Teaching
I spent most of my career teaching social studies. As I stood in front of a classroom, explaining Gettysburg or World War I (two of my favorite lesson plans), I didn’t expect my students would remember all the details. While I would (ask my wife) get incredibly detailed about Confederate movements around and up Little Round Top, or vividly create a picture of life in the trenches of Northern France, I was really trying to teach my students something else.
I wanted them to “feel” the incredible courage of Americans, willing to risk everything for a cause they believed in. I tried to make them “live” in that moment with a nineteen year-old from Texas, or Maine, or Ohio, as they faced the existential threat of death. My hope was they would understand that being an American (even an American fighting against the Union) was a cause worth fighting for, and even dying for.
If there was any “indoctrination” going on, it was that even with all of its flaws, the concept of the American experiment was and is, worth it. It was so important, as the Founding Fathers so eloquently put it, that: “(W)ith a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor” (Declaration of Independence).
Benjamin Franklin put it succinctly: “We must, indeed, all hang together or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.” It was true outside Independence Hall in 1776, and it is still true today.
More Perfect
I based my goals for the class on this “hanging together”; and one other phrase, this by James Madison. “We the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union…” (Preamble, US Constitution). It’s that odd phrasing, “more perfect”. We’d spend just a little time dealing with the grammatical issue created by “more perfect”. Clearly if something is perfect, there is no more “perfecting”, nor making it “perfect-er”. But it wasn’t a Madisonian grammar error, it was an intentional understanding.
America was not perfect. It was a Nation with enslavement and economic inequity, and huge regional diversity. But instead of saying the negative, a “flawed” America (is that “woke”?), Madison instead recognized that the Constitutional Republic was a form of government so much better, that it simply need be allowed to “grow”. The growth is the “more perfecting”, and we could see it in the Constitution itself. The inclusion of an Amending process (Article V) allowed the Constitution to “grow”, from the Bill of Rights on.
The American experiment in democracy was literally based in change, in becoming “more perfect”. {This is exact opposite of the legal argument of the Supreme Court “Originalists”. Their opinion is that the Constitution was set in stone, like a tablet down from Mount Sinai. Their idea is that anything other than amending, leaves the Constitution static and unchanged. That doesn’t fit with Madison’s model at all}.
Learning Outcome
My goal for my students was to see America as a place where regardless of our ethnic, regional, racial, religious, gender or political differences; we could all still “hang together”. And that, together, even in a Nation full of flaws, we could continue the process of making it, and our lives, “more perfect”. That was a goal worth living for, and if need be, dying for; despite the imperfections that America has. And that was what teaching social studies in America was all about.
Today, all of those “vaunted ideals” are being erased. The current America is becoming, in my view, “less perfect” at an alarming rate. Patrick Henry in his famous “Liberty or Death” speech said: “…The next gale that sweeps from the North will bring to our ears the clash of resounding arms.” Today, you might say the next news update “shall bring to our ears” the sound of American democracy failing, on piece at a time.
Prudence
It would be easy to “go small”. The “prudent” move might be to hide. The shield of white, suburban America, of old age, of stable pension and mortgage; all seductively call out; “Lay low. Let the gale pass by”. But what about those young Americans who drove into a hail of minié balls at Gettysburg with nothing but the bayonets on their rifles? What about the heroes who held the trenches at Second Battle of the Marne? What about my parents, who placed their lives on the line to stop Fascism in World War II? They stood up to the tempest, regardless of the risk. Those “ordinary” heroes (how can a hero be ordinary?) might not have articulated the Founding Fathers’ reasoning, but they were defending the American experiment.
If not us, who will stand up for Jefferson’s and Franklin’s and Madison’s ideals?
And, what do I owe those thousands of students who watched the battle lines of Gettysburg move across the chalk-board, or imagined the stench of mud, feces and human rot in the trenches of my class?
American Answer
It must be more than being small; more than prudence in my actions. There are many ways to stand for “more perfect” today, but hiding is not one of them. So I too must call out a government that is acting Un-American, from secret police round-ups to blowing up ships on the high seas. The Founding Fathers would have understood the need to leave their homes and act, as soldiers or legislators or statesmen, or even as authors. Thomas Paine, the “conscience of the American revolution”, said it.
“Whatever is my right as a man is also the right of another; and it becomes my duty to guarantee as well as to possess. Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom, must, like men, undergo the fatigues of supporting it.”
He also wrote:
“THESE are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.”
It is no time to be a summer soldier or a sunshine patriot. Our souls are being tried, but the clear duty to our Nation remains. We must stand by it now: for our families and our ancestors, and for students past and future.
Because those future students will ask, in a freer America; “what did you do?”
We must provide the answer to that question; one that makes America more perfect again.
