for what they do. i think that history, the love of history, the understanding of history, begins truly, literally at home. i think if there's a problem with education today in the country, it's with us. we who are fathers, mothers, grandfathers, grandmothers. [ applause ] if i were teaching a course, a high school course, in the constitution, i would begin by stressing that the very presence of george washington at the constitutional convention was a major reason for why he succeeded and he said very little. why was that? you have to understand that.

the constitution center in philadelphia, which was a huge undertaking is in very serious trouble. attendance is not good. they really are struggling. and they made it kind of a huge electronic game show affair. i don't think that's the way to do it. it's about people. you have to understand those human beings. i think that's true about teaching any aspect of history, american history or any history. >> peter? >> i'll pick up on that, david. that makes a lot of sense to me. the humanity of the founders and identifying with what they did. i would say there are a couple of problems that explain the dire state of constitutional studies. one is they've been dominated by lawyers. [ laughter ] i think -- i think akhil will agree with me.

and it also is something that we set aside when i was a boy and when many of you were in school in civics and this was the stuff that was so boring. because it wasn't part of our history. i think we need to take it back into history and historians have their share of blame here, too, in that very few of us have focused on the founding. now i blamed gordon wood for that because his book was so great that nobody bothered to study the subject anymore. so i think we've broken through and there's actually very lively constitutional scholarship that hasn't made it to the schools yet. i would just pick up on something that akhil said earlier, the first thing to say is everybody knows we live in an interconnected world now. we need to think about the constitution in its own time. in a world context. and that is, what's happening

geostrategically, geopolitically, war explains a lot. explains in akhil's talk, he talks in 1776 a state of war, that moment of origins, i think we need to recover a sense of the contingency and of the failures of the founders in order to make it come alive so that we can relate to our world in a way that we begin to understand they related to their world. so i think it's something historians can do and that it takes the last generations to trickle down. maybe the internet will make it faster. but i think the new way of thinking globally about the generation of the founders and the challenges they faced abroad and at home, the threat of war with each other, the threat of war in the larger world, the reality of war, the american revolution is a 50-year period of war in the world. that's what frames everything. from 1765 through 1815 and we

can say beyond the civil war is yet another episode in the history of wars. so i think you can make it compelling. kids love war. we began in war and in that context that i think we can begin to recover what these human beings did. their greet you a chiefments, their great failures. >> all right, i'll turn to kyle harper who is director of the institute for american constitutional heritage. tell me your approach. >> i think one of the exciting things about teaching college is you're teaching adults and teaching kids who are becoming adults. and you're not just teaching them facts. you're not just asking them to memorize when an amendment was ratified -- you're not just teaching them facts. you're teaching them to become citizens. if you embed practices of

citizenship inside the classroom you cannot only achieve greater results in your teaching but excite them and engage them to take what they learn into their lives as citizens and so, to me, that means creating situations for debate and civil discussion in ways that make them realize that these facts on a page actually influence and deeply impact their political lives, and so whether it's religious freedom or privacy, whatever it is, these are issues with a history and history matters particularly when it comes to the constitution in a way that profoundly will shape the world they live in. so giving them a chance not just to learn that but to engage with that and to recognize -- to make it come alive because they realize that it shapes their lives and ask them to develop their voice is a way that i think we can do in the 21st century. it isn't just lecturing at them but asking them to develop their voice as citizens inside the classroom and then take it outside the classroom. >> akhil amar, do you begin by showing them what was left out?

