Take up the White Man’s burden—

Send forth the best ye breed—

Go bind your sons to exile

To serve the captives’ need;

To wait in heavy harness,

On fluttered folk and wild— Your new-caught, sullen peoples,

Half-devil and half-child.

— Kipling (1898), "The White Man’s Burden"

Goals 2000 has ushered in a new era in education and American life. Schools have become one of the pivotal battlegrounds in an increasingly vicious culture war. To the power-hungry coalition of big business and big government, which are the same elements in American society that Will Rogers used to call the "big boys," Goals 2000 is a major victory. These elements are robbing the people of the power and capability of becoming fully human by controlling the formation of young minds. By capturing the schools, they are robbing people of the ability to become autonomous self-determining individuals free to express their convictions according to conscience. Goals 2000 is an outgrowth of a constellation of educational ideas, such as Outcomes-Based Education (OBE), that presumes a single standard of thought and behavior is right for and should be imposed upon all people. It is a contemporary version of Max Weber’s "emissary prophecy" described by Bowers (1993) as "the belief that one possesses a truth that must be shared with others, and even imposed on others in order to save them" (p. 41). Goals 2000 is the enemy of diversity and as such it is an attempt at stamping out those cultural streams that are not assimilated into the modernist Eurocentric mainstream.

By "diversity," I refer to ethnic and racial differences between people as well as any characteristic that is used to classify and separate populations, such as gender, social class, physical traits, and psychological functioning. I also refer to the diversity of ideas, which is less commonly considered but is even more important. People vary in their thinking and understanding of themselves and the world. Implicit in the notion of diversity of ideas is the recognition articulated in Brown’s (1978) theory of metaphor, that how a person thinks about oneself and what one believes about the world shapes one’s experience of the world. A person’s sense of self becomes intimately linked to one’s ideas, especially the assumptions one makes about metaphysics, ontology, and epistemology. People normally derive these root assumptions virtually unconsciously from the culture in which they grow up. But shifts in core assumptions inevitably lead to changes in a person’s experience and the significance attributed to it. Maintaining an environment that fosters or at least allows for a diversity of ideas is essential because these core ideas are building blocks for the construction of personal experience, and, on the collective level, for the construction of a consensus reality.

Both of these kinds of diversity are threatened by Goals 2000. For traditionally disenfranchised minorities, Goals 2000 constitutes a new variation of the white man’s burden. Originally, this term referred to the imperialistic conviction that the superior white man, having conquered the inferior colored peoples of the world, was responsible for the care and well-being of the colonized people. The white man’s attitude toward the defeated races was presented by Kipling as noblesse oblige. But beneath the thin patronizing veneer was fundamentally an attitude of contempt and hatred that dehumanized the white man’s alleged beneficiaries. No culture was regarded as equal to the European standard, which was held up as the yardstick of true civilization. To the extent that the cultures of colonized people were judged to be different, they were found wanting and inferior.

In our time, with the collapse of overt forms of European expansionism and colonialism, the white man’s burden might be assumed to be merely an artifact of the past, but it is not. In one supremely important domain the white man continues to bear his burden with jealous zeal. In the world of ideas, the white man’s thinking and habits of thought are the only ones that matter. The European modernist core beliefs are still the sole legitimate standard for the construction of a worldview. Any worldview founded on assumptions other than these is simply not taken seriously. This is the most damaging and insidious form of colonialism, because for the culturally different, it constitutes enslavement in a foreign and hostile world view, a consensus reality where the involuntary minorities of western nations always come out on the bottom because they are always judged wanting. However these minorities be defined or reconstituted in the next century, they are a priori losers in the new world order to the extent it is constructed around the modernist mindset.

Philosophers such as Sloan (1992), Pearce (1971, 1974), Griffin (1989, 1993), Berman (1981), and Bowers (1993) have analyzed the core metaphysical and epistemological assumptions that provide the foundation of the modern mindset that have led Western societies to the brink of human and environmental disaster. At the root of this worldview is an objectivist position which holds that the subject and object are wholly separate and divorced, that the mind and body are essentially disconnected. Knowledge— or at least all legitimate knowledge — of the outside world is derived from sense experience and cannot come directly from intuition, inspiration, or spiritual insight. Like the prisoners in Plato’s cave, we tend to live in a world of shadows where we substitute our representations of reality for reality itself, a peculiar way of seeing conditioned by the materialistic education provided by modem schooling. Socialization in modern Western society induces the separation of subject and object, and consequently the self is experienced as progressively more disengaged from the world. As a result, the self is isolated and reduced to a mere ghost in the machine.

