Educating Citizens

Democracy requires more of its citizens than any other form of government. It depends on the capacity of the citizens to govern themselves. But the habits and dispositions of self government are difficult to acquire and to sustain. They are rooted in moral and political principles in which each new generation must be educated. It is no accident that history provides so few examples of successful and enduring democracies. In the American democracy today, we have largely lost sight of those moral and political principles which provide the common ground of American political community and inform the civic character required of American citizens. There is widespread recognition of the necessity to restore that private morality which is the source of the public good and to strengthen the common bonds of civility among the diverse citizens of America. Educating citizens in the principles, rights, duties, and capacities of citizenship is the primary purpose of public education in America, and our institutions of higher learning play a critical part in making our public schools capable or incapable of fulfilling their purpose. That America is failing miserably in accomplishing this purpose is apparent to all who have eyes to see and ears to hear.

There are, of course, other failings in American education about which we may read almost daily, such as declines in SAT scores and in the basic skills needed for a competitive workforce. These failings are connected with but subordinate to the failure to educate good citizens. The causes of these failures are many and various. Even when we can agree on the cause, it is not always possible to agree upon or even to envision a solution. To the extent that a single cause may be identified as the primary source of our failure at the task of educating citizens, it can be summed up simply: bad ideas.

Education in America today, at every level, is dominated by doctrines that openly repudiate the principles on which America is founded; indeed, they deny the very capacity of men to distinguish freedom from tyranny, justice from injustice, right from wrong. These doctrines have wholly discredited the perspective of the democratic citizen: they have made self government itself unintelligible as a political phenomenon. So pervasive has been the influence of these doctrines that the teaching of American citizens from the earliest elementary levels to the graduate schools takes place almost wholly within their horizons. The consequence has been a corruption of the political language through which the nation conducts its public deliberations, a citizenry increasingly confused or uncertain about the ground and substance of its rights and duties, and political and educational leaders capable for the most part only of deepening the crisis. These bad ideas are rooted in a profound assault upon human reason and human nature as grounds of human morality, an assault waged over the past two centuries culminating in explicit and assertive nihilism. The popular expressions of these ideas in our time take a wide variety of forms. But as they are professed and practiced in the world of American education today, they converge most faddishly under the banners of “Multiculturalism” and “Diversity.”

The multicultural movement and the diversity movement are distinct political and intellectual movements which frequently overlap and reinforce one another. Their stronghold is in the academies of higher learning, whence they have sallied forth into practically every nook and cranny of American life. Anyone who reads a daily paper or a national news magazine has read about them over the past several years. These movements are “multi”-dimensional or “diverse” as one might expect, but it is possible to identify their most common ideas and predilections. For convenience’ sake, I will refer to the diverse phenomena as multiculturalism.

Multiculturalism

The foremost idea of multiculturalism is the equal value of all cultures, or cultural relativism. This is an idea that has made it impossible for a generation of American students to make the perfectly rational moral distinction between a “culture” that puts Jews in the ovens and one that grants them freedom of worship and all rights of citizenship. (Under the heading of “diversity,” this is also why public schools must not teach that monogamous heterosexual marriage is morally preferable to homosexual promiscuity. All “lifestyles,” like all cultures, are created equal.)

This is not just the view of zealots or extremists but of the mainstream, supposedly responsible public officials making policy at the highest levels. To offer just one small example among countless thousands: At a conference sponsored by the National Governors Association, a distinguished historian who was a co-author of the California Framework for History and the Social Sciences had the temerity to inform her audience that “California would be teaching democratic values as a standard of judgment” for our students. In response, “half a dozen speakers jumped to the microphone to argue that it was ethnocentric and chauvinistic to expect other people to care about or practice democracy.” This was not at a rally for the resurrection of the Grateful Dead, but at a conference sponsored by the National Governors Association. The conference took place, as it happens, just prior to the spectacle of Chinese youths in Tiananmen Square erecting their Goddess of Democracy on the model of the Statue of Liberty and shouting “Give me liberty or give me death!” ¹ (Many got the latter; none got the former, but it would be “ethnocentric” to suggest who got the worst of it.)

