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History functions for a nation as memory does for an individual. Just as memory is essential for individual identity, so history is essential for national identity. A nation with an inaccurate or distorted knowledge of its history is like an individual with false memories. Only a nation with an accurate knowledge of its past is equipped to govern itself in the present and future.
Government in the fullest sense is the way a people organize their common life to make it better. In the United States, the fullest expression of government is the self-governing of the American people. Preserving self-government requires clear-sighted attention to our fundamental principles.
These principles are found in the primary sources of our history. We aim to understand those sources as their authors did. This implies that we can escape our own time and understand something from another time. Indeed, one cannot deny this without self-contradiction: the denial would have to claim to be always true, to escape our time, as it denied such an escape was possible. If we can understand the documents of the past, then our minds are free from the present. If they are free from the present, then they are also free from the limits of gender, race and socio-economic status that characterize us here and now. That our minds are free from these things means that we share a common humanity. It means, in the most important sense, that all men are created equal. Using primary sources to understand what their authors meant is simultaneously a defense of human freedom and equality.
Our manner of using these sources reinforces, as it derives from, the primacy of human equality and freedom, which we understand to be not only fundamental political principles but fundamental educational principles. In all of our seminars, faculty engage with teacher participants as equals in devotion to the truth and to understanding the sources we study as their authors understood them. Our faculty talk with teachers, rather than at them, because that is how free and equal individuals converse with one another. Our manner implies, in brief, that our classrooms are small republics. What is required for a serious conversation about important things (free attention to the truth, listening to others, waiting one’s turn to speak, modest but assertive statements of one’s views, etc.) are, writ large, the kind of virtues needed for political self-government, for ruling and being ruled in turn. Our manner encourages everyone involved to raise their expectations of themselves, making themselves better students, teachers and citizens than they would otherwise be. At its best, an American history or government class—wherever it occurs—reenacts the Founding of the American republic and thereby preserves it. It strengthens the American republic by inculcating the manners, understanding, and inclinations self-governing citizens require. We are dedicated to making every American history and government class in America its best.
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