An inevitable consequence of the artificial separation of mind and body is the now traditional conviction that mind as discursive thought is purer and loftier than the comparatively crude and debased body (Sloan 1992; Pearce 1971, 1974). Although contemporary thought denies that the separate mind is constitutionally different from the body, it persists in thinking of the body as subservient in function and value to the higher organizing principle of mind. The emphasis in Eurocentric thought on hierarchy and evolution makes it difficult for modernists to consider that mind and body could be functionally different but qualitatively equal.

The modernist mindset has inevitably led to the arid vision of a dead, purposeless, meaningless universe that is absent of God and devoid of ultimate value or meaning. This dead and purposeless world has inevitably led to untold personal misery and despair. On a societal level, it has deprived people of the perennial values of basic humanity that might have prevented the tragedies of projected and externalized self-hatred that arises when the self is cut off from meaning, such as the Holocaust not just of Jews in Europe, but in Cambodia and Uganda, and now in the former Yugoslavia. The brutal persecution and dehumanization found virtually everywhere in the world are made possible by the modem worldview’s denial of the sacred and moral relativism. While modernism is not the only worldview that can lead to tragedy and human degradation, it is the primary ideological architect of such in our time.

The core problem with the modern worldview is its failure to bring its adherents happiness, a sense of meaning, wholesome interpersonal relationships, or a healthy relationship with nature and the earth itself. Our society is decomposing before our eyes because at its core it has substituted dead mechanism for the life of the soul. A society such as ours is the embodiment of the living dead; like the vampire images that resonate so strongly in our popular culture, modernist societies have retained only a dim semblance of inner life by draining the soul from living indigenous and premodern cultures.

The presumption of the white man’s superiority is supported by the objectivist epistemology of modernism: If there is a single objective reality that can be known by distinguishing true facts from false beliefs, then the modem Eurocentric worldview of scientific objectivity is clearly superior to the "primitive" beliefs of indigenous and nonwhite cultures. There is one right answer to every question because there is a single reality that is either known or unknown. From here it is a short jump to the conclusion that there exists one "right" people and all the others are somehow wrong. The implicit assumptions of non-European cultures are devalued because they do not support the construction of modernist consensus reality.

The interests of African Americans and other traditionally disenfranchised minorities in the United States are already marginalized in the practices of public education and are likely to have their collective interests further marginalized by Goals 2000. The idea that government schooling is a method for reproducing Eurocentric culture and the social inequities implicit to it has been explored by theorists such as Althusser (1971) and Apple (1978, 1979). The OBE/Goals 2000 mindset is merely an educational incarnation of the European modernist core assumptions. Goals 2000 is merely an operationalization of OBE ideas, and both are applications of the same modernism that gave us Jim Crow, apartheid, the Holocaust, and Jensenian rationalizations of standardized IQ tests; the modernist worldview can only lead to comparable injustices without profound revision of its core assumptions.

The non-European involuntary minorities of North America, such as people of African descent, pose a profound alternative to the modern mindset. African Americans and other involuntary minorities have, as a survival mechanism, retained vestiges of their traditional culture that place them at odds with the values and folkways of mainstream middle class Eurocentric modern culture. While it cannot be denied that Africa is a big continent and the cultures transported to the new world were as diverse in folkways, customs, and ethnicity as those cultures that came from Europe, certain underlying commonalities of the diverse cultures of Africa were forged together under the oppression of slavery. This pan-African sensibility differs in its underlying root assumptions from European modernism in some very significant ways. In particular, African worldviews provide a holistic alternative to the objectivist epistemology of modernism. B. A. Allen and A. W. Boykin have identified nine traditional West African cultural values that have been transmitted to contemporary African Americans:

1. spirituality, a vitalistic rather than mechanistic approach to life;
2. harmony, the belief that humans and nature are harmoniously conjoined;
3. movement expressiveness, an emphasis on the interweaving of movement, rhythm, percussiveness, music, and dance;
4. verve, the especial receptiveness to relatively high levels of sensate stimulation;
5. affect, an emphasis on emotions and feelings;
6. communalism, a commitment to social connectedness where social bonds transcend individual privileges;
7. expressive individualism, the cultivation of a distinctive personality and a proclivity for spontaneity in behavior;
8. orality, a preference for oral/aural modalities of communication;
9. social time perspective, an orientation in which time is treated as passing through a social space rather than a material one. (Allen and Boykin 1992, 589; see also Boykin 1983).

