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On Teaching Democratic Ideals
Ed Schwartz
Change Magazine
May,1976
A great many peop!e are talking about the breakdown of public
values today, but few have any ideas about how to combat it. For
educational institutions, the problem is particularly acute. For
years, universities prided themselves on being "value-free," en-
couraging scholarly research in a detached, objective fashion.
Even during the 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 the academy is
called upon to help restore faith in a political process
that it has scrupulously sought to avoid.
To be sure, the university periodically has risen to
defend certain principles, but these have all revolved
around the procedures essential to scholarship-free
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, the 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 the universities have never handled the
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 the private needs
of the self-self-interest, so-called; and third, a strategy that
helps Americans measure contemporary institutions in accordance
with the public values that our society is supposed to share. All
religions have adopted these principles of moral education in
their efforts to win allegiance to their respective
faiths-whether the authority resides in the Bible or a pope;
whether self-terest depends upon security from hell or purity
earth; whether the institutions promote justificatification by
faith or justification by good works as well, the problem lies
in discovering the appropriate counterparts for civic education,
particularly for a civic eqcation that establishes a framework of
values without imposing a particular ideology in the process. A
careful assessment of the American tradition suggests several
possibilities for this country.
As a starting point, we ought to accept the Decl<
tion of Independence as the central source of authority for
national civic ideals, just as political scientists recognize the
Constitution and the Federalist Paper the final word on American
political institutions. G.K. Chesterton saw the critical
importance of the Declaration to the country over 50 years ago.
"America is the only country in the world that is founded on a
creed," he observed in What I Saw in America. "That creed
set forth with dogrnatic and theological lucidity in the
Declaration of Independence." The "chief mark" of the
Declaration, in turn, was "something which is not only
absent from the British Constitution but something which all our
constitutionalists have invariably thanked God, with the jolliest
boasting and bragging that they had kept out of the British
Constitution. It is the thing called abstraction or academic
logic. It is the thing which such jolly people call theory; and
the who can practice it call thought. It is the theory
equality.... It enunciates that all men are equal in th
claim to justice, and that their authority is for the
reason just."
Past political leaders have had little difficulty
using the Declaration as a vehicle for political education of
this sort. In 1848, Elizabeth Cady Stanton insisted that the
right of women to vote was mandated "according to the declaration
of the government under which we live." In 1896, William Jennings
Bryan defended the cause of "the struggling masses, who produce
the wealth and pay the taxes of the country, against the "idle
holders of the idle capital" as the "issue of 1776 over again."
More recently, the Rev, Martin Luther King pointed to the
Declaration of Independence as a "promissory note to which every
American was to fall heir," and "dreamed" that "one day the
nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its
creeds-'we hold these truths to be self-evident that ail men are
created equal.
From this perspective, it is astonishing how little cular
material exists that uses the Declaration as an explicit frame of
reference for civic education. If debates over the Constitution
define the issues that have arisen over the structure of
government in our history, only the Declaration can help us
understand the economic and social demands that have made
structural change necessary. Alexis de Tocque-
e, for example; recognized immediately the importance of equality
to American values and politics. It was "a passion-ardent,
insatiable, incessant, invincible; they call for equality in
freedom; and if they cannot obtain that, they still call for
equality in slavery." The ideal of equality begins with the
Declaration of Inendence. Thus, until social scientists find ways
to clain the relationship between the Declaration and
contemporary issues of justice, they will be overlooking
the reason why such issues arise in the first place.
Even more serious than the failure of social scientists
to discuss the Declaration of Independence in their classrooms is
their tendency to formulate political problems in ways that
ignore the connections between public principles and private
interests. John Schaar, a professor of political science, has
observed that moderm criticism often posits "an incompatibility
between things that we call individual freedom or authenticity
or fulfillment and self-realization on the one side, versus
the structures and processes of power and of domination and of
alienation and mediation on the other." The self can find no
comfortable home at all in society in such a scheme-only in
isolation, freed of external restraints. Authority no longer
represents a prerequiisite to freedom; it becomes instead
freedom's irreconcilable enemy.
