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The Essential Conservative Reader for Adolescents
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.
Dealing with that stuff is pretty easy now; I just tell them the problems with what they’re hearing on TV or in the classroom, or I ignore the issue because the attempts at liberal indoctrination have failed. But at some point, sooner than I would like, they are going to need more. So I started thinking about a reading list for when that time comes to help my kids realize that a lot of liberal pablum is misguided at best and overtly destructive at worst. I want them to think critically about these issues.
The reading material needs to be accessible to a seventh grader (or thereabouts), so the Road to Serfdom, Capitalism and Freedom, and Liberal Fascism are probably out. I also don’t want the material to seem hectoring or overly preachy about the virtues of conservatism.
Here’s what I have come up with so far:
- “The Gods of the Copybook Headings,” Rudyard Kipling
- Animal Farm, George Orwell
- 1984, George Orwell
- Politics and the English Language, George Orwell
- Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
- Harrison Bergeron, Kurt Vonnegut
- The Use of Knowledge in Society, Friedrich Hayek
- The Pretense of Knowledge, Friedrich Hayek (These last two might be a little too advanced for a seventh grader, but it can’t hurt to try. Plus, you can never have enough Hayek.)
What am I missing? What other short and/or accessible works should be included in The Essential Conservative Reader for Adolescents/Young Adults?
Published in Literature
On Heinlein, it depends on when his stuff was written. He started as a socialist then as he traveled the world recognized what a failure it and other ideologies were and transitioned to more a more right wing libertarian capitalist position. The various books he wrote reflect this transition.
Eric, the first war has already been won: unless you live in a relatively cloistered area, the teachers will for the most part be nihilists, lovers of scientism or post modernism, unaware of what the good life truly looks like, even though they have the best intentions for your kids (if they aren’t a bad teacher being protected by the union). And that doesn’t even get to all the ancillary crap like stupid arguments denying students prayer in school or mandatory sex “ed” or anti patriot behavior by the principal.
So it is a retreat. In California public charter schools are huge and a good many conservatives have retreated there instead of homeschool. It is likely a counter counter culture war is in the works, we are building the engines of it now.
Ah, I didn’t know that. Will try some more then.
Very interesting article. Thanks. I’m putting Credo and the book, Discovery of Freedom, on my list of things to read.
I’m wondering what you’ve read about her in order to know about the points where the novel, Diverging Roads, is autobiographical. I’ve come across some of that information about her life, but couldn’t tell you where. Mostly I’ve read about her life in relation to her mother’s.
I think some of her material possessions ended up at her parents’ home in DeSmet, which is a historic site that our family once visited.
Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death. It changed my entire life.
Reticulator…the Wikipedia article on her mentions that, like her protagonist in Diverging Roads, she worked as a telegraph operator and was briefly married to a man who seems very similar to the protagonist’s husband.
See also this New Yorker article: Wilder Women. Sad that Rose considered herself to have had a life which was “arid and sterile.”
And if the kid likes the Heinlein juveniles, he might want to read his adult novels. Heinlein was prolific and wrote dozens and dozens of novels.
But beware. Heinlein was afraid of death. A majority of his later novels are around themes of time travel, suspended animations, extended longevities, and other themes around postponing death. Some of them were just creepy. And in several, as he meditated on very long lifetimes, he started probing odd family structures, like suspended-animation grandparents the same age as the grandchildren, and formalized serial marriage contracts, and other goofy stuff.
Also written by Rose Wilder Lane: Travels with Zenobia, the story of 1926 trip via Model T Ford from Paris to Albania. I excerpted it in this post:
http://chicagoboyz.net/archives/35924.html
Oops. I should have said her grandparents’ home — the one built by Pa Ingalls after he and Ma left their farm and moved to town. I seem to remember that Rose’s typewriter was in a room full of other Rose Wilder Lane things. I don’t know if any of her personal papers are there.
The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe