A Crisis of National Identity: Reconnecting Our Youth With America’s Heritage of Freedom

The following is the text of my speech delivered February 7, 2006, to the Northern Virginia Townhall group — a grassroots and independent subsidiary of Townhall.com. This group is an informal gathering of conservatives and libertarians of all stripes in this area that meets the first Tuesday of each month at an area restaurant to discuss and engage with the issues of the day from various conservative perspectives. The speech ran just short of 30 minutes and was followed by nearly 25 minutes of Q and A. (Here is a printer-friendly version in PDF format.)

It is good to be here among fellow conservatives, and esp. what I call true federalists. The fact of your involvement in this group demonstrates your concern for what is happening locally as well as nationally. I truly believe that if federalism and restoring the federal government to its proper constitutional bounds is going to happen, it will happen not primarily from the worthy efforts of people involved in national politics, but because reform and civic responsibility will be first taken up and achieved at the local and state levels.]

Begin: My talk tonight is an overview of what we at the Bill of Rights Institute see as a major problem in our nation’s schools, and what we are doing to help correct this crisis in civic education.

Growing up, one lesson that was firmly pressed upon me — and one that I have never forgotten — is the fact that to be an American is a phenomenal privilege. To call yourself an American was not to simply say you were born here, and it certainly was not without meaning.

In this way, we are unlike every other country around the world. To be French means that one was born in France. In a fundamental way you could not emigrate to France and become truly French. The same holds true for Germany, Taiwan, and Brazil. Fundamentally, across the world your national identification is tied to your origins.

Not so in America. Any person can immigrate here from France, Germany, Taiwan, or Brazil, and be really and truly American. This is because to be American is to hold to our common heritage, to revere our nation’s Founding principles, to embrace freedom as we have always understood it. America is more than an idea, of course, but it is no less than an idea. To be American means that you forswear allegiance to the places of your ancestry and pledge allegiance to the Constitution, and to our Founding principles of limited, republican government; individual responsibility and property rights; freedom of conscience and the ability to worship the Lord free from coercion, etc.

I’m afraid that this basic understanding of what it means to be an American is being lost. And nowhere is this problem more pronounced than in our nation’s schools.

Simply put, our young people are increasingly incapable of answering in a substantive way the question, “what does it mean to be an American?”

At a time when we face serious new challenges at home and abroad, there may be no more important question for our young people to answer.

Alarmingly, America’s students seem to be taking their cues in answering this question from former-President Bill Clinton, who made the following statement in his first inaugural address:

Each generation of Americans must define what it means to be an American.

In other words, according to Clinton, what it means to be an American is different today than it was yesterday, and will be different again tomorrow — and he is fine with that.

Numerous studies and surveys prove that vast numbers of our children now unquestioningly accept Clinton’s relativistic and meaningless description of what it means to be an American.

A recent survey of students at Rutgers University exemplifies this fact. As one student said in a typical response, “I guess the redefinition of American identity is that people make an identity for themselves.”

More disturbing is the 8th grade student in nearby Potomac, Maryland, who said recently, “Being an American means nothing to me. I’m not even proud [to say] that I’m American.”

These examples are not mere anecdotes. According to the “Nation’s Report Card,” three out of every four students lack “basic knowledge” of America’s rich heritage and the principles that have always guided our great country.

In his Farewell Address, George Washington — a president I’m sure you will agree whose wisdom and moral example should be followed today — laid out his last will and testament for our young nation, that our “free Constitution” would be “sacredly maintained.”

Washington hoped that “The name of American, which belongs to you in your national capacity, must always exalt the just pride of patriotism,” especially in our “independence and liberty,” bought at such great price.

The views of our young people today show that our schools have failed to pass on Washington’s vision of what it means to be an American.

No wonder “America means nothing” to so many of our young people. They never learned what America is all about — so how could they be proud of our great country?

It is said that nature abhors a vacuum. If so, I fear for our future.

Already, we are seeing the rotten fruits of this failure of civic education over the past few decades.

