One of the nation’s largest Tea Party umbrella groups is pushing a curriculum to teach public school kids about the Constitution that American Constitution Society Executive Director Caroline Fredrickson says is so outside the mainstream that even the conservative Federalist Society would likely object to its use.
The curriculum, whic
h members of the Tea Party Patriots are bringing into schools through an “adopt a school” program during Constitution Week in September, was developed by the National Center for Constitutional Studies (NCCS), founded by the late Cleon Skousen. Skousen promoted the idea that the Constitution is a divine document that may have biblical roots, and authored Glenn Beck’s favorite book on the Constitution, The 5,000 Year Leap, reports Stephanie Mencimer in Mother Jones.
The American Constitution Society has been participating in Constitution Week for years, by sending volunteers to classrooms with lesson plans that feature the Sixth Amendment right to an attorney, students’ free expression and freedom of religion rights under the First Amendment, and the Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable search and seizure.
NCCS’s lesson plans are likely to have a very different focus, if an NCCS seminar Mencimer attended last year is any indication. She explains:
Among other things, NCCS uses materials written by Skousen suggesting that Anglo-Saxons are descended from a lost tribe of Israel; Skousen claimed this meant the Constitution may have been inspired by God, who intended for America to be a Christian nation. The very same bogus history has been perpetuated by the white supremacist movement.
Very little of the eight-hour lesson I sat through included a discussion of how the Constitution affects average people, or how it's been changed over time to reflect the nation's progress—such as the amendments giving women the right to vote, ending slavery, and lowering the voting age.
Mencimer notes that few people are aware of the federal mandate to teach about the Constitution, and that “few schools have apparently complied with the mandate.”
But ACS’s Fredrickson warns schools against adopting any program that presents a skewed understanding of the document.
"Any tea party organization that steps into the classroom has got to make sure they are actually educating students and not misleading them," she told Mother Jones.
To meet the growing need for Constitution Week instruction, ACS is expanding its own Constitution in the Classroom program. To learn more or sign up, click here.
Jefferson believed in a living Constitution not a holy one
From Jefferson's letter to Samuel Kercheval:
Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them like the arc of the covenant, too sacred to be touched. They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human, and suppose what they did to be beyond amendment. I knew that age well; I belonged to it, and labored with it. It deserved well of its country. It was very like the present, but without the experience of the present; and forty years of experience in government is worth a century of book�reading; and this they would say themselves, were they to rise from the dead. I am certainly not an advocate for frequent and untried changes in laws and constitutions. I think moderate imperfections had better be borne with; because, when once known, we accommodate ourselves to them, and find practical means of correcting their ill effects. But I know also, that laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths disclosed, and manners and opinions change with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also, and keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy, as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors. It is this preposterous idea which has lately deluged Europe in blood. Their monarchs, instead of wisely yielding to the gradual change of circumstances, of favoring progressive accommodation to progressive improvement, have clung to old abuses, entrenched themselves behind steady habits, and obliged their subjects to seek through blood and violence rash and ruinous innovations, which, had they been referred to the peaceful deliberations and collected wisdom of the nation, would have been put into acceptable and salutary forms. Let us follow no such examples, nor weakly believe that one generation is not as capable as another of taking care of itself, and of ordering its own affairs. Let us, as our sister States have done, avail ourselves of our reason and experience, to correct the crude essays of our first and unexperienced, although wise, virtuous, and well�meaning councils. And lastly, let us provide in our constitution for its revision at stated periods.
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