>> well, them -- there are so many -- >> can you hold that microphone? >> from my 6-year-old to my undergraduates to my law students, different audiences when they get out to meet ordinary folks. here is my multi-pronged approach and it's very autobiographical. so my parents when i was a young boy take me to mt. vernon and to the white house and to congress, the capitol building, and to independence hall and that just wowed me. and then my teachers had a role play exercises where it's 1850 and you're henry clay and you're daniel webster, and that was kind of cool.

and i read storybooks, history books, books of the sort david mccullough writes for ordinary nonscholarly audience, full of immaculate scholarship but just accessible to ordinary people and then i get to college and i read gordon wood's work. and so now taking that, that's autobiographical. that's how i got into this. i do think the national constitution center is a great public space and i really got to know gordon when he was the founder. >> so you start very young. but let's say you didn't have such parents. let's say you get to college and you are required to take a course on the history of the

constitution, i am required to take that course. how do you engage me immediately? >> i think it's actually a little late to start then. so i think politics is sport. [ laughter ] >> i agree. >> i think it can be fun. if you can know all about the football team and your favorite baseball team, you can actually follow politics, which is very interesting, and know your presidents and every july 4th i think we actually need materials. kid friendly, family friendly, like secular sadr-like idea. we have to have -- our calendar is built for these occasions of remembrance, memorial day and flag day and constitution day and july 4th and veterans day and we're not using -- and presidents' day as proper occasions. just come up with materials so that families -- >> there are too many sales out there. that's the problem.

[ laughter ] >> this could be fun and it could be like little teams. competitions even because kids like to compete, too. knowing the founders. it's like following sports teams. >> rosemarie, fun? >> fun? well what strikes me is that most people know at least a little bit about the declaration of independence but very little about the constitution. i say well that's the sexy document. that's the document that has the grand abstract principles. and the constitution is, as you said, the boring document because it's all about structures and processes and institutions. unfortunately what most people don't understand is that that

declaration of independence would have bean dead letter after the war of independence if there wasn't a constitution. so what i try to do in my teaching is restore the contingency that this young united states would have fallen apart. there would have been no united states after 1887 or 1888 or 1890 if there was no constitution. that james madison himself thought that the constitution would fail when he left philadelphia in 1787 because they didn't pass one of the most crucial provisions he put in there of veto by the congress on state laws. the ability of congress to veto state laws. i think some of the things that were said about the ratification process and how it was a nationwide debate, kind of referendum about the constitution. that can restore at least to

people who i am able to get in my classes, i think, is about the excitement what it meant at the time and i hope it would carry over to an understanding that we're the people today and without paying attention to that constitution it may not be there and i think we've been a victim of the success of the constitution. it's been as one historian once said machine that goes of itself. we've had as a luxury as a people to sit back somewhat ignorant of the structures of government and let the processes of government go along which side we may or may not vote in a given election. again, you know, voting was seen as this incredible privilege. it was incredible when people got the vote. there would be universal male suffrage. that was a big radical innovation. we lost that. we lost that sense of excitement

and innovation. >> gordon woods. >> i think historians are responsible at least at the college and university level. i think people here at ou are very fortunate, you don't realize that throughout the country most undergraduate schools do not have courses on the constitution and haven't had them for at least a half century. i'll give you one fact that maybe is wrong but it's my impression. the william mary quarterly is the leading journal in early american history. over the past 40 years, until last october, there was not a single article published, it comes out four times a year, not a single article on constitutional history. the beginnings of the constitution or the constitutional issues involved in the imperial crisis, nothing until october of this last year and i think that's a kind of

straw in the within. we have to understand historical interpretation goes in fashion. over the last half century there have been other issues that have preoccupied the historical occupation. issues of race, women, legitimate issues that have preoccupied graduate training and the writing of history in graduate schools and in undergraduate schools. now in law schools constitutional history has been continued and it's always there. but i'm talking about the undergraduate schools that simply neglected that. i think change is coming. fashions change. some of the other older issues have become tired and young people are looking for new issues. i think this article that appeared in the october issue of the william mary quarterly was a kind of indication of a new era emerging in scholarship. >> david fisher. >> i find that history teaching

anticipate history learning is alive and well and flourishing in thousands of classrooms around the country. it's not so flourishing in other classrooms. we might ask what works and what doesn't in meeting and talking to the incredibly creative often young teachers in elementary school, in high school, especially as to be inspired by the possibilities. i think there are more troubles in the colleges for reasons that gordon just described. but what seems to be to work -- we're talking first of all very young children is something that awaken as sense that others have walked this earth before them. something that also triggers an exercise in the imagination. and there's lots of ways of doing that. taking them there. telling them stories.

