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 starts then, so i think politics is sport. i think it can be fun. >> i agree. >> 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 materials. a secular sader. we have to have occasional -- we have -- our calendar is built on occasions for remembrance. we call them memorial day, flag day, constitution day, and july 4th and veterans day, and we're not using -- and presidents day

as proper occasions to just come up with materials so that families -- >> there are too many sales out there. that's the problem. >> this can be fun, and it can be like little teams. the competition -- you know, competitions even, because kids like to compete, too, on knowing your constitution, knowing the founders, knowing politics. it can be fun like following sports teams. >> rose marie, fun? >> fun? well, what always strikes me is that most people know at least a little bit about the declaration of independence but very little sub stantsistantively about the constitution. i said that's the sexy document. that has the grand, abstract principles and the constitution is the boring document because it's all about structures and processes and institutions.

unfortunately what most people don't not is that that declaration of independence would have been a dead letter after the war for independence was over if there hadn't been a constitution. what i try to do in my teaching is try and restore some of what peter mentioned, the contingency that this young united states would have fallen apart. there would have been no united states after 1787 or '89 or '90 if there wasn't a constitution. that james madison himself thought the discussion would fail when he left philadelphia in 1787 because any didn't pass one of the most crucial provisions he put in there. a veto by the congress on state laws. the ability of congress to veto state laws. i think some of the things that akihl said about the ratification process and how it was a nationwide debate, a 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 some of the excitement about what it meant at the time and i would hope that that would carry over to an understanding that we are the people today, and without paying attention to that constitution, it may not be there. i think we've been a victim of the success of the constitution. it's been, as one historian said, a machine that goes of itself. we have had the luxury as a people it to just sit back sw somewhat ignorant of the structures of government and let the processes of government go along with deciding we may or may not vote at any given election. again, you know, voting was seen as this incredible privilege. it was incredible when people got the vote. that there would be universal

mail suffrage, and there was a big, radical innovation. we've lost that. we've lost that sense of excitement and innovation. >> gordon wood. >> i think the historians are in part responsible for the neglect of the constitution in at least at the university level, college 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 half a century. i'll give you one fact that may be wrong, but it's my impression. the women married quarterly is the leading journal in early american history. over the past 40 years until last october, there was not a single article published that comes -- it comes out four times a year. not a single article on constitutional history. the beginnings of the constitution, the constitutional

issues involved in the xweer yal crisis, nothing until october of this last year, and i think that's a kind of straw in the wi wind. we have to understand that historical interpretation goes in fashion. over the last half-century there are other issues that preoccupy the historical profession. issues of race, issues of women, legitimate issues that have preoccupied graduate training and the writing of history in graduate schools and in undergraduate schools. now at the law schools constitutional history has been continued and it's always there. i'm talking about the undergraduate schools have simply neglected that. i think changes are 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 quarterly was a kind of

indication of a new issue emerging in scholarship. >> david fisher. >> i found learning is flourishing in thousands of classrooms around the country. it's not so flourishing in other classrooms, and we might ask what works and what doesn't to meet and talk to it is 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 work -- if we're talking about very young children is something that awakens a sense that others have walked this earth before then. something that also triggers an exercise of the imagination, and

there are lots of waying s of d that. taking them there, telling them stories. kids love stories that way. then in classes beyond that, it's a question of, i think, 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 in a lot of academic history. we lost the stories. we lost the events. now they're all coming back at a great rate. i would be very hopeful for things. >> 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 panelists, take your microphone with you. >> apologieapologies. >> 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 constitution.

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 worship the constitution. i think 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 think we need in this -- 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 before, well, p 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 toward them it's going to be their world. how do we leave it? i don't think we're thinking collectively in those terms. so i really think it's time for us to think generationally, and i will invoke the spirit of jefferson. in this way i think we can think beyond the kind of partisan politics because this involves collective activity. this involves the commons. this involves things that we share. i think that's the crucial lesson of the founding. it's not that we need to say hands off the constitution. it's perfect. they were divinely inspired, but there is something and i think akihl put it 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 and keep the light bright and understand the way to cherish 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. >> did i say something wrong? david fischer. >> i'm sorry. it's also the years as well as the microphone. >> my fault. >> one thault thought that come is i 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 student 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 individual 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. they came away with a sense of intimate involvement in large processes, and then after that into the more complex and abstract questions such as the constitution. i'm sorry. you can 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 re revolutionary era and the constitution as a climax of the course. your question, diane was politics. i'm reminded of reek beck west's statement, when politics comes in the door, truth goes out the window. there is a problem. there was a problem with politics, especially democratic politics, because -- we all sense this. there's a lack of honesty on the part of politicians. 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. when pogo was right, we've met the enemy, and it is us. we punish our paoliticians for

gaffes and mistakes and telling the truth. it runs rampant throughout the political system. it's an embarrassment for a democratic society to force our politicians to be disingenuous and not be honest. do we want them honest? that's the question. 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 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. 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 we have as many men and women willing to engage in political life. they pay an awfully high price, and the worst is the d disingenuousness we impose on one another. >> david mccullough. >> i feel strongly and i experimented with this myself as a guest professor in 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. we're working with other students. if i were assigned to -- it would depend at what level i was teaching. if i was teaching at the college level, i think i would go about it this way. 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 participa 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 i had. 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, and see

