Your friend Jim George thinks you'd be a great addition to Ricochet, so we'd like to offer you a special deal: You can become a member for no initial charge for one month!
Ricochet is a community of like-minded people who enjoy writing about and discussing politics (usually of the center-right nature), culture, sports, history, and just about every other topic under the sun in a fully moderated environment. We’re so sure you’ll like Ricochet, we’ll let you join and get your first month for free. Kick the tires: read the always eclectic member feed, write some posts, join discussions, participate in a live chat or two, and listen to a few of our over 50 (free) podcasts on every conceivable topic, hosted by some of the biggest names on the right, for 30 days on us. We’re confident you’re gonna love it.
As my children (currently first and third graders) get older, I’m increasingly concerned about how to inoculate them against the incessant liberalism they will be exposed to on a daily basis through school and media. I already have to deal with cartoon dogs lecturing them about global warming and teachers not letting them eat snacks because — heaven forfend! — the yogurt contains Oreo crumbles.
I agree that Witness is too much for Eric’s stated purpose. However, the prologue in the form of a letter by Chambers to his children is well worth it. It is a profound, accessible one-sitting read.
Love the Hitchiker’s Guide.
The Abolition Of Man is an absolute must for the older adolescent. It is short and extremely critical of the broad nihilism present in our culture. National Review chose it as number seven on their “100 Best Nonfiction Books of the Twentieth Century.”
William F. Buckley’s Fall of the Berlin Wall
Don’t know but I enjoyed Rocketship Galileo.
From science fiction,just about anything by Heinlein,but my pick(at least for later teen years) would be “Time Enough for Love”(which includes the “Sayings From the Notebooks of Lazarus Long” as well as the “Tale of the Man Who Was Too Lazy to Fail”.)
For a short work, I would suggest “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch” by Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
Speaking of Vonnegut, two more very good suggestions would be:
.
(He sure was concerned about forced euthanasia of the elderly.)
Henry Hazlitts’ Economics in one Lesson. It is a relatively short and easy read. Someone mentioned The Abolition of Man. Might be difficult for seventh grade, but an older teen might want to read it later on paired with Brave New World. The Screwtape Letters would be a better choice for a 7th grader.
Sounds like the fountainhead for a series greeting cards.
Pretty heady reading proposed and is age as well as comprehension dependant.
This may sound a bit odd, save Aesops Fables and Grimms (Unabridged) are good starts. Encourage above all, the courage to ask “Why”, then introduce the challenge of providing a well reasoned point of view.
The classics mentioned provide added foundation.
In this old souls time as a youth in a”Suburban” Ohio township with no TV, there was but one option, read anything you got yer hands on. That would appear to be child abuse in this era –
Animal Farm may be viewed as prep, yet has no meaning until one has spent time in the real world with eyes to see the results the pages propose.
Brave New World sucks.
It just plain sucks.
I’ve read books that suck before, but that book is the suckiest load of suck that ever sucked.
:-)
One Day In The Life of Ivan Denisovitch by Solzhenitsyn is short enough for high school reading.
About those TV shows. Desubscribe cable. Ban broadcast. Watch only media that you select. We did that while our kids were small through high school and I think it was a good idea. Didn’t prevent two of them from turning into moonbat crazy leftists but TV is only one factor. And bear in mind that kids are going to do what they’re going to do. You can teach them to paddle, show them the boat, take them to the river, but the rest is up to them, you can only watch from the riverbank.
I thought of suggesting that one, but it’s really only applicable to Christians, mostly, all other things being equal, nine times out of ten, and perhaps not applicable to conservatives of other faiths, perhaps, all things being considered, at the end of the day, vis-a-vis, etc…
The Holy Bible. It’s an essential reader for anyone. There are kid-friendly translations available. I remember Dr. Berlinski recommending it ( especially the Old Testament), as well.
I am following this and taking notes! I pulled my youngest out of public school last year and keep a list of required books for her to read. We always have two going at a time, one that I read aloud to her, and one that she reads independently.
“Barstool Economics” video by Lee Doren: http://youtu.be/Xj7nRc3_EG0
The Long Winter was in large part the work of Laura’s daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, a disciple of Ayn Rand who shaded the story to fit her ideology. The actual long winter was very real, though, not only in DeSmet SD but throughout the Great Plains. Rose couldn’t have done it without the material her mother gave her. (Years ago we took our kids to visit a lot of the Laura Ingalls Wilder sites.)
The Chronicles of Narnia
Watership Down
Jonathan Swift’s satires
And there is no such thing as too much history and historical biography. Get actual narrative history that tells who, what, when, and where. Even if the interpretation and application are no good (and often they will be no good leftishism, given that the authors want to be allowed to eat and breed) the reader will still be left with the facts. And there is nothing quite so good as reading multiple histories that overlap and disagree in their emphases and interpretations. There is stuff appropriate for young ages, but adult-level narratives with lots of details about who did what to whom, and when, can often to be more interesting to young children than books that are dumbed down.
