{"id":1506331,"date":"2022-06-07T10:49:19","date_gmt":"2022-06-07T14:49:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1506331"},"modified":"2022-06-07T10:49:24","modified_gmt":"2022-06-07T14:49:24","slug":"a-healthy-republic-is-built-by-leaders-who-read-widely-routinely-and-regularly","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/a-healthy-republic-is-built-by-leaders-who-read-widely-routinely-and-regularly\/","title":{"rendered":"A Healthy Republic Is Built By Leaders Who Read Widely, Routinely, And Regularly"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"&quot;\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">26<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Fa-healthy-republic-is-built-by-leaders-who-read-widely-routinely-and-regularly%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1506331&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><p>Among the most remarkable facts about the Founding Fathers, though little discussed, is how much John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and the others read. They belonged to what I call \u201cthe culture of reading,\u201d men of books.<\/p>\n<p>What did they read? The Bible, of course; Roman writers like Cicero and Livy; Greek philosopher Plutarch; Italian Renaissance poets; and then there were the writers of the Enlightenment, the writers of common knowledge. If we talk about which Enlightenment writers the Founders read, the names of John Locke, Adam Smith, and David Hume, to name a few, recur. How many of us, however, know that John Adams\u2019s favorite story was the fairy tale \u201cBeauty and the Beast\u201d? Or that Jefferson read and reread Sterne\u2019s \u201cTristram Shandy\u201d throughout his life, while George Washington was fond of Smollett\u2019s \u201cHumphry Clinker\u201d?\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Some of the Founders began libraries, others schools. Early public education started with one goal: to teach the citizenry to read, particularly the Bible. However, reading as an educational goal is, alas, no longer in favor\u2014and to our detriment. Our country was founded on the love of reading and the belief in its necessity for our fragile Republic. When I think of Ben Franklin\u2019s words\u2014\u201ca Republic, if you can keep it\u201d\u2014I think of the need for literate citizens.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Our Republic suffers today because we do not consider reading books an essential ingredient in education. I would argue that the only requirement to become educated is that of reading, which does not necessitate that young people attend an expensive college or university or go deeply into debt. Buying books is a bargain in comparison.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>When I was in high school, I had lists of the ten or twenty or more books that every entering college student should read or have read. Loving lists, and loving to read, I worked my way through several titles. Some writers, like Joseph Conrad, whom I read when I was fourteen, were far too old for me. Others, like Jane Austen, I read with delighted relish\u2014her humor always infectious. The point, however, is that I entered college already familiar with the books professors were assigning. In class after class, I was revisiting old friends or re-encountering those with whom I had never been able to become comfortable with a few years earlier.<\/p>\n<p>Let me repeat. Our Republic is suffering because we have forgotten that we must read. In our lack of reading, we find ourselves at the mercy of those who claim to have done the reading, the research, and know the facts on any given cultural or political issue. How often do they? Not often. If these gatekeepers do not like the facts or the story, they change it, rewrite it, or reshape it. Those keepers at the gate do not expect their audience to know or to bother finding out what they have done. They believe we do not know how to read for ourselves\u2014or that we will just not bother.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>So, a story about a speech? Or a tweet? How many of us read the original to discover the true story\u2014and not the often outrageous fabrication produced by the gatekeepers? Our failure puts ourselves and, thus, our Republic in jeopardy.<\/p>\n<p>These ruminations make me think of Thomas Paine, the pamphleteer whose writing helped bring about the American Revolution. He wrote for the ordinary, everyday inhabitant of this soon-to-be fledgling country. He stirred people with phrases like \u201cThese are the times that try men\u2019s souls,\u201d a more euphonious sentence\u2014rarely written and so movingly memorable. People, our forebears, read Paine, enough so that we defeated the British and won our freedom.<\/p>\n<p>We have had other great readers in our history. Abraham Lincoln is an obvious and well-known example. It is sad, though, that we can name so few such leaders. However, just because we are only able to name a few, we, the citizenry, do not have the excuse to disregard reading, ourselves. The less trustworthy our cultural and political \u201cleaders\u201d are, the more incumbent upon us it is to read\u2014and to read widely, routinely, and regularly. We can start our own lists of must-read books. We can share them, talk about them, and encourage each other to read the books on our lists.<\/p>\n<p>Ben Franklin used the conditional in talking about our Republic, which was born in a flood of reading, but Franklin\u2019s big \u201cif\u201d still exists today. We need a new flood of reading, for I know of no better way to answer Franklin than to open a book and begin to read.<\/p>\n<p><em>Cheryl Forbes is Professor of Writing and Rhetoric at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, NY. She is the author of eight books on theology, philosophy, science, and memoir.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>The opinions expressed in this piece are the author\u2019s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.<\/p>\n<p><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Among the most remarkable facts about the Founding Fathers, though little discussed, is how much John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and the others read. They belonged to what I call \u201cthe culture of reading,\u201d men of books. What did they read? The Bible, of course; Roman writers like Cicero and Livy; Greek philosopher Plutarch; &#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":866,"featured_media":1506392,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1506331","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1506331","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/866"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1506331"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1506331\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1506392"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1506331"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1506331"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1506331"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}