This reigning dogma among professional educators who shape the curriculum of American public schools requires a non-chauvinistic, non-ethnocentric, balanced treatment of Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and Jefferson or Lincoln. Moral relativism prohibits preferring freedom to despotism or believing that there can be a rational ground for preferring one over the other. With Lincolnian firmness, our civics instruction is dedicated to the proposition that “the concept of freedom can mean different things to different people in different circumstances.” Which while true is hardly conclusive, and offers small consolation to the one being enslaved by another’s concept of freedom. ²

Inherent in the idea of cultural relativism is the idea that culture, race, or ancestry (feminist multiculturalists throw in gender) determines our ideas. Our minds, that is, are locked inside our skins, and the gulf between races or cultures is unbridgeable. There is no such thing as human reason capable of grasping any part of objective moral truth (which also doesn’t exist) which is worthy of imparting to a student. No truth, that is, except the asserted truth that certain preferred cultures must be “affirmed.” We must, therefore, have black teachers to teach the black point of view to black students; “hispanic” teachers to teach the “hispanic” point of view to “hispanic” students, etc. Education itself is thus understood to be merely the imposition of one’s own ethnically or culturally determined prejudices on others. The relation between teacher and student can be understood only in terms of power.

Multiculturalists loudly denounce the emphasis in American schools on American history and culture and western civilization. Everyone has read about this. Perpetuating the American heritage in American public schools falls under the heading of “Eurocentrism,” one of the worst forms of cultural or ethnic chauvinism. It discriminates against other cultures by denying them an equal “voice” in the classroom or the textbooks. One might think that it would be a rational and non-controversial approach to teach American students about the American Declaration of Independence and the American Constitution. This is naive. And, again, it is not just the “fringe elements” who protest. At a meeting of the California School Boards Association, a school board member objected to such an approach: “We have children from all over the world. They want to learn about their own cultural heritage, not about the Bill of Rights.” ³ American taxpayers are thus required to support the inculcation among American citizens of non-American cultural heritages however antipathetic these cultures may be to democracy or to American institutions. The preferred cultural categories, “black” or “African,” “hispanic,” “Asian,” “Pacific Islander,” and so on, are egregiously arbitrary. How many hundreds of “cultures” are there in Africa? Should Puerto Ricans be compelled to immerse themselves in Mexican culture? But the categories are more or less convenient for the bureaucracies.

Bilingualism springs from this fount of multiculturalism. The common understanding of bilingualism is that it is a program facilitating the transition to literacy in the English language for American students whose first or native tongue is something other than English. In fact, the animating idea of the bilingual movement today is to preserve the sanctity of the students’ “native” language and culture against the imperialistic efforts to force the “foreign” tongue of English upon them. According to a study by one of the country’s leading experts on bilingualism, “71% of the studies show transitional bilingual education to be no different from or actually worse than doing nothing” to achieve English literacy. ⁴ Bilingualism has even worse effects in math. Federal statistics, moreover, show that “as many as 60% of the children to whom [“transitional” bilingual education] is offered are not in need of a “transition” to English since English is already their best language.” ⁵

The more tepid multiculturalists say that teaching “American culture” is fine and proper, adding merely that American culture is defined by unqualified openness to all cultures. These are the ones who chant that it is “Diversity” that unifies us; and in a meeting of professional “educators” no one laughs or raises a puzzled eyebrow. The more ardent multiculturalists not only denounce the emphasis on western civilization as bad but denounce western civilization and its American variety as uniquely evil in themselves. The very ideas of “humanity” and “reason” are seen in this view as Eurocentric (and for the feminists, patriarchal) prejudices contrived to exploit “oppressed” cultures. This is the real driving force of the multicultural movement.

