Jason Bedrick is a Senior Research Fellow for the Center for Education Policy at The Heritage Foundation, where he focuses on education freedom and choice, religious liberty, classical education, and restoring the primary role of families in education. His research on education policy has been published by numerous national and state-level think tanks, and he is an adjunct scholar with the Cato Institute, where he once served as a policy analyst with the Center for Educational Freedom. inFOCUS Editor Shoshana Bryen spoke with him about civic education in our schools.
inFOCUS: As we approach America’s 250th birthday, some say our founding documents don’t have relevance anymore because they were written by racist white men who owned slaves. Is it possible that the founders wrote the right principles, and we just have trouble living up to them?
Jason Bedrick: It’s important that we not judge historical figures by modern standards. In fact, we have the luxury of asking these questions because the Founders were so successful in advancing their particular vision for society, which was deeply rooted in biblical and classical liberal values. Rabbi Ari Berman of Yeshiva University recently said at the Religious Liberty Commission hearing that America was a nation “conceived in promise, not in perfection.”
These were men born into a world where slavery was the norm. Yet they were advancing principles that, within a century, led to the abolition of slavery in the United States. We should judge them based on the principles that they espoused and their attempts to live up to those principles, however imperfect, rather than condemn them based on the progress that we have made since then in trying to put those principles into practice.
iF: If we start there, how did we get from “e pluribus unum” to “diversity is our strength”? Should we look back at the prior slogan? Should we try to eliminate diversity? And what role does civics education, or lack thereof, play in understanding e pluribus unum?
Bedrick: Civics education should be central to American education. By the time of the Founding, when they were thinking about education, they were thinking of it in terms of preserving our republic. Benjamin Franklin, in response to the question of what form of government we were given, famously said, “A republic if you can keep it.” And they recognized that a nation that was going to be self-governing had to be sufficiently educated in civics in order to preserve that republic. This idea of e pluribus unum is certainly a central part of that. It’s why this is the motto on our currency: that out of many different groups, people who have different interests, religions, backgrounds, and political ideas, we have to be united around something.
And what is that?
This idea that diversity is our strength too often refers to people who are ethnically diverse or are diverse in terms of their sexual proclivities, but are exactly the same in terms of their political ideology, which is a far-left political ideology. That’s not, I think, real diversity as the Founders understood it. But the most important thing about e plurus unum is the “unum,” that which unites us. That is our civic life. That is our commitment to the values espoused in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.
iF: Our civic life is grounded in an 18th-century Anglo-Protestant enlightenment, tempered by Judeo-Christian ethics. As the late great Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks said, the Covenant and the contract.The covenant is the obvious Covenant, and the contract is the relationship among God, the king, and the Jewish people; the United States has the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Rabbi Sacks said the only two countries he knew that had both a covenant and a contract were Israel and the United States.
Is it possible to teach that kind of particularism, that kind of Judeo-Christian ethic, that kind of Protestantism in the public school system? Particularly to students whose parents did not come from that ethos.
Bedrick: The public school system absolutely has a duty to explain the particular values on which our nation was founded and the ideas that inform them. We have to teach about the American Founding as part of the broader Judeo-Christian and Western traditions, and within the Anglo-Saxon branch of those traditions.
The Founders did believe in some universal values. For example, “We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal and are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights.” These are universal values that come from a particular religious tradition, a Christian tradition deeply informed by Christian Hebraists and therefore by the Jewish tradition. This idea that all men are created equal comes essentially from the Bible, that we are created b’Tselem Elohim, in the image of God, and therefore have equal dignity. This is simultaneously a universal value and a belief that was not universally held. The Founders said, “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” but it was not at all self-evident for Aristotle or for Plato or Socrates, or actually. for most people throughout most of human history.
They looked around the world and saw not natural equality, but rather natural inequality. Many Greeks believed that there were those who had souls of gold, silver, bronze, or iron. Either you had a soul that determined you were meant to rule, or you were meant to be in some sort of priestly or aristocratic class, or you were meant to be a peasant, a soldier, or a slave. They believed that was natural. The universal idea that all men are created equal, actually stems from a particular religious and philosophical tradition. It is imperative that our schools teach that tradition.
iF: That can be and should be taught in the school system. But are there those who say those kinds of values should be taught by parents at home, or by religious institutions. How can the school take on that responsibility rather than the family?
