The Coolidges in Brule, 1928

September 8, 2013September 8, 2013 / gouverneurmorris / Leave a comment

Depicted here is the President and First Lady leaving the small country church services one of the Sundays during the summer of 1928.

Deliberately avoiding the elaborate churches and ordained preachers of Superior, the Coolidges went to hear “lay-preacher” Mr. John Taylor, a blind man of 70 years. His sermons, on what newspapers have summarized “plain living and high thinking,” were reminders that the truth is often found in the simplest, humblest of circumstances.

If too enamored by the elaborate and sophisticated, the individual often misses the obviousness of truth entirely just as the apostle asked in 1 Corinthians 1:20 and 1:18: “Where is the wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the disputer of this world? Hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world?” “For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.”

On Knute Rockne and Football

August 31, 2013August 31, 2013 / gouverneurmorris / Leave a comment

Governor Coolidge is photographed meeting Amherst’s football captain on Pratt Field, 1920.

As college football season commences and the NFL settles on its concussion suit, it is worth reflecting upon the principles of which the game is supposed to consist. It is more than big jocks slamming into each other for four quarters. It means more than the business of contracts, celebrity and eradication of risk. Notre Dame’s Knute Rockne taught young men the heart of the game was more than all that. The passion for excellence and development of moral strength was the essence of the sport. Coolidge, writing on the sorrowful occasion of the great coach’s death in 1931, offered these thoughts on the man and the abiding worth of what he taught,

Knute Rockne is gone. As a football coach he ranked at the head of his profession. In the thirteen years during which he trained the Notre Dame team there were one hundred and five victories and but twelve defeats. Five of his teams never lost a game.

Back of these achievements was a great man, an inspiring leader and a profound teacher. His training was not confined to the physical side of athletics. He put intellectual and moral values into games. He taught his men that true sport was something clean and elevating. Right living and right thinking went into his victories.

Rockne conducted a course that was only incidental in education. Yet he had a name and fame with the undergraduate world and the public surpassing that of any faculty member in the country. His activities had the benefit of publicity, but that does not account for his hold on young men. We shall find that in his constant demand for the best that was in them. No bluff would answer. Fifty percent would not do. His passing mark was one hundred. He required perfection. That was why men honored and loved him. That was the source of his power (“Calvin Coolidge Says,” April 2, 1931).

On What is Missing in Education

August 25, 2013October 12, 2013 / gouverneurmorris / 1 Comment

In all the discussion over the years concerning the deficiencies of modern education, from the improvement of testing standards, the adoption of new curricula, or even the construction of expansive facilities, the most fundamental component is missing. The purpose of education, for most of America’s existence, has been encouraging the student’s grasp of morality and sense of service to others. So it was for the last classically educated President in our history, Calvin Coolidge.

For all the concern over school shootings, sexual misconduct, drugs, violent outbursts, and other self-destructive behavior, the basics continue to be neglected as incapable of addressing the “complexity” of the issues. This is a refusal to live in reality. It is a decided effort to run from the hard decisions of maturity, allowing immature and unhealthy impulses to dictate both the lives of individuals and the governance of schools.

No one is born with perfect behavior, impeccable manners, or maturity. These qualities must be taught, for students absorb both the good and the bad. Cut out the moral core and there is no compass to help the individual discern good from evil values. Moreover, the young are no longer taught the most basic virtues of character: self-control, temperance, kindness, forbearance, patience, charity, and diligence. Instead, moral instruction is ridiculed as an attempt to impose extreme codes of behavior or to establish a state religion. Animalistic behavior is regarded as normal, and any attempt to reaffirm essential standards of conduct is met with organized ostracism from accepted society by politically correct elites. In truth, character has nothing to do with a “separation of church and state” and everything to do with a good and healthy civilization.

We are failing our children egregiously. The individual is treated as mere biological matter or, at best, mind without conscience, free to respond to any and every stimuli while simultaneously being devoid of a spiritual nature or the needs of the soul. Mere relay of information is not education. Transmitting data, shorn of any idea that truth exists and can be known objectively, does not fulfill a teacher’s obligation.

Coolidge said it best,

“Man is far more than intelligence. It is not only what men know but what they are disposed to do with that which they know that will determine the rise and fall of civilization…The realization of progress that has marked the history of the race, the overwhelming and irresistible power which human nature possesses to resist that which is evil and respond to that which is good, are a sufficient warrant for optimism. If this were not so, teaching would be a vain and useless thing, an ornament to be secured by a few, but useless to the multitude.”

Coolidge thought such a narrow base of informed and truly educated people was not right. Proper education reached as many as it could. Proper education did not abandon certain communities, specific demographics, or particular economic strata. It seems some today have surrendered the standards because too few live up to them. Hence, literacy continues to fall, historical awareness evaporates, and nothing is required of the inmates running the asylum.

Coolidge appealed to higher standards proven by decades of historical experience. People were not richer, wiser, better, or purer than they are now, but they knew the effort to aspire to standards was worth it. Aspiring to the ideal — a character formed and maintained through constant effort — was worthy not because perfection could be realized, but because good character is found in its pursuit.

Coolidge continues,

“Our country…has founded its institutions not on the weakness but on the strength of mankind. It undertakes to educate the individual because it knows his worth. It relies on him for support because it realizes his power…[T]he chief end of it all, the teaching of how to think and how to live, must never be forgotten.

All this points to the same conclusion, the necessity of a foundation of liberal culture, and the requirement for broadening and increasing the amount of moral intellectual training to meet the increasing needs of a complicated civilization. Free schools and compulsory attendance are a new experience. No power of government can bring them to success. If they succeed, it will be through the genuine effort and support that can come only from the heart of the people themselves. It is this condition that makes the position of the teacher rise to such high importance.”

Without the moral and the spiritual to support and sustain the individual, all the “facts” and material stimuli of modernity will leave the student empty, ill-equipped for the potential life holds. It will squander the great inheritance due the next generation: the wisdom of those who thought great thoughts and did great deeds before us.