Richard Dreyfuss wants more civics in schools. We must resume teaching civics

We must resume teaching civics
Richard Dreyfuss wants more civics in schools.
C-SPAN 2
9/17-18, 2011

I have tried for years to find those words that could make you feel the dread I feel about one fact of American life: we do not teach civics in our public schools anymore.

When you really think about that sentence, you begin to understand the selfishness, greed, denial, decay and the belief that the people are the audience, not the performance of America.

America is a miracle and the whole world knows it except Americans because we don't teach it.

Do you think that the rest of the 21st century will be some kind of cakewalk? No you don't. But our kids aren't taught to balance a checkbook, how to hammer a nail, to cook or sew, or what due process is or why we have it. So how easy would it be to change it to “selective” due process.

I am trying to save my country. My line in the sand is refusing to think, “There's nothing I can do.” I can see something that others don't: how diminished we've become to one another.

We are raising up the cheap, the profit-only values.

We punish only the nickel and dimers, and we never demand accountability.

There is 100 percent agreement today that when a public official speaks, he or she is inauthentic.

You can fix Wall Street and the banks, and they will come back with subtler thievery.

You can keep complaining about taxes too high or low, instead of thinking about what we need. If you do, you can watch potholes bloom and see heroes — cops, teachers and fireman — living beneath the poverty line.

We want our kids to be devoted to the nation; what reasons do we give them if we don't tell our tale? That we're south of Canada?

A few weeks ago I addressed the Bar Association of the state of Maine. I asked, 'How many people here -- judges, lawyers and professors -- practice law in the courts of Maine without going to law school?'; No one raised their hands. I said, 'I rest my case. You all know the necessity of the bar exam. You all know that you must learn the arcane rituals of the courtroom. And yet, you cannot transfer that sensibility to citizenship, which is far more complex than lawyering.' "

We refuse to see the 800-pound gorilla sitting in our living room: If we don't teach who we are, why we are who we are and why we came to be who we are, we can solve every current political problem and it won't mean a damn thing because we will still have no firm foundation to stand on and know what is right from wrong. That's why good men do evil things, because they don't know the difference.

There are basics we must teach our children, and we don't teach them.

We fail.

We are the first generation of Americans to get an “F” in the most fundamental principle of our country: our future is more important than our past.

We are a nation bound by ideas only. We have no common ancestry or religion or commonly-agreed-to caste or class system. We are bound by those ideas born in the Enlightenment and actualized in the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights: the protection of individual liberties and that the people have the right to be protected by law, the same for all. If each new generation of Americans is not taught those ideas, and taught with rigor and pleasure, we are not bound.

What are the curricula that are absent, without which we will die as a nation and certainly as a moral exemplar? They are the pre-partisan tools of civic expertise: reason, logic, clarity of thought, critical analysis, raising up the values of dissent, debate, context and civility. We must tell the tale of the achievement of the Enlightenment which we alone actualized in our founding documents. We are not re-inventing the wheel here. These ideas are 3,500 years old, taught by the Greeks to their young. But of course we don't teach these inescapably necessary tools that allow us to maintain and comprehend this complex political process. That's because either we've done pretty good so far, there's not enough time in the day, or it's way too difficult for our kids.

If any of what I've just said is true, then God save the United States, because we're not.

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