Founding Fathers

Before Reading

    The founding fathers are a selective group of people that helped birth the new nation known as the United States of America. These founding fathers created the foundation for the place that we live in today, and they sculpted the beginning of it. To us, the founding fathers are more than the people who helped create the United States of America. They are also historical role models that inspire every new generation that is born in America to succeed and embody the dream of liberty that the founding fathers passed down. As children, we learn about the founding fathers and the effect that they had on not only the turnout of the United States of America, but the entire world. We do not learn mostly about who these people actually were, but learn about the importance of these people and where we might be without them.To us living today, the founding fathers seem untouchable in terms of greatness. The founding fathers are idols that everyone is taught to look up to and learn from. We are taught that everything we know about the government we have today was set in place by solely the founding fathers. That the secure government we currently use was created using the ideals of the founding fathers.

After Reading

    After reading the passage, I have a different view on the founding fathers of the United States of America. The dream and philosophies which America is based upon did not start with the founding fathers. These ideas have been carried along for many years, waiting for other civilizations to use. The dreams and philosophies that the United States of America is based on were collected from many different people including John Locke and his contract theory of government. John Locke also influenced a sense of freedom in the United States of America. Locke stated that “knowledge comes from our five senses. It does not come from ideas that God has implanted in our minds.” In other words, Locke is saying that we are free to express what we experience in life instead of what we learn about God at an early age. The kind of person we are at birth is nobody however, after time, we are sculpted from experience by using our five senses.   

Comprehensively, I believe I can think lesser of the founding fathers, without losing any respect for them. Before learning about the founding fathers, I thought of them as pioneers of freedom that were responsible for creating the best ideas and laws for government. After finally reading the passage however, I now understand that the founding fathers of the United States of America were simply compiling the beliefs of others to create the nation and were taking ideas from older civilizations in the world. Before the idea of separating from Great Britain crossed the mind of the founding fathers, they had not even inherited the stances on politics, nature, society, economics, human beings, and happiness that we see in the United States of America today.