4 Pillars For American Education

https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/four-pillars-educating-america/

Excellent article!

These are the four chief elements, the four pillars, of the founding of Hillsdale College: learning, character, faith, and freedom. The College’s founders saw these things not as items on a discrete list, but as a description of the complete human being and of the well-lived human life. Of course colleges proceed by argument, evidence, and proof, and here at Hillsdale we argue about anything, including these elements. We preserve them as well because they lay the ground for that argument, for its continuing civility and probity, for the advancement of learning, and for the preservation of the freedom to do it. They are a prescription for civilization.

I tend to order them in what I see as the proper order :

1. Faith -- Because you are certain to have it, and if it isn't in something unchanging and purposeful, then why bother?
2. Character -- Which I believe can only be developed by faith in Christ, because through the workings of the Holy Spirit that will allow it's growth in humility and confidence--confidence in Christ, not yourself. 
3. Learning -- If you are a Christian, you will be immersed in learning about Christ, and in Christ you will be truly free to face a lot of the very uncomfortable things about reality. Without Christian faith, and character developed by the Holy Spirit, you will almost certainly learn a lot of very wrong things. 
4. Freedom -- I see this as an often misunderstood pillar. As Solzhenitsyn and Frankel taught us, even in the most extreme cases of the lack of physical freedom, we can be free in Christ beyond all even potential earthly human freedom. In fact, the greatest earthy physical freedom is often a horrid prison of addiction, striving after mammon, etc 

I found this paragraph to be a good statement of what we need to get back as a people if we want to be "Great Again". 

In former times, the most thoughtful people valued the old or the new only insofar as they gave a clue to the eternal and transcendent. In seeking the transcendent, they believed that old things did have a certain dignity on their face: they have the advantage of persistence, which is one part of virtue. Things that have been thought good for a long time are worthy of attention, respect, and study. New things are harder to judge. Nonetheless, both old and new things must meet the test of permanence and transcendence.

To the modern ear, that sounds antiquated. Today the theme is not permanence, but change; not transcendence, but presence. Change is the master key to everything. Change can be eternal only in the sense that everything changes. But if everything changes, nothing is permanent, and nothing is transcendent. Today we are trying to make a transcendent good out of the one thing that cannot transcend.

We are created with an eternal soul, and our life is intended to be a journey back to the source of that soul.  We are permanent, we made to seek the permanent. Truth itself is under a withering attack -- how can it not be if all is change?

Modern liberalism in America begins with two ideas: one, everything is change; two, we should use science to get control of the process of change and make the society into what we want it to be. This is the engineering project that has significantly changed the way we are governed. It threatens to change our way of life decisively and for all time.

 Just read the article rather than me, your very freedom to be able to do so is under a vicious and amoral attack in a sham "impeachment" as this is written!