Football suffers from our educational system as does our culture. We no longer teach civics, American history and exceptionalism. This destorys our math and science education. It takes American motivation and basic educational building blocks of scholarship to get students involved in science and math. It was the simple education of one room schoolhouses and a single text that built the greatness of America.
McGuffey Readers
dominated American education from the 1840s into the 1900s; even today there is
a revival of their use among home schoolers. In 2008, the McGuffey Eclectic Reader was ranked with Thomas
Paine’s Common Sense and Alexander
Hamilton’s The Federalist as “books
that changed the course of U.S. history.” For seventy-five years, his system and his books guided the
minds of four-fifths of the school children of the nation in their taste for
literature, in their morality, in their school development, and, next to the
Bible, in their religion.”The texts were the source of knowledge and motivation
for American industrialists such as Henry Ford, Andrew Carnegie, H. J. Heinz,
George Westinghouse, Thomas Edison, and John D. Rockefeller, as well as the
founder of Kroger Company-A. H. Morrill.
Many American presidents, such as Lincoln, Harrison, Grant, Hayes,
Cleveland, Harding, Garfield, McKinley, Truman, and Roosevelt attributed their
scholarship to the McGuffey Reader.
McGuffey approached education as a moralistic adventure. He interweaved morals,
religion, and virtues into basic lessons. They promoted patriotism and
nationalism through the “cult of Washington.” But Washington was only one of
this heroic Pantheon of greats, which included Napoleon, Daniel Webster,
Patrick Henry, and John Adams. In the
earliest lessons the virtues of perseverance, charity, patience, courage,
industry, self-discipline, and cleanliness. These basic building blocks created great scientists, inventors, warriors, and business giants.
