Twelve Score and Seven Years Ago; Stenhouse’s Public Education Address

Our founding fathers fervently believed that an informed and educated citizenry is vital to the preservation of our great American democracy and our God-given and constitutional freedoms.

As citizens across Rhode Island and America celebrate President’s Day and the birthdays of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, I hope you will forgive me for taking liberty in re-shaping perhaps the greatest words ever written – Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address – and modifying them to highlight a great battle that we face here in the Ocean State against an agenda-driven Rhode Island Department of Education that seeks to mis-inform students and turn them into activists against their own country:

“Twelve score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal … and free.

Now we are engaged in a great civic battle, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure attacks on its own history. We are met on a great societal battle-field for our children’s minds. Our schools have come to eradicate a portion of that history, with purposeful disdain for those who gave their lives that that nation might live in liberty and equality. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should fight against these wholly improper teachings.

It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work and the great task remaining before us — that we take increased devotion to that cause for which our nation was truly founded — that we here highly resolve that the American Birthright of liberty shall not die in vain — that this nation, under God, shall come to realize a re-birth in appreciation for the noble pursuit of freedom — and that honest education of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

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