something exciting? i'm going to start with a person you've not yet heard from though will hear from this evening at dinner, and that's david mccullogh. [ applause ] >> thank you very much. history is human. three words and i sincerely believe that that is the essence of teaching history and of understanding history, and i also believe firmly that our teachers are the most important people in our society. they are doing the work. >> me, too. >> so i do not blame our

teachers, and i object to anything that is proposed or enacted or becomes acceptable socially that makes the difficulties of teaching greater still. we should be doing everything we can to support our teachers and to give them our appreciation for what they do. i think that history and the love of history and understanding of history begins truly, literally, at home. ip think that if there's a problem with the education today in the country, it's with us. we, who are fathers, mothers, grandfathers, grandmothers. [ applause ] >> if you were teaching, how would you answer -- >> if i were teaching 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 it succeeded. and yet 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 fair. i don't think that's the way to do it. it's about people. you have to understand those human beings, and i think that's true about teaching any aspect of history, american history or any history. >> pete, you're up. >> 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'd say there are a couple of problems that explain the dire state of constitutional studies. one is they have been dominated by lawyers, and we need to take it back from the lawyers. and i think i ski going to 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 as civics. and this was the stuff that's so boring. it's 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 have broken

through, and there's actually a very lively constitutional scholarship that hasn't made it to the schools yet. i would just pick up on something akhil said earlier. the first thing to say is everybody knows we live in 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 and geopolitically? war explains a lot. explained in akhil's talking, talked about 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 wep can relate to our world in a way that we begin to understand they related to their world. so i think it's something that historians can do and that it takes the last generations for these things to trickle down. maybe the internet is going to 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 and in the larger world. 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. it's yet another episode in that history of wars. so i think you can make it compelling. kids love war. well, we began in war. and it's in that context that i think we can begin to recover what these human beings did. their great achievements. their great failures. >> i'll turn to kyle harper, who is director of the institute for american constitutional heritage. tell me your approach. >> well, i think one of the exciting things about teaching college that you're teaching

adults and you're teaching kids who are becoming adults. and you're not just teaching them facts. you're not just asking them to memorize when and that was ratified -- sorry. you're not just teaching them facts. you're teaching them to become citizens. and i think if you embed practices of citizenship inside the classroom, you can not only achieve greater results in your teaching but you can excite them and engage them to take what they learn inside the classroom into their lives as citizens. to me that means creating situations for bait and civil discussions in way that make them realize the facts on the page actually influence and deeply impact their political lives. so whether it's religious freedom, privacy. whatever it is. these are issues with history. history matters particularly when it comes to the constitution in a way that profoundly will shape the world that they live in. giving them a chance not to just 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 we can do it in the 21st century. it isn't just lecturing at them, but it's asking them to develop their voice as citizens inside the classroom and take it outside the classroom. >> akiel amar, do you give by showing them what was left out? >> well, "them" -- >> can you hold that microphone in front. >> from my 6-year-old to my undergraduates to law students, different audiences when they get out to meet ordinary folks. here's my multi-pronged approach, and it's very auto biographical.

so my parents, when i was a young boy, take me to mount vernon and to the white house and to the congress, to the capitol hill and independence hall, and that just wowed me. my teachers had role play exercises where it's 1850 and you're henry clay and you're daniel webster, and that was kind of cool. and -- and i read storybooks, history books. books of the sort that david mccullogh writes for ordinary non-scholarly audiences in full of -- scholarship but accessible to ordinary people. then i get to college, and i read gordon wood's work. and so here's 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 gourd whn he was the

founder, really, of the academic board. >> so are you, sir, 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 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. i think politics is a 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, constitution day, and july 4th and veterans day, and we're not using -- and presidents day as sort of proper occasions to just come up with materials for families. >> there are too many sales out there. and that's the problem. >> well, this can be fun, and it can be like little teams. you know, comp tipgss, even, because kids like to compete, too, on knowing your constitution, knowing the founders, knowing politics. it were 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.

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 understand is that that declaration of independence would have ban dead letter, at least after the war of independence was over, if there hadn't been a constitution. so what i try to do in my teaching is try and restore 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 the constitution would fail when he left in 1777 because they didn't pass one of the crucial provisions he put in

there. a veto. the ability of congress to veto state laws. and i think some of the things that akiel 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 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. and we have had the luxury as a people to just sit back, somewhat ignorant of the structures of government, and let the process of government go along with deciding to we may or

may not vote at any give een lection. again, you know, voting was seen as this incredible privilege. it was incredible when people got to vote, and 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 owe you, they're 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 empirical 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. over the last half-century there have been other issues that have pre-occupied 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. but 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 era 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. i used 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 first of all 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 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, 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. >> 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 to us fetishize or 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. 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

akiel put it brilliantly when he talked about the 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? >> oh, david fisher. >> i'm sorry. it's also the years 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 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. 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. 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. i'm -- your question, diane, was politics. how does contemporary politics or politics in general -- i'm reminded of rebecca west's statement. she 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.

when pogo was right, we've met the enemy, and it is us. we punish our politicians for gaffes and mistakes and 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. no not be honest, and yet, do we want them honest? that's the question. so 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 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. it's -- they pay an awfully high price, and the worst is the disingenuousness that we impose on them. >> david mccullogh. [ applause ] >> 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. or 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 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 can get help any way, from anywhere you want. that's how you accomplish things in life. you don't have to dot 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. 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.

and i think that -- and then, peter i think 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 to show that it wasn't so different. >> akhil? >> i like team exercises. if i were in high school, i