them as human beings. see them as fallible. people struggling to do something right that's extremely difficult to achieve and what thep went through. i assigned one person to do nothing but study what the weather was in philadelphia that summer. we know what weather is like, summers are like in fiphiladel a philadelphia. imagine you're cooped up in a building, a room, and you can't tell anybody what you're doing and everybody is after you to find out. this has its own intrinsic kind of drama. but the essence of the pull of history is people. to see them as not figures in the history book, names in the history book but human beings, what was it like for them? it always, always works. i'd do one more thing, and that is tell each student, you can

get help any way, from jefr where you want. that's how you accomplish things in life. you don't center to do it all yourself. enlist your parents in the project. get somebody that you know who is an expert to talk with you. use the telephone. ask questions. we don't train students well enough in my opinion it to ask questions. they're always required to have answers, but the way you find out in life is to ask questions. pull it out of people. there isn't a single person that any of us ever meets who doesn't know something we don't know. interview them. >> i want it to take issue with the fundamental proposition that politics is separate from understanding the constitution. i mean, understanding the writing of the constitution is understanding politics.

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 capitol. 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. the ratification contest was a slugfest. i think that -- then i think peter talked about the 1790s. the politics of the jeffers jeffersonians and the federalists in the 1790s is

every bit as bitter 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 in 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. i think there's a real opportunity in teaching the founding period so though it wasn't so different. >> akihl. >> i like team exercises. if i were in high school, i would definite have kids work in teams. i like that a locality. i love role plays, and one advantage -- see, the earlier we can -- you have to develop a

taste for these things. the earlier you can introduce people. 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 two and a half years weren't so fun. 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 about past politics and organized around these very colorful personalities so when i'm a kid, these little podded 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 than in math and maybe a different thing for music. i like teams. i like role plays, and i definitely like the presidency in particular because it's very personal. >> kyle. >> well, if i can just reflect on some of the experiences we've had here at ou in the last few years where we've founded a constitution program, and i've enjoyed i think some initial successes. yes, i'm bragging a little bit. we haven't let a fear of politics impede us. the constitution is always politicized. it's a principle that the constitution is bigger than politics. it's that the constitution isn't conservative or liberal, but it's the framework within which we decide our political fate. we worked hard to create authentic political representation for conservatives and liberals within our program, and i think it's been an element of our success.

reflecting on that, there are one of two explanations. one is that possibly we start to see an age where this is becoming an exciting topic again for academics and we're past some of the academic culture wars, or we have david here and everybody respects him and it's easy. maybe a little bit of both. >> i do want to invite those of you who would like to pose your own question to move to the microphone here on my left right up front at any point. if i see someone there, i'll call on you. the phones are open. you know, this morning peter spoke of needing a renewal every 19 years or so, every generation

of the constitution. the idea was that our so-called founding fathers spoke out then, but what about now? have we reached a point in our history, akhil amar, where you believe we need to gather ideas for taking a look at the mistakes and some of the wrongdoing that the constitution -- what happened? oh, i'm so sorry. is he all right? are you all right? okay. coming to the microphone.

all right. please be careful of those stairs. have we reached that point, akhil? >> two or three -- i like to get people expressing opinions. this is especially true in a law school. so my version of david's assignment, these teams might be who is the most overrated president? who is the most underrated? something where they have to take a position. what were the biggest mistakes in the past? what do you think the five biggest challenges of the future are going to be? and again, we could have teams and you could even compete to win a prize for your team for the most interesting answer to that. but i do think just finally on the challenges of our world they are global challenges created by

the internet and climate change and international terrorism. so some of the answers that we inherited don't make sense because those answers presuppose old world over there, new world here. we'll just sort of keep them at bay and do our own thing, and that's not their future. so to get them to -- you know, what are the five things that are going to be the biggest challenges of the next 20 years? that would be a fun team assignment. the answer has to be political. >> who else wants to respond? rose marie. >> i think it would be interesting to ask you all, to ask students, to ask in the audience if they wanted to take advantage of the clause in the constitution that would allow us to call another constitutional convention. in our history it's never been done. we had one constitutional

convention, but the constitution does provide procedures by which we, the people, can reconstitute ourselves as a convention of the people and have a whole new document. and frankly i think if people would take that exercise seriously and start thinking about what a whole new constitution would look like written out of whole cloth, i think they would, one, have a greater appreciation of the founders, and two, i think they would appreciate the challenges of governing today in a more full way. >> david mccullough. >> i really truly believe it all comes back to or down to or up to leadership. and leadership at all levels but particularly political leadership. here we are in one of the great universities of our country, a state university in which the

president teaches a course on civics. imagine the president who is responsible for the enormous budget for 44,000 people if you count the employees and the students. with all that he has to contend with, he takes time out to teach that course every year. i don't know of another president of a major university who teaches a course. maybe there are some, but the point is, we lead by example. our politics haauoliticians hav st same thing, and so do the people in the media. we must not -- i think it's

appalling that we have people on television regularly every day reporting the nation's events and the world's events who, one, can't really properly use the english language -- [ applause ] >> -- and who, two, don't seem to ever read books. it is not coincidental in my view that the strongest, most admirable presidents we've had have all been students of history. many of them have been the authors of history. when george marshall was first appointed secretary of the state by harry truman, he was asked in a press conference, did you have a good education at vmi, virginia military institute? he said, no, i