According to an American Bar Association study, released in late July 2005, things have gotten so bad that:

• Nearly half (45%) of Americans are incapable of identifying the three branches of government. (More than one in five believe the three branches of government are the Republican, Democrat, and Independent branches.)
• Less than half (48%) of Americans can correctly identify the meaning of the concept of separation of powers.
• A minority (48%) of respondents correctly identified the role of the judiciary in the federal government.

What the results of this study and others show is that Americans today are woefully uninformed about how the government works — thus limiting their ability to effectively interact with and influence it.

They simply don’t understand that they themselves — “We the People” — are sovereign.

As Alexander Hamilton explained over 200 years ago, “Here, sir, the people govern.”

But more importantly, it shows that Americans are largely ignorant of their nation’s Founding principles.

One poll in recent years even suggests that most Americans today would not ratify the Constitution if it were to again come up for a vote.

It has been said the people get the government they deserve. Another way to put that is, if enough Americans don’t value freedom, we will lose our freedoms.

Or, as you and I know so well: A heritage forgotten is a heritage soon lost.

To apply this lesson back to the schools, a recent study out of the University of Connecticut revealed that there is a strong correlation between the rights students know and understand and the rights they are willing to fight to preserve.

Their conclusion should be a call to arms for those, like you and me, who love and cherish our freedoms: The rights that students do not know are the rights that we are in danger of losing.

This is why Thomas Jefferson spoke of the need for what I call “informed patriots”:

I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion.

In previous generations, our fellow countrymen understood that being an American first and foremost involves an attachment to — even reverence for — our country’s Founding principles.

Certainly you and I share this great love for America and its rich heritage of freedom.

But with no historical context on which to base their opinions, our children and grandchildren are substituting arbitrary “feelings” and personal preferences for facts and history.

Even worse, they are susceptible to falling prey to those that harbor political agendas that would undermine the freedoms that America’s Founders fought to secure for succeeding generations.

How did this happen?

The answer is at least three-fold: 1) unprepared teachers; 2) inadequate and biased textbooks; and, 3) the radical multiculturalist agenda that has infected school curricula.

Teachers Lack Necessary Knowledge
Regrettably, ignorance about the Constitution is rampant among America’s teachers. Most educators today are ill-prepared to teach their students about American history and our Founding principles.

• In fact, 80 percent of high school Social Studies teachers did not major or even minor in History.
• Many teachers hold degrees in Secondary Education with a concentration in Social Studies — an interdisciplinary study of history, economics, geography, political science, and sociology that leaves teachers with knowledge a mile wide and an inch deep.
• Other teachers are teaching entirely outside their field — perhaps holding a degree in Physical Education, since approximately 25 percent of high school Social Studies teachers are coaches.

And yet, these are the people charged with teaching our young people about America’s heritage.

Research tells us that teacher knowledge of subject content is the most important factor affecting student learning. Common sense tells us that you cannot teach what you do not know.

Another reason for the crisis in civic ed is:
Poor Textbooks. A couple years ago the Bill of Rights Institute pulled together a Fact Sheet on the state of leading history and civics textbooks in use in schools today, using our own surveys as well as studies published by the Texas Public Policy Foundation and the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation. I’ll read from the summary statement:

Textbooks used in America’s History and Civics classes have been found to be only 69 percent accurate overall. They failed a bias test with a 60 percent mark, and received a “D” in historical soundness. Most notably, the texts featured very little discussion of the Western intellectual and political traditions that informed the Founders and that served as precedence to our Constitution and Bill of Rights. Further, many of the books substituted their own interpretations of passages of the Constitution with little or no reference to what the Founders, especially The Federalist, had to say on the issue.

On this fact sheet we included numerous examples of the rampant bias, errors and omissions that mark leading textbooks. Here are just a few examples:

• The 624-page American Government by Houghton Mifflin Company spends only 1 page on the Bill of Rights, 32 on the Constitution at large, and 24 pages on federalism — the bedrock principle of American government.
• The American Republic to 1877 by Glencoe claims the “general welfare” clause in the Preamble of the Constitution authorized the national government to ensure “as much as possible that citizens will be free from poverty, hunger, and disease.”
• American Government by Prentice Hall makes the ludicrous declaration that “The American people have generally agreed with a liberal interpretation of the Constitution.”

