Hadley Arkes at the Catholic Thing writes– post Independence Day–that the Declaration of Independence, not the Constitution that followed it–is the real basis for American democracy. His starting point is a speech made by Michael Mukasey, Attorney General under George W. Bush. Arkes says: And so, in a moving speech on Memorial Day, that remarkable [...]
Ron Chernow writes in the Wall Street Journal that partisanship and political vitriol are nothing new in this country. Once the War for Independence was won, and folks had to decide how the country should be governed, it was clear that George Washington’s “noble but failed dream of nonpartisan civility” was not to be. In [...]
Mark Riebling at City Journal has an amazing piece about the uniqueness of American thought. As he explains, the word “responsibility” and the phrase “personal responsibility” did not enter written English until the Constitutional Convention in 1787. Of course, the Framers did not pioneer the concept of man as a personally responsible agent. That notion, [...]
Lindsey Burke and Jennifer Marshall make the case against a common national curriculum, arguing that standardization is more likely to result in uniform mediocrity than in academic excellence. According to Burke and Marshall, having common standards not only won’t increase student learning, national standards will tend to lower standards and distract schools and communities from [...]
In the disheartening-at-best-tragic-at-worse department, most American students don’t know anything about the fundamental ideas America is based on. (Though they most likely know about the instances when America failed to live up to her own high standards — but that’s a post for another day.) As former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor– who’s out [...]
A judge in Idaho recently ruled that a charter school could not use the Bible in class. But the case is about much more than that. As the recent controversy over the work of the social studies textbook selection committee in Texas makes plain, the issue isn’t just textbooks—as my own students point out, they [...]