This story originally was published by Real Clear Wire
By Abraham Unger
Real Clear Wire
Earlier this month, at a National Association of Independent Schools (“NAIS”) conference, more than one speaker got up and gave a blatantly anti-Semitic diatribe. This revered national education association is the premiere accreditation agency of over 1,500 of the most elite private schools in the country, including Dalton on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. The conference program was so biased that some Jewish participants tried to hide their Star of David pendants inside their shirts. The relentless anti-Semitism unleashed over the past year speaks volumes about a larger infection that has reached the top echelons of America’s most vaunted school accrediting organization. This kind of raw bigotry by an education organization against a religious minority tells us something unnerving about the state of our schools right now.
The American answer – the only hopeful answer for our long-term social health – is to get back to reminding ourselves just how and why this country was founded. That means reviving civics at the heart of our school curricula, long before our children land on college campuses or in the workplace. If we don’t expose young people to the great debates and documents upon which our nation was established, how can we expect them to be thoughtful citizens of a republic when they mature? Imagine students in middle school reading George Washington’s letter to the colonial synagogue of Newport, Rhode Island. In that central epistle of American government, written to the Jewish community by our first president, Washington made clear that tolerance of different identities is not merely a conditional indulgence. Bigotry would be given “no sanction.” Liberty for all was an a priori presumption based on natural rights.
How many of our students in middle school and high school know terms such as natural rights and religious liberty, let alone the classic texts on which they are based and that helped spawn these United States? We need to recommit ourselves to education about our foundational propositions, events, and documents.
Last month, just as the NAIS conference of hate was about to start, another national conference got underway. This one was different.
The Jack Miller Center is devoted to one purpose: the teaching of American civics. As Dr. Justin Dyer from the University of Texas at Austin succinctly explains, that means “the rights and duties of citizenship.” This is a vast curricular mandate, necessarily beginning with the classics of Western thought that led to the American Founding and documents such as the Federalist Papers and the Constitution. How do the ancients, from the Jews to the Greeks to the Romans all the way to Locke and Hobbes and Rousseau, get us to Jefferson and Adams? And how does Jefferson get us to Lincoln and beyond? How was our government formed, and how has it evolved over time? What is its structure? What does it mean to be a citizen of this new and different kind of country in the history of nations?
These are fundamental questions. At the Jack Miller Center’s November National Summit on Civic Education, the urgent significance of this kind of student learning was the only agenda item. Various educational leaders spoke, and real, concrete discussions took place on practical curricular progress. As the Head of School of a classical middle and high school, I see this kind of national dialogue as intrinsic to our founding principles. Students acquire significant skills as readers and writers while also gaining a deeper understanding of the American story.
At Emet Classical Academy, we stand each morning for the Pledge of Allegiance. This is not some rote ritual. We say it because we understand what it means. In our high school Practicum Program, students are mentored by an expert in their extracurricular field of interest, learning that industry substantively while also thinking about how to make a public contribution. For example, a ninth-grade student interested in sports management is mentored by the leader of a sports facility. He will study the role sports play not only in our city’s economy but also in local democracy. These kinds of curricular modules form the pieces of a truly meaningful education.
Civics is at the root of the kind of students we seek to raise. Will they be reflective and public-minded, or, in the frankest of terms, civically illiterate, and then compelled through no fault of their own to become resentful of a democracy to which they feel they have no claim? The choice is ours—not only as educators but also as parents and citizens.
If we in school leadership positions don’t move fast, we’ll continue to see the downward spiral of our democracy into tribalism and hatred, just as we saw at the NAIS conference this month. The Jack Miller Center, and schools that learn from its work and commit to a path of knowledge about, and hope in, the American experiment, offer another way. Hate comes from insecurity. Education is its antithesis. Let’s start teaching our children once more about their own promise—and their country’s.
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