Essay Contest: Can Al Qaeda Be Deterred?

7,500 words for that? I can name that tune in two with the only deterrent that is going to work...

kill them.

One of the stats we regularly use is that not one of the top 50 universities in the US requires a course in American History, and only a handful require any sort of history at all. Imagine if you had told Jefferson, Adams that 16 or more years of education would be available to nearly all willing to take it, but that history would be confined to 2-3 45 minute per day classes in 7-10th grade!

(Recently on a blog near here, a professor of the American Revolution proposed to one of her colleagues that she might learn something of the military side (being well enough versed in the women/African American / South American / social history side, she said. The colleague was open to the idea, but with questions about the purpose of so devoting her time).

Foreign Policy courses run mostly to the same plan as History classes, just with a snottier past-perfect tense added to the writing.

Then we give the best paying jobs to actors and singers who couldn't cut any of those classes, and allow them the main stage to voice their oh-so-thought-out military strategies.

Margaret Thatcher has said this:
“Ordinary citizens still gather to discuss important questions, but they are less informed, less able to support their arguments. One reason is that they aren’t being taught liberty and morality in school. There are still many good schools run by good teachers and supported by many good parents and good communities, but for the last several decades the general systems of education in the United States and Great Britain have been floundering.”

Ordinary citizens who know in their hearts the naiveté of the actors and political opportunists still cannot find in their education the words and ideas to defend their beliefs.

Extremists engage in terrorist activity to get press. We not only give them the front page, the news show leaders, we non-stop denigrate every step our NCMAs make in fighting them.

Cro's answer has its merit. But lets also decide not to play whack-a-mole for the next 12 millenia. If we're gonna put a stop to the al-Quaeda replacement hordes, we need also to stand up and decide what we'll count as civilized learning and behavior, and make sure that our fellow citizens have the opportunity to learn and practice it.

Mainstream academia isn't working on the problem because they think Bush invented it.

Ed, those are some terrific points. Although I admit that I had no idea that the state of American academia had degenerated to such levels.

I suppose it gives your project an additional measure of purpose, though.

John, alas, and it gets worse with the attendees of the nation's education schools.

I'm sure your familiar with Lt. Gen Josiah Bunting (Superintendent Emeritus at VMI, for readers in Rio Linda). Gen. Bunting now heads the Gugenheim Foundation, and chairs the National Civic Literacy Board at ISI.

This spring, that group released a report, The Coming Crisis in Citizenship: Higher Education's Failure to Teach America's History and Institutions. In their survey test of 14,000 students, college seniors scored just 1.5% better than their freshman peers. At 16 schools, seniors did worse.

Overall, students failed the test miserably. Less than half could place "We hold these truths to be self-evident" in the Declaration. More than half could not (in multiple choice) choose Yorktown as the battle to end our revolution (28% chose Gettysburg). Only a quarter could guess the purpose of the Monroe Doctrine. Less than half knew of the Bill of Rights ban on an official religion.

Among the worst of the 50 schools: Johns Hopkins, UC Berkley, Cornell, Brown, Duke, Georgetown, Yale, U VA, Chicago, Michigan, and your old neighbor Washington and Lee.

(Strangely, W&L students had among the best scores at 63%. They just didn't improve any between freshmen and seniors).

But that kind of knowledge still doesn't show the real depth of the problem. We're in a war of beliefs. Like it or not, this is a war for the soul of Islam, and these people turn to terrorism and suicide bombs for their faith. Are we willing to cede to the extremist view?

Here's what Christina Hoff Somers said about students vs. our Judeo-Christian (or mainstream Muslim) beliefs:
“When you have as many conversations with young people as I do, you come away both exhilarated and depressed. In many ways they are more likeable than the baby boomers—they are less fascinated with themselves and more able to laugh at their faults. An astonishing number do volunteer work.
“Conceptually and culturally, however, today’s young people live in a moral haze. Ask one of them if there are such things as ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ and suddenly you are confronted with a confused, tongue-tied, nervous and insecure individual. ‘It’s kind of like whatever works best for the individual. Each person has to work it out for himself.’”

Maybe we should submit Bunting's An Education for Our Time to the contest.

If you try to change education broadly, the guardians of education and law will target you for defunding, lawsuits, and public mockery. How will you get past those already entrenched?

AnotherOpinion: Good models include Hillsdale College, Amazon.com, Core Knowledge Foundation, K-12, Inc., ISI and the National Association of Scholars, anything funded by the John M. Olin Foundation, and more. See AEI's recent seminars and publications on Entrepreneurship in Education. Lots of exciting things are going on. Some big gaps exist, and lots of reactionary press and legislation, but...

One thing that was not clear was who the target demographic is.

Since they are offering a grant, do they only want students and professors....or do professional soldiers also count?

Or even Joe Blow who has an idea...