Stephen Pratt will be a speaker at the upcoming “Utah’s Freedom Conference: Reclaiming Our Constitutional Heritage“. For more details and to register go to Utah United.
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Liberty and Learning sponsors “Know Your Liberty” series classes, in various locations around the country.
Please contact Stephen if you would be interested in hosting a Know Your Liberty series.
Following are the titles of the lessons in the new “Know Your Liberty” series:
First Session:
1. The Empire Has No Clothes: Why and How to Study History?
2. Becoming A Citizen-Statesman in the 21st Century
Second Session:
3. Government by Judiciary: From Rule of Law to Social Darwinism
4. Empire of Debt: What Has the Government Done to Our Money?
Third Session:
5. Three Founding’s of America: The Evolution of America from 1620 to 2007
What are the objectives of the Know Your Liberty series?
1. Confront our history by careful study. Learn the facts about who we are and where we came from as a people.
2. Apply critical thinking in an effort to discern the disinformation, that which is false and misleading.
3. Share the truth, even if it is painful. Wake the town and tell the people. Be kind, be gentle with love unfeigned.
A paragraph from John Denson’s new book, A Century of War: Lincoln, Wilson, and Roosevelt, Mises Institute, 2006, summarizes the relationship between liberty and learning:
“I am advocating the careful study of history for the purpose of developing this will to peace. One of my favorite history professors is Ralph Raico who tells the story of asking his college students ‘What is history?’ and one of the students replied, ‘It ‘s just one damn thing after another.’ Henry Ford said, ‘History is bunk,’ meaning that it is usually false and misleading rather than unimportant when correctly written. In Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary, he defined history as ‘an account, mostly false of events mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools.’ However, when history is written truthfully I believe that Bolingbroke gave the best definition, ‘History is philosophy teaching by example.’ If we can read history by looking at past events to determine what ideas were being followed, we can see how those ideas worked out in practice and learn lessons from the experience of others and avoid the same mistakes. The extreme importance of history and its study was cogently stated by Patrick Henry, ‘I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided, and that is the lamp of experience. I know of no other way of judging the future but by the past.’”
