The war is for the family. The battle for their children's education and their grandchildren's freedom is as real to them as if they could witness the clangs of bayonets on the field or hear the blasts of mortars in the harbor.

In our day, a vast majority of people is dependent either on an employer or the government-or both. One way to rate your level of independence might be to measure how long you can survive, feed your family and live in your home after your employer stops paying you anything.

Will we follow the course of societies past that have lost their way and crumbled under the devastating forces of economic upheaval, war and other crises? Or we pull together as families and communities to create a brighter future?

We tend to let our freedoms slip away because they are tucked away in documents and policies that we don't ever deal with directly.

Nothing will have more impact on the future of the world than for each of us to find out why we were born and to do it. Human beings tend to do this when parents, teachers and other mentors invite us to it.

The next step is for the great teachers to arise, and for them to clearly understand the challenges ahead and mentor accordingly. Where most generations focus the education of their children on preparing to make a living or succeed financially, leadership generations are taught by parents who see a higher role for their children.

The liberal arts are the arts of communication and thinking. 'They are the arts indispensable to further learning, for they are the arts of reading, writing, speaking, listening, figuring.