Such an approach to life, though it may be imposed in the
universities, is not natural to human beings. Everywhere we hear
demands from citizens for dignity, a sense of worth in the
overall scheme of things. Economic inequality, social
deprivation, and political corruption have aroused widespread
cynicism and distrust because they suggest to people that the
major institutions no longer care about them. People long for
community as well-for physical reconstruction of small towns and
urban neighborhoods, as well as for a revival of the social and
religious values that have held distinctive national groupings
together. Finally, they demand participation in the decisions
that affect them-in the workplaces and the cities as well as in
the universities and professional associations. Dignity,
cnmunity, and participation have emerged as important principles
for movements in the past 15 years. Significantly, they all
assume a social dimension without which the private self must
operate.
Dignity, community, and participation can become useful
concepts for social science courses as well. A growing network of
instructors within the New Jersey-eastern Pennsylvania region is
beginning to adapt them to a variety of concerns. Thus, dignity
is now used as an organizing principle in both an introductory
humanities course taught at Allentown Community College and a
course in contemporary labor problems offered by Rutgers,
Pennsylvania State University, and the University of West
Virginia through the Union Leadership Academy. A few urban
studies classes at the University of Pennsylvania and
Rutgers-Camden are now applying the idea of community to urban
history and policy. Political theorists at Rutgers Univer-
sity will soon test a course on citizenship emphasizing
classical and modern notions of participation, funded
by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. These
seminal ventures suggest new points of departure for social
science teaching, hopeful signs for civic education in the
future.
We must recognize, however, that dignity, community, and
participation are merely useful conceptual tools for linking
public and private concerns. They do not determine specific
strategies for public policy and action. A citizen may achieve
dignity through exploitation of others. A community can be
organized for an unjust war. A political movement may demand
participation in the process of oppression. Thus, while these
values may represent important public goods, they do
not represent the ultimate ideals of equality and justice
that most Americans have come to identify with their
civic heritage.
The imaginative opportunity for political education,
then, is to compare the strategy for dignity, community, and
participation suggested by the Declaration of Independence with
the strategies adopted by institutions today. Can a worker, for
example, achieve dignity as a citizen within the framework of the
modern corporation? Can a neighborhood resident pursue life,
liberty, and happiness in most American cities? Can a citizen
participate effectively to make government respond to the ideals
of the Declaration7 The Institute for the Study of Civic Values
has used questions like these in a variety of seminars and public
discussions with workers and neighborhood residents in Philadel-
phia. Such forums have brought citizens together who have not
been able to talk to one another in any other way-union members
and welfare recipients; neighborhood leaders and city planners;
whites and blacks. There is no reason why these preliminary
successes cannot be duplicated in the classroom on a much
broader scale.
To be sure, the university is not the only institution
that must assume the responsibility for upholding America's civic
values; all institutions share the burden to some extent.
Thankfully, many institutions are coming to grips with the
issues. Enerywhere, churches. unions. political parties,
corporations are reexamining their relationship to American
ideals and to the broad public that surrounds them. The
recovery of political faith is high on the national agenda, even
if most of us must stmggle to fin<l svays to acnieve it.
The universitv does emerge as a logical leader in this
process, however, for better or for worse. For all its
imperfections, it remains the one institution in America where
ideas are supposed to be taken seriously as ends in themselves;
where Chesterton's notion of "theory" or "thought" is a
legitimate enterprise. Shortly after his Presidency. Jefferson
began to organize the University of Virginia, which he envisaged
not merely as a community of scholars but as a center for
creating active citizens and public leaders. At the end of nis
life. he saw this ideal as a vision second only to the
Declaration itself. It is noted as such on his tombstone.
Educators today may ask themselves whether the vision should
remain there, resting in what must be an uneasy peace, or if the
Bicentennial year should be the occasion to revive it.
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