In the Little Town on the Prairie, the character of Laura Ingalls displays the kind of cognitive connection that homeschooling parents everywhere hope to one day witness. More importantly, Laura Ingalls Wilder the author captures the realization of a timeless truth. At an Independence Day celebration in a fledgling town surrounded by homesteaders in Dakota Territory, 15-year-old Laura understand freedom more fully.
The town gathers during the festivities and recites the Declaration of Independence, which, like everyone else present, Laura already knows by heart. After the recitation:
Then Pa began to sing. All at once everyone was singing:
‘My country, ’tis of thee,
Sweet land of liberty,
Of thee I sing. …
‘Long may our land be bright
With Freedom’s holy light,
Protect us by Thy might,
Great God, our King!’
The crowd was scattering away then, but Laura stood stock still. Suddenly she had a completely new thought. The Declaration and the song came together in her mind, and she thought: God is America’s king.
She thought: Americans won’t obey any king on earth. Americans are free. That means they have to obey their own consciences. No king bosses Pa; he has to boss himself. Why (she thought), when I am a little older, Pa and Ma will stop telling me what to do, and there isn’t anyone else who has a right to give me orders. I will have to make myself be good.
Her whole mind seemed to be lighted up by that thought. This is what it means to be free. It means, you have to be good. “Our father’s God, to Thee, author of liberty…” The laws of Nature and of Nature’s God endow you with a right to life and liberty. Then you have to keep the laws of God, for God’s law is the only thing that gives you a right to be free.
This syllogism illuminates eternal principles. To be truly free is not to do anything but to do the good. For anyone who has had the misfortune to inspect college dormitories after move-out, you know that coeds have the option to avoid cleaning for the four-month semester, but this cannot be called freedom. True freedom is cleaning adequately on a regular basis to foster the full thriving of the human person in that particular environment. This is what Laura points to when she says to be free means “you have to be good.” You have the liberty to do anything, but true freedom comes only with striving for goodness.
The passage, along with much of the narrative about Laura’s adolescence on the Great Plains, should lay to rest any misconceptions about the level of education among the pioneers. As others have noted, there is evidence of high levels of literacy and enthusiastic cultures of learning on the frontier. Perhaps, like the British colonists before them, the Americans trekking out into the uncivilized territory in the West felt a need to maintain a strong culture of literacy and learning. About the British colonists, Stephen Mansfield wrote:
We should remember that the early English settlers in the New World left England accompanied by fears that they would pursue their “errand into the wilderness” and become barbarians in the process. Loved ones at home wondered how a people could cross an ocean and live in the wild without losing the literacy, the learning, and the faith that defined them. The early colonists came determined to defy these fears. They brought books, printing presses, and teachers with them and made the founding of schools a priority.
For Laura’s family, education is a topic of constant concern. In the simplified narrative of the children’s series, the only reason Pa puts an end to his restless moving to new ventures is Ma’s sincere wish to be settled near a town with a school. Recitation, songs, hymns, and stories permeate the stories of Laura’s family.
Laura’s incite on Independence Day shows the ideas people can recognize when given the materials of an educated mind. As Cornel West puts it in his idiosyncratic way, the texts we give our children are like weapons for battle. An education is equipping the individual for what Blake calls “Mental Fight.” The ethos and ideas transmitted with our stories and poems, songs and prayers demarcate the limits of our understanding and our conception of what is possible.
Conversely, we cannot expect people to understand ideas that exist in a tradition of conversation when they have not been given the tools needed to enter the conversation. Laura’s ability to memorize, a skill once commonplace, now vanishingly rare, allowed her to juxtapose ideas.
The heart of Laura’s observation is the fact that self-government has a literal signification. The beginning of a truly free society is within the individual: government of the self. If a person is not governing his appetites, he will be enslaved by them, not free. In order for a democratic republic to propagate freedom, the citizens must attain freedom as nearly perfectly they can within themselves.
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