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Disputed Questions is a new series from RealClearPolitics that brings writers of diverse viewpoints together to discuss and debate, with civility, the great issues of our time. Republishing this series is free with attribution to RealClearWire. Please republish these essays as one single posting. The Moral Case for American Goodness Endures By Wilfred Reilly The modern United States of America is one of the richest, happiest, and most productive societies ever to exist. The U.S. is one of the wealthiest countries in the world, with a per capita gross national income of $55,351 –...

Disputed Questions is a new series from RealClearPolitics that brings writers of diverse viewpoints together to discuss and debate, with civility, the great issues of our time. Republishing this series is free with attribution to RealClearWire. Please republish these essays as one single posting. To Save Itself, America Needs Not Two Parties, But Many By Lee Drutman Is America headed for a second civil war? To judge from recent columns, books, and polls on the topic, we might be. If violence is the alternative to politics, and our democracy is fracturing under the strain of two competing...

The Supreme Court has overturned the tables that have governed our mating and dating for the past half century. We ought now to expect a real-time rewrite of the sexual social compact. Absent Roe v. Wade, organized women of the world are going to be asking more of men. Women are rightfully angry with men in general, SCOTUS men in particular — and, if you’ve been a free rider on your partner’s reproductive sacrifices, you. Men, it’s time for our best behavior. We ought to expect a sustained pushback across the culture and public...

At the heart of the Matthew J. Ryan Center at Villanova University is an unabashed love of America and an open acknowledgement of its greatness, says director Steven F. McGuire. The Ryan Center, he notes, was founded to take seriously American history, traditions, and principles and to promote the study of free societies more generally. The center is named after a Villanova alumnus who served for over 40 years in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives and was widely respected on both sides of the aisle. Before assuming office, Matthew J. Ryan was himself a teacher and “believed that...

Civic education should supply “what students need to know to be participants in American public life,” says University of Virginia professor James W. Ceaser. But that goal is not being met at any educational level today. At the primary and secondary levels, Ceaser contends that civics mostly “isn’t being taught well or isn’t being taught at all.” Colleges and universities, for their part, “have turned their backs on political science” as it was classically understood, changing the discipline’s focus to scientific expertise and mathematical...

Retro Report director of education David Olson calls civic education an “essential” part of a “high quality, rigorous education that students across the country should receive.” Civics, he says, “involves both analyzing and understanding founding principles and what makes the United States unique.” A journalism nonprofit that was founded nine years ago, Retro Report helps students learn about various aspects of civics – especially as it relates to U.S. foreign policy. Teachers trying to put the conflict in Ukraine into perspective can show films that...

The End of History has ended. It officially ended with Vladimir Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine. Francis Fukuyama wrote The End of History in the early Nineties. It’s a book that captures the optimistic zeitgeist of that decade — born of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the implosion of communism. The basic idea was that once communism faded away — the reality, not the ideal, which will forever exist in the minds of many intellectuals — the world would become a more liberal, democratic and commercial place. It was an argument with real legs. East...

“Some educators approach civics in terms of activism and protests,” Professor Mark David Hall notes, “but protest for its own sake is not useful in civic education.” As Hall notes, “Before students can be participants in self-government, they must have a knowledge of the basic principles of America’s constitutional order.” The John Dickinson Forum at George Fox University provides students with this crucial foundation in civic knowledge. The university’s Herbert Hoover Professor of Politics, Hall founded the Dickinson Forum five years ago...

The rise of “action civics,” which prioritizes political activism over basic civic knowledge, is proof that a good civics curriculum is needed more than ever. Fortunately, parents, teachers, students, and citizens wanting to learn or teach civics have a key resource they can look to: the Civic Literacy Curriculum. Provided by the School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership at Arizona State University, the curriculum is a set of free, comprehensive resources on American history and government. Featuring more than 100 lessons and 200 videos, flashcards, and abridged study...

The American Idea podcast looks “to restore an understanding of the history and principles that show us what it means to be an American,” says Ashbrook Center executive director Jeff Sikkenga. Presented by Ashbrook, the podcast “explores America’s Founding principles and their effect on American history and government.” Sikkenga notes that it “elevates lively and thoughtful conversations with renowned academics and public figures based on questions rooted in the fundamental documents and debates of America.” It’s what he calls “the...

