The Forgotten Man and The Great Society and a Talk from Jed Hartings

Jed Hartings will discuss the emerging growth of public classical charter schools as an education alternative in Ohio, with focus on our experience founding the Cincinnati Classical Academy.
He will describe the core tenets of the classical approach to education and how they differ from today’s public schools, with illustrations from school curricula. He will discuss what’s required to found a school, our experiences and challenges, the partnership with Hillsdale College, and related founding efforts across the state.
America is experiencing huge federal deficits, massive federal debt, and so much free, “helicopter” money from the government that many Americans choose not to work. And all this was done in response to the COVID crisis. When you combine our current situation with the plans that have been proposed – like Build Back Better and the Green New Deal – the USA seems to be pivoting from a quasi-Capitalist system over to a social democracy like those in Europe, or maybe even something to the left of that.

So, how did we get here? We will take a look at that through the painstaking research of author Amity Shlaes, who explains how progressives, socialists, and communists used two earlier crises to implement socialist programs while attacking our capitalist system. In The Forgotten Man she describes how FDR and many leftists in his New Deal administrations first moved the dial away from capitalism towards socialism in the 1930s. Their efforts were greatly aided by Americans’ desire to end the crisis of the Great Depression. She convincingly shows how the New Deal failed in that mission, yet its programs remained in place.