On Teaching Democratic Ideals

Abstract

tions, problem is particularly acute. For years, universities prided themselves on being 'Value-free/' encouraging scholarly research in a detached, objective fashion. Even during 1960s, when students and others tried to point out that relativism was also a commitment, higher education tried to maintain a public posture of neutrality. Now academy is called upon to help restore faith in a political process that it has scrupulously sought to avoid. To be sure, university periodically has risen to defend certain principles, but these have all revolved around procedures essential to scholarshipfree speech, due process, academic freedom. The crisis of values today extends beyond procedures to fundamental goals and directions. A sense of purpose has disappeared from our public life; and with its departure, common understandings that make for civility in private life are vanishing as well. Millions of Americans have lost touch not only with where their country has been, but why it has been there. Such a situation calls for a restoration of authority and community, not merely liberty and due process. Since universities have never handled problems of authority and community terribly well, it is not surprising that they are ill-equipped to handle them today. The preconditions for a response would seem to be these: first, acceptance of a common system of authority within which we can debate issues of value; second, development of a framework that allows us to link public principles with private needs of selfself-interest, so-called; and third, a strategy that helps Americans measure contemporary institutions in accordance with public values that our society is supposed to share. AH religions have adopted these principles of moral education in their efforts to win allegiance to their respective faiths whether authority resides in Bible or a pope ; whether self-interest depends upon security from hell or purity on earth; whether institutions promote justification by faith or justification by good works as well. The problem lies in discovering appropriate counterparts for civic education, particularly for a civic education that establishes a framework of values without imposing a particular ideology in process. A careful assessment of American tradition suggests several possibilities for this country. As a starting point, we ought to accept Declaration of Independence as central source of authority for national civic ideals, just as political scientists now recognize Constitution and Federalist Papers as final word on American political institutions. G.K. Chesterton saw critical importance of Declaration to country over 50 years ago. America is only country in world that is founded on a creed, he observed in What I Saw in America. That creed is set forth with dogmatic and theological lucidity in Declaration of Independence. The chief mark of Declaration, in turn, was which is not only absent from British Constitution but something which all our constitutionalists have invariably thanked God, with jolliest boasting and bragging, that they had kept out of British Constitution. It is thing called abstraction or academic logic. It is thing which such jolly people call theory; and those who can practice it call thought It is theory of equality.... It enunciates that all men are equal in their claim to justice, and that their authority is for that reason just. Past political leaders have had little difficulty in using Declaration as a vehicle for political education of this sort. In 1848, Elizabeth Cady Stanton insisted that right of women to vote was mandated according to declaration of government under which we live. In 1896, William Jennings Bryan defended cause of the struggling masses, who produce wealth and pay taxes of country, against holders of idle capital as issue of 1776 over again. More recently, Rev. Martin Luther King pointed to Declaration of Independence as a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir, and dreamed that one day this nation will rise up and live out true meaning of its creeds'we hold these truths to be self-evident that all EDWARD SCHWARTZ is president of Institute for Study of Civic Values in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.