"Reid" What The Founders Read, And See How Far We've Fallen

Is common sense no longer so common at our universities and colleges?

The core idea of common sense realism is that there are self-evident truths and that self-evident truths are known to be true by means of common sense; common sense enables us to know what is self-evidently true.  Read the Founders, and you will find them constantly referring to self-evident truths.  They got their understanding of self-evidence from Reid.  Because the Founders' thinking relied on Reid's conception of self-evident truth, what Harvard and Princeton and the others were aiming at in those days was teaching American college students how to think like an American.

We have heard the words "We hold these Truths to be self-evident ..." all our lives.  To approach the Founders' understanding of self-evident truth is to approach the heart of the American founding.  Jefferson and the other Founders held that "all men are created equal" is self-evidently true.  According to Lincoln, it is "an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times."  For more than a hundred years, American colleges dedicated themselves to teaching the philosophy the Founders and Lincoln were relying on in making that declaration.

Things have changed at Harvard, Princeton, and the other ones, too...

American higher education was once dedicated to teaching young Americans to think like an American.  Today, students are taught anti-Americanism.  That is the explanation for all those fabulously privileged Americans, many of whom are graduates of America's most prestigious universities, demonstrating their violent rejection of the American way of life by rioting in the streets and attacking statues of Jefferson and Washington.  They could not possibly make their anti-Americanism any clearer — and, for the most part, they were taught their anti-Americanism in American schools and universities. 

We can, and should, do better.  It's just common sense.