As bad as these examples are, the most serious problem may be that the textbooks are simply boring. They fail to tell the powerful and exciting story of our American experiment; they have become a hodge-podge of topics that do not connect. They miss the point.

Multiculturalism
Finally, for four decades, the educational “philosophy” in our country has been driven by radical multiculturalism and the effort to “de-exceptionalize America.”

This is an approach to teaching American History and Civics that is based on the premise that the United States is “just another country,” no better than any other.

In other words, a radical nation that terrorizes others and brutalizes its own citizens is no worse than America is — the radicals, according to the de-exceptionalists, are simply different.

De-exceptionalism has come to dominate American universities and colleges, and has trickled down to the middle and high school levels. For instance, the mission statement for a set of highly-influential national Social Studies standards reads, in part: “Students should be helped to construct a pluralist perspective based on diversity and … a global perspective.”

In fact, far too often, academia denounces patriotism and love of country as a vice.

For example, the University of Chicago’s Martha Nussbaum condemns “patriotic pride” as “morally dangerous.” And Princeton’s Amy Gutmann argues that it is “repugnant for American students to learn that they are, above all, citizens of the United States.”

Worse, many of today’s students learn that they are morally superior if they identify with “humanity” and abandon their commitment to America. Richard Sennett of New York University teaches that this denial of American identity is “a positive phenomenon.”

Multiculturalism, then, has been embraced as the highest value. Meanwhile, we are ignoring the common principles that should unite us.

I’m all for teaching the history and virtues of all cultures — but not at the expense of the common heritage that we all share as Americans. For too long, American History and Civics lessons in our schools have disparaged and neglected America’s Founding principles — with horrible ramifications.

As Abraham Lincoln once wrote, “The philosophy of the school room in one generation, will become the philosophy of government in the next.”

If we fail to transmit our fundamental values and national identity as Americans to the next generation, we place in jeopardy everything you and I hold dear, including freedom, opportunity, and our way of life.

As David McCullough, the Pulitzer-prize winning author of the bestsellers 1776 and John Adams, said recently:

We cannot function as a society if we don’t know who we are and where we came from.

I agree.

We must make sure that every American comes to understand what it means to be an American.

Certainly, America’s Founders understood how important this question is. Joseph Story, who was nominated to the Supreme Court by President James Madison and then served as a distinguished professor of law at Harvard University from 1829 until his death in 1845, wrote in his Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States:

Let the American youth never forget, that they possess a noble inheritance, bought by the toils, and sufferings, and blood of their ancestors; and [the] capacity, if wisely improved, and faithfully guarded, of transmitting to their latest posterity all the substantial blessings of life, the peaceful enjoyment of liberty, property, religion, and independence.

In writing his Commentaries, Story’s chief concern was to pass on the legacy of the Founders so that succeeding generations would know what it means to be American and what we have always stood for. As he wrote:

In this way (as it is hoped) [the reader's] judgment as well as his affections will be enlisted on the side of the Constitution, as the truest security of the Union, and the only solid basis, on which to rest the private rights, the public liberties, and the substantial prosperity of the people composing the American Republic.

More recently, historian Victor Davis Hanson added: “Americans should also remember that we are bound together by a shared commitment to Western values and the U.S. Constitution.”

I believe that if America is to preserve its national identity, young people must be encouraged not only to appreciate the sacrifices of our forefathers to secure the blessings of liberty, but also to believe that the preservation of these freedoms and values is worth their own sacrifice. In other words, students must understand what it means to be an American.

SOLUTION

I have had the distinct privilege of working for the Bill of Rights Institute since January 2001. The reason I came to work for the Institute is the same reason so many people generously support our work: I saw an organization dedicated to addressing the problems in civic education I just finished outlining in a very powerful and promising way.

Our mission is simple: To educate young people about the words and ideas of America’s Founders, the liberties guaranteed in our Founding documents, and how our Founding principles affect and shape a free society.