kids love stories that way. then in classes beyond that, it's a question of, i think, of getting them embarked on inquiries that are meaningful to them from the very start. framing questions that speak to their condition as well as to others around them. and then it keeps growing from there. i think other things got in the way that you described. we lost that sense of individual agency and a lot of academic history, we lost the stories. we lost the events and now they are all pretty bad. and i would be very hopeful. >> i want to remind you all, please hold those microphones very close so that everyone can hear you and when you turn to talk to your fellow panelist, take your microphone with you.

>> well, my apologies. >> okay. peter, this morning you talked very vividly and dramatically about the dead hands of history. i find myself wondering about the very live hands of politics, and to what extent politics is now beginning to undermine our sense of this gorgeous document with all its failings, how politics is intervening in what we thought we had as a constitutional democracy. >> right. well, diane, i think the big

problem is that people invoke the constitution but they don't understand it. it becomes sacred scripture, and it's supposed to be perfect. i think it's radically disabling for us to fantasize or two were the constitution. it's quite a different thing to appreciate the achievement and to sense how they thought about future generations. i think that should be a model. i would adopt the jeffersonian idea of generational stewardship that we need to be concerned about the coming generations. this idea of martians have to come before we can think in terms of world government or a real crisis -- well if we do think of the next generation as not just extensions of us but people that we have a trust, that we have to fulfill towards them, it is going to be their

world, how do we leave them. i don't think we're thinking electively in those terms. i think it's time for us to think generationally and i will think it was put brilliantly when he talked about this, big democratic bang that took place. i think that's something that's up to us to cherish, the legacy of that bang to keep it alive, to keep the light bright and tuned way to cherish it is not by making believe that we are them. and that we can -- we can

channel them. they want us to look forward. so that would be my response. >> david wood. >> you're supposed to respond to that, david. [ laughter ] >> did i say something wrong? david fisher. >> oh, david fisher. i'm sorry. it's always the ears as well as mic microphone. >> forgive me, my fault. >> wouldn't start with the constitution, with students. we find in trying to find a better way than our survey, which was losing students very rapidly to substitute three semester courses for two and each centered on one event, the revolution. civil war. world war ii. each covered 100 years.

the students loved it. they were -- they were invited to get into this history in terms of experiences. often linked to their own experience. it was easy for world war ii. they interviewed the members of their family. they said i'd never talked to my grandfather before. and they came away with a sense of intimate involvement in very large processes. and i think after that, then into the more complex and abstract questions such as the constitution. i'm sorry. could follow from that. >> gordon wood. >> well, i'm not sure how to design a course on the constitution. i've never done that. i teach history and the constitution is part of that history. i teach a course on the revolutionary era and the constitution is a climax of that course. i'm -- your question, diane was

politics, how does contemporary politics or politics in general. i'm reminded of rebecca west's statements who said when politics comes in the door, truth goes out the window. there is a problem. there is a problem with politics, especially democratic politics because -- and we all sense this -- there's a lack of honesty on the part of the politicians. and why should that be so? that's because if they say something true, they're apt to get punished. so, in the end, the problem is us. the american people. we've met the enemy, it is us. we punish our politicians for gaffes, for mistakes, for telling the truth. so disingenuousness runs rampant throughout our political system. it's an embarrassment for a

democratic policy to force our politicians to be disingenuous, to not be honest. and yet, do we want them honest? that's the question. so the i think there's a real difficulty that we have to face as a democratic people to look at ourselves and ask ourselves, are we encouraging our political leaders to be what they ought to be? jefferson, washington, madison, could not have the survived in our political environment. they simply could not have been what they were and still survived. so democracy we pay a price for it. and so we should be aware of that price and we should be careful about how we put our democracy together. it's not an easy task, and i think i -- i just -- when i look at what political leaders have to go through, it's amazing that