Bedrick: There are things I hope families and religious institutions would strive to instill in children. But I think it’s essential that these civic principles be taught during school hours as a part of a child’s formal education. Children spend most of their waking hours on weekdays in these institutions. And the school has a duty to teach them in a structured, formal sense. Children at home and on weekends are unlikely to gather together with their religious leaders or their parents to read through the Federalist Papers or Lincoln’s Second Inaugural or the Gettysburg Address, and talk about what these texts mean or how the principles explicated within them inform our system of government. This really has to be done in a structured way in schools.
iF: Is That the separation of church and state. The state has certain things that it wants to teach children, which would be the civic values, and the church, largely speaking, teaches the other things.
Bedrick: Not exactly. I see this as one of the central purposes of education. We hear the term “liberal education” a lot. I think it often gets confused because the term “liberal” is usually associated with a particular modern political ideology, usually with the Democratic Party. But what does liberal education really mean?
The root of liberalism is libertas, liberty. So a liberal education is one that prepares you to live in a free society. And that form of education has to take character formation into account. It has to cultivate virtues and individual self-governance to prepare someone for proper citizenship as an adult, which is our national self-governance. Character formation entails the forming of the soul, and parents and religious communities have a huge responsibility there. But the schools have a responsibility there as well, particularly when it comes to transmitting the text and history and tradition of our culture to children that they are otherwise not likely to get in a formalized way – unless they’re homeschooled.
iF: Kids also sometimes go to religious schools instead of public schools. Is there a mandate that religious schools teach a certain amount of math, geography, or civics? Can you create a religious school without that mandate?
Bedrick: Those rules vary by state. There are no national rules in that regard. Education is properly a state issue, so it certainly varies by state. Some states are much more prescriptive, some are less. Even the ones that are more prescriptive tend to have requirements based on how much time kids must spend in the class, or they’ll give a list of things that children have to know about the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, or maybe the state constitution, certain key events, like the Revolutionary War, Civil War, so on and so forth. But they tend not to require a particular curriculum. That tends to be left to local schools, whether local school boards or private schools.
You hear the teachers’ unions and others talk about public schools as the cornerstone of democracy. Well, it can’t possibly be the cornerstone of democracy, because our constitutional order predates the existence of public schools in this country by more than 100 years. In the Founding era, most people were educated in some form of private system, either in church schools or by itinerant teachers. There were a number of formal schools, but you don’t really have the common public school system until the late 1800s.
Civic education is central to education, but you don’t need the public schools themselves to have a strong civic education.
iF: There are parents who research the options for school, religious, private, public, and so on. But there are also immigrant children and immigrant parents, and immigrant children who come here without their parents. Is there a disadvantage to immigrant kids not having a single system in which they can be with kids whose parents have done the work and with parents who haven’t done the work?
Bedrick: I think the real question is whether it is better to have a system that is completely uniform or to have a system in which people have the freedom to try different ways of educating children, and parents have the freedom to choose. The first type of system really only makes sense if there is one right way to teach a child, we know what it is, and we have confidence that the government will put that system into practice indefinitely. I think all three of those assumptions fail. We are a free and pluralistic society, and our education system should respect and reflect that freedom and pluralism.
iF: But how do we catch the kids who don’t have the benefit, whose parents can’t do that or aren’t here to do that? If you just say, “Okay, fine, there’s a public school down the street,” have you shortchanged that child?
Bedrick: I want to move away from the public school system; I don’t think the default should be public schools. I would actually get rid of the default to public schools.
iF: I didn’t ask you about it, but please.
Bedrick: There are 18 states that have some form of a universal school choice program. Many of them are universal vouchers. Many of them are universal K-12 education savings accounts. Instead of your child turning six and you basically get enrolled in the local public school by default, I think all parents should be given a menu of options that are in their area.
I’m on the board of an Arizona organization called Love Your School. We’re now operating in a few other states. Love Your School provides that information to parents. We have “little platoons” of people who go into a lot of preschools and kindergartens, and show parents the options – including a lot of non-school options. There are tutors, virtual schools, and hybrid schools, where children spend two to three days in a traditional classroom environment, and then two to three days at home in more of a homeschool or homeschool co-op environment. There are all sorts of options parents can choose from. And we shouldn’t have a system that defaults them into just one option.
iF: I like it idea because, again, the government is not responsible for us; we are responsible for ourselves. But then you need to ensure you’re catching all the children and that the adults responsible for them have the information they need.