Multiculturalism has no patience for objective academic standards of excellence. These are merely other means by which the “dominant culture” oppresses “minority cultures.” Therefore demonstrably objective tests are denounced as racist, and multiculturalists insist that students be graded only within their racial or cultural group or that tests be redesigned so that preferred “minorities” perform as well as the “dominant” racial group. This is called “Race-norming,” and it has been practiced in the hiring policies of the federal government for years. Private employers are now reluctant to take high school diplomas or grades into account in hiring for fear of being punished under the law for racial discrimination. ⁶

The multiculturalist replaces education with therapy, insisting that supporting the students’ “self-esteem” is the governing object of education. Self-esteem is achieved by teaching the students of “oppressed cultures” to be proud of their particular race or ancestry. Some argue that this should be done by revealing the true greatness of these oppressed cultures which has been systematically repressed by a dominant white, male, European culture. But the more candid or incautious multiculturalists admit or even insist that the self worth of the oppressed must be cultivated by myths where facts will not do the trick.

A relatively harmless example of the “truth-road-to-self esteem” is UC Irvine’s Native American Intertribal University Preparatory Summer Program, a $700,000 a year program serving a few hundred youths from a few dozen different tribes each year. As one of the participants described the purposes of the program, “Every person here needs to make these kids understand how worthy they are as Native Americans.” To help accomplish this students study canoe construction and build shelters with bark to demonstrate how inventive and environmentally sound Native Americans are, and especially “to disprove this notion that Native Americans didn’t work very hard.” Some teachers apparently at least considered whether it might be more beneficial “to concentrate class time on what the children have to do to succeed in school and in mainstream society.” But parents seemed pleased. One marveled at how his daughter had “matured and developed a confidence in her own worth and an identity as a native woman” in only three weeks. ⁷

Oppressed students can travel the multicultural road to self-esteem beyond the walls of their schoolyards. It branches off into every corner of popular culture and knows no bounds of tribe or even species. “Indians are about the environment, sensitivity, and culture,” as Bonnie Paradise, Director of the American Indian Registry, said while denouncing the insensitive treatment of Native Americans in the movie “Black Robe.” ⁸ Speaking for the organized handicapped or “differently abled” as they are sometimes sensitively called, Ira Zimmerman, advocacy chairman of the National Stuttering Project, complains about the unflattering depictions of stutterers in such movies as “A Fish Called Wanda” and “Oscar.” Expanding his clientele he complains that the movie “Hook” was not introduced by “a public service campaign on behalf of the disabled.” ⁹ The oppressed are not confined to the alleged human species. Betty Denny Smith, Director of the American Humane Association’s Los Angeles office, was very concerned about a scene of a wolf attacking a man in the movie “White Fang”: “I was very concerned about that being an anti-wolf statement.” Those who watched the film know that that scene was removed and that the movie included a “disclaimer from Defenders of Wildlife saying healthy wolves do not attack human beings.” ¹⁰

Representing the “myth-road-to-self esteem,” Beverly Slapin of Communities United Against Racism condemns as racist the inclusion in American history textbooks of the account of the migration of Indians across the Bering Strait to Alaska, whatever may be its claim to historical truth. “Native people say they were created here,” she says, “that they sprang from Earth, not from Europe or Asia… [To] disregard people’s religious beliefs is racist.” ¹¹ Alex Haley, famous as the author of Roots, was extremely influential in teaching black Americans where to seek self-esteem. Historians generally regard Haley’s Roots as fiction and doubt that he located his actual ancestor. Leaving aside the fact that Haley was half Irish and might have written a different fiction appealing to Hibernian-Americans had he traced his father’s rather than his mother’s “roots,” the uplifting point is that mythical roots can be the source of even greater self-esteem than actual roots, as most of us descendants of horse thieves can attest.

