Learning To Love Our Country

Noah Webster, known as America's Schoolmaster, believed that learning to love one's country began at the time children began to walk and talk with stories-stories-stories!  That would of course, necessitate the parents knowing and loving their country to be able to share about it with the little children.  It would have to be a priority with the parents to spend a lot of time teaching their children, carefully selecting inspiring books to read to them, and taking them to historical sites when possible. Music and art could be explored and enjoyed to further enhance the experience of learning to love one's country.

During the early years of our great republic, learning was highly prized and eagerly sought after.  Our literacy rate was very high because we were a Bible reading people who understood the necessity of teaching our children how to read at an early age.  Americans knew that "the fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge, the beginning of wisdom," so it was essential for every individual to read the Bible for himself.  In America's early years before our people became sophisticated, worldly and corrupt, the purpose of life was known to be not about pleasing oneself, but God.  Harvard University's Rules and Precepts stated:  "Let every student be plainly instructed, and earnestly pressed to consider well, the main end of his life and studies is, to know God and Jesus Christ which is eternal life, John 17:3 and therefore to lay Christ in the bottom, as the only foundation of all sound knowledge and learning..."  The story of America is the story of its' Bible believing, God loving people who achieved unparalleled success and upward mobility as a consequence of who they were and knowing what they were called to be.

Every Bible believing, Bible reading Christian still knows and understands this truth, but in the world and even the church world, it's not acknowledged or seems to be known.  It as if almost everyone has bought into the idea that education is for the purpose of getting a good paying job or acquiring a prestigious profession/position with good benefits, etc...so if that's the case, what's the purpose of fostering the love of country and the founders of it?  We've been going down this road a long time now and it would be difficult to change direction even if enough of us had the will to do it. But in the early years of our great republic, it was done and done well.  We have the blueprint left to us - we are Americans.  Our children are American children.  They have a heritage, a great treasure to learn about, to love and to claim.