we have as many men and women willing to engage in political life. it's -- they pay an awfully high price, and the worst is the disingenuousness that we impose on them. >> david mccullough. >> i feel very strongly and i've experimented with this myself as a guest professor at cornell one term. i strongly believe that we should bring what i would call the lab technique to the teaching of the humanities in the sense of getting students to go into the lab as it were and work out the answer or the solution or the understanding of a subject or a problem on their own or working with other students. if i were assigned -- it would depend of course, at what level

i were teaching. if i were teaching it at a college level, i would assign four students to work together and four other students to work together and four more. and each of them would be assigned to know about one single person who participated in the constitutional convention. and they would be required to either present a report or to get up and say my name is james madison. here's the life had i. here's what happened to me. and they would work at a table with four at a table because that way, you would get to know what the other three at your table also did or didn't do. but enter it by the individual life of each of these protagonists. and see them as human beings. see them as fallible people struggling to do something right that's extremely difficult to

achieve. and what they went through. i would assign one person to study nothing but the weather was in philadelphia that summer. we know what weather is like, summers are like in philadelphia. imagine you're cooped up in a building in a room and you can't tell anybody what you're doing, and everybody's after you to find out. this is all -- this has its own intrinsic kind of drama. but the essence of the pull of history is people. and to see them as not figures in a history book, names in a history book but as human beings, what was it like for them. and it always, always works. and i'd do one more thing and that is tell each student, you can get help any way from anywhere you want. that's how you accomplish things in life. you don't have to do it all

yourself. enlist your parents in the project. get somebody that you know is an expert to talk with you. use the telephone. sknl questions. we don't train students well enough, in my view, to ask questions. they're always required to have answers but the way you the find out in life is to ask questions. pull it out of people. there isn't a single person any of us ever meets doesn't know something we don't know. interview them. >> i guess i want to take issue with the fundamental proposition that politics is separate from understanding the constitution. i mean, understanding the writing and ratification of the constitution is understanding politics. and i think today, the problem is that americans think that politics is so much worse than at any time in our history or

that -- or even worse than that, they don't feel any connection between themselves and their government. the government is something in washington or in their state capital. i think there's just because people don't care or want to learn about history enough, i think that they don't understand the extent to which a lot of these things have always been true, that you know, the process of having a constitutional convention was fraught with controversy. the dynamics of the constitutional convention were bitterly contested. ratification contest was a slugfest. and i think that -- and then i think peter, you talked about the 1790s. the politics of the jeffersonians and the federalists in the 1790s is every bit as bitter and vi tuprative as it is today. so i think that another of the

points that we can make as history teachers is that it's not so different. the founding era as it is today. it's just the sense of ownership, the sense of connection we feel with the political process and with our involvement in it that makes it different. and i think there's a real opportunity in teaching the founding period to show that it wasn't so different. >> akhil. >> i like a team exercises, if i were in high school, i would definitely have kids work in teams so i like that a lot. there are actually -- i love role plays, good where -- and one advantage -- see, the earlier we can -- you have to develop a taste for these things and the earlier you can introduce people to -- there are many acquired tastes and there are a bunch of things that

aren't fun at the beginning but are fun after a little bit. my kids are now after three years beginning to actually play piano as in playing as in actually having fun and the first 2 1/2 years weren't so fun and now it's fun. i do think that one feature, one advantage of the presidency is it's very personal. it remains our most personal office, and so it's a really good way of getting people interested in contemporary politics to learn. past politics and organized around these very colorful personalities. so when i'm a kid, you know, these little potted bobbs merrill 178-page little histories actually kind of get me interested. so i agree. you have to get people interested. and there's probably a different way maybe of doing it for science and