Martin Bernal’s Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, is a sincere effort to “lessen European cultural arrogance” by demonstrating the indebtedness of white European civilization to black African sources. ¹² Knowledgeable scholars have amply demonstrated the untruth of Bernal’s primary claims. But truth must not get in the way of therapy. As the African Baseline Essays insist, “the therapeutic effect of history [for black students] can be lost, indeed totally defeated, if the African contribution is omitted.” Therefore black students, and presumably any other students who are in the same classroom with them, must be taught that “Since Africa is widely believed to be the birthplace of the human race, it follows that Africa was the birthplace of mathematics and science.” ¹³ As Marcus Garvey candidly put it, “Things that may not be true can be made true if you repeat them long and often enough. Therefore always repeat statements that will give your race status and advantage.” ¹⁴ This sage advice must presumably be kept from members of the “dominant” race or culture.

The teachers who teach our public school children are graduates of American colleges where such doctrines of multiculturalism are rampant. They then (or concurrently) attend a teacher-training institution where to these doctrines are added arcane methodologies for promoting them. There are about 1,300 teacher-training institutions, or “ed schools,” in America today. There are about 150 graduate schools of education which concentrate more on the study of education than on training teachers—preparing education professors, administrators, etc. The approximately 2.8 million public school teachers depend on these institutions for the certification that allows them to teach.

Social critic Rita Kramer recently spent a year visiting and studying representative schools of education across the country. Her conclusion: “At present, our teacher-training institutions, the schools, colleges, and departments of education on campuses across the country, are producing for the classrooms of America experts in methods of teaching with nothing to apply those methods to. Their technique is abundant, their knowledge practically nonexistent. A mastery of instructional strategies, an emphasis on educational psychology, a familiarity with pedagogical philosophies have gradually taken the place of a knowledge of history, literature, science, and mathematics.” “Hardly anywhere did I find a sense that any kind of knowledge is valuable in itself or more valuable than any other… What matters is not to teach any particular subject or skill, not to preserve past accomplishments or stimulate future achievements, but to give to all that stamp of approval that will make them ’feel good about themselves.’ Self-esteem has replaced understanding as the goal of education.” “The worst of the ed schools are certification mills where the minimally qualified instruct the barely literate in a parody of learning.” ¹⁵

Educational therapy apparently works. We have succeeded perhaps beyond our expectations in replacing knowledge and skills with self-esteem in our students. American students and even their parents “feel good” about their educations. While Asian students outperform their American counterparts both in reading and in math, the American students are much more likely to consider themselves “among the best” in those accomplishments. And around 80% of American mothers think their child’s school is doing a good or excellent job even as one national study after another headlines the declining academic performance of the nation’s students. ¹⁶ The prospect in civics, one supposes, is that Americans will feel good about their country as their civic freedoms continue to erode and they turn to tribal warfare.

The not surprising tendency of the multicultural therapy inflicted on America’s students at all levels is to produce adult citizens who cannot distinguish between right and wrong; who are ignorant of their rights and duties as citizens and of the foundations and conditions of their political freedom; who have been taught to identify themselves through the skin color or surnames of their ancestors; who are ignorant of American history and the principles of American democracy or have been taught to despise America; who are lacking in basic intellectual accomplishments; and who believe that they should feel good about all this.

Perhaps the most tragic injustice perpetrated against the innocent student by teachers animated by these bad ideas is that he will have been denied his greatest birthright as an American. He will have been intellectually and therefore politically exiled from that community bound together by what Abraham Lincoln called “the principles and axioms of free society”: the community originating in 1776 with the bold proclamation of the inalienable rights of man as the foundation of American political existence. Indeed, today’s student is in a sense divested of his very humanity insofar as he is taught to understand himself not as a being possessed of the “rights of human nature,” but as a member of one tribe asserting his atavistic will against other tribes, while possessing no capacity of distinguishing or choosing between good and evil.

