THIS SHOULD BE READ BY EVERY
STUDENT IN COLORADO WHERE THEIR TEACHERS ARE OBJECTING
TO INCLUDING INFORMATION ON PATRIOTISM AND CAPITALISM IN THE SCHOOL
CURRICULM. IF A STUDENT IS UNABLE TO READ THIS, THEY SHOULS ASK THEIR TEACHER “WHY
CAN’T I READ?”
By
DONALD KAGAN
Adapted from remarks by Yale University historian and professor emeritus Donald Kagan
at the Hotchkiss School in Lakeville, Conn., Sept. 18, a talk based in part on a lecture
he delivered at Yale on Nov. 4, 2001:
What is an education for? It is a question seldom investigated
thoroughly. The ancient philosophers had little doubt: They lived in a
city-state whose success and very existence depended on the willingness of
citizens to overcome the human tendency to seek their individual,
self-interested goals and to make the sacrifices needed for the community's
well-being. Their idea of education, therefore, was moral and civic, not merely
instrumental. They reasoned that if a state or community is to be good, its
citizens must be good, so they aimed at an education that would produce
virtuous people and good citizens.
Some two thousand years later, from the 16th through the 18th
centuries, a different group of philosophers in Italy, England and France introduced a powerful new idea. Their
world was dominated by ambitious princes and kings who were rapidly asserting
ever greater authority over the lives of their people and trampling on the
traditional expectations of individuals and communities. In the philosophers'
view, every human being was naturally endowed with three essential rights: to
defend his life, liberty and lawfully acquired property.
The responsibility of the state, therefore, was limited and
largely negative: to protect the people from external enemies and not to
interfere with the rights of individual citizens. Suspicious of the claims of
church and state to inculcate virtue as mere devices to serve the selfish
interests of their rulers, most philosophers of the Enlightenment believed that
moral and civic instruction was not the business of the state.
Among our country's founders, none was a more devoted son of the
Enlightenment than Thomas Jefferson, yet as he considered the needs of the new
democratic republic he had helped to establish, he came to very different
conclusions. Like the ancient philosophers, Jefferson regarded education as essential to the
establishment and maintenance of a good polity— Plato, in "The
Republic," spends many pages on the nature of the citizens' education, as
does Aristotle in "Politics." Jefferson regarded a proper educational system as
so important that in the epitaph he wrote for himself, he did not mention that
he had twice been elected president of the United States but proudly recorded that he was the
"Father of the University of Virginia."
Jefferson was convinced that there needed to be an
education for all citizens if they and their new kind of popular government
were to flourish. He understood that schools must provide "to every
citizen the information he needs for the transaction of his own business; to enable
him to calculate for himself, and to express and preserve his ideas, his
contracts, and accounts, in writing."
For Jefferson, though, the most important goals of
education were civic and moral. In his "Preamble to the 1779 Virginia Bill for the More General Diffusion of
Knowledge" he addresses the need for all students to have a political
education through the study of the "forms of government," political
history and foreign affairs. This was not meant to be a "value free"
exercise; on the contrary, its purpose was to communicate the special virtues
of republican representative democracy, the dangers that threatened it, and the
responsibility of its citizens to esteem and protect it. This education was to
be a common experience for all citizens, rich and poor, for every one of them
had natural rights and powers, and every one had to understand and esteem the
institutions, laws and traditions of his country if it was to succeed.
It is striking to notice the similarity between Jefferson's ideas and those of a leader of the
last great democracy prior to Jefferson's fledgling democracy. In 431 B.C., Pericles of Athens
described the character of the great democratic society he wished for his
community: A city "governed by the many, not the few," where in the
"matter of public honors each man is preferred not on the basis of his
class but of his good reputation and merit. No one, moreover, if he has it in
him to do some good for the city, is barred because of poverty or humble
origins."
Both great democratic leaders knew that democracy, properly
understood, requires a careful balance between the political and constitutional
rights of the individual, where absolute equality is the only acceptable
principle, and the other aspects of life, where equality of opportunity and
reward on the basis of merit are appropriate. They also agreed on the need for
individuals to limit their desires and even to curtail their own rights, when
necessary, to make sacrifices in the service of the community without whose
protection those rights could not exist. In short, democracy and patriotism
were inseparable.
These values have not disappeared, but in our own time they have
been severely challenged. With the shock of the 9/11 terror attacks, most
Americans reacted by clearly and powerfully supporting their government's
determination to use military force to stop such attacks and to prevent future
ones. Most Americans also expressed a new unity, an explicit patriotism and
love of their country not seen among us for a very long time.
That is not what we saw and heard from the faculties on most
elite campuses in the country, and certainly not from the overwhelming majority
of people designated as "intellectuals" who spoke up in public. They
offered any and all explanations, so long as they indicated that the attackers
were really victims, that the fault really rested with the United States.