Bedrick: The vast majority of research shows a small but statistically significant positive effect from the school choice program or charter schools. But when people ask about it, it’s sort of like asking, whether dieting works. Well, are we talking about the Atkins diet? Are we talking about the Mediterranean diet? There are hundreds of different diets out there, and some might work better for some people while others might work better for other people. Some might have a better overall effect. So to ask whether charter schools work depends on whether we are talking about a classical education charter school, a progressive charter school, a Montessori charter school—right there, you know some schools may be better than others. I think this in itself is an education in our civic culture.
Freedom is messy. People have to take responsibility for themselves and actually do the work of figuring out which school is going to work best for their kids.
iF: This is not just a problem of immigrant parents, obviously. There is a cadre of kids who don’t get what they need in order to succeed. Immigrant children come to mind, but it seems your “little platoons” are necessary for American-born children as well.
Bedrick: Absolutely. It does seem that immigrant children have more of the deck stacked against them because language-wise and culture-wise, they’re a little bit behind. That’s just what they are. But the system of choice, on the whole, works better for everybody..
iF: Should there be some basic minimum requirement? Should a child have to learn the Declaration of Independence or what the Civil War was about by the time they’re 12, as they do for math, for example?
Bedrick: There is an immigration test that, unfortunately, most Americans would fail if they were to take it. Groups including the Annenberg Public Policy Center and the US Chamber of Commerce ask very basic questions about our government: How many branches are there? Can you name them? And most Americans, unfortunately, can’t accurately name all three branches of government.
Robert Pondicio at the American Enterprise Institute likes to say that he is against imposing the immigration test as a high school graduation requirement because it is something you should be able to pass in eighth grade. I certainly agree. I think we have to really step up our performance when it comes to civic education. Getting back to Ben Franklin – It’s a republic if you can keep it – we are not going to be able to keep this republic indefinitely if children do not develop a solid understanding of our system of government. Not just how it works but why it was designed the way that it was designed.
“Action” civics is not going to do that for you, by the way. This idea that we’re just going to take kids to a protest rally or to go to the state legislature and teach them how to advocate for a bill—which invariably somehow always ends up being some left-wing cause is not going to do it. Students need to actually engage with the history of the Founding, engage with the Federalist Papers, engage with the ideas of John Locke and others who had an influence on the Founding Fathers, and read the words of the Founding Fathers and their debates. That’s how they’re going to develop an understanding of what this country is and what our system of government is meant to do.
iF: What are those founding documents and principles they should know?
Bedrick: I would go to the Phoenix Declaration, which is a coalition document of more than a dozen institutional signatories and dozens of public officials and individual signatories. It is an American vision for education.
One of the planks of the Phoenix Declaration is citizenship. It says that a republic depends upon an educated and patriotic citizenry and schools should teach students the civic virtues and civic knowledge necessary for self-government and the task of building a “more perfect union.” We specify some of the things that students need to learn. It says that the students should develop a deep understanding of and respect for our nation’s founding documents and the ideas they contain about ordered liberty, justice, the rule of law, limited government, natural rights, and the equal dignity of all human beings. These are the core.
Students need to understand why the Founding Fathers didn’t just create another monarchy. They were part of a monarchy. Why didn’t they create another one? Or the opposite direction—why didn’t they just create pure democracy? Why did they create this system of checks and balances, of separation of powers, a system of federalism? Why are there both federal and state governments? Why are most legislatures in this country bicameral? When students investigate these features of our constitutional order, they will see what our Founders were trying to do, what they feared, and why they built a system meant to preserve liberty, individual rights, and equality.
We think of ourselves in some sense as a young country. We don’t have the centuries-old castles that dot Europe. Or we go to Israel and see things that are 2-3,000 years old. It is actually mind-blowing in that sense that we are the world’s oldest democracy. Our system of government has outlasted most of the governments that exist in the world today—at least in the developed world. How is it that our Founders were able to create a system that was so durable? That’s something our students should engage with in the Federalist Papers and the debates of the Founding Fathers, and learn. And they’re not going to learn it by going out on the street and holding an anti-ICE sign at a protest.
iF: The theme of this issue is immigration and how to create the groundwork for both native-born and immigrants to come together in their understanding of the United States. It concerns me that even native-born children are not getting civics education.
