Dennis Goecks: The death of democracy being greatly exaggerated
About the writer: Dennis Goecks is retired from a career mixing engineering, politics, business and teaching. An engineer long active in Republican politics, he served as a Yamhill County commissioner from 1989 to 1997. After losing a third term bid, he returned to his management engineering consulting firm and taught business and management at Chemeketa Community College.
Over the last month I have seen much regarding the No King rallies, specifically the pictures and information in the News-Register. I asked myself how I would explain all this to a civics class.
First, I would make sure each student had a copy of the Constitution of the United States.
I would explain that it is up to date with the 27th Amendment, ratified on May 7, 1992. I would make sure they thus understood it is not some old document written by a bunch of white men 250 years ago, but has been updated 27 times to reflect the will of the people.
Second, I would give them a copy of a Dan Hegeland article from American Thinker titled, “Basic Civics for the No King Protesters.” I would explain that it ends with the following:
“In other words, all the friction, tension and chaos they’re experiencing isn’t the death of democracy. It’s the Constitution functioning exactly as designed. The system is messy, frustrating, and slow by design — because the founders feared concentrated power more than they feared inefficiency. Madison would be proud. Hamilton would be smiling.
“The protesters think they’re the Resistance. They’re actually the civics class. And they’re failing the exam.”
Finally, I would ask my students to study both the Constitution and the article, along with any other information they might come across.
I would emphasize the purpose of education is not to tell them what to think, rather how to think. I would tell them when we would be taking the issue up again for discussion.
Can you imagine how interesting this could be?
Our students would go to the base document, reading and understanding just what it says. They would discover the wonderful gift God has allowed us to have with a Constitutional Republic. And they would understand how important it is to be an informed citizen voter, as that is required to keep the gift.
Comments
Bigfootlives
AMEN!
Sadly, the response of most of the people under the age of 40 is, What's a Civics Class? Even Scarier, I wonder how many of them know what the Constitution is.
Otis
While the birth of Autocracy is greatly under-exaggerated.
InfoPro
As a graduate student, I had the pleasure of teaching an undergrad survey course on US History. This was in 1995, and the students were primarily freshmen and sophomores. I was absolutely astounded at the number of students that could not tell me the difference between the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Civics, let alone history, are necessities in education and they shouldn't be limited to classroom instruction. Kids need to experience and take part in civic activities and experience history to learn. Mr. Goecks is exactly right, our Republic is a gift that we all must work to keep.