and revivifying and owning anew older traditions and awaking the curiosity in the soul of each citizen. National greatness will not be recovered via a mindless expansion of bureaucratized schooling. Seventy years ago, Dorothy Sayers wrote, 'Sure, we demand another grant of money, we postpone the school leaving age and plan to build bigger and better schools. We demand that teachers further slave conscientiously in and out of school hours. But to what end? I believe,' Sayers lamented, 'all this devoted effort is largely frustrated because we have no definable goal for each child to become a fully formed adult. We have lost the tools of learning, sacrificing them to the piecemeal, subject matter approach of bureaucratized schooling that finally compromises to produce passive rather than active emerging adults. But our kids are not commodities, they are plants. They require a protected environment, and care, and feeding, but most basically, an internal yearning to grow toward the sunlight. What we need is the equipping of each child with those lost tools.”

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About Ben Sasse

American politician and academic administrator

Benjamin Eric Sasse is an American politician and academic administrator. He served as a United States senator from Nebraska from 2015 to 2023 and later became president of the University of Florida. He is a member of the Republican Party. Sasse is known for his public criticism of Donald Trump. He was one of seven Republican senators who voted to convict Trump of incitement of insurrection in Trump’s second impeachment trial.

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