Bedrick: Yes, that’s right. Our civic culture is supposed to provide that “unum” of the e pluribus unum. We are a nation of immigrants, but that idea presupposes that people are coming here for a reason. That they are letting go of certain commitments that they had in the old country and embracing certain commitments here. That doesn’t mean that they have to abandon their religion. It doesn’t mean that they have to abandon their culinary or other traditions. They don’t have to do that. But they do have to embrace America as a nation, but also commit themselves to the American values for which it stands.
Neither Republican nor Democrat
iF: There are people who think that those things are right-wing or conservative. They are the same people who say, ”Well, you know, the Founding Fathers were all racist because they owned slaves.” How do we encourage them to see these documents and this thinking as neither left-wing nor right-wing? Neither Republican nor Democrat.
Bedrick: In the Phoenix Declaration, we quote in the preamble both Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. We do that intentionally because here are two men who were passionately dedicated to the American project and to the principles of the Declaration. Both of them were, of course, on the drafting committee of the Declaration. Both were dedicated to the system of government established by the Constitution of the United States. But they were essentially on opposite poles of that shared political project. They have very different interpretations of these documents, but they were committed to the principles.
All Americans should be committed to the principles of equality, of justice, and of liberty. We will inevitably have disagreements over what exactly those terms mean and when these principles come into tension with each other, which ones should take priority, and under which circumstances. Some of the great liberals were committed to the Declaration and the Constitution and said, “You know what, America, you are not living up to your values.”
Frederick Douglass, in his famous “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” address, makes this case. He said, essentially that. “You say you’re for freedom. You say you’re for equality, yet how do you have slavery?” He wasn’t like the 1619 Project people or Ibram X. Kendi, saying the Declaration is a fundamentally racist document and we should tear it and the Constitution up and start from scratch. No, he was saying, “I believe everything in these documents, and America needs to resembles the ideals they contain.”
Same with Martin Luther King Jr. In his “I Have a Dream” speech and throughout his career as a civil rights leader, he was making the case that America needed to live up to the values that it proclaimed. He never said those values were wrong or that we needed to start from scratch and embrace other foreign values.
Liberals and conservatives alike are committed to the founding principles, even if we disagree on how to translate them into practice. That commitment is what unites us as a nation.
Coming Full Circle
iF: We’ve come around to the beginning, which is to say the problem is not in the principles. To the extent that we have a problem, it is not the documents; it’s what we do.
Bedrick: We should also recognize that just as there are those on the far left who have abandoned the American project and want to undermine it and replace it with something foreign, there are those on the far right who also have absolutely abandoned the American founding. They think the Founders took a wrong turn at John Locke and want to replace the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution with something foreign—a throne and altar system or a blood and soil system. And so we who are dedicated to the principles of the Founding need to be equally passionate in our opposition to those on the far right as we are to those on the far left.
The Caveat
iF: Here’s a caveat. We know that we have people in this country who are not the immigrants we want. Let’s be clear. Over the last 10 years, we have created a problem. Do we need to think about those people differently?
Bedrick: America’s immigration system should operate in America’s interests. And we need an education system that instills American values in all children, native-born and immigrant alike. But that doesn’t mean we should just count on that system. It is wholly appropriate that our immigration policy embrace those who embrace America and reject those who reject American values.
There’s no shame in coming to America for economic opportunity, so long as you are embracing American values as well. But if you’re coming here because you want to conquer America, if you’re coming here because you want to fundamentally change America, and you are not going to embrace American values, you want to replace American values with something else, whether that’s communism or jihadism, then no.
We have not only the right, but also the obligation, to say “you are not welcome here.”
iF: Last question -look ahead 20 years, 30 years, what would success look like to you?
Bedrick: Success would be where the median voter has a sufficient understanding of the American system, how it works, and why it was designed the way it was designed. That knowledge should help foster a passionate attachment to our nation and our consitutional order, as well as a desire to transmit American values, to the next generation.
iF: That’s what I want for my grandchildren. Jason Bedrick, on behalf of inFOCUS Quarterly and our readers, thank you for an enlightening conversation.
