Interview: Jack Miller

FtA: You started the Jack Miller Center for Teaching America’s Founding Principles and History because you wanted to make sure the American dream would be available to future generations. For many people, that might look like focusing on economic opportunity or prosperity, but you went in a different direction. Tell us, how does civic education preserve the American dream?

Jack Miller: If people don’t know what our country is about, then how can we be united? We should all know the vision of the Declaration of Independence—that all men are created free and equal, and that they’re guaranteed their life and liberty. But, and this is very, very critical, they are also guaranteed the pursuit of happiness—not happiness itself. People have to understand that the American Dream is that pursuit of happiness, where people take their own ideas, their own God-given gifts, and, with a lot of hard work, create a better future for themselves and their families. This freedom should really unite all Americans, so when I saw that 75% or more of the people don’t know what any of this means, and heard that these ideas are being taken out of our educational system, I decided to work to try and get them back in.

FtA: That’s a perfect segue to my next question, which is, for decades we have been seeing low levels of civic knowledge amongst students and adults. What do you think are the primary causes of this decline, and which of those causes are most within the power of educators and policymakers to address?

Jack Miller: Well, I’ll be, I suppose, a little politically incorrect here, but I believe there’s two causes. One cause is the extreme emphasis on science and mathematics and things that you can use in your job to work, so it has turned our universities into giant trade schools, and so civics education had no place in that, according to them. That’s one of the problems that we’ve had. The other one, though, was more insidious. At the time of the Vietnam War, we had the protests, and some of those protestors became professors. And then, if you know how universities work, the professors are the ones who run the place. I mean, the administrators take care of the mechanics, but the professors do the hiring of other professors. They decide what’s being taught, what’s not being taught, and these people made a conscious effort to either downgrade or corrupt the teaching of American founding principles in history. They took it off of some campuses, they corrupted it on others, and they kept getting more and more professors like themselves on campus. So this has been a major effort by like-minded people, and once they made the big change in universities, they decided they had to get to an earlier stage, and they went into the K-12 area. When I was in grade school, first thing every morning we’d salute the flag—pledge allegiance to it. The National Anthem was sung in our assemblies. And now they’re gone. Those are my two reasons why I think universities have gone astray.

FtA: The phrase “civics education” can mean different things to different people. In your view, what distinguishes excellent civic education from ineffective or even counterproductive approaches?

Jack Miller: To me, the thing that distinguishes it is to read our founding documents: make sure you understand the Declaration. It’s simple, but it’s complex in a way. Understand our Constitution. Everybody talks about the Constitution, but the Declaration is really, as Lincoln said, the golden apple and the Constitution is a silver frame around it to protect it. Read the Federalist Papers. Read what went on. Read what Washington said—especially his famous letter to the Jewish congregation in Newport, which emphasized the idea that everybody is welcome here in America as long as they are productive. That is a real civic education. Read good history books by good historians, and avoid inaccurate, bitter works like the 1619 Project. So, to me, a good civics education is not going out and volunteering at a soup kitchen or something like that; that is not a civic education. Do that if you want. There’s nothing wrong with it, but it’s not a civic education.

Martin Center: The Jack Miller Center places significant emphasis on the American founding and the study of primary sources, which you just talked about. Why is engagement with the founding era in particular so important for today’s students? 

Jack Miller: Well, I think it’s because we set a standard that other countries copied. And before America became independent, all the nations were sort of hierarchies; you had kings who had all the power, or most of the power. England had started taking away some power from their king. They had this tiered society—you had the king, then the lords, then the working people who had little hope of progression. It’s important that we understand that we’ve created something different in the world. We were supposed to be like the shining city on the hill that others could copy, and supposedly, we would just be that. We wouldn’t interfere with anything they’re doing; we would just do our thing, and they could copy us. And our Founding, by the way, is based on the Jewish Bible. A lot of the Constitution is based on Deuteronomy, and you’ve got other ideas in there from other books. You also have some Christian ideas in there, so America is really a Judeo-Christian nation. So it’s unfortunate that not only has the population fallen away from learning American founding principles, but [also] that they’ve begun to fall away from religion, because they’re not going to learn what they should learn in both places. You look at a Bible in any church, 75% of the Bible is the Jewish books and texts, 25% is the New Testament. So our founders came over with the Old Testament, and they knew all of these books very well.

FtA: Civic education often becomes entangled in contemporary political debates. How can schools and universities teach controversial issues in a way that promotes intellectual humility, civil disagreement, and genuine inquiry rather than political advocacy?

Jack Miller: Well, number one, you’re always going to have political advocacy, and there’s nothing wrong with that. I think that we’ve seen the bitterness that’s there today many, many times. We saw it in Lincoln’s time, we saw it in Jackson’s time. But, if people are truly united in the principles that make America a free nation—that make America great—then they can argue all they want on political issues (if that’s what they enjoy doing). At the end of the day, though, they can agree, “we’re trying to make America better.” Better in the sense of what our fathers gave us, not better in the sense of saying, oh, well, capitalism is no good, socialism is better.

FtA: Colleges and universities once saw civics education and civic formation as central to their mission. Has higher education drifted away from that responsibility, and if so, what specific changes would help colleges better prepare students for citizenship?

Jack Miller: They definitely drifted away from that civic mission. The original colleges and universities—Harvard and others—were set up to teach people to be good citizens. They were set up to teach people to serve in government, not as a lifelong occupation, but for a certain amount of time, and that was the whole purpose of the universities in the beginning. Today, as we said before, it’s not the purpose of most universities, except Hillsdale and a few others that do teach this. [Most] have fallen far, far away from it. I went to my granddaughter’s graduation, and the keynote speaker was a Nobel Prize-winning author who spoke for 45 minutes on immigration. So he’s speaking to college graduates here, and he spent all that time talking about how immigrants are so important, and we have to have immigrants, and he just kept at it, and he never once said the word “legal.” And I think that’s a problem. If our kids are learning from professors like that who are saying, “Hey, we’ve got an immigration law, but it’s okay to break it,” then it’s okay to break any law. We’re supposed to be a “nation under law.” So, anyhow, I think the universities have to get back to it now.

Martin Center: Last question: if you could wave your magic wand and implement one major reform in American education over the next decade to strengthen civic knowledge and constitutional understanding, what would it be?

Jack Miller: Well, of course, the first answer is to get solid civic education back into the entire educational system: universities, K 12, religious schools, homeschooling, trade schools, and community colleges. I think the most important thing is to start at the university level and get solid civics, history, and Western civilization programs into all of the universities as a required subject and an important part—perhaps even a separate school within the university, where all students could go. Some could major in it, some could get master’s degrees and PhDs. Now everything starts at the university level. So if we can get the universities doing that, that will hopefully change the schools of education (which don’t do a good job of preparing teachers to teach civics and American history) and that would then change what’s going on in the high school arena, the K-12 arena. So I guess the one thing is…to get all the universities teaching this, having the states require a solid civics education. I think that’s about the most important one.

Jenna Robinson is president of the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal. Jack Miller is founder and chairman emeritus of the Jack Miller Center for Teaching America’s Founding Principles and History.