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Sustaining Our Freedom: Launching a campaign for Constitutional literacy

Sustaining Our Freedom: Launching a campaign for Constitutional literacy is a Sponsored Report prepared by The Washington Times Advocacy Department and Essentials in Education (EIE).

Recent Stories

Constitutional Literacy: The crisis in civic education funding

If you pick up a newspaper, magazine, or academic journal around Constitution Day, you are very likely to read about the troubling decline in civic knowledge and engagement in this country. The statistics I discussed in the introduction to this special section are startling.

James Madison

Constitutional Literacy: Finding solutions, improving lives

In 1788, James Madison wrote in Federalist 45: "The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government, are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite."

Constitution

Constitutional Literacy: Teaching Citizens About the Constitution

We have a saying here at the National Constitution Center: we are not here to teach lawyers, we are here to teach citizens. This is our rallying cry--one we need because making a 228-year document relevant to a 21st-century audience isn't easy. Now, after years of planning, we have found a way to take this 18th-century document into every classroom in America.

Constitutional Literacy: Renewing the American mind

The United States is exceptional not because of what it has achieved—independence, power, wealth, or status—but for what it stands for: liberty, equal rights, popular consent, the rule of law, constitutional self-government. To transmit this knowledge from one generation of citizens to the next is the most important requisite for American democracy.

Constitutional Literacy: A fertile ground for students and teachers

Educators throughout the country have long understood the value of teaching about the United States Constitution. State education leaders have enhanced the significance of that instruction by giving it a prominent place in the key documents that guide teachers in public schools—learning standards.

Constitutional Literacy: The power of principles

Words have power. Ideas stir the soul, but until ideas are embodied with words they are only dreams that fade away when the bright sun of reality dawns. What the brave men and women of 1776 did was face the sun and boldly declare what they knew to be true, knowing that the probability of such ideas surviving was at best a dream.

Constitutional Literacy: What inspires me about the Constitution

As a naive young boy seeking my own happiness, it was second nature for me to believe that most people were the same way. I believed that attaining personal happiness was more than enough of a challenge for people, without adding other people into the mix. I thought that this was the natural state of affairs.