Perhaps the most unique African transplant to the new world that has posed a coherent challenge to modernism has been the spiritist tradition (Deren 1953; Ventura 1987a, 198Th; Davis 1985; Barbosa 1989; Hurston 1983). Throughout the Caribbean, Central and South America, and most especially Brazil and Haiti, the African spiritist tradition has been very strong and culturally influential. In the southern United States, especially in the New Orleans area, the spiritist tradition has had and continues to have a vital influence. It is clear that jazz and much of rock and roll’ and rhythm and blues that are so pervasive a part of the contemporary sensibility are derived from African spiritism (Ventura 1987a, 1987b; Finn 1992).

What is so subversive about spiritism to the modern mind-set? African spiritism with its animistic emphasis on dance and spirit possession challenges the Cartesian split between mind and body. Spiritism recognizes no sharp division between them and consequently, the body is not devalued as lesser or inferior. Instead, the body serves as the means to our access and experience of the spiritual forces that are identified as the basis and source of meaning in life. In the practices of African spiritism, the worshipper dances to invoke the Loa or spiritual forces. The music accompanying the dance is an expression of the universal rhythms and the dance serves as a physical enactment of the patterns of a deeper and more profound order. This deeper order cannot be grasped discursively as an external object. Instead, it must be subjectively experienced through the body as the instrument of the divine. The whole purpose of invocation is to blur the boundaries between the material and spiritual worlds. By enacting the rhythms of the spirit world, the dancer/worshipper becomes the spirit being whose movement she describes and is transformed by the experience. What matters is the participation in the spirit world and the abandonment of self to something greater and more meaningful than ordinary life, but which has the effect of infusing ordinary life with a sense of the transcendent. After this experience, our place in the scheme of things is not a theoretical abstraction known only discursively, but a living reality of experientially verified majesty, beauty, and purpose. The dancer abandoned to the spirit entertains none of the doubts or crises of faith that are the fruits of modernism.

To truly accept the African, her culture and fundamental mindset would open the modern West to a profound revision of its root assumptions. Ultimately, it would open Westerner’s to a dramatically different experience of self. Such a revision holds the promise of a desperately needed renewal of spirit and personal wholeness. I am not advocating that the West should simply adopt wholesale the worldview of traditional Africa. I am suggesting that the deep wounds suffered by the West could be healed by a genuine open-minded reconsideration of root assumptions. Open-minded means not being limited by preconceived ideas about what constitutes acceptable solutions to the problem. Traditional worldviews, while undoubtedly limited in their own ways, offer the West alternative assumptions that could enable us to construct a more humane and innately satisfying consensus reality.

Traditionally, diversity has been seen as a factor to be minimized in the interest of facilitating national unity. Diversity was assumed to be problematic, a chaotic force introducing the destabilizing effects of entropy and disorganization into a social system. Individualism was expressed in American society quantitatively as the freedom to participate in the open marketplace or to consume according to the dictates of personal desire. Individualism was egoism — an expression of the individual’s exploitation and control over one’s environment. But the individual was not encouraged to diverge qualitatively from the cultural and paradigmatic norms of society. The person was not expected to be anything more than the product of one’s own conditioning and biology, and certainly not to be the instrument for the realization of some higher volitional force.

"Deep diversity" is a principle that challenges modern objectivism with the recognition that all knowledge is merely a description or a representation of experience. Deep diversity assumes that the subject is commingled with the object, that what we can know is our experience of an essentially mysterious reality. Experience should not be confused with the reality it represents but is merely that portion of reality we allow ourselves to consciously acknowledge. Reality is full of an indeterminate number of possibilities that we reduce to what culture has taught us to believe is possible. Deep diversity recognizes that it is essential to encourage as many f descriptions of reality as possible since all are necessarily incomplete.

Hence, it keeps us humble by forcing us from the hubris that Blake called "Newton’s sleep" (Erdman 1965, 693). Descriptions are not so much "right" or "wrong" but need to be evaluated on different criteria. The effectiveness of a description is relative to the perspective of the perceiver; in the very act of constructing a description, the describer necessarily draws on her/his values and implicit assumptions. A description might, for example, be evaluated in terms of aesthetic qualities or how convincingly it evokes in another person the experience of the initial describer (Wilson 1986; Bennett 1978; Wilber 1993).