Cheaper by the Dozen [the book, not the films]
Despise historical fiction.
Kid-friendly translations are fine, but be wary of kid-friendly paraphrases and abridgements that leave out the gory, abusive, disreputable details that are true to life. They are often boring and condescending. The King James Version and its successors are sufficiently bowdlerized versions of the originals.
I’m a private English tutor for middle and high school students. I agree with those who say that some of the suggestions seem too advanced for middle school. I’d like to recommend the following:
The Jungle Book, by Rudyard Kipling. Classic hero-tales that still feel fresh and original. The first story, “Mowgli and His Brothers,” is a wonderful political allegory that holds lessons for us even today. (Skip the last story, “Her Majesty’s Servants.” So boring that I’ve never made it all the way through.) The Second Jungle Book is also worth reading.
The Call of the Wild, by Jack London. London ended up a socialist, but this is a great story about the importance of making oneself powerful in a harsh world (yeah, love gets a few lines as well). An example of how the book is greater than the man.
The Lotus Caves, by John Christopher. Suppose your moon crawler fell into a cave that provided you with everything you wanted. Would you want to escape?
The Giver, by Lois Lowry. It’s just a totalitarian society, though; I don’t recall a connection to leftist ideas.
Starship Troopers. I will tentatively recommend this one. It has very little literary merit (when I read it recently for the first time, I found it boring), but the justifications of the social order make a lot of sense.
The True Believer, by Eric Hoffer. One of the best works of psychology for young readers.
I think Orwell, particularly the essays, might be too advanced for middle school students. “Politics and the English Language” is hard for high schoolers. This essay means little to people who have not encountered turgid writing themselves and seen the consequences of being led by it. You could just show them the sample sentence about killing citizens and the rewrite the lines from Ecclesiastes.
I’m on the fence about 1984 (again, for middle-schoolers). I’ve never made it all the way through. I agree with Misthiocracy that Brave New World is bad writing.
Not sure about Ayn Rand either. The writing is middling at best; there are probably better vehicles for libertarian ideas.
I assume that you’ve already read them Kipling’s “If,” but it’s worth a mention in this thread.
Recently I discovered the “Uncle Eric” series on Amazon. They sound good for middle school students. Has anyone here read them?
I’ll also second Free to Choose, for inoculation against leftist thought. You might also consider Sowell’s The Vision of the Anointed, which does a good job of presenting the psychological roots of leftism.
Laches is good for middle school students, though not particularly conservative. On the subject of heroism, the Apology is a good account of humility and integrity in the face of state abuse. I haven’t read The Law, but I’m considering working it into my curriculum.
In my experience as an 8th-grade teacher, I found that my students loved The Giver more than any other books they read that addressed the theme of liberty. They also found many connections between the conditions in the book’s fictional dystopia and features of our contemporary culture.
My students also liked Animal Farm, particularly those who’d taken advantage of the background instruction they’d received about Soviet history. Some of the more perceptive ones began to see Orwellian features in contemporary politics (and life at school, for that matter) as we worked our way through the story.
Our accelerated students read One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which was a great book for many of them. There were many wonderful ideas presented in the book, but I don’t think that it provides an accessible (to them at least) rebuttal of leftist dogma. It does provide a very graphic picture of life in the Gulag, at any rate. That in itself is a useful bit of historical context for a generation which seems to be growing up largely ignorant about the horrors of applied Marxism in the 20th century. Even if one were totally uninterested in the politics, the artistry of Solzhenitsyn’s writing is something I’d love for my child to experience.
Agree!
I submit that it’s the method it teaches that is the conservative part, not the conclusions reached by the characters (since there really isn’t a conclusion). The point is about being skeptical of any “expert authority’s” preferred definition of a vital moral concept, especially when they are unable/unwilling to defend it. I think that’s a pretty conservative take-away for a middle school student in an age of “settled science”.
Am I mistaken, or has nobody yet suggested any of Chesterton’s adventure/espionage/detective stories?
She had not yet really devised her Objectivist philosophy when she wrote We The Living. It’s very much about coming of age in Lenin’s Russia, and not about Objectivist or libertarian philosophy.
How about The Moon Under Water, about Orwell’s vision of the perfect pub?
;-)
All of them are good, if the kid likes the genre, especially Starship Trooper and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (Is that “juvenile”? I may be “senile”, because I forget.)
And there’s also Podkayne.
Once again, Little Red Hen, as well as Aesop’s Fables.
My mother was so taken with the former that she sent us copies all the way from America, more than once, so that we need never be without the Little Red Hen. I took the trouble to make my pre-school age grandchildren an interlinear translation into Hebrew, so they don’t grow up insensitive to the benefits of enterprise and initiative.
We talk a lot about charity too, but also about the Red Hen.