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Well the project I'm working on now... actually I have a contract, and i'm behind on it
with Beacon Press
it's to really write a book on a series of questions
about the history of American education again
questions that are still relevant uh... in our own times
and there are several parts to it...
but one of the things I want to write about has to do with the issues of citizenship
and immigration, and education
and I'm particularly interested in what it implies for civic education
because
Americans are... in my view, quite confused about
a number of civic issues: the meaning of immigration historically in American
society,
the meaning of citizenship historically in American society
and it comes up in all kinds of ways
I mean, one of things that interests me about the question as to whether the president
is a citizen, is not the birther question. But people have introduced
notions about the distinction between a citizen and a natural born citizen
as if somehow it had some founding in American constitutional law
or somehow it's a part of the American creed. Well these are questions that were
debated uh... and debated for months
on end
uh... in 1866 when they actually framed the fourteenth amendment
and it was passed by congress and later ratified by the states in
1868
but it's not like this was a new question this was a question at the heart of the
39th congress you know, what is an American citizen? What is citizenship?
uh... They also
simply revised the naturalization law in 1870 so there were all kinds of
questions about aliens, about illegals
these are questions that've been in American history again and again
and every time they come up, they bring up issues of race, of
ethnicity, of national origins
there's a certain amount of hysteria of uh... and nativism that come with it
and the
the work… the book that i'm working on now, is part of it will be an
effort to
sort of say to the American public
if we had elementary and high school students
that had a good civic education
and going to be informed voters
here's the kind of understanding they will have
about their nation, about their history, about questions of citizenship
and and so forth
and i think it's sorely needed now I think civic education has been overlooked
in American schools for a long time
but when you watch American politics and you watch
uh... talk show uh... American talk shows, you watch
cable news and things like that, you realize that we've had generations who
grow up without a good civic education and it's really starting to make a
difference
in terms of how we think about the country, about law, about religious
liberty
uh... something, you know that's one of the things that
I'm not really writing about, but when you think about that
if you look, if you read Jefferson and and you read...
uh... Madison and others on these questions, they're very clear about these
questions
we now have a view of that that's entirely different
than the founding fathers and yet we think
that our current views of religious liberty
were views held by the founding fathers
and you say, what happened to civic educate? I'm not saying that you have to agree or
disagree with them
but at the very least you should know
what they stood for
and the principles on which they wrote
uh... that the religious every clause in the constitution, and things like that so
it does have a lot to do with civic education
uh... but also um... other questions as well