The Public Value of the Liberal Arts John Agresto Academic Questions

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John Agresto: Borough Educational activity and Patriotism

On October three, 2019 JMC board member John Agresto delivered the  keynote accost at the Jack Miller Center's 2019 Summit on Higher Educational activity. Focusing on the theme of the superlative, "Should America's Colleges Teach Patriotism?" Dr. Agresto spoke on true patriotism and its relationship to civic knowledge.

Education Patriotism

Below, a transcript of Dr. Agresto'due south keynote address, delivered October 3, 2019 at the Jack Miller Center Summit for Higher Education in Chicago, IL:

Give thanks you, Jack [Miller], Mike [Andrews]…

ConstructionMy father was born in 1920, and, when the war broke out, he went and joined the navy. He fought all of Earth War II in the Pacific on a light cruiser called the Wichita. When the war was over, he came back to New York and worked unloading trucks at the Fulton Street Vegetable Market. Then he tried owning a bar in Brooklyn. When that failed, he became a day laborer in construction. A hod-carrier, he poured cement at dissimilar construction sites for the rest of his life.

He was an ordinary person, not fancy at all. Yous might say he was far more prosaic than poetic. But at that place was one verse form he liked and would say to us kids at present and so. He must accept learned it in seventh or 8th grade since he never made it to high schoolhouse. It was an onetime poem by Sir Walter Scott. It goes like this:

Breathes in that location the man, with soul so dead,
Who never to himself hath said,
This is my ain, my native land!
Whose heart hath ne'er within him burn'd,
Equally domicile his footsteps he hath plow'd,
From wandering on a foreign strand?
If such there exhale, go, mark him well;
For him no Minstrel raptures swell;

The wretch, concentred all in self,
[Shall quickly] forfeit fair renown,
And, doubly dying, shall get downwards
To the vile dust, from whence he sprung,
Unwept, unhonour'd, and unsung.

Teach patriotism? Seems unnecessary–information technology's seemingly natural. Just those with dead souls don't love their country.

We sometimes hear countries called "our fatherland," or peradventure "our motherland." Nosotros often dear information technology every bit nosotros love our own, as part of ourselves, considering, for some inbred, natural reason, all humans dearest their own. Nosotros know that.

For example, no thing how wonderful, how lovely, other parents' children are, and no matter how disappointing your own kids might be, information technology still takes an immense endeavor of the will to love other people'due south kids more than your own.

The same seems to be true with love of land. If love of one'due south own is as natural to being man as love of ourselves, why would we e'er fifty-fifty retrieve it necessary to teach people to dear their native land?

Why? Because, natural or not, I think we all sympathize that patriotism tin can be undermined and twisted. And, in America today, it is being twisted.

Classroom, early 20th centuryI spent much of my developed life equally a president of or professor in some very fine colleges and universities. And I am not one who is comfortable painting schools and colleges with so wide a castor as to say that they are, each and all, corrupting our kids and turning children against their country. But we all know that some, perhaps many are. And then, the question we have to get to is: What tin we do about information technology?

Just to know how to remedy this problem, we kickoff have to inquire what's causing and so many teachers and their students to actively dislike their country.

Now, from what I can see, this undermining is done in a few ways – for example, these days nosotros all accept to be "critical thinkers." This rarely means careful thinking, or systematic thinking, or analytic thinking, or, heaven foreclose, just plain Thinking. To exist critical frequently means exactly that – beingness critical: nosotros take to criticize everyone and everything that went before. Now, our students are hardly disquisitional of themselves, since so many of them are led to believe, perchance fifty-fifty encouraged to believe, that their generation knows more and better about all the important things. All besides often, critical thinking has taken the identify once occupied by manifestly, old Thinking, or what we frequently just used to call Agreement.

Second, in some schools and colleges our students often read only those things that support their positions or their identity. Things opposite to, or ideas and books that might work to undermine their ideas and notions, trigger unhappy feelings. And neither students nor their professors and teachers want to be made uncomfortable. So, do I think these institutions of swell learning should teach patriotism? Can you imagine what a mess they would make of it? Why would you trust them?

Third, you know the pitiful content of much of contemporary history and civic education: the American Founders were racist, sexist, homophobic rich white guys. From that, information technology follows that the country they established must exist the same – racist, sexist, diff, unjust, and pretty much evil.

Flags at a paradeBut maybe the worst part of education today is not the misuse of the idea of "critical thinking," perchance not fifty-fifty the idea that all knowledge is progressive and we, living today, know better than those who lived before. Peradventure the worst is not even the propaganda that our Fathers were evil, racist, onetime and white. Perhaps the worst thing is summed upwards in the word I used a few seconds ago – "identity."  We are taught in schools, in pop culture, in movies, in yous name information technology, that the affair that defines us, the thing that we should be near attached to, devoted to, and honey is our "identity."  This thing that is near important to us e'er seems to exist something narrow, non something 1000. Mayhap it'due south our race, our sexual orientation or preference, our particular organized religion or sect, our color or ethnicity – everything merely our identification, our identity, as simply "Americans."

