Quin Hillyer
Quin-Essential Cases: Kids can still learn about government's limits
By: Quin Hillyer
Examiner Columnist
April 7, 2009
Our young adults don’t understand much about American government because we don’t teach them about American government. Or at least we don’t teach them well enough for them to care about it.
About once each year, a group, usually the essential Intercollegiate Studies Institute, publishes the results of a new survey showing just how few students, even at elite colleges, know the most essential information about American civics and history.
An impressive outfit called the Bill of Rights Institute is working to change that, at the high school level, through “instructional material and educational programs on America's Founding documents and principles.”
One of its projects is the annual “Being an American” essay contest, which this year attracted 31,000 participants who explained which “civic value” they believe “is most essential to being an American.”
The nine regional winners (and two runners-up from each region) were honored last week at a D.C. gala emceed by Juan Williams of NPR and Fox News, and keynoted by Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.
Thomas set the tone with a heartfelt paean to civic virtue, accountability, judicial “humility,” and especially “this precious but essential commodity” called liberty.
“Our freedoms do not come from the government,” he said. We already are endowed with liberty, and “the government comes from us.”
Judging from the finalists’ essays, these kids “get it.” Indeed, some of their essays (written many weeks ago) almost precisely mirrored Thomas’ words. For instance, home-schooled student Sapphire Feltner of Cheyenne, Wyoming noted that the Declaration of Independence said that American’s rights are “endowed by their Creator, not by government. This is very important because if the government granted us these rights, they can take them away. Then it’s no longer self-government, it’s despotism.”
Feltner was the winner in the Mountain Region, comprised of eight states from New Mexico to Idaho. Her solid reasoning was matched by Mid-Atlantic Region winner Katelyn Stauffer of the public Ephrata (Penn.) Senior High School. Stauffer wrote:
“Having gained independence from a despotic government just a few years prior to the penning of the [Constitution], the founding fathers understood that it was of the utmost importance to make sure that the new government would be one that was accountable to the nation’s citizens…. To this end the Constitution explicitly laid down a series of rules, which stated what the government could and could not do. By creating a system of checks and balances the document further held each branch of government accountable for its actions, as all actions could be subject to review.”
Justice Thomas said much the same thing when he said “we each must hold ourselves accountable…. The job (on the Supreme Court) requires you to take on a more humble approach to judging and saying ‘I don’t have the authority to do this.’”
Ashwin Aravind, second place winner in the Pacific Region, wrote that the Constitution, by deliberate design, “prevented the accumulation of power by officials in government.” Furthermore, “as a result of our success, many countries have adopted our model of the rule of law by drafting constitutions that preclude tyranny from accumulated power in government.”
Thomas: “It is the right thing to do: It is the right thing to try to preserve liberty.”
It has always been thus. Liberty under law has been the great accomplishment of these United States, but the love of liberty was not an American invention. On April 6, 1320 – exactly 689 years ago yesterday – 53 earls and barons of Scotland wrote the Declaration of Arbroath, asserting that kings serve only at the pleasure of their subjects.
In words eerily presaging the closing line of the Declaration of Independence – “We mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor” – the Scottish nobles wrote this: “It is in truth not for glory, nor riches, nor honours that we are fighting, but for freedom — for that alone, which no honest man gives up but with life itself.”
By helping many thousands of high schoolers understand that limiting domestic government is essential for the cause of freedom, the Bill of Rights Institute enables new generations to uphold their sacred honor. Well done.
Quin Hillyer is associate editorial page editor for The Washington Examiner.
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