Like many of you, I am a product of the public schools, in my case mostly through the 1970s. It’s a sad state of affairs, but I learned more about our Constitution from School House Rock than I did in all the social studies classes in 12 years of government run schooling. Little did I realize how far we had drifted from the supreme law of the land! I didn’t know because I didn’t care. Like many of you I thought the Constitution was for lawyers and judges.
It’s not what you know that will hurt you, it’s what you know that just ain’t so that gets you in real trouble. It was through David Barton and the WallBuilders podcast that I started to learn how much I didn’t know about how our form of government is supposed to work. More importantly, I began to learn how much of what I had been taught just wasn’t true. And it wasn’t just their opinion: WallBuilders has one of the largest private collections of original documents from the early years of our nation. Using these original documents David Barton and WallBuilders showed what our founding fathers had set up, why they did it the way they did, and how our country operated for the first century and a half of its existence. The more I learned the more frustrated I got, not only with how Washington works, but what we expect from them. When I learned about the John Jay quote at the beginning of this chapter I was encouraged to read and study more. I read the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Federalist and Anti-Federalist papers. I sought out other teachers and podcasters, always comparing them to the original documents to see if what they were saying was so. During this time I not only found out how much I didn’t know, but how much most people just didn’t care.
Then one day I was at a family cook-out at my cousin’s place. It had become routine during these cook-outs that I would sit down with my cousin’s two oldest boys and discuss politics, the Constitution, and current events. Occasionally one or two people would sit in for a while, but it was mostly just the three of us. This cook-out would turn out to be different. As I got up from the picnic table I had been sitting at with my two second cousins, a couple of family friends asked if they could discuss something with me. Always ready for a good discussion, I said “sure” and sat back down. The topic at hand happened to be capital punishment, but what is more important to this story is what happened during the discussion. As we discussed the topic from a Constitutional, Biblical, and moral point of view I eventually noticed several people had stopped their conversations and either joined us at our table or turned their chairs to listen. Within about 15 minutes I was “holding court” with about a dozen people listening to my point of view on the topic and the methods and reasons I had for that point of view. When we had finished, the family friends thanked me for helping them understand a complex and contentious topic using language they could easily understand. This made me think: Could part of the problem with a lack of understanding of our Constitution have to do with how teaching it was approached? Could it be that a focus on names and dates was less effective than the stories and reasons behind the document? Could a practical application of Constitutional ideas engage people better than a “history lesson”? More to the point, if I could keep a dozen friends and family engaged in a discussion on how to apply our understanding of the Constitution to a topic, could I engage more people as well?
If the family cook-out kindled the idea of teaching others about the Constitution, a friend’s Bible study really got the fire going. I was driving home from said Bible study one night listening to a Wall Builder’s podcast. In this episode, David Barton brought up the report “The State of the First Amendment: 2013” from the First Amendment Foundation. The report summarizes the findings from their 2013 survey of the attitudes of Americans about the First Amendment. In this report they found that 36% of those surveyed could not name a single freedom listed in the First Amendment. If this survey was representative of the nation as a whole, more than one-third of Americans had no idea what freedoms are protected by the First Amendment! I must admit, I didn’t catch much more of the episode as I fumed over the ignorance of my fellow Americans, the carelessness we used to teach our children, and the utter failure of the education system to teach the young. No wonder we see college students who don’t know when the Revolutionary War was fought or against whom. Even worse, this explains why we see people clamor for government to do something when they have no clue what the federal government was designed to do in the first place.
Then a radical thought hit me. Why can’t we study the Constitution the same way I had just studied the Bible? Not with high-school teachers or college professors spouting dates and names from books that don’t even reference the historical documents they claim to be reviewing, and certainly not with long-winded dissertations how a passage means the exact opposite of what it plainly says. Could we go back and read the documents themselves, discuss them in small groups, express our opinions, and then compare them to the actual words on paper? If I could learn about the Constitution on my own, would others be interested in doing it themselves, too? I discussed the idea with friends and family and many agreed it would be a good idea. One friend took the initiative and reached out to the local public library to see if we could have the studies there. We set a date and time, I put together an outline for our first meeting, and the Constitution Study was born.
I remember sitting in the library’s meeting room with my daughter, wondering if anyone would show up. Was this just a fool’s errand? Would other people take time out of their busy days to discuss the Constitution? First one friend showed up, then another. Then a couple of people I didn’t know, but had heard by word of mouth, then another who saw the sign we had put in front of the library. All totaled a dozen people showed up and looked to me to see what this Constitution Study was all about. I asked them to name the five freedoms listed in the First Amendment and got answers similar to the The State of the First Amendment:2013 report. I then described how important it was for the people to understand how our government was designed to work and how this Constitution Study would work. Over the next nine months, (before I moved to Tennessee) we read and studied the Constitution together. We debated how things should work versus how they actually work today. We probed the limits of our rights and what we can do to restore Constitutional order to our nation.
After moving to Tennessee, I didn’t have the network to start a study locally. I asked some people, but didn’t get the same enthusiastic respond I had back in New York. After some soul searching, research, and training I decided to start the online Constitution Study you’re visiting now. I’m also working on a Constitution Study Guide to help others learn about studying the Constitution and to start studies of their own.
I hope to find you as another patriot fighting to restore our nation to its proper order. John Adams said he studied politics and war so his children could study mathematics and philosophy. Let us study the Constitution so our children may study mathematics, philosophy, or whatever they want, in a country where men and women are still free!