Interrelated Essential Questions

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Pages: 5

WILLIAM refreshed his coffee and brought his iPhone back to his room before walking to the seminar room where the social studies and history curriculum was scheduled to be presented. The room was set up for a presentation, with rows of chairs facing a podium and a screen. A man wearing a business suit and thick glasses was setting up a laptop computer connected to an LCD projector. A dozen recruits began to fill the seats.
“Good morning, everyone,” the man in the business suit said. “It’ll just take me another minute to boot up my computer. Materials are on the back table. Everything has been three-hole punched for you. Please pick up your copies and snap them into your binders.”
William stood in line with the other recruits and made his way
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It looks like everyone is settled, let’s get started. My name is James Anderson. I will be serving as a social studies and history teacher at the Front Street Beacon Academy in Charleston, South Carolina this coming fall. For the past year and a half, I’ve been writing curriculum with a group of scholars from Liberty University. We have developed a thematic curriculum guided by three interrelated essential questions: Question one - How does power become centralized? Question two - When power becomes centralized, why does liberty perish? Question three - What is the obligation of a patriot when liberty is threatened? The goal of these essential questions is to lead students to an understanding that the history of the United States, and the world at-large for that matter, is remarkably consistent. Generation after generation of Americans has handed over individual freedom to governmental structures in exchange for the promise of security. This process leads to the consolidation of power, which ultimately robs individuals of their natural right to liberty. Let’s start with a review of the US history curriculum, and then we’ll get into the world history …show more content…
“I’ll offer two reasons: First, students are exercising free will when they choose to study at Beacon Academy. They are living the concept of free association. If they don’t like what we’re teaching, they are free to leave. Our principles will be transparent from orientation through to graduation, so will our curriculum. Second, and more importantly, by teaching this curriculum, we are providing Beacon students the skills and content knowledge necessary to live our mission. Our mission is to provide students the ability to live self-sufficient, independent lives - to stand on their own two feet. We want them to be able to face the challenges of this world; to succeed or fail based on their quality as individuals. If they fail, we want them to be rugged individuals; we want them to brush themselves off, pull themselves up by their bootstraps, and go after it again. We don’t want them reaching out to the largesse of government and expecting a hand out. Traditional public schools teach students that an expansive social contract managed by centralized government is a net positive for our nation. They teach students that it is an obligation of the whole to provide for the needs of the individual. That socialist paradigm has created a mindset of dependency, which has translated into voting patterns that have elected wave after wave of progressives, individuals who promise that government has the ability to insulate us from what Thomas Hobbes described as a short,