Culture wars!

Roger Scruton makes some extremely valuable points in this article:
http://spectator.org/people/roger-scruton/all.xml

This is a small extract from the article:

SO WHAT SHOULD CONSERVATIVES BE DOING? This is the last of my regular articles for The American Spectator, so let me conclude a happy period of my life with a few observations for future use. Our work, it seems to me, consists in what Plato called anamnesis -- the defeat of forgetting. We cannot ask young people to live as we lived or to value what we valued. But we can encourage them to see the point of how we lived, and to recognize that freedom without responsibility is, in the end, an empty asset. We can tell them stories of the old virtues, and enlarge their sympathies toward a world in which suffering and sacrifice were not the purely negative things that they are represented to be by the consumer culture but an immovable part of any lasting happiness. Our task, in other words, is now less political than cultural -- an education of the sympathies, which requires from us virtues (such as imagination, creativity, and a respect for high culture) that have a diminishing place in the world of politics.

Of course, we should do our best to control the growth of the state and to make it more difficult to depend upon its constant expansion. We should seek, through whatever avenues remain, to rebuild our education system with knowledge rather than “self-esteem” as its product. There are a hundred small-scale ways in which we can help the next generation not to fall completely into the trap that is being prepared for it. But there is no way, I fear, to destroy that trap entirely. For it is built from human ingenuity and baited with our own desires.