We Hold These Truths

Intelligent liberal critics of such multiculturalism see the problem more or less clearly. As the respected historian of education Diane Ravitch says, American schools should say to students from other cultures “that wherever they have come from, wherever their parents have come from, they are now preparing to be American citizens… They must learn about American history, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights, because this is now part of their precious heritage as American citizens.” ¹⁷ So far so good. But in inviting students from other cultures to become American, Ravitch would have them understand that “the unique feature of the United States is that its common culture has been formed by the interaction of its subsidiary cultures… Paradoxical as it may seem, the United States has a common culture that is multicultural.” “Our story is one of diverse peoples meeting, mingling, and changing each other.” ¹⁸ It is hardly unique for a “common culture” to be formed from “subsidiary cultures.” Nor is America’s uniqueness to be found in diverse people mingling with and changing one another. Lawrence Auster, a respectful critic of Ravitch’s position, points out that her view “turns out to be virtually identical in key respects” with the multiculturalism she criticizes. ¹⁹ But, typical of the conservative response to multiculturalism, Auster offers as a remedy the affirmation of America’s “Anglo-Saxon” roots. ²⁰ Alex Haley for the WASPs?

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., offers a useful analysis of the phenomenon of multiculturalism in his popular little book, The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society.²¹ In response to the tribalism inherent in the multicultural view, Schlesinger says that “what has held the American people together in the absence of a common ethnic origin has been precisely a common adherence to ideals of democracy and human rights.” ²² But these ideals which Americans are supposed to hold in common become very slippery in Schlesinger’s hands. “The American Creed… is an ever-evolving philosophy.” It is “history” that gives us our “values.” “People with a different history will have differing values. But we believe that our own are better for us. They work for us; and for that reason we live and die by them.” ²³ Certainly in proclaiming the “American Creed” in 1776, Thomas Jefferson had no intention of proclaiming an “ever-evolving philosophy.” He meant to proclaim what Lincoln understood him to have proclaimed, “an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times.” This is the “paradox” and uniqueness of America, that for the first time in history a particular people established a particular political community on principles not peculiar to them but rooted in human nature itself.

America began with a ringing affirmation of a fundamental moral and political truth: “We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights.” Certainly, here was no appeal to skin color or ethnicity. The truth of human equality and liberty was asserted against all despotisms of race, class, or religion. Neither is this an appeal to “history” or an invocation of “Anglo-Saxon” roots. America is distinguished by being founded on an idea, the idea of the equal rights of human nature. We do not “live and die” for this idea because “it works for us” or because it is “our own.” We make it our own because it is true. And having been elevated by making it our own, we pledge “our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor” to its vindication. No nation or people in history had ever established its political institutions on such principles.

There is no question that these ideas were generated by and historically and politically implemented by what the multiculturalists refer to as dead, white, European males—DWEMs to use the popularized acronym. Are we then to believe that they should be or must be confined to beings of that description? That the blessings of liberal democracy “belong” only to the particular race or culture or gender that gave rise to it? This was never the belief of a Washington, or Jefferson, or Lincoln who did so much to secure these blessings for their posterity. They believed themselves to have the high honor of securing and transmitting imperfectly and in one small place a universal inheritance, the birthright of all humanity. They never for a moment found the authority of their ideas in the time, or race, or culture of those who proclaimed them or established them in the fundamental laws of their country. The authority of their ideas lay, simply, in their truth. That men throughout most of history (and throughout most of the world still today) tyrannized one another in an infinite variety of ways was not proof that human beings do not possess equal rights by nature—rather it was proof of how rare and difficult a thing it is to secure them. It is proof of the philosophic rigor, the high moral discipline, the rare political sagacity, and—one must add—the great good fortune that is required for reflection and free choice to prevail over ignorance, prejudice, accident, and force. Nothing short of such rigor, and sagacity, and luck will solve our current educational problems.

Proclaiming that all men everywhere and at all times possess by nature equal rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, the American founders undertook the historic effort to secure these rights, so far as they thought they could then be secured, to a small people at a particular place and time. They were acutely conscious of the limits of their ability to secure these rights. When they were able to establish a “more perfect union” they understood full well how far from perfection they remained. It was all the new republic could do in the first century of its existence to keep the experiment in freedom from failing miserably at home as the principles espoused in the American revolution slowly and uncertainly began to take hold on the minds if not yet in the politics of other peoples in the world.

