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This story was originally published by TheStatehouseFile.com.

By Colleen Steffen
TheStatehouseFile.com
November 4, 2024

Andrea Neal doesn’t even say hi, sailing into her classroom at St. Richard’s Episcopal School under the twin gazes of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, who look down benignly from their frames on the cinderblock wall.

She beelines toward her podium past photos from class trips to the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., including the sad COVID year they had to pose on Zoom with fake backdrops. One kid used a picture of the White House by mistake, which still makes Neal laugh. She thinks her students are funny and capable, and they will fight for her attention all period.

“Today we start the Declaration of Independence, and it’s my favorite!” she sings. “We’re gonna pull out highlighters!”

One-time opinion editor for The Indianapolis Star and a former member of the Indiana State Board of Education, Neal has taught her We the People class at St. Richard’s for 21 years. This is her last year before retiring, and she’s relishing her final sprint through the United States’ founding documents. But it’s hard to imagine she was ever less than this enthusiastic.

On a queasy, uneasy day before a historic election, as the anxiety of the state and nation peaks, it feels unaccountably hopeful to think of her middle-schoolers sitting up in their desks as she beams at them, preparing for their own someday turn in the voting booth.

“When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another …”

The seed of this class on this recent sunny autumn day began when the University of California at Los Angeles created the Center for Civic Education in 1965 “to promote an enlightened and responsible citizenry committed to democratic principles.” 1965—the year of the march from Selma to Montgomery, the Voting Rights Act, another fraught and dangerous year in the life of the nation.

Citizens can only take responsibility for their nation through a deep understanding of its government, history and ideals, the center said. The concept wasn’t new. In the U.S., civics dates as far back as 1790.

Its main obstacle wasn’t new either: What history exactly? Whose ideals? Who gets to decide?

These were never easy questions, complicated by every new wave of immigrants, every foreign war, and they became louder in the 1960s with the civil rights and women’s rights movements, so that American public schools began opting out of the argument. Other educational priorities, like STEM, also leeched time away from “Washington Crossing the Delaware” and “I only regret that I have but one life to give for my country.”

Now a third of Americans can’t name the three branches of government. Closer to home, Hoosiers are some of the least likely citizens in the nation to vote, their indifference blamed in part on no one ever teaching them why it’s important.

The Indiana General Assembly took action with a 2021 law requiring a semester of civics education for middle-schoolers, but almost 35 years earlier, in 1987, the Center for Civic Education created the We the People curriculum.

Teachers like Neal undergo rigorous training for a rigorous curriculum, which culminates in state and national competitions that simulate congressional hearings. It’s a commitment from both teacher and school, and Neal feared St. Richard’s would retire the program with her. But the school has already tapped her successor, who team teaches with her most days, a young woman with long hair and cool glasses and an obvious share of Neal’s enthusiasm for the subject.

Neal stands by her podium—actually a metal stand meant to hold music, which is appropriate since she’s more a conductor gesturing and pacing and waving each of her sometimes (but not for long) reluctant teens and tweens into the discussion.

How does the Declaration of Independence famously begin, she asks. A student falls into her trap.

“We the people …”

No! Wrong one, common mistake. (That’s the Constitution.)

She begins to read aloud from the textbook, stopping every sentence or two so the students can analyze, discuss, write notes. They will only cover about a third of the short document in this hour-long class during which the students will mention John Locke and the Olive Branch Petition and whether or not the rate of taxation on the colonies was really unfair.

This isn’t an advanced placement course. “By the time the year is over,” says Neal, “I’m disappointed if every student can’t participate like that.”

“… A decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation …” 

“Why did they need a document?” Neal asks. Kind of weird to send your king a Dear John letter, isn’t it? Make a tidy list of everyone he will want to hang?

“They believe in governing by social contract,” one student answers.

“England is far away”—how else will they find out?

“For trading reasons.”

Neal: “This is dangerous what they’re doing!”

Our politics still feels dangerous. An overwhelming majority of Americans says thinking about the unknown future of the country is causing them “a significant source of stress.” The American Psychological Association found last month that politics is causing us more anxiety than crime, the environment and global conflict.

Is this all we can agree on? The stress is affecting Republicans, Democrats and Independents almost identically, a full 73% to 80% of all of us.

Google has reported a spike in searches for “election stress.” Mental health professionals have reported an increase in election-inspired appointments.

“If you’re feeling stressed, it simply means you’re paying attention,” a Duke psychologist told NBC News.