We made a strategic decision to focus our efforts primarily at the high school level. The reason for this is two fold. First, it is the last time each generation of Americans is likely to study American history and government. Seventy percent do not go on to graduate from college, and for those who do, very few individuals study these subjects, unless they are history or political science majors.

Second, before late middle school and high school, students are usually unable to grasp the more abstract principles upon which this nation was Founded.

So, by focusing at the middle and high school levels, we can potentially influence the hearts and minds of nearly 10 million students a year. For these, we’ve developed a two-pronged approach:

• First, we reconnect young Americans with our country’s history, especially focusing on the contributions of the Founders and the stories of great Americans.
• Second, we engage young Americans with our Founding principles as articulated in the Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and Bill of Rights.

And the best way to reach these masses of students is through their teachers, since the average teacher has 100 students pass through his or her classroom each school year.

Since our founding in September 1999, then, we have concentrated on addressing the three main problems behind young people’s civic ignorance by 1) developing and marketing instructional materials that are unabashedly pro-American and that are firmly grounded in America’s Founding documents; and 2) educating and training teachers through our Constitutional Seminars to give them the tools they need to teach their students what it means to be Americans.

How successful have we been so far?

Well, to date, we can report the following progress:

• We have now delivered instructional materials on America’s Founding documents to more than 91,000 teachers nationwide.
• We have developed six sets of curricula that focus on America’s Founding principles and civic values:
• The Bill of Rights and You
• Citizenship and Character: Understanding America’s Civic Values
• Being an American : Exploring the Ideals That Unite Us
• Founders and the Constitution: In Their Own Words
• The Bill of Rights for Real Life
• Media and American Democracy
• We have now educated and trained more than 5,500 teachers to better teach the Constitution and America’s Founding principles.
• What’s more, we have established regular contact with more than 22,000 teachers each month through our three weekly eLessons — “Bill of Rights in the News”, “Landmark Supreme Court Cases and the Constitution”, and “First Amendment in History.” Many of these teachers receive two or more new lesson plans with which to teach their students each month.

The Bill of Rights Institute has been able to achieve these successes due to the talent and dedication of our education team. This team possesses more than 60 years combined teaching experience, and includes two members of the prestigious James Madison Memorial Fellowship, recognized for their superior knowledge and ability to teach their students and their fellow teachers about the Constitution and American history.

The Institute has also been fortunate to work with nearly 150 of the nation’s leading scholars and experts in the fields of constitutional law, history, and political philosophy to develop our instructional materials and conduct the 95 Constitutional Seminars we have held to date for teachers across America. These experts include Ed Meese, attorney general under President Reagan; Richard Epstein, the distinguished law professor from the University of Chicago; and Dr. Robert McDonald, a historian from the United States Military Academy at West Point.

And so I am glad to be able to report — amid all the discouraging trends I outlined earlier — that there is good news, and hope.

In short, the Bill of Rights Institute is on the verge of being able to do something that America’s schools have been sadly failing at for several decades: teach a generation of young people their rights and responsibilities under the Constitution, or, in other words, what it means to be an American.

Titled the “Being an American” Project, our campaign for 2006 and beyond will substantially build upon our past successes in creating and distributing excellent instructional materials on the Constitution and America’s Founding and in educating and training thousands of teachers through our Constitutional Seminars and related programs.

The Institute’s plans include the following:

• Increase the number of Constitutional Seminars and other professional development programs we conduct for teachers by nearly 25 percent — thus holding 75 such programs across America in 2006
• Conduct not just three, as we have the past two years, but seven Advanced Constitutional Seminars for teachers, including five weeklong programs, such as our annual Summer Institutes at George Washington’s Mount Vernon
• Introduce two new curricula focused on the First Amendment: Faces of Freedom in American History for middle school students, and Conflict and Continuity: The Story of American Freedom for high school students

As a result, the Bill of Rights Institute plans to increase our core network of teachers by 50 percent, resulting in 30,000 teachers a month receiving Institute instructional materials, and 7,500 gaining in-depth education and training through our Constitutional Seminars.