As most of us have come to know too well, the terrorists of al
Qaeda and other jihadists regard America as "the great Satan" and
hate the U.S. not only because its power stands in the way of the achievement
of their Islamist vision, but also because its free, open, democratic,
tolerant, liberal and prosperous society is a powerful competitor for the
allegiance of millions of Muslims around the world. No change of American
policy, no retreat from the world, no repentance or increase of modesty can
change these things.
Yet many members of the intelligentsia decried the outburst of
patriotism that greeted the new assault on America. The critics were exemplified by author
Katha Pollitt, who wrote in the Oct. 1, 2001, edition of the Nation about her
daughter wanting to fly the American flag outside their window after 9/11.
"Definitely not," Ms. Pollitt replied. "The flag stands for
jingoism and vengeance and war."
Such ideas still have a wide currency, reflecting a serious flaw
in American education that should especially concern those of us who take some
part in it. The encouragement of patriotism is no longer a part of our public
educational system, and the cost of that omission has made itself felt. This
would have alarmed and dismayed the founders of our country.
Jefferson meant American education to produce a
necessary patriotism. Democracy—of all political systems, because it depends on
the participation of its citizens in their own government and because it
depends on their own free will to risk their lives in its defense—stands in the
greatest need of an education that produces patriotism.
I recognize that I have said something shocking. The past
half-century has seen a sharp turn away from what had been traditional
attitudes toward the purposes and functions of education. Our schools have
retreated from the idea of moral education, except for some attempts at what is
called "values clarification," which is generally a cloak for moral
relativism verging on nihilism of the sort that asserts that whatever feels
good is good.
Even more vigorously have the schools fled from the idea of
encouraging patriotism. In the intellectual climate of our time, the very
suggestion brings contemptuous sneers or outrage, depending on the listener's
mood. There is no end of quoting Samuel Johnson's famous remark that
"Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel," but no recollection
of Boswell's explanation that Johnson "did not mean a real and generous
love for our country, but that pretended patriotism which so many, in all ages
and countries, have made a cloak for self-interest."
Many have been the attacks on patriotism for intolerance,
arrogance and bellicosity, but that is to equate it with its bloated
distortion, chauvinism. My favorite dictionary defines the latter as
"militant and boastful devotion to and glorification of one's
country," but defines a patriot as "one who loves, supports, and
defends his country."
That does not require us to denigrate or attack any other
country, nor does it require us to admire our own uncritically. But just as an
individual must have an appropriate love of himself if he is to perform well,
an appropriate love of his family if he and it are to prosper, so, too, must he
love his country if it is to survive. Neither family nor nation can flourish
without love, support and defense, so that an individual who has benefited from
those institutions not only serves his self-interest but also has a moral
responsibility to give them his support.
Thus are assaults on patriotism failures of character. They are
made by privileged people who enjoy the full benefits offered by the country
they deride and detest, but they lack the basic decency to pay it the
allegiance and respect that honor demands. But honor, of course, is also an
object of their derision.
Every country requires a high degree of cooperation and unity
among its citizens if it is to achieve the internal harmony that every good
society requires. Most countries have relied on the common ancestry and
traditions of their people as the basis of their unity, but the United States can rely on no such commonality. We are
an enormously diverse and varied people, almost all immigrants or the descendants
of immigrants. The great strengths provided by this diversity are matched by
great dangers. We are always vulnerable to divisions among us that can be
exploited to set one group against another and destroy the unity and harmony
that have allowed us to flourish.
We live in a time when civic devotion has been undermined and
national unity is under attack. The idea of a common American culture, enriched
by the diverse elements that compose it but available equally to all, is under
assault, and attempts are made to replace it with narrower and politically
divisive programs that are certain to set one group of Americans against
another.
The answer to these problems and our only hope for the future
must lie in education, which philosophers have rightly put at the center of the
consideration of justice and the good society. We look to education to solve
the pressing current problems of our economic and technological competition
with other nations, but we must not neglect the inescapable political, and ethical,
effects of education.
We in the academic community have too often engaged in
miseducation. If we encourage separatism, we will get separation and the
terrible conflict in society it will bring. If we encourage rampant
individualism to trample on the need for a community and common citizenship, if
we ignore civic education, the forging of a single people, the building of a
legitimate patriotism, we will have selfish individuals, heedless of the needs
of others, the war of all against all, the reluctance to work toward the common
good and to defend our country when defense is needed.
The civic sense that America needs can come only from a common
educational effort. In telling the story of the American political experience,
we must insist on the honest search for truth; we must permit no comfortable
self-deception or evasion, no seeking of scapegoats. The story of this
country's vision of a free, democratic republic and of its struggle to achieve
it need not fear the most thorough examination and can proudly stand comparison
with that of any other land.
In the long and deadly battle against those who hate Western
ideals, and hate America in particular, we must be powerfully
armed, morally as well as materially. To sustain us through the worst times we
need courage and unity, and these must rest on a justified and informed
patriotism.
