Meg Mott (megmott.com) is a professor emerita, former town moderator, and self-described Constitution Wrangler and Good Clash Provider.
PUTNEY-Here are some grim statistics.
• One in three Americans do not know there are three branches of government.
• More than half do not know the number of members in the House of Representatives.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which conducted the 2024 survey, came up with a plan. The Civic Trust is a program designed for the American workplace that “gives employers the tools and resources they need to elevate civic knowledge, skills, and disposition.”
Employees explore how power is shared through federalism, how arguments are channeled through separation of powers, and how to engage with different points of view in the workplace. Along the way, employees and management learn that the House currently has 435 members.
Civic knowledge, skills, and disposition are the three legs of stable political society. Too often civic education just focuses on the first two, as if character development is not a matter of common concern.
But lately people are starting to notice that a lack of moral gravitas in the general population may explain our current poisonous political discourse.
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Outside Minneapolis, Eagle Ridge Academy teaches civic virtue through great works of religion, literature, and philosophy. Students at the charter school wear uniforms, stand when they speak, and walk single-file down the hallway.
They also learn to have the kind of conversations where real differences of opinion are necessary in order to get below the surface of a question. The books stand at the heart of the curriculum, providing a moral quandary that is complex enough to elude any easy answer. The point is to wrestle with the problem. To do that well, takes a willingness to zoom way out to see the biggest question.
James Traub, who reported on Eagle Ridge for The New York Times, was candid about his initial skepticism about a classical education. Was it really the school’s role to cultivate the moral development of children? But as he listened to a class of ninth graders discuss Aeneas’s betrayal of Dido, he began to have second thoughts.
It was Aeneas’s fate to rebuild Rome. Was he being honest with Dido about his larger responsibility?
When one student noticed that a girl hadn’t said anything, she asked, “What do you think?” And the girl answered.
These students, wrote Traube, had developed the “habit of thinking in serious moral terms.”
Civic virtue is not just getting attention in classical schools. Over 90,000 middle- and high-school teachers are making use of the Bill of Rights Institute’s curriculum, which focuses on nine civic virtues, connecting the natural rights listed in the Constitution to the habits of good citizenship.
Students explore: What sort of Courage is required when declaring an unpopular view? How does one balance Humility with a strong sense of Justice? Difficult policy questions morph into larger philosophical questions when considered through the lens of a civic virtue. One could argue as if your opponent were stupid, but where is the Honor in that?
Besides workplaces and classrooms, there are other places to practice civic virtue. The Constitution singles out juries as playing a particularly important role in moral development. Alexis de Tocqueville described juries as a “gratuitous public school,” where ordinary people learned how to judge whether or not a thing was right. “By obliging men to turn their attention to affairs which are not exclusively their own,” he wrote in Democracy in America, it rubs off that individual egotism which is the rust of society.”
The Civics Trust has an entire curriculum focusing on the work of juries.
Unfortunately, fewer than 5% of cases go to trial. Proponents of the decline of the jury point to the amount of time and resources a jury trial requires. We are told that the average juror is biased and irrationally punitive.
That may be so. The question remains, however, what other free public school are we offering to reduce the rust of individual egoism? Where can those of us who aren’t in school, aren’t employed at a civics-minded business, or serving on a jury think about political matters in serious moral terms?
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In Mr. Lemon’s class the big question was “Was Aeneas right to abandon Dido?” In our polarized times, when many people claim to speak Truth to Power, we need places where we can challenge one another to be more courageous.
In a Blue corner of a Blue state, it does not take much courage to criticize Republicans. It does take courage to question the political strategies of one’s own side. Feminists, for instance, are practicing courage when they question some of the strategies of #MeToo.
“Every school says it encourages civil discourse and mutual respect,” Traub writes in his piece on Eagle Ridge. “But that can be the pre-condition for something greater.”
“Something greater” means wrestling with the big questions in order to develop the habits of specific civic virtues. In the Vermont constitution, those virtues include justice, moderation, temperance, industry, and frugality. In New Hampshire, they include sincerity, sobriety, and “all social affectations, and generous sentiments.”
We come together to wrestle with the common problems of our time, not to showboat or dominate but to become the more perfect persons that our founding documents celebrate.
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For those who are interested in exploring how morality might improve our politics, I’ll be leading a series of discussions at the Putney Public Library on Thursday evenings in July.
The free discussions, supported by a grant from the Vermont Humanities Council, begin at 6:30 p.m. We’ll wrestle with some of the hot button issues in Vermont, including affordable housing and tensions between religious liberties and non-discrimination statutes.
The goal won’t be to win or to vanquish one’s opponent but to build dispositions toward our common life.
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