But beyond that, the Bill of Rights Institute will for the first time, through the “Being an American” Project, directly engage young people with America’s Founding principles.

At the center of this new effort is a national student essay contest — beginning right here in Virginia, as well as in Kansas and Texas — to bring to a focus everything that the Bill of Rights Institute is working to achieve.

The goal of the essay contest is simple:

Inspire students to research and thoughtfully consider the answer to the fundamental question, “What Does it Mean To Be An American?”

In other words, by working with and through our vast network of teachers, we will ask young people across the country to reflect on the rights and responsibilities of American citizenship, as well as the values and principles that unite us as Americans.

By writing these essays, young people will have the opportunity to consider American history and the example of great Americans, the student’s own role as a citizen in a free society, and the challenges and responsibilities that role entails.

The process of researching and writing their own essay and reading other students’ essays will further familiarize young people with the principles and character traits that sustain our freedom.

Cash prizes and other incentives will be wisely utilized to encourage as wide participation as possible, and will be awarded to students and their teachers based on the quality of the students’ essays.

These essays must be thoughtful, well-organized and contain the following elements:

• Analysis of one or more Founding documents and how they express what it means to be an American
• Discussion of at least one figure from American history whose life has helped the student understand American civic values
• Reference to one or more examples from the student’s own role models, as well as action that the student has taken to enjoy the freedom America offers and fulfill the responsibilities of citizenship
• Personal reflection on what being an American means

Notice how this is the exact oppostite of Bill Clinton’s formula. Rather than lead with the student’s uninformed opinion, we make sure the student grasps the fundamentals of what it means to be an American and only then do we ask for their personal, but now informed, view.

In other words, beyond simply learning from the Bill of Rights Institute’s instructional materials as they are taught by their Institute-educated and trained teachers — a very important aspect of our goals in its own right — these students will have to demonstrate a certain mastery and in-depth understanding of America’s Founding principles and what has made America great.

With our core network growing to more than 30,000 teachers, this means that as many as 3,000,000 students across the country will be actively exploring America’s Founding documents and the lessons from our rich history.

The media coverage — and the additional opportunities — this contest is likely to generate is priceless.

As I said earlier, I fear that many young people today no longer share the concern of Joseph Story and of our Founding Fathers that our Founding principles and American identity be preserved.

This is of no light or passing concern. As Story warned, “[The Constitution] may, nevertheless, perish in an hour by the folly, or corruption, or negligence of its only keepers, THE PEOPLE.”

In the recent hearings over Judge Samuel Alito’s nomination to the Supreme Court, there was lots of talk about “super-precedents” or, as Alito humorously retorted, “super-duper-precedents.”

At the Bill of Rights Institute, our aim is to remind students that there is something way more important than how long a constitutional interpretation has stood, or how popular a current political fad is. What is of highest importance is the actual Constitution of the United States.

Other fine organizations are fighting the good fight to preserve our constitutional heritage in the halls of government, in state and local communities, and in colleges and universities — and I commend their worthy efforts.

But only the Bill of Rights Institute is solely dedicated to reaching a generation of young Americans in our middle and high schools with the words and ideas of our Founders and the liberties guaranteed in our Founding documents.

The more young people who come to understand what it means to be an American, the more who will actively exercise their rights and responsibilities as citizens, and the more who will join in other worthy efforts to defend America and the freedoms you and I have always held dear.

This is the whole aim of the “Being an American” Project.

As Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, once said:

I anticipate the Day when to command Respect in the remotest Regions it will be sufficient to say I am an American.

The bad news is that too many Americans — and especially our young — have no idea what it means to be an American. Too many have bought into the Clintonesque belief that what it means to be an American changes from time to time and from individual to individual. By this measure, America has no foundation.

The good news is that right now, you and I have an unprecedented opportunity to restore America’s foundation in our Founding principles. Together, we can once again teach the next generation what it means to be an American.

Thank you.

* * * * * * *

If you are interested in learning more about the Bill of Rights Institute, or would like to financially support our work, click here, or email me. Thank you for your consideration.

Posted under Uncategorized

Comments (0)