Home Free: Handing on Liberty to the Very Young

It's never too early to begin teaching values to children

Examples from history offer opportunities to discuss with children the American ideals that our country was founded on. Biba Kayewich

“Give me a child until he is 7 and I will show you the man” is a saying attributed to St. Ignatius of Loyola. “Give me four years to teach the children, and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted” is credited to Vladimir Lenin.

Despite their radically opposed worldviews, both the Jesuit and the Marxist recognized the importance of education and the impressionability of young minds. As Jane Austen might have put it, this “is a truth universally acknowledged.”

For many years, a debate has raged over indoctrination in our schools, centered on the teaching of socialist principles, and more recently on race and gender critical theory. Our universities are ground zero for these culture wars. In the past few years, these same battles have erupted in our elementary and secondary schools. Millions of parents became aware of these ideologies when the pandemic and distance learning gave them a front row seat in their children’s classrooms. Some responded by withdrawing their children from public schools and enrolling them elsewhere, some are fighting back, and some have either ignored the situation or put out the white flag.

Whatever their situation, however, all parents and grandparents have the power to vaccinate their children against collectivism and postmodern dogma. Keeping in mind those aphorisms from Ignatius and Lenin, we can teach them from their early years to love liberty and our rights as Americans.

And the resources for that worthy undertaking are at our fingertips.

Toddlers and Tykes

Have you read “The Little Red Hen” to your little ones? It sports the old lessons that we reap what we sow and hard work brings rewards. How about “The Little Engine That Could”? That blue engine delivered presents to children on the other side of a mountain, all the time teaching determination by chanting “I think I can, I think I can.” These classic stories and many others, simple and yet profound, are perfect for teaching the virtues associated with liberty to the pre-K set.

Want to reinforce your children’s innocence and goodness? Give them some poetry. Within just a few minutes, a 3-year-old can memorize Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The world is so full of a number of things/ I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings,” which teaches gratitude for all the beauties and wonders they survey. From “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” to “Purple Cow,” children can find delight and laughter in verse, both of which are attributes of liberty. Search online for “poems for toddlers,” and a beautiful garden of such verse is yours for the having.

And don’t forget the fairy tales.

In many of these stories, the heroes are children, not yet teenagers, thrown into hardship and dangers demanding from them courage and self-reliance. Tales such as “Jack and the Beanstalk,” “The Three Little Pigs,” and “Cinderella” teach kids that obstacles and wickedness can be overcome, lessons that again are key ingredients for the soul’s embrace of freedom and the good.

School: The First 6 Years

Mary and Johnny have learned to ride bikes and tie their shoes, but most importantly, the kids have learned to read.

Most children still love read-alouds with Dad or Grandma, but they’re also ready to jump into stories, biography, and history on their own. Here, libraries and bookstores offer a multitude of choices featuring freedom and resilience as virtues, from the “Little House on the Prairie” books to the “Childhood of Famous Americans” series. Recommendations abound online, such as the Great Books lists at the Liberty Common Elementary School, a charter school in Fort Collins, Colorado.

Also available to families are new resources promoting the ideals of liberty, free enterprise, and true critical thinking. Heroes of Liberty offers biographies, most of them based on 20th-century figures, for readers aged 7 to 12. If you visit its website, be sure to check out the blog’s advice for parents. Brave Books aims its publications more at early elementary school, maybe up to fourth grade, and features colorful books as antidotes to our cultural confusion. Each book comes with a game and family conversation starters.

American Cornerstones Institute offers the “Little Patriots” series and a free online learning platform teaching K–5 students civics lessons, history, and American values, with workbooks and activities free of charge.

Hands-Off Instruction

Unsupervised play facilitates independence, imagination, and creativity in children. Biba Kayewich

We’re all familiar with the value of hands-on learning in school, from fifth grade field trips to graduate students’ studying environmental science at the coast.

If we wish to raise children who cherish freedom, however, we must also allow them the joys of play and learning that are unsupervised by us. Building castles with blocks and Playmobil knights, putting up tents in the backyard, playing soldier in the woods, putting together puzzles—these and countless other acts of the imagination build independence and creativity in the child.

In addition, most children are hardwired for the freedom that movement and exploration bring. They run where adults would walk; they skip around the room while telling a story; they are energy in motion. Give them the time and space to expend that energy, away from all but protective supervision, and their unfettered minds and active bodies will teach them the meaning of liberty.

‘Families Are Resistance Cells’

That is the name of a chapter in Rod Dreher’s “Live Not by Lies.” Here, Dreher introduces his readers to the Benda clan of Prague, who for years lived under the thumb of totalitarianism in communist Czechoslovakia.

Indoctrinated daily at state schools and essentially everywhere else in public, the Benda children gathered in the evenings in their apartment, where the parents instructed them in their Catholic faith, screened movies such as “High Noon,” with its depiction of a sheriff standing alone against the bad guys, and read aloud to them for two and three hours at a time, which included making their way through “The Lord of the Rings” six times, with each reading just as enjoyable and profitable as the last.

In this underground classroom, the Benda parents taught their children mental and spiritual resistance to communism, and to contribute to “the moral reconstruction of their nation” once totalitarianism was defeated, which all of them fully anticipated. As one of the Bendas’ sons told Dreher, “The key is to expose children to stories that help them know the difference between truth and falsehood, and teach them how to discern this in real life.”

If the Benda family can accomplish such feats while risking arrest and prison, surely the rest of us living today in America can do the same.

The Mission

Examples from history offer opportunities to discuss with children the American ideals that our country was founded on. Biba Kayewich

Some reading this article may protest, “But this sort of education in liberty is indoctrination, just like the schools teaching woke ideology.”

Agreed.

Children are largely blank slates, and what is inscribed on their minds and souls, by education and experience, determine who and what they will become. If we want to raise them to value those rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness that have been so important for so long to so many Americans, we must teach them to know, love, and serve those ideals.

The Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation in Washington features a number of short videos in which survivors of totalitarian regimes from around the world bear witness to the suppression, atrocities, and murders carried out by those governments. In one of these documentaries, which are, by the way, appropriate for our young in upper elementary school and beyond, Nal Oum tells of his narrow escape from the killing fields of Cambodia. He begins his narrative with these words: “The more you step on me, the more you press on me, I prepare myself like a spring. I have a mission to do.”

Like Oum, we too have a mission. It is to honor truth and liberty and to teach these treasures to our children.

Editor’s Note: Nal Oum is the father of Epoch Times editor Channaly Philipp.