Now, the few paragraphs I merely spoke are true, merely non completely true. I said I didn't desire to paint with too broad a castor for one simple reason:  there are a number, a very good number, of schools and colleges that aren't equally I simply said. Many of them are pocket-size and individual, many are religious, and some – I have to tell you – are major private and public universities. Why some places have been able to resist the four trends I just mentioned, I hope nosotros can get to in a bit.

But start let'due south ask a question, a serious question – if being patriotic is natural for most human beings, if the poem is right that those who practice not love their country take seriously dead souls, why is it that nosotros have a problem? Have we ever had this trouble? Do all countries accept this trouble?

Let me take you back to the time of our American Founding – to the fourth dimension when we alleged our independence and wrote our constitution. We must have been one state then, no? A identify total of patriotic men and women, people willing to sacrifice (as the Proclamation of Independence says) their fortunes, their honor, and even their lives? Well, maybe not. If we look back to those days, it looks like we weren't all that unified in our devotion to this new country of ours. Probably a 3rd of the colonists were withal loyal to Dandy U.k., a 3rd were patriots and fought for us to exist gratuitous, and roughly another third, from what I've heard, just tried to sit it out.

Fifty-fifty the Proclamation of Independence itself hints at this lack of devotion to our new state – it declares that we were "United Colonies," merely it also notes that we were thirteen "gratuitous and independent states." So, given that bifurcation, which should we say was "our ain, our native country?" The the states, or the private state in which we might reside? This problem was at the center of so much of the turmoil in our early on history. Call back of poor Robert E. Lee. To which community did he owe his fidelity, his devotion? To the people of Virginia or to the people of the United States?

James Madison - John VanderlynYou probably know that in the years earlier the Ceremonious State of war we already understood that nosotros had this problem – the opponents of the Constitution, the Anti-Federalists as they came to exist chosen, said that at that place had never been a commonwealth or a commonwealth in all of homo history that was big and various. Only niggling countries could be real democracies – countries more like cities than whole nations. And, if they were larger, they had to be unified and homogeneous. They had to accept an "identity" that every denizen could identify with – perchance all Catholics, or all Jews, or all Spaniards or Japanese. And even in that location, fractures and factions could hands dissever the country into ceremonious war.

Simply our Founders knew that we couldn't exist unified in terms of, let's say, faith or ethnicity.  In the original 13 states we were Anglicans, Lutherans, Congregationalists, Baptists, Catholics; we were English language and Scottish, German and Scandinavian and Dutch. Nosotros were split among farmers and merchants and those who worked the seas and the rivers. Nosotros were, from the get-go, equally diverse and pluralistic – yous might even say multi-cultural – as the political mind could imagine. Nosotros couldn't be unified by claret; nosotros couldn't – every bit other places might –  give our devotion to one sect, or one extended family unit, or one tribe, or one common way of life.

If patriotism is built on dearest of one'due south own, what exactlyis our own, what do we, as diverse Americans, have in common, concord in mutual, that could claim our loyalty and to which we might be devoted? In other words, what is our singular American identity?

From the Declaration of Independence to the Federalist Papers to the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, what our Fathers hoped nosotros would grow in devotion to – what nosotros would make our own – was something hardly tangible. Information technology was the thought of the equality of all men in their possession of equal rights and equal freedom. It would be this devotion to an idea that would lead us to attach ourselves to this land. Information technology would be a land that, with great difficulty and with many missteps and failures, would protect our rights and provide us with equal justice under law. Information technology would be that country and those principles which would concur us together and even help u.s. respect, perhaps even love, our neighbors, our fellow Americans, with whom we share no common blood, no creed, no family relation. It was devotion to the country congenital on the idea of equality, rights, and freedom that led my begetter – an Italian-American who quoted Scottish poets – to fight in a war alongside Jews and Irishmen, Hispanics from New United mexican states (who died by the hundreds fighting for America in the Bataan Death March), plus everyone else, from West Virginia mountain men to Navajo code talkers.  They understood something almost the promise of America which, fifty-fifty if it wasn't perfect or perfectly applied, commanded their love and devotion and transcended their different backgrounds and, cartel I say, their dissimilar "identities."

I want to read something that has always moved me. It'south a talk Abraham Lincoln gave here in Chicago merely afterwards the Fourth of July in 1858. It goes similar this:

Nosotros are now a mighty nation, we are thirty — or about thirty — meg people, and we own and inhabit about one-fifteenth part of the dry out country of the whole earth. We run our memory back over the pages of history for about eighty-ii years. At that place we notice that we were, then, a very minor people, vastly inferior to what we are now, with a considerably smaller extent of territory and, indeed, less of everything we deem desirable amidst men.

