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The Forum contributes to civic education by bringing in speakers each year to discuss American Founding principles. According to Hall, some speakers also give talks on individuals and movements in later generations who focused on those principles, such as Abraham Lincoln, whose statesmanship was heavily influenced by the Declaration of Independence. For example, historian Wilfred M. McClay recently spoke on the Constitution’s role in contemporary civic education.
Planned speakers for the Spring 2022 semester will include Paul Miller of Georgetown University, Jason Ross of Liberty University, Kevin R.C. Gutzman of Western Connecticut State University and, tentatively, Ian Rowe of the Woodson Center/1776 Unites.
Hall says that students who participate in the Forum don’t get a merely triumphalist account of America. After the killing of George Floyd in 2020, he and an African-American colleague held a reading group on the problem of race and the United States. Discussions featured materials from both the 1619 Project and its critics and articles arguing both for and against reparations. Hall and his colleagues worked to promote “ideas instead of protests,” he says, and they “went out of their way to include students on all sides” of the current debate. He notes that this particular reading group was so popular that a new group had to be created to accommodate all the interested students.
Student reading groups are a major part of the Forum’s programming. Groups of around ten students convene each semester to discuss readings on liberty, equality, and human flourishing in America and throughout the world. Reading articles from The Economist and other top periodicals, students debate controversial topics such as the justice of Harvard’s affirmative action policies. Group members are also invited to attend dinners with the speakers the Forum brings to campus each semester.
Hall believes that a chief threat to civic education is the coarsening of political discourse. He points to efforts in Florida’s public schools as a hopeful sign that states are beginning to take civics more seriously.
An accomplished student of early American Christianity, Hall also highlights the important connection between upholding a “moral commitment for freedom” and religion, an increasingly overlooked aspect of civic education today. He points to a famous syllogism offered by the Library of Congress’s James Hudson on the relationship between religion and morality: virtue and morality are necessary for free republican government; religion is necessary for virtue and morality; therefore, religion is necessary for republican government.
Hall acknowledges that our circumstances have changed markedly since the Founding, when disputes were mainly between competing denominations of Christianity; today, different religions are vying to be respected in the public square. Nevertheless, he cites George Washington’s teaching that it is unlikely for a society to function well without a shared morality backed by religious instruction. Though Hall admits that Washington suggested that certain individuals could be moral without being religious, this achievement is highly unlikely for society as a whole.
Promoting the virtues of citizen self-government, along with the importance of morality and religion, the John Dickinson Forum looks to strengthen the foundations of the American polity. Click here to read the article on RealClear.
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