In the course of its history, the American people have many times fallen beneath the high standards they set for themselves at the beginning. They have strayed from those principles, and they have forgotten them, and become confused about them, and allowed misunderstood self-interest to obscure them. The reason that Abraham Lincoln is rightly regarded as the greatest democratic statesman is that he kept America from abandoning those principles as the foundation of American democracy. His statesmanship preserved for future generations of Americans the moral truth of human equality as the pole star of their political life: as “a standard maxim for free society, which should be familiar to all, and revered by all; constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated, and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence, and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people of all colors everywhere.” ²⁴

To begin to restore American education today, it is necessary to restore the moral and intellectual horizons within which the self evident truths on which America was founded can command the respect and allegiance they deserve; within which the life and death choices required of citizens and statesmen can appear as something other than arbitrary assertions of ethnicity, or history, or gender. Within such horizons, among the variety of regimes that come to light in principle and in history, Americans can justly appreciate why and how Lincoln might say of America, that here “We find ourselves under the government of a system of political institutions conducing more essentially to the ends of civil and religious liberty than any of which the history of former times tells us.”

The “genius” of the American people at the time of the American revolution and founding made it both possible and necessary to establish a regime based on the republican principles proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence. As Jefferson said in explaining the genesis of the Declaration of Independence, the ideas expressed in it were “the common sense of the subject” in America. He was merely expressing “the American mind.” It was only because the American people had learned to embrace republican principles that it was possible to establish an American republic. The founders were animated by “that honorable determination which animates every votary of freedom to rest all our political experiments on the capacity of mankind for self-government.” ²⁵ But they understood that this was a capacity that Americans would have to demonstrate for themselves, and continue to demonstrate each generation. As the Declaration proclaims, the just powers of government are derived from “the consent of the governed.” Only a people prepared to consent to a republic are capable of establishing one. This means a people prepared to recognize their own humanity and that of their fellow citizens; who will neither aspire to be masters nor submit to be slaves; who are prepared to rule and be ruled in turn; who are prepared to abide by the laws they claim the right to make for themselves. A people that means to be free must have the virtues necessary to sustain their freedom. Do we?

It is up to this generation, as it has been up to each generation that preceded us and will be up to each generation that succeeds us, to demonstrate our capacity for self government. This we do for our own sake and for the sake of the cause to which our country was dedicated some two centuries ago. What we prove capable, or incapable, of doing about the present state of American education will reflect not only on ourselves but on the prospects of free government itself. “The American people owe it to themselves, and to the cause of free Government, to prove by their establishments for the advancement and diffusion of Knowledge, that their political institutions… are as favorable to the intellectual and moral improvement of Man as they are conformable to his individual & social Rights. What spectacle can be more edifying or more seasonable, than that of Liberty & Learning, each leaning on the other for their mutual & surest support?” ²⁶

At the end of the American war of independence James Madison wrote an Address to the States, endorsed by Congress and by George Washington, recommending measures to secure the fragile independence that had just been won. He concluded with a reflection that sheds light on what is at stake in the education of American citizens in our own day: “[T]he citizens of the United States are responsible for the greatest trust ever confided to a political society. If justice, good faith, honor, gratitude and all the other qualities which enoble the character of a nation and fulfill the ends of government be the fruits of our establishments, the cause of liberty will acquire a dignity and lustre, which it has never yet enjoyed, and an example will be set, which cannot but have the most favourable influence on the rights of Mankind. If in the other side, our governments should be unfortunately blotted with the reverse of these cardinal and essential virtues, the great cause which we have engaged to vindicate, will be dishonored and betrayed; the last and fairest experiment in favor of the rights of human nature will be turned against them; and their patrons and friends exposed to be insulted and silenced by the votaries of tyranny and usurpation.” ²⁷

This article is an adaptation of a chapter from “Moral Idea for America,” edited by Larry P. Arnn and Douglas A. Jeffrey
(The Claremont Institute, 1993).