We look upon these changes as exceedingly advantageous to us, and we fix upon something that happened away dorsum, as in some style or other being connected with this rise of our prosperity. Nosotros notice a race of men living in that day whom we claim equally our fathers and grandfathers; they were fe men, men who fought and died for the principle they were contending for. And we understood, because of what they did, that the caste of prosperity that nosotros now enjoy has come to the states. We hold these annual Independence Day celebrations to remind ourselves of all the good that was done in this process of time, of how information technology was done and who did information technology, and how we are historically continued with it. We get from these meetings [feeling] more than attached to ane other and more firmly spring to the country we inhabit. In every style, we are better for these celebrations.

But afterwards we have done all this we have not yet reached the whole. At that place is something else connected with information technology. Nosotros accept besides these men—descended by blood from our ancestors—amid us maybe one-half our people who are not descendants at all of these men. They are men who have come from Europe—German language, Irish, French and Scandinavian—men that take come from Europe themselves, or whose ancestors take come hither and settled here, finding themselves our equals in all things. If they await back through this history to trace their connection with those days by blood, they find they have none, they cannot behave themselves back into that glorious epoch and make themselves feel that they are part of u.s.. But when they expect through that erstwhile Declaration of Independence they find that those old men say that "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal," and so they experience that that moral sentiment, taught in that 24-hour interval, evidences their relation to those men, that information technology is the father of all moral principle in them, and that they have a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the mankind of the men who wrote that Declaration, and so they are.

That is the electric cord in that Declaration that links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together, that volition link those patriotic hearts as long as the love of freedom exists in the minds of men throughout the world.

So how should nosotros go about teaching patriotism in our schools? I believe that the style to counter those who feel called to demean the achievements of this country and undermine the natural amore we all should feel for it, is not by moralizing demands or preachy lectures, but by the clarity and force of our agreement. I firmly believe that understanding buttresses amore — that even if patriotism is natural, it is surely refined and reinforced by understanding; that trying to encourage patriotism not grounded in knowledge will be shallow, or perhaps worse.

But if we wish to inculcate this kind of intelligent patriotism — if we wish students and our swain citizens to respect this country and what it stands for — where practice we plow?

Land of HopeWe could start, of course, with educating parents. Near of them know in their hearts that the founding principles of this nation are simply, rare, and worthy of manual from their generation to the next. Many parents I know are drastic to find manufactures and books to help them understand what they dearest. Here I have to commend the Miller Eye. Professors connected to the JMC work hard at publishing adept books, manufactures, and op-eds attainable to regular citizens, writings that assistance everyone empathise better the pregnant of America. In fact, ane professor on the Miller board, Nib McClay, just published this yr perhaps the best (and best-selling) volume on American History in decades – it's called Land of Hope, An Invitation to the Slap-up American Story.

There are others involved in this project – literally hundreds of teachers and university professors who work in their classes to transmit our Founding and Constitutional principles. Information technology has been the hope of all of united states of america that rediscovering the meaning of the Founders' principles and the reasons behind them might help set u.s. back right. This ways finding those extraordinary professors and teachers who are non afraid to be erstwhile fashioned and teach their students virtually the American Founding. Not afraid to help students sympathize what the Founders were trying to accomplish and why. Not deterred from understanding what they did, respecting what they did, and then transmitting all that they did to their students.

Tearing down is piece of cake. The tendency to promote our own more contemporary notions while rejecting or even analytical ideas that went before helps us view ourselves equally truly "critical" thinkers, and makes united states feel better about ourselves. Simply peradventure, just maybe, if nosotros can help teachers take the Founding seriously and effort to understand what today seems and then easy to dismiss, nosotros all might learn something — something truly valuable non only for ourselves, but also for our students and for our country. Want to teach kids to love their country? Have them sympathise all that America has achieved in this chaotic and tearful globe, and the reasons, the ideas, the principles behind those amazing accomplishments. In other words, teach them the fullness of what the American Founding achieved and the reasons and ideas that allowed those accomplishments to unfold.

Thank you.


John Agresto, Board MemberJohn Agresto is the one-time President of St. John's College and former Chancellor and Provost of the American University of Republic of iraq. While interim President of St. John'southward, which has been praised as 1 of the best liberal arts colleges in the land, Professor Agresto actively worked in designing and supporting its Great Books Program. He has been a leading proponent of the value of a liberal arts instruction, lecturing and writing on its nature and benefits for many years. Before assuming his position at St. John's College, Professor Agresto served equally President at the Madison Center in Washington, D.C. and every bit Assistant Chairman, Deputy Chairman, and Interim Chairman to the National Endowment for the Humanities for 7 years. Widely published in the areas of politics, law, and education, he is the author or editor of several books, including Rediscovering America: Freedom, Equality, and the Crisis of Democracy (Asahina & Wallace, 2015), Mugged by Reality: The Liberation of Republic of iraq and the Failure of Good Intentions (Encounter, 2007), The Supreme Courtroom and Constitutional Democracy (Cornell, 1984), and The Humanist as Citizen: Essays on the Uses of the Humanities (National Humanities Centre, 1981).

Professor Agresto is a JMC board fellow member.

Learn more than about John Agresto >>


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