To take a near at hand example of natural law, our Declaration of Independence asserts:

Why are Cicero’s orations and dialogues no longer known to American students?

John Dewey, the leading liberal intellectual of the first half of the 20th century, was also the degrading transformer of American education. His Democracy and Education (1916) expressed the view that education should not teach specific things, but that children should be immersed in experiences that would create an allegiance to the group and prepare them for the collectivized, secular world of socialism. History, Dewey wrote, had no place in a modern school curriculum.

Going whole hog in Reconstruction in Philosophy (1920), Dewey argued that society ought to scrap all ideas of religion, morality, and philosophy prior to the atheistic materialism of socialism and Dewey’s own brand of moral relativism, the philosophy of Pragmatism.

The Russian Communist Revolution (1917) was taking place in this same period, and Dewey, along with his Columbia University Teachers’ College confreres, was much taken with the Soviet educational system. The Soviets expressed Dewey’s conceptions somewhat more brutally than did Dewey:

We must hate — hatred is the basis of Communism. Children must be taught to hate their parents if they are not Communists. V. I. Lenin — speech to the Commissars of Education, Moscow, 1923.

Obviously, Cicero could not be permitted to remain in the school curriculum. He was a believer in the Stoic system of natural law in human affairs, the same conception of natural law that underlay John Locke’s famous justification for ousting autocratic King James II. Locke in 1689 had argued that, by arbitrarily abrogating the rights of individuals to life, liberty, and property, James II had broken the natural law compact with his people and thereby forfeited the legitimacy of his reign.

This was, in 1776, exactly the same argument employed by the colonists to confront George III’s taxation without representation. Hence Jefferson’s reference to “harmonizing sentiments of the day, whether expressed in conversations, in letters, printed essays, or the elementary books of public right, as Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, Sidney, etc..”

Thomas E. Brewton is a staff writer for the New Media Alliance, Inc. The New Media Alliance is a non-profit (501c3) national coalition of writers, journalists and grass-roots media outlets.