The Naked Truth: A Classic Lesson in Being Civil

The Tallahassee Classical School (TCS) represents all that is wrong about these public supported non-civically-minded schools. Public schools are supposed to be open to all and to open all (students) to an 'open' or civic public life. These charter schools wish to prevent that.

People think that tax money must educate kids. That is totally and absolutely false. No one would rush to create and fund schools that train students in Nazi thinking. Though I feel that Hitler and Nazis are used too much, we know that this extreme example says that there are limits. So, to further explore this the line between open public schools and Nazi schools, it is ironic that Tallahassee Classical School would/could even be ‘somewhere else’ than ‘open’ on just such a line.

TCS is not the same as an open public school; however, a true 'classical' education (if TCS offered one) would/should certainly motivate it to be more of an opening experience for kids. However, this school is not smart enough to even know that it has pivoted 'classical' toward one of its opposite meanings. For the Greeks, classical meant to search for, discover, or create great virtue -- goodness, truth, and beauty. But though these Greeks quested for the great, it was the pursuit and domain of all.

Tallahassee Classical seeks to create an elitist environment with a very restrictive world view holding to an illiberal past. This is what 'classical' has come to mean to some people today -- as in classical music. Additionally, Hillsdale College's curriculum is a weak and very restrictive picture of the past. I reviewed the materials that they posted on-line. They are feeble at best.

Back to one of my earlier points, states don't collect taxes to merely educate kids, but instead to educate kids to live and thrive in an open democracy.

The principal was tricked into resigning with a lawyer's trick that protects the school from a retaliatory lawsuit. Hope Carrasquilla probably should have made them fire her; heck, she is getting all of the bad press anyway. Then, she could have sued and exposed them for their shallow 'reasons' which would have exposed the school as illiberal, non-classical, non-public, anti-civic, and a bad investment of Florida money. But should we ask her to fight this battle alone?

Those in favor of maintaining a Judeo-Christian ‘oppression’ in American in its final days think that by diverting funding to these anti-civic charter schools, they will be able to stem the massive demographic shifts in America -- co-habitation before marriage, declining religious affiliation and participation rates, rising rates of multi-religious Americans with intense curiosity/interest in Eastern religions and traditions, and a massive shrinkage of the traditional WASP everything, but they will not.

The table is tilted way too much. Gravity will not be denied. America is much more diverse and it needs to be more open to itself.

The ‘anti-woke movement’ is the latest, and hopefully last, attempt by anti-progressives to stop the gradual changes that started after the US Civil War. From the early attempts at creating indentured servitude in the post-Civil War south (The Free State of Jones) and the creation of prisoner-chain-gang slavery AND on thru Jim Crow Laws and redlining (which was conceived in Chicago by Homer Hoyt), America never seems to lack the creativity it (thinks it) needs to continue its 'closed-minded' and 'closed-state' thinking. The Tallahassee Classical school wants to be the final anchor on that civic slave ship.