Yesterday in our car traveling lecture hall, on the way to the homeschool community weekly park day, my daughter pipes up: "Dear Kid's father is an organic gardener. And Dear Kid has never heard of Monsanto. What's up with that?" I reply with "Well yeah...." and we trail off into silence. Dear Kid goes to school-in-a-building. I guess they aren't teaching children about Monsanto there.  But since Monsanto owns the government and the government owns the schools, we can't be surprised. And anyway they are probably too busy teaching "civics" or "gov 101" or some such.

After a moment Dear Daughter asks, "So, if a bee takes some genetically modified DNA into an organic field and then Monsanto can sue the organic farmer for stealing their DNA. Then why don't organic farmers sue Monsanto if their DNA gets into the organic crops." 10 points for Gryffindor, an excellent question! Organic farmers wondered the same thing and took Monsanto to court. Where judges have consistently ruled in Monsanto's favor.  "How can that be," asks the child? If this is so obvious to a child, we must consider the specter of corruption.

This begins a long discussion about life in a democratic republic, why the founding fathers (Jefferson and Adams were mentioned specifically) set up our government based on a system of checks and balances, the three arms of our government: executive, legislative, and judicial, the importance of a well educated population who votes, and the fact that power tends to corrupt. Ending with emphasis on the success of this governmental model leading to amazing prosperity, which has led to heretofore unimaginable amounts of our national wealth being held by private corporations. Who now have enough money to lobby buy the government--secretly. The founding fathers didn't think to allow for that possibility. And someone, eventually, is going to have to beat that flaw back into submission, if our government is to function well.

Notice please, this conversation is an example of child led or interest driven learning. Waiting for relevance is a powerful tool. I left out the economic lesson: corporation owned government suppresses economic growth in the population base. We'll get to laws about monopolies another day--thank you Ronald Reagan, may you rot in peace.

In the park, later, I found myself happily seated next to a married couple, both historians. I wondered to them about the best time to offer certain brutal truths to the children, the Holocaust, for instance. Historian Dad said he has information from original documents, letters home from American soldiers, he would hesitate to offer college students.