Again, Ryan is 100% wrong...

Just kidding. He's right... and we all know it.

While I am a fan of Bill Bennett on the radio, his commentary isn't what you'd call "cutting edge" and he maintains a very moderate format for his call ins. It is a fun, entertaining program more than it is hard analysis... but it can be educational and you can often hear something worthwhile at almost any time during the show. I just don't think he is ever going to have the following that the bigger names have... he isn't "edgy" enough.

What I find most valuable about his program is his first-hand experience in the areas he discusses most. He has a Doctorate, he has two other Master-level degrees, he has years of Cabinet experience (with two different Administrations)... and while he keeps his radio topics and discussions "family-friendly", he does occasionally drop some absolute gems when it comes to his own, undiluted opinion on politics and policies.

Off the air, his efforts to reform our education system have my full and unfettered support. I don't think there is a voice out there better able to articulate the needs and failings of our system than his, and his solutions are perfectly sound and founded on basic, fundamental principles of education with an eye on both what has worked in the past and what the nation needs more of in the future.

Couple this with his open, honest and publicly visible life of faith (a proud but unassuming Roman Catholic) and his very traditional but obvious love and respect for his wife (whom he always refers to as "Mrs. Bennett"), and I am convinced that this man could find a role for himself in the conservative movement rather quickly, if he wanted to.

One more thing... Ryan seemed to say that the British education system might be better than ours, at least in regards to history or geography, but I am not at all sure that is true. Granted, a greater percentage of their students move on to college degrees, but that doesn't mean they are getting a better education. In the case of history, the failing in both systems is rooted in a national loss of objectivity.

There are courses of study that are subjective in nature... literature, music, art, poetry, dance, etc... and there are courses that are objective in nature, and in our society we have seen History 101 relegated to the former area, where history and its lessons are determined to be and presented as "subject to interpretation" rather than just as much a "science" as mathematics, or geology, or chemistry, or astronomy. That isn't to say that there aren't new things to be found, or new areas to explore... even in the fundamentally objective subjects like those mentioned above, new and exciting study is made or discovered almost every day.

I don't feel a good education is to be had without a very thorough mix of both the subjective and the objective areas of study. Literature is just as important as mathematics, and a study of the theater arts is just as vital as a basic understanding of chemistry. Our system has failed in its priorities, and it has spent decades objectifying the subjective and vice versa. A clear and specific example is today's trend (nation-wide) to inject the very subjective topic of global warming into a vast array of study areas, from social studies and earth sciences to student government and (even in my school district) athletics. Another fine example of the subjective nature that our educations system teaches the subject of history is in the manner in which Christian religion is studied.

Christianity is taught to my children as a repressive, backward position bent on burning books and heretics and keeping such luminaries as Galileo or Darwin marginalized as much as possible. What should be taught is that Christianity, like any other human endeavor or field of study, has made mistakes and has had bad people associated with it, but that it has also contributed vast amounts of beauty and art to the world that otherwise would never have been known. Without Christianity, we would have no Sistine Chapel. No Notre Dame Cathedral. Handel wouldn't have composed the Messiah, and Bach wouldn't have written Jesu, Joy of Man's desiring. Da Vinci wouldn't have painted the Last Supper. Our very education system itself, founded on the model of religious or monastic institutions at places like Oxford and Cambridge and Paris and Cologne, would be without Universitas. Where would the world be now without the contributions of such Christian (and, specifically Catholic) scientists as Nicholas Copernicus, Roger Bacon, Nicolas Steno, Gregor Mendel, and Georges Lemaitre (the first proponent of the Big Bang theory and a Jesuit priest!)?

Why are my children taught that there is no room for religion in education, but NOT taught that history has provided us with excellent examples of purely secular, atheistic societies that completely removed religion from education, and that each one has failed in its promise to build a better world... those examples being the USSR, Communist Cuba, the Eastern Block States, Vietnam, North Korea and Maoist China? How is that sort of selective reasoning NOT understood to be exactly the kind of subjective tripe that they accuse "Christians" of doing for the last 2,000+ years?