Implicit in a depth conception of diversity is the assumption that differences express a natural and healthy condition. Deep diversity goes beyond tolerance or even concepts of mutual coexistence or interdependency. Deep diversity implies that differences between people and their ideas are indicative of a level of organization that is more fundamental than the comparatively superficial structures imposed by conventional thinking about racial/ethnic, cultural, or ideological differences. Deep diversity is an expression of the intelligence intrinsic to human life or life on earth in general that all systems of knowledge are attempting to fathom. It assumes that meaning and significance for humanity necessarily originate not in ourselves as egos, but from our participating selves rooted in a hidden and (for most of us) unrealized unity. By embracing diversity, we open ourselves to a deeper level of insight into the implicit order of human affairs.

The concept of deep diversity differs from the more conventional notion of diversity in the same way that deep ecology differs from mere ecology. In both cases, the adjective "deep" implies a dimension of inter-relatedness where the greater the mutuality between elements in the system, the greater the overall integrity of the system as a whole. The promise of deep diversity to education comes from the assumption that the most essential educational goal for the child is the process of becoming and realizing in practice one’s deepest, most essential self. This process has been called self-actualization, but in this context, it implies something more than the alienated self commonly cultivated by our society. The role of education in self-actualization is much more than merely developing the child’s academic and social skills; it really means enabling the child to be an effective and conscious instrument for realizing the divine in the life of the body and the experiential world associated with it.

The promise of deep diversity, denied and rejected by the modernist policies of Goals 2000, is that it creates a kind of open environment where our constructions of experience are not confused with objective reality. If we do not have access to as full a range of core assumptions as possible, then individuals are deprived of the raw materials to construct their own experiential world. As an autonomous individual, one’s freedom to be one’s own person is the ultimate attainment. This can only be achieved in an unfettered environment where the individual can be guided by conscience to values that reflect one’s unique perspective on the fundamental mystery of life. This experience must be discovered and interpreted for oneself, or the individual can accept the assumptions implicit to her/his birth culture. We as individuals are all unique and have irreproducible contributions to make to society. If we, as individuals, can find our own inner muses, our own sources of identity, beauty, and inspiration, then a life of meaning and purpose becomes possible. In the same way that qualitative differences reflect the uniqueness of individuals, different cultures are unique and irreducible (Fideler 1994).

In nature, diversity can be observed both across and within species. This may superficially appear as unnecessary multiplicity but upon closer examination, biologists have demonstrated that the enormous diversity of behavioral and morphological characteristics within a species provides it with a greater chance of surviving unanticipated environmental threats. A misplaced sense of parsimony can easily underestimate the deeper utility of diversity (Pepper 1993). Just as biological diversity can provide the human species with survival benefits, the diversity of human ideas, especially those root assumptions that provide the foundation for people’s worldviews, ensures the capacity to survive unanticipated hazards (Bowers 1993; MacLaughlin 1993). Ultimately, we want more than mere survival; we long for meaning and purpose.

For the conditions of deep diversity to prevail, people need to have complete freedom to educate children according to conscience rather than the dictates of the marketplace. Deep diversity demands that we recognize that in ordinary life there is no one right way and that individuals as culture participants, both individually and collectively, must be free to educate their own children according to their own values.

Diversity is challenged on grounds that we need universal standards. There are two frequently heard rationales justifying the need for such standards: the economic argument and the unity argument. The first claims that if all children in the country do not learn the same essential job-related skills, the nation will be overpowered by better-educated competitors from other countries. Hence, all students need to learn the same essential skills to enable America’s technology-driven industries to be more competitive in the global marketplace.

This demand for universal educational standards without regard for individual or cultural differences is more of the white man’s missionary zeal. The reduction of education from nurturing a soul to preparing workers to be grist for the economic mill reflects the internal colonization of the West. Ordinary middle class citizens fearful of losing their livelihood and stripped by materialistic education of any coherent notion of themselves as anything more than units of production or consumers are the contemporary equivalent of Third World peasants in an old colonial empire.

We are taught in government schools to distrust our own inner compass and look outside ourselves for direction from officially sanctioned experts. This lesson enables us to be led by the nose by any force rich enough to control the media. Then, through constant fear of losing a typically degrading and unrewarding job, people come to view their employers more as philanthropists than exploiters. But the worst intrusion is the colonization of the mind, which robs the self of its intrinsic legitimacy. Alienated from one’s own inner sense of purpose or direction, the colonized person’s actions betray his or her own interests and serve those of one’s conquerer.

The fact is, we simply do not know whether schooling affects the economy or international competition. The theories underlying Goals 2000 are unproven (Stake 1991; Bracey 1987). These policies were motivated and tailored to gratify popular opinion. Unfortunately, popular opinion is skill-fully manipulated by Rogers’s "big boys" through a continuous diet of lies and half-truths.

