In addition to the hundreds of meetings being held, there was an outpouring of new publications by scholars and commentaries by columnists and editorialists detailing the ideas and events leading up to the assemblage of the Convention in May 1787 and the signing of the Constitution in September 1787. Television programs, notably those on PBS by Bill Moyers and Peter Jennings, further illuminated the public's awareness of "the history lesson" about the origin and meaning of the Constitution.
But, meanwhile, during those same months in the summer of 1987, another series of "civics lessons" was being taught in the daily press and on TV, riveting the attention of millions more of Americans on the Congressional hearings dealing with the Iran/Contra affair and the nomination of Robert H. Bork to be a new associate justice of the Supreme Court. Not since the Watergate summer had constitutional questions come so alive. Few civics lessons as portrayed in school textbooks sounded like the issues dealing with the separation of powers, checks and balances, federalism, judicial review, or the Bill of Rights being aired and debated among the three branches of government in Washington.
Few citizens moderately alive to the news of the day could escape noticing that something important was happening. But what could the citizen make of it? What were the civics lessons to be learned? Did the history portrayed in the Bicentennial lessons, after all, have any real relevance to present-day questions of presidential power in foreign affairs, or Congres- sionai oversight, or Supreme Court activism? Could the Framers' original intentions have anything to do with privacy and abortion, equality, civil rights, affirmative action, or desegregation and prayer in the public schools? Did the scholarly tomes help the citizen more or less than did the hearings themselves or the ideological columns or talk shows of the com- mentators of various political hues? And what should the schools have been doing, if anything, about all this by way of preparing citizens to make judgments about their government-in-action , their present political leaders,and their candidates as would-be policy-makers in the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of government?
The bulk of this book was obviously written before the disclosures of the Iran/Contra affair that began in November 1986 or the nomination of Judge Bork to the Supreme Court in July 1987. This book does not deal specifically with the Iran affair nor the Congressional confirmation hearings regarding appointments to the Supreme Court. It is not intended to be an adversarial book on these particular events. It is intended to look both to the past and to the future with regard to what civic values and ideas the schools should be teaching. It refers to the events of the summer of 1987 simply as illustrations of the recurring close encounters between the Presidency, the Congress, and the Supreme Court over issues that could affect all citizens and shape public policies for decades in the future. They are recent examples of public policy debates which require the best in- formed public judgments that the American citizenry can mobilize regarding the basic civic values underlying our constitutional order.
How are citizens eventually to judge the merits of the policies and the practices arising from these events? Surely not by any simple or easy formulas or ideological refuge, but in the long run only by careful judgments, informed by a seasoned historical perspective and a meaningful conception of the nature of citizenship and leadership in a democratic republic. And this process should begin early in the schools and continue throughout the educative process—a process one could hope would continue as long as citizenship itself does.
So, this book tries to marshal some historical perspective with which to look to the future of civic education in the schools. The first stage of the Bicentennial commemoration ended on September 17, 1987, marking the framing of the unattended Constitution. Next comes the period of debate over ratification of the Constitution, the actual beginning of the federal government, and the framing and adoption of the Bill of Rights. The stimulus of the occasion provided by the Bicentennial commemoration thus ends in December 1991.
But the task of reforming and reformulating a civic education for the third century of the Republic will have scarcely begun. That task requires the best and most sustained cooperative efforts of the scholarly community, the educational profession, and the public. To that task this book is dedicated. It is not a handbook or curriculum guide. It treats of four in- gredients of civic education that I hope will inform the outlooks of those who do the curriculum-making, the textbook-writing, and the teaching in the schools as well as those in educational policy-making positions.
These have to do with study and learning about history, study and learning about constitutional principles, and study and learning about the conception of citizenship upon which various approaches to civic education may rest. And, finally, it offers a set of twelve ideas and civic values that I believe should suffuse teaching and learning in the schools, as students, teachers, and concerned citizens alike seek to understand and to practice what American citizenship is all about. They are not new nor original, but I believe that they embrace the essence of education for citizenship: summa educationis pro civitate.
It should be noted here that this book was originally planned as part of a more comprehensive study of the civic mission of public education in American society, a study I have been working on for the past few years as a visiting professor at San Jose State University and a visiting scholar at the School of Education and Hoover Institution of Stanford University. A single book was contemplated, but the coincidence of the beginning of the five-year commemoration of the Bicentennial of the Constitution and Bill of Rights, along with the memorable constitutional debates of 1987, made it seem desirable and timely to speed up the publication of the four chapters constituting this book.
