and to the congress, to the capitol building and to independence hall and that just wowed me. then my teachers had role play exercises where, you know, 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 that david mccullough writes for an ordinary audience that's accessible to ordinary people. then i get to college, and i read gordon wood's work. and so here's now taking that -- out bie grauy autobu autobiogra-

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 really of the academic board. >> 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. 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 seder. we have to have occasional -- we have -- our calendar is built on occasions for remembrance. we call them memorial day, flag day and 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. and 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. it's 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 substantively about the constitution.

and 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. and, unfortunately, what most people don't understand 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. so 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 hadn't been a 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.

a veto by the congress on state laws. the ability of congress to veto state laws. and i think some of the things that akhil 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. and 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. and we have had the luxury as a people to just sit back 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. but -- and, again, you know, voting was seen as this incredible privilege. it was incredible when people go to vote and that there would be universal male suffrage and there was a big radical innovation. we've lost that. we've lost that sense of excitement and innovation. >> gordon wood. >> well, i think the historians are in part responsible for the neglect of the constitution 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 -- 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 imperial crisis, nothing until october of this last year, and i think that's a kind of straw in the wind. we have to understand that historical interpretation goes in fashions, and over the last half century there have been 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, but i'm talking about the undergraduate schools that 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 women's married quarterly" was a kind of indication of a new issue emerging in scholarship. >> david fisher. >> i find that history teaching and history learning is alive and well and 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 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 me to work, first of all, if we're talking about very young children is something that awakens a sense that others have walked this earth before them, something that also triggers an exercise of the imagination, and there are 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 in a lot of academic history. we lost the stories. we lost the events. and now they're all coming back at a great rate.

and 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. >> 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 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, 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. and 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

akhil 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 to keep the light bright and understand the 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. >> did i say something wrong? >> oh, david fisher. >> i'm sorry. it's also the ears as well as the microphone. >> my fault. >> one thought that comes to me 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 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 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. and they came away with a sense of intimate involvement in very large processes, and then i think after that then 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 era and the constitution as a climax of the course. your question, diane, was politics. contemporary politics or politics or general. i'm reminded of rebecca west's statement, 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. and when pogo was right, we've met the enemy, and it is us. we punish our politicians for gaffes, for mistakes, for telling the truth. so disingenuousness runs rampant throughout the political system. it's an embarrassment for a democratic politic to force our politicians to be disingenuous and not be honest. and yet 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. 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. they pay an awfully high price, and the worst is the disingenuousness that we impose on one another. >> david mccullough. >> i feel strongly and i 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. we're working with other students. if i were assigned to -- it would depend, of course, 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 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 they went through. i'd assign 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 philadelphia. imagine you're cooped up in a building, in 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. 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 k 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 who is an expert to talk with you. use the telephone. ask questions. we don't train students well enough in my opinion 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. [ applause ]

>> 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. the ratification contest was a slugfest. and i think that -- 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 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, and i think there's a real opportunity in teaching the founding period so show that it wasn't so different. >> akhil. >> i like team exercises. if i were in high school, i

would definitely have kids work in teams. i like that a lot. there are actually -- i love role plays 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, 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 about past

politics and organized around these very colorful personalities so when i'm a kid, you know, these little potted bobs marrow, 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. but 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 have enjoyed some i think initial successes, so, 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. and the ground rule of our program has been that the

constitution isn't conservative or liberal, but that it's the framework within which we decide our political fate, and so we've worked hard to create authentic political representation for conservatives and liberals within our program, and i think it's been really an element of our success. reflecting on that, there are one of two explanations. one is that possibly we're starting to see an age where this is become iing 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. >> all right. 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. that 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? i mean just something where they actually 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?

something -- and, again, we could have teams and you could even sort of 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. and 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 -- but 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. and the answer is going to have 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. [ applause ] 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.