Christopher Flannery insists that a civic rebirth depends “on the great truths of the Western heritage” and “the liberating principles of the American Revolution and Founding ” – the foundational truths that Abraham Lincoln called the “principles and axioms of free society.” A senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, Flannery argues that American civic education is currently “in crisis.” “From our preschools to our graduate schools,” he contends, “we are teaching our children and young people to hate their country and to...

Professors Benjamin and Jenna Storey have a motto: “Education must begin from where the students are.” Today, they note, “an increasing number of bright, politically interested young people prefer Karl Marx, Carl Schmitt, and Malcolm X to the ‘Federalist Papers,’ John Stuart Mill, and Martin Luther King, Jr.” While the Storeys find such attractions “obviously troubling,” they also “take them seriously as a sign of students’ desire to look everywhere for insight into our current political...

Teachers looking for a history and civics curriculum that focuses on America’s promise of securing liberty for all have a new resource: the 1776 Unites curriculum. A creation of 1776 Unites, an initiative of the Woodson Center focused on reviving American education and culture, the curriculum embraces the “ideas of family, faith, and entrepreneurship that have enabled all Americans – including black Americans – throughout history to move from persecution to prosperity.” As 1776 Unites members wrote in an open letter to the National School Boards...

Teachers looking for a history and civics curriculum that focuses on America’s promise of securing liberty for all have a new resource: the 1776 Unites curriculum. A creation of 1776 Unites, an initiative of the Woodson Center focused on reviving American education and culture, the curriculum embraces the “ideas of family, faith, and entrepreneurship that have enabled all Americans – including black Americans – throughout history to move from persecution to prosperity.” As 1776 Unites members wrote in an open letter to the National School Boards...

Discussions of the Constitution regularly dominate cable news and political commentary, but constitutional knowledge among Americans is perhaps at a nadir. The NAEP U.S. history assessment finds each year that more than half of high school seniors score “below basic.” The 2020 Annenberg Constitution Day Survey found that just 51 percent of American adults could name the three branches of government – and 23 percent could not name one. If citizens don’t know the most rudimentary facts about their government, how can they pass on the blessings of liberty to future...

Should the U.S. Constitution be interpreted through the lens of the Declaration of Independence? A recent debate hosted by The Federalist Society pitting teacher and writer Hadley Arkes against University of Toledo law professor Lee Strang demonstrated that this is not merely an academic question. It touches on the foundations of the American regime – the “Novus ordo seclorum” (new order of the ages) conceived during the summer of 1776. “As the culture becomes more and more deeply entrenched in relativism,” Arkes argues, “we need to recapture the wisdom of...

“The teaching of civics and American history must be framed as a welcome to all who would seek to be engaged citizens,” says Pete Peterson, dean of The Pepperdine School of Public Policy (SPP). Civic education, he notes, should produce “humble and passionate citizens who take seriously their political and civic responsibilities throughout their lives.” Rather than seeing the American Founding as irredeemably corrupt, as some critics do today, Peterson agrees with leaders of the civil rights movement such as Martin Luther King, Jr., who conceived of our founding...

According to Intercollegiate Studies Institute president Johnny Burtka, “Free societies don’t work without virtuous and educated people.” The American republic relies on a “citizenry that can engage in politics at every level – from local townhalls to the highest offices in the country.” Though political engagement is important, “especially with institutionalized wokeness and systematic purging of curriculums, political victories are ultimately short-lived,” Burtka argues. Long-term recovery, he continues, is contingent on renewing “civic...

The rise of critical race theory, along with the popularity of the New York Times’s 1619 Project, presents a serious challenge to the concept of “E Pluribus Unum.” According to Richard Reinsch, the editor of Liberty Fund’s Law & Liberty portal, what should be a clear-eyed and sober debate over America’s fundamental character is being ignored in favor of a “one-sided view of American history and law as racist.” Reinsch argues that though there have been “tremendous problems in our development as a nation” – which Americans...