Bonus material
No Legal Briefs this week because I want to feature something I think you might like. My oldest daughter graduated from college a couple of weeks ago. She attended Ashland University in Ashland, Ohio, where she was an Ashbrook Scholar. The Ashbrook Scholar’s program is for undergraduate students studying political science, history or political economy. Their mission is to “strengthen constitutional self-government by educating our fellow Americans in the history and founding principles of our country and the habits of reflection and choice necessary to perpetuate our republic.”
The Ashbrook Center is full of remarkable people, but one man, Peter Schramm, is held in particularly high esteem. Dr. Schramm served as the executive director of the Ashbrook Center from 1997 to 2013. He was an immigrant from Hungary. In 2006, Schramm wrote an essay called, Born American, But In The Wrong Place. You can read the full length essay here.
What follows is the Schramm essay’s final few paragraphs, which I thought may be appropriate this holiday weekend.
I AM TOLD that before I was born, my mother went to see a fortune-teller, and the old woman told my mother that she would have a son and that he would grow up to be a soldier in a foreign land. I have been content to be a student in a land that was once foreign to me but is now my home in a sense that is much deeper than Hungary ever could have been my home. These days I continue my life as a student of America. The difference is that now a university pays me to study rather than collecting payment from me. I am in the ironic position, here at this Midwestern liberal arts college in central Ohio, of teaching native Americans (I mean native-born Americans, not American Indians) how to think about their country. How odd it seems, and yet how perfectly American, that they should need me, a Hungarian immigrant, to teach them.
I suppose that I should no longer be surprised by the dismal education of students in high school. But I continually receive fresh reminders of just how bad it is. One of the things I do here in my capacity as Director of the Ashbrook Center and a professor of political science at Ashland University is to interview prospective applicants to our program. Now our program is intense, and we take only the best students, and they are, in comparison to their peers, quite accomplished and well read. But this really means nothing. Most of them have read nothing but mediocre textbooks. They come in with a lot of silly prejudices about America—though perhaps (since this is the Midwest) some good habits and some sensible opinions; mostly due to their upbringing. And these are the best of the students. I meet many more of the other kind—students who, like me at that age, have no idea of what they are doing with themselves and certainly have no civic perspective.
The United States was the first nation in the world to construct an elaborate system of public schools. All the founders understood that republican government demanded that the citizens be educated. Citizens have to choose their representatives wisely, they have to learn to become independent, to be able to earn a living. And they have to be taught self-control. They have to have the habits of mind and heart that are necessary for self-government. These native Americans need teachers. And I have become one of those teachers. Call it a repayment of a debt; call it honoring my father and mother for seeing things rightly and thereby giving me a chance to be in the right place and my children a chance to be born in the right place. Call it what you will. But what I do with these American natives is I teach them about American politics and American history. I start with a simple thing about their country and themselves. I tell them that they are the fortunate of the earth, among the blessed of all times and places. I tell them this is an obvious and an incontrovertible thing. And their blessing, their great good fortune, lies in the nation into which they were born. I tell them not only that their country, the United States of America, is the most powerful and the most prosperous country on earth, but also that it is the most free and the most just. Then I tell them how and why this is so.
That is, I teach them about the principles from which these blessings of liberty flow. I invite them to consider whether they can have any greater honor than to pass undiminished to their children and their grandchildren this great inheritance of freedom. And then we talk for a few years about how they might best go about doing that. And this is the beginning and the end of what I have learned and of what I teach both as an American citizen and a human being.