If there is any merit to the "schooling affects global competition" argument, it is the opposite of what the OBE and Goals 2000 advocates claim. Too much rigid boiler-plate instruction strips children of the qualities really needed to make American industry competitive — imagination, creativity, playfulness, enthusiasm, compassion, and sensitivity to the needs of others. More importantly, it prevents school children from growing up into happy, healthy, contributing adults. Universal government-imposed, business-inspired standards will, in the words of John Gatto (1992), even further "dumb down" America’s children and future workers.

Standard-setting and criterion-referenced standardized testing will not improve education if the goal is the child’s self-actualization (Gordon 1989; Kohn 1993). Educational policies that are driven almost exclusively by economic considerations are staggeringly superficial and devoid of any recognition of the developing child’s essential needs. To reduce people to merely quantitative elements devoid of qualitative significance, to be treated as interchangeable parts for the needs arid purposes of industry is wrong. Legitimate education can never become purely utilitarian. As a society, especially in the area of education, we need to affirm the qualitative elements of our lives.

Another rationale for opposing diversity with universal standards might be called the unity argument. This position holds that we must teach children a single set of values to direct their lives. Without these common values (which happen to serve the interests of big government and big business), it is argued that it will be impossible to preserve a united and harmonious society This perspective is compelling to the extent it recognizes the rightness of having a common life, but it fails to acknowledge the wisdom of democracy, a form of government intended to accommodate diverse opinions in a common civic life. There is no need to artificially remove diversity in the interest of having a harmonious common life. There does need to be a common ground between people sharing a collective life, hut that common ground cannot and should not be imposed from outside by denying people their right and ability to think for themselves as individuals or to realize their cultural ideals in the education and socialization of their children. By imposing external, economically-motivated standards on schooling, Goals 2000 reflects deep-seated doubt in the capacity of human interest, ability, and need to reflect an implicit higher organizing principle.

The bottom line of this discussion is that most people in American society suffer some form of dehumanization (Kohn 1993). This is true not only of members of groups on the standard list of victims, but even of those who are dehumanized by assuming the role of oppressor. State-sponsored public schooling has been one of the primary agents of this dehumanization and the move toward national goals and standards will further perpetuate this trend. Public schools have always organized instruction for the convenience of the institution rather than for the needs of individual children. Curriculum decomposes real life experience into contextually meaningless facts that may be logically arranged but are not at all reminiscent of how a child would naturally learn. In public schooling, how or what a child should learn is not determined by a teacher’s personal attempt to nurture a child’s innate aptitudes, interests, and abilities, but by the external dictates of curriculum or bureaucratically-mandated school practice. With the advance of national curriculum standards and national educational goals, these dictates are even further removed from the classroom.

The agenda of national standards, as expressed in Goals 2000, assumes that everyone needs to know the same things at the same time, and has zero tolerance for individual differences. The legislation often gives lip-service to allowing teachers and schools to educate children in the way they think best, but in practice, educators will be held hostage under the constant threat of poor student performance on high-stakes standardized tests. Teachers, if they want to hold onto their jobs, will "teach to the test." Teaching to the test exacerbates the tendency to emphasize the institutional agenda over the needs of individual children and further narrows both teaching and learning to mere formulatic utilitarianism (Porter 1989; Stake 1991; Shepard 1991; Bracey 1987; Airasian 1988). Shepard warns that using high-stakes standardized testing to enforce standards could actually undermine educational effectiveness. She writes, "It would not be far fetched to say that testing in the past decade has actually reduced the quality of instruction for many students" (1991, 238).

Goals 2000 and similar programs will most adversely impact the traditionally disenfranchised groups within American society: the involuntary minorities and poor people of all races and ethnicities. The OBE/Goals 2000 mindset seeks to covertly eradicate diversity by imposing standards of thought and behavior. It offers the implicit promise that if African Americans conform and succeed with these standards, they can enter the mainstream and enjoy all the material success this implies. This is a promise that cannot be kept; it is the white man’s burden revisited.

Goals 2000 is a false promise to involuntary minorities and the poor because success is contingent upon meeting the Eurocentric modernist standard. It is impossible for many of these people to meet that standard to the extent that they are culturally alienated and self-defined as other; the criteria for success are not objective and independent of culture but are the very embodiment of the white middle class sensibility — a sensibility derived from the economically-driven modernist vision. An animistic or spiritist culture that recognizes no sharp boundary between the inner and outer life does not raise children whose differential life experiences favor the kind of decontextualized abstract reasoning rewarded on IQ and standardized achievement tests. Boykin (1983) argues that African Americans on average do more poorly in school than their white peers because of the cultural discontinuity between home and the classroom.

