Julia Steiny: Loss of a common standard affects education and the republic
01:00 AM EDT on Sunday, June 27, 2010
America was founded as a nation of different peoples held together by the idea of Democracy and the primacy of the Common Good.
In an age when Congress itself is paralyzed by partisan interests, let us celebrate the Fourth of July by revisiting the democratic ideals on which the country was founded. And let’s remember that our Founding Fathers believed that the only force that would maintain their intrinsically precarious democracy was education — common knowledge and skills taught in Common Schools.
Toward the beginning of his latest book, “The Making of Americans: Democracy and Our Schools,” E.D. Hirsch Jr. recounts the famous story of Benjamin Franklin leaving the Constitutional Convention of 1787. A woman asked, “Well, Doctor, what have we got?” Franklin replied, “A Republic, Madam, if you can keep it.”
Even in the 18th century, immigrants poured into our then-new nation, so the Founders’ challenge was to design and teach a practical, community-first faith that could encompass all of what Hirsch calls the “tribes,” separated by religion, language, cultural habits or nations of origin. Tribes are naturally self-interested. S