It’s time to get away from the idea that everyone is entitled to his, her and now zir opinion. Opinions need to be based on something—on fact, on experience, but definitely something—unless you’re over the age of 90. After that go ahead; you can say what you want. But really, what’s going on out there? When did we become so uninformed?
A standard polling question this election cycle asks respondents to rank their concerns, and one that ranks high is “the threat to democracy”. What do people think is a threat to our democracy? The uncivil behavior of our elected officials? Probably. How about the decline of our defensive capabilities, or cyber-warfare, or the financial cliff we’ve already gone over? Dig a bit deeper (polls never do) and it seems that what people consider a threat is any opinion that is contrary to their own. If only more of us had a better understanding of our Constitution we’d be able to get along better—after all it’s our roadmap for living with differences! How can we expect to preserve our freedoms and self-government like this? Ah—the civics class, how we miss you.
It’s a simple idea; teach young Americans how to be American. How does a bill become a law? What qualifies as Constitutionally protected speech? Where do our gun ownership rights come from and what was a militia? As a democratic republic the expectation was and should still be that we ordinary citizens be able to think critically about these ideas. As Benjamin Franklin prophetically replied to Elizabeth Willing Powel, a Philadelphia socialite who asked him what kind of government he thought would emerge from the Constitutional Convention, old Ben said “a republic if you can keep it”. Our Constitution was written to be intelligible by all of us. Without a basic understanding of our Constitution and how our republic functions, we’re thrown back onto this morass of opinions and histrionic demonstrations.
Nothing could be more un-democratic than to try and find answers not envisioned in the Constitution to the problems of today, and a civics class could teach this. If it isn’t in there yet, then we need to let it work its way through society. And our federal system that preserves the states’ rights is the perfect system for experimenting. Federal and state government, checks and balances, the separation of powers into executive, legislative and judicial, the Bill of Rights; it’s all there. The Constitution shows us the way—it’s process over outcome, and it will work every time.
A civics class could illuminate the idea of American exceptionalism—the recognition that our founding principles place us in a special posture towards other nations. To be an American one must consent to the proposition that all men are created equal and are endowed with certain unalienable rights, and to pledge allegiance to our Constitution—a powerful notion in a world where birth used to determine the rest of your life. American exceptionalism isn’t arrogance or jingoism or provincial naivete. Quite the opposite. It’s the reason why we are able to welcome people from other cultures into the fold.
Believe it or not after this rant, I must admit that I never had a civics class in school. But, I did have a music class and thinking about this brings the memory of it to my mind. In music class, we sang songs accompanied on the piano by one Mrs. Smith, part of that educational legion from years gone by who without advanced degrees managed to do her job and maybe impart a bit of insight. Mrs. Smith. Even her name in this age of multiculturalism now seems to come from some improbable past. It was through music class with Mrs. Smith and her dancing fingers (she played the piano with the sort of rollicking inaccuracy of a songster instead of a musician), that I first learned the word caissons as in the World War I song “..the caissons go rolling along”. An elementary school class of kids singing that song is absurd, and I do see the humor. But back then no one would have suggested that singing a different song—a song that the children might better understand—would be more appropriate! Why? Education is meant to introduce young minds to ideas with which they aren’t yet familiar. Was singing that song the best use of time? I don’t know, and I really don’t care. It was an attempt to pass on something of our history and shared culture from one generation to another, and I appreciate it now for that simple reason. It was a glimpse of another generation and another time that unlike our own was consumed by a world war. It was a small history lesson.
As an adult, the confusion over rolling caissons was replaced with an understanding of that terrible world war and all wars for that matter. One flickering film clip in particular comes to mind. It’s of a World War I British soldier singing the Over There song. The famous song written by George M. Cohan is an American anthem written from the American perspective, but with a universal cry that “...we won’t be back ‘till it’s over over there”. It’s a heartbreaking recording and preserves so earnestly the youthful optimism that went into that war and died there. It’s a song and a perspective that could only come from that time and place. The innocence, the willingness, the courage, the sacrifice. And, when an inspirational, patriotic song was again needed for the army the lyrics were adapted—still patriotic and inspirational but from a contemporary perspective and arguably more institutional—perhaps to distance the horrible costs of war away from the individual and onto a nation. We need to preserve and understand the past and the people who lived it on their own terms. It’s part of how we got here; it’s part of our shared culture.
So, Mrs. Smith and the music class was a sort of history and civics lesson and not a worthless one. Knowledge grows by accretion, and memory is integral to that. At some point, my mother told me that Mrs. Smith was suspected of being a “tipster” my mother said tipping back an invisible bottle towards her mouth miming a drinker. I imagine today Mrs. Smith would be dismissed as unsuitable if she could even get hired in the first place lacking certifications. But, back then before professionalism descended upon teaching bringing uniformity and boredom, people like Mrs. Smith were part of the mix. I can still remember the day when she sat down at the piano stool facing the circle to begin class, and raising first one leg and then the other over the piano bench began to play. I remember because on that day Mrs. Smith wasn’t wearing underpants.
