Civic Education

Our new generation is a new people that must acquire the knowledge, learn the skills, and develop the dispositions or traits of private and public character that undergird a constitutional democracy. Those dispositions must be fostered and nurtured by word and study and by the power of example. Democracy is not a “machine that would go of itself,” but must be consciously reproduced, one generation after another.

Our people also should realize that civic education is essential to sustain our constitutional democracy. The habits of the mind, as well as “habits of the heart,” the dispositions that inform the democratic ethos, are not inherited.