An important life was cut short this week in Ashland, Ohio, when 44-year-old Roger Beckett passed away. As executive director of the Ashbrook Center, Roger’s noble goal was nothing less than saving the republic by strengthening America’s anemic approach to civic education. The tool he chose to do this was both surprising and powerful: training and retraining teachers of history and civics to teach using primary documents.

Roger had followed the normal course to prepare himself to be a teacher, completing a master’s degree in one of our nation’s notable schools of education. But he finished the program dispirited and discouraged about teacher preparation. He felt he had been taught the wrong things — techniques of teaching, but not the subject matter he was to impart. Did you know that high school teachers of history or civics (or math or science for that matter) may have studied very little of those topics themselves? That was lesson one for Roger’s campaign to reinvent civic education: Teachers need to know and be excited about their subject.