It’s difficult, but Neal leads her students back in time to imagine when the future of the country was always this uncertain, when the flag with its 50 stars pinned to the bulletin board wasn’t the inevitable outcome.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness …”

A student named June Conder translates the famous and still somewhat enigmatic passage.

“People should be able to elect their own people,” she says. “Everyone is created equal at birth. All men are equal with their natural rights.”

Neal counters, “Was that true at the time?”

The student chorus answers: “Wellllll …”

Unalienable rights—that weird grammar—life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness have tripped people up from the beginning. Whose liberty? What happiness? Americans have read the words differently over the years. They’ve stretched them to include more people, more concepts. Others have come behind them and tried to draw the words tight again like the opening of a drawstring purse.

Locke, the Enlightenment philosopher and inspiration for Jefferson and his cohort, wrote before the future president did that all men have the right to “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Property.” In changing the word, did Jefferson change the meaning? Or was the economic development of white land-owning men all he had in mind?

If so, does it matter? Don’t we call these living documents for a reason? The only constant in life is change, said Heraclitus. He’s about the only philosopher not tossed around in Neal’s classroom, the students chasing their line of thought as it twists and branches.

“Choosing your decisions for your own life is life,” says June.

Doing what you want. It’s a teenager’s answer. If 1776 America was a rebellious teen, what is it now?

Teaching the We the People class has become harder since 2016, Neal says. Students arrive with more strident opinions, or from homes with divided politics, or sensitively aware of the divisions in society, or all the above. Everyone is more afraid of the conversation.

But this isn’t a debate class. The center that created We the People isn’t a partisan organization. Neal sidesteps the undertow of current events—but only just.

Past is prologue, after all. Shakespeare said that. Then they carved it on a statue in front of the National Archives, where the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights sit in a dim marble room like a cathedral vault.

…  That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it …”

A visitor to the class had to use a new computerized system in the foyer of the school before entering. It’s a laptop on a table that scans your ID and alerts the office before the door can buzz open to let you inside. There was a school shooting earlier this week, somewhere else in the country, but never very far away.

The almost crushing news of the day isn’t talked about in class, but it’s never very far away.

Neal asks her students, “Is there a right of revolution today?”

A girl in a Peter Pan collar and a sparkly hair clip asks, “If a president came to power and decided to start changing things, could we start a revolution?”

“That’s kind of what presidents do,” Neal says. “People vote for change.”

Student Noah Steingold asks, “How do we get anywhere if our leaders change each other’s laws and argue back and forth?”

The class discusses how long it takes to arrive at decisions under republics vs. under dictators. Yes, dictators are faster. The students highlight words they have to look up in the dictionary: “absolute despotism,” “usurpation,” “tyrant.”

After class, Noah says he’s always liked history, but he’s never had a class that went so deeply into it before. He used to hear his parents talk about politics and not have his own thoughts to share. That has changed.

“I’m thinking for myself more,” he says.

That is also happening at June’s house. “I really like sharing my opinion,” she says. (Parents of teens everywhere sigh.)

And it’s happened for Gwendolyn Roebel as well.

“This allows us to be more open minded. Then we’re not viewing it as sides and getting your way,” she says—like on TV news when talking heads in their little squares yell over each other.

A lot of adults right now, “they’re seeing it as sides and shutting out what the other side has to say,” she says, “and maybe the best thing is to compromise between the two.”

Before her two decades as a teacher, Neal spent more than 20 years as a journalist, including covering the U.S. Supreme Court for United Press International in Washington, D.C., trained in that increasingly lost skill of setting aside personal feeling to see and translate the many sides of an issue. “One source is never enough, three gets you closer,” she says—the old editor’s mantra.

“We hear so many opinions spouted on the TV at night, but it doesn’t seem like it’s grounded in knowledge of the Constitution or what’s allowable under the law,” she says.

“[Students] feel empowered because they have this background knowledge, then their opinion is worth something.”

None of Neal’s students are old enough to vote. Whatever the outcome of this election, she says, “This younger generation is not only going to have to solve it but have to sacrifice for it.”

Right now, they’re just kids in ponytails and plaid uniform skirts, in a room with an American flag bulletin board and a print-out Bill of Rights on tea-stained paper. But their highlighters are out. Their books are open. Their ideas still seem to hang in the air like the dust motes caught under the classroom’s fluorescent lights.

They’re going to be ready.

“And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.”