1. Diane Ravitch, “The Global Democratic Revolution,” Keynote Address, California Education Summit, December 12, 1989. Return to text.

2. Paul Gagnon, Democracy’s Half Told Story, (Washington, D.C.: American Federation of Teachers, 1989) pp. 162-164. Return to text.

3. Ravitch, ibid. Return to text.

4. Christine Rosell, cited in Abigail Thernstrom, “Bilingual Miseducation,” Commentary, February, 1990, p. 47. Return to text.

5. Ibid. See Rosalie Pedalino Porter, Forked Tongue: The Politics of Bilingual Education, (New York: Basic Books, 1990), for a useful account of this subject. Return to text.

6. Michael Heise, “Getting an ’A’ Should Get Kids a Job,” The Wall Street Journal, June 23, 1993. See also Linda S. Gottfredson, “Clinton’s New Form of Race-Norming,” The Wall Street Journal, June 3, 1993. Return to text.

7. Kristina Lindgren, “Teaching Indian Youths to Discover Themselves,” Los Angeles Times, August 4, 1992, A3, 18. Return to text.

8. Terry Pristin, “The Filmmakers vs. the Crusaders,” Los Angeles Times, December 29, 1991, Calendar Section, p. 8. Return to text.

9. Ibid., p. 29. Return to text.

10. Ibid., p. 30. Return to text.

11. David L. Kirp, “Textbooks and Tribalism in California,” The Public Interest.

12. Cited in Dinesh D’Souza, Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus, (New York: The Free Press, 1991) p. 116. Return to text.

13. African-American Baseline Essays, (Portland, OR: Multnomah School District 1J, 1987) pp. M4-5. These elaborate lesson plans have been adopted by school districts in many major American cities. Return to text.

14. From Robert Hill, ed., The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987) p. 194. Cited in Dinesh D’Souza, ibid., p. 120. Return to text.

15. Rita Kramer, Ed School Follies: The Miseducation of America’s Teachers, (New York: The Free Press, 1991) pp. 209-220. Return to text.

16. Harold W. Stevenson, “Learning from Asian Schools,” Scientific American, December 1992, pp. 70-76. For fuller treatment of this theme, see Harold W. Stevenson and James W. Stigler, The Learning Gap: Why Our Schools Are Failing and What We Can Learn from Japanese and Chinese Education, (New York: Summit Books, 1992). Return to text.

17. Ravitch, Ibid. Return to text.

18. Diane Ravitch, “Multiculturalism: E Pluribus Plures,” The American Scholar, Summer, 1990, p. 39. Quoted in Lawrence Auster, “America: Multiethnic, Not Multicultural,” Academic Questions, Fall, 1991, p. 73; and Ravitch, “A Response to Auster,” Academic Questions, Fall, 1991, p. 86. Return to text.

19. Lawrence Auster, “America: Multiethnic, Not Multicultural,” Academic Questions, Fall, 1991, p. 73. Return to text.

20. Auster, Ibid., pp. 72-84. Return to text.

21. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society, (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1992). Return to text.

22. Ibid., pp. 117-118. Return to text.

23. Ibid., pp. 136-137. Return to text.

24. Roy P. Basler, Ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1953), Volume II, p. 406. Return to text.

25. Alexander Hamilton, et al., The Federalist, Jacob Cooke, Ed., (Middletown Connecticut, 1961), p. 250. Return to text.

26. James Madison, to William Barry, August 4, 1822, in Marvin Meyers, ed., The Mind of the Founder: Sources of the Political Thought of James Madison, (New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1973), p. 440. Return to text.

27. Marvin Meyers, ed., The Mind of the Founder: Sources of the Political Thought of James Madison, (New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1973), p. 32. Return to text.

Christopher Flannery is a Member of the Board of Advisors at the Ashbrook Center and a Professor of Political Science at Azusa Pacific University.