Historically, we know that blacks and the poor have consistently performed below mainstream whites when evaluated with standardized criteria. There is a long-established difference in IQ of roughly 15 points between whites and blacks (Flaugher 1978; Jensen 1972). However, this phenomenon does not reflect genetic differences between the races but differences in how people who come to define themselves as black or white come to see themselves and their place in society. The main point of this paper is that the barriers to involuntary minorities are paradigmatic and are not amenable to simple accommodations within modernist methodologies. Efforts to design a culture-fair IQ test have always failed and will probably continue to fail because the criterion used to validate such measures is biased. Gould (1981) shows that standardized tests have frequently been used by experts with a political agenda of justifying discriminatory practices. There is no reason to assume that Goals 2000 technocrats will produce different results if the same technologies and assumptions are applied again. This tactic is particularly insidious because on the surface it seems fair (decked out with all the trappings of science), but the majority of involuntary minorities and the poor will be disadvantaged by these practices.

The idea that "might makes right," an implicit assumption of the white man’s burden, is apparent in the Goals 2P00 reforms. Power to set standards is being consolidated in the federal government, which will use control over funding to enforce its mandates. There is no consideration for alternative points of view or goals as legitimate aspirations. The National Education Standards and Improvement Council and the National Educational Goals Panel by definition promote a model of schooling that serves the economic agenda of the power brokers. It is a short and easy step to impose the same standards on private schools through the economic lure of vouchers. In order to qualify for vouchers, a private school might need to demonstrate it provides "quality" education by conforming to the federal standards (Richman 1994; Arons 1994). This will only further extend the campaign to crush diversity in our society.

What is really needed is a separation of school and state comparable to the constitutional division between church and state. Families should be free of government compulsion in the education of their children. I agree with Richman (1994), who writes that

"nothing less than a frontal assault on the current system, a philosophical challenge to the premises of state education, will -work. We can begin by revisioning our very conception of the purpose of education. Contrary to the educators, elected officials, and bureaucrats, our children are not a resource that the schools are mandated to develop for the good of the nation." (p. 85)

No one has better articulated the principled basis for the separation of education and the state than Rudolf Steiner, whose theory of the threefold social order defines education as a cultural activity. According to Steiner, the proper "motivating impulse" for the establishment and governance of schooling can only come from a "free and independent cultural life." Steiner wrote that the sole determinant of what children should learn is human nature, which he perceived as deeply imbued with spiritual meaning and significance. He warned, "It is neither for the state nor the economic life to say: We need someone of this sort for a particular post; therefore test the people that we need and pay heed above all that they know and can do what we want" (1985, p. 72). Education as a cultural activity needs to be implemented in a bottom-up fashion. Each constituency needs to design instruction and schooling to serve the goals and vision of its culture. The separation of education and the state would be a step toward the free and independent cultural life advocated by Steiner. It would also be a substantive gesture of respect for those in our society who are racial/ethnic minorities or those who subscribe to minority viewpoints.

In the final analysis, opposition to Goals 2000 and national educational standards is an attempt to preserve freedom. But a determination to escape the compulsion of oppressive big government does not give, us license to ignore those in our society who are in need. Rejecting big government and the social safety net that has legitimated its intrusions only deepens and expands our personal responsibility to those in need. If, in the legitimate interest of protecting our freedoms, we seek to limit the reach of government, then we must either redefine the legitimate role and boundaries for government to serve the needy or assume the responsibility directly ourselves.

The American people at this historical juncture, when confronted with great injustices, seem selectively blind and maliciously inclined to scape-goating. The outrage and contempt leveled at the poor and weak for their exaggerated abuses of the welfare system are not reasonable given the indifference to the overwhelmingly greater abuses of the rich and powerful at direct cost to the middle class. It is morally reprehensible for our society to tolerate hopelessness and grinding poverty, while it blithely condones a tiny but spoliatious minority’s accumulation of inordinate wealth. The discontent of the middle class has so far been successfully manipulated to blame the poor and weak for the sins of the rich and powerful. Now is a time for moral courage, a time to stand up for what we believe is right because, if we as a people fail, the country could easily slip from a precarious democracy into an American-style fascism. If public education has attempted to steal our children’s minds, then the recent move toward national standards, conceived in avarice and contempt, reaches to steal our souls.

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