Last week, Richard Dreyfuss did something very few people on the left rarely do. He agreed with Tucker Carlson, and did so emphatically. Dreyfuss’ point: That in education, teaching civics and the Constitution is not what it once was.
“Civics has not been taught in the American public school system since 1970. And that means everyone in Congress never studied the constitution and the bill of rights as you and I might have.” Dreyfuss
In an interview with Carlson, Dreyfuss went on to say that for some reason, we have drifted away from teaching the American values that made us distinct and unique, and those values are embedded within our Constitution.
“People come from all over the world or are born into this nation without the values that we have here. That’s why they came here, to get them. And what are they? You can put them in opportunity, rise by merit, mobility, and freedom. That’s what we sell. And if you don’t want that, you’ve chosen the wrong place. And you don’t get a pass by being born here, you have to learn it. Even the Ten Commandments are not known at birth. You must learn them. And we must learn our values and if we don’t, we are fatally, fatally wounding ourselves.” Dreyfuss
Certainly, Dreyfuss has a point, and he has for years captained an effort to restore Civics to education. His Dreyfuss Initiative asks for people to “Sign the Preamble” and get schools back to teaching the Constitution.
While it is easy to attack the public school system and its de-emphasis on civics and the Constitution, and I’m thrilled that someone at Dreyfuss’ public status is doing so, I don’t place the blame for Civics’ recent tumble solely on government schools.
In actuality, I dare say one should not be surprised if schools no longer list the Constitution as something that should be of the highest priority of learning in public education.
The Supreme Court has progressively made the Constitution mostly irrelevant since about the same time schools made Civics education irrelevant.
Reading the Roe v. Wade decision is like walking through a minefield, as the majority of the Supreme Court tried to justify abortion using almost any means necessary and avoiding all but the most tangential reference to the actual Constitution.
The Court found abortion rights in “penumbras” of the equal protection clause (or the due process clause, since the Justices skip back and forth between the two…penumbras are finicky that way), meaning it wasn’t actually written but it was implied, and furthermore it was implied somehow without the writers even knowing they implied it.
Indeed, in Justice Rehnquist’s dissent, he noted:
“To reach its result, the Court necessarily has had to find within the scope of the Fourteenth Amendment a right that was apparently completely unknown to the drafters of the Amendment.” Rehnquist dissent in Roe
When the highest court in the land disregards the text of the Constitution to reach a political and legislative result, one should expect the nation’s teachers to do the same.
I guarantee that even in the “penumbras” which no one knew existed until the Court invented them, there was no mention of the word “trimester” in the debates of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights or any of the passed amendments. Somehow, the Supreme Court decided that, regardless of what the Constitution actually said, somehow the founders embedded abortion rights by trimester that no one noticed for over 100 years.
If the 1970s brought us a Supreme Court that made the Constitution and its actual text hardly substantive in their own decisionmaking, why would it not surprise us that the education system would follow suit and de-emphasize it in their classrooms?
Certainly the Court today has had its moments of achieving its political goals regardless of how tortured a path it must tread to do so. Chief Justice Roberts’ famous “It’s a tax and it’s not a tax” declaration on the Affordable Care Act shows how far the Court can go for its ends when the means are meaningless.
Dreyfuss said “The Constitution and the Bill of Rights must be central and the parties must be peripheral.” The last half-century have shown that the reverse has been true. Supreme Court Justices are no longer approved with near unanimity based on qualifications but on party line, filibuster-threatening votes based on conservatism vs. liberalism. Judicial theories like Substantive Due Process (which means the opposite of what it says) and Stare Decisis have relegated the actual Constitution, both its text and its intent, to a subordination to the political flavors of the day.
Justice Scalia warned that if the Court and the country disregards the text and meaning of the Constitution as approved by the vote of the People and favors an amorphous, ever-changing definition agreed to by five out of nine lifetime-appointed people, we would cease to have a Constitutional Republic at all. We will be governed by the whims of five unelected judges.
And it that world, is the teaching of civics that important?
Dreyfuss’ point, and it is a strong one, is that the teaching of civics and the Constitution is critical to the preservation and survival of our system of government, as a rudder is critical to the steering of a ship.
I just think the schools would treat the Constitution as of supreme importance if the Courts actually did so as well.