The other part of the original plan deals with the long-range dilemmas facing education for citizenship in a pluralist democracy and the special urgencies that arise when competing claims call for educational reforms that lead in different directions. That part of the study is being published by the Hoover Institution Press under the title The Civic Mission in Educational Reform; Perspectives for the Public and the Profession. As the title suggests, it focuses on the educational reform movement of the past few years as viewed in the broader spectrum of issues affecting the role of public education in preparing youth for American citizenship. With a few notable exceptions, the historic civic mission of education has been at best muted or at worst wholly ignored in the many reports and reform actions that have blossomed since the report of the National Commission on Excellence in Education in 1983.
The Civic Mission deals not only with the excellence movement's call for improved academic achievement and cultural literacy, but also with such other clamorous claims on educational reform as: technological literacy to sharpen America's competitive economic edge in the world community; a return to the traditional moral and religious values of Western civilization; a reemphasis upon parental rights and family choice; and a return to local and private control of schooling. Part 1 views these claims in the light of the changing roles of families, schools, and communities since the founding of the Republic; the tensions for schooling arising from the competing who do the curriculum-making, the textbook-writing, and the teaching in the schools as well as those in educational policy-making positions.
These have to do with study and learning about history, study and learning about constitutional principles, and study and learning about the conception of citizenship upon which various approaches to civic education may rest. And, finally, it offers a set of twelve ideas and civic values that I believe should suffuse teaching and learning in the schools, as students, teachers, and concerned citizens alike seek to understand and to practice what American citizenship is all about. They are not new nor original, but I believe that they embrace the essence of education for citizenship: summa educationis pro civitate.
R. Freeman Butts
Carmel Valley, California
February 1988
Hobert Burns and Francis Villemain were the culprits who stood on its head Horace Greeley's advice about when to go West. They got me to come to San Jose State University on the pretext that I would stay for a year as Visiting Professor, knowing full well that my wife and I would pull up stakes after 40 years in and around New York City.
Soon after we were settled in Palo Alto, Paul Hanna held out the inducement to continue research as a Visiting Scholar at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University and to find a haven for my files of papers in the Hoover Archives. He, and later his colleague, Gerald Dorfman, kept encouraging me to keep working away on the civic mission of American education. As a result, a volume is now being published by the Hoover Institution Press for their Education and Society Series, under the title The Civic Mission in Educational Refotm. Meanwhile, Gene Schwilck, presi- dent of the Danforth Foundation, gave me the chance as a consultant to learn first hand about innovations in civic education, which Danforth had been pursuing.
For a still longer time and on a much broader front, David Mathews, president of the Kettering Foundation, honored me with the designation of Senior Fellow for several years, during which time I was privileged to help organize the Council for the Advancement of Citizenship and act as chairman of its annual Jennings Randolph Forum. As a member of the Kettering Associates Council, I still continue as a member of the CAC board of directors and honorary chair of the Randolph Forum.
Finally, the major debt for this particular book is owed to Charles N. Quigley, executive director of the Center for Civic Education. For more than a decade he has repeatedly invited me not only to be a member of the board of directors of the Center but to engage actively in its conferences, its writings, and its counsels. I am the first to make it clear that I have leamed more from these valued connections than I have been able to teach. That will be immediately clear to anyone who reads further in this book and knows the materials produced by the Law in a Free Society project.
But the usual disclaimer is appropriate. I provide the Center not only with plausible deniability but absolute deniability that any of my views officially represent those of the Center. In fact, many of the views of this book have already been published in a number of sources, most, if not all, of which I hope I have recognized herewith:
Portions of Chapter 1 appear in an anthology edited by Bemard R. Gifford, History in the Schools: What Shall We Teach? (New York: Macmillan, 1988). Portions of Chapter 2 are adapted from my historical chapter in a volume edited by Howard D. Mehlinger, Teaching about the Consh'tukion in American Secondary Schools (Washington, D.C.: Project 87, 1981) and in my own, Religion, Education, and the First Amendment (Washington, D.C.: People for the American Way, 1985). Chapters 3 and 4 are adapted from my The Revival of Civic Learning (Bloomington, Ind.: Phi Delta Kappa Educational Foundation, 1980). A shorter version of Chapter 4 appeared in a special issue of the American Journal of Education, Februaty 1988, an article entitled "The Moral Imperative for American Schools: "Inflame the Civic Temper.'" Portions of my discussion in Chapter 4 of Morris Janowitz, The Reconstruction of Patriotism, first appeared in Educational Studies, Summer 1986.
In each case the original writing was done at the invitation of the editor or publisher, to whom permission to reprint here is gratefully acknowledged.
The names and numbers of all the team players who faithfully turned the scribbles of this unreconstructed pen-pusher into readable type cannot be listed in this scorecard. But the super-stars in the hectic final stages were clearly two members of the staff of the Center for Civic Education, Roslyn Danberg, production coordinator, and Kerin Martin, administrative coordinator. They made the game well worth the candle.
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