Civics Lesson 1

Intended for high school and college students.  Adapt as needed.

 

Exercise

Play the telephone game. You know how it goes.   

Put 5-8 students in a line. Whisper to the first student:  

 "The greatest freedom comes from a group of people following rules they chose together."

They each whisper the sentence to the person next to them. Whatever comes out the other side, compare it to the original.

 

Sample Discussion

Did any of you lie?  Did any of you purposely mess things up? 

Of course not.  This is just the result of human nature.   

I suppose if each of you had photographic, or eidetic memories, that’d be one thing.  You could get each word exactly right.  

But most of us don't.  So you got the words as best you could, but when you couldn't remember the exact words you filled in the blanks by focusing on the meaning.  More specifically, what you thought I meant. 

And the next person does the same.  They try to get the words, and when that fails they try to explain what they thought you meant. 

[BREATH]

Now imagine all knowledge being processed this way.  Everything.  Even those big, dusty books. 

Hold on, you might be thinking: We can just look at the original!  We can dig out the ancient manuscript and see exactly what they meant.  Easy enough, right?

Well, start with the fact that you can never truly know what anyone else means.  If I say, "I just saw the most beautiful person I've ever seen!" would you know what that person looked like?

If I say, “I just ate the best food I’ve ever had!” would you know if I was exaggerating or not?  I mean, maybe if they just came from our cafeteria.  Then it’d clearly be a lie. 

But, perhaps more importantly, the message itself may have been written unclearly or just dead wrong. 

And which message am I talking about? Any sentence can have dozens of meanings.  Even something as simple as Dick and Jane could have multiple meanings or surprisingly complex subtext. 

But let’s imagine this time the message is clear.  The reader understands it perfectly, and writes it down. 

Let’s say it’s from an ancient Sumerian tablet.  Someone will have to translate it before it gets to you.  Who's to say if they translated it right?  (Even if it were in English, most of us couldn’t understand the English language from just a few hundred years ago.) 

Now a college professor reads that translation and writes a book comparing the meanings in that tablet to other similar ones. 

Maybe your teacher was in that class, and can teach it to you based on what they remember from that class. 

Or maybe someone else reads the professor’s book, and inserts a few parts of the tablet's text into the new textbook they’re writing.  The book gets packaged up, and sent to you to read for your next class.

See the problem? The message breaks down a little more and a little more with each stop.

And those were the better paths for how it gets passed down!  

It can also happen like this:

A college professor reads the original text and then writes a two-sentence summary in chapter 12 of their new textbook. They use that book to teach a class.

A student skips that class a lot and doesn't read that chapter.  But the student does happen to remember One Big Important Sentence™ the professor said about that book. 

The student later decides to write a book, and that book happens to feature the One Big Important Sentence™ that the student remembered.  The book tells us that the One Big Important Sentence™ explains the whole original tablet, and therefore, explains life.  

Then this person sells the book as part of a self-help "lifestyle brand" that incorporates One-Big-Important-Sentence™ explanations of that tablet, along with 50 more classic volumes of history and literature... all in a twenty-page pamphlet that’s yours for only six easy payments.  Call now, operators are standing by. 

And you know you can trust that salesman – he went to college! 

[BREATH]

Remember, it's not just history going through that telephone process... not just literature... not just philosophy and science... it's civics too.  It’s what we believe about each other, our government, and how we function best in the world.

It's how we run our government.  It's how we do politics.  It's the US Constitution, The Social Contract, The Wealth of Nations, and a lot of other old books that helped lay the foundation this nation was built on.  It's the Declaration of Independence.

Show of hands: How many of you have read the Declaration of Independence all the way through?  Don't be ashamed - I was [insert age] before I finally did that. 

[BREATH]

So, what's the big message here?  What's the One Big Important Sentence™ you need to walk away with today? 

It's a question.  A question I want you to ask yourself.  Maybe ask it of a few others in your life, too. 

There's no perfect answer to this question, and I'm not going to tell you that you're right or wrong either way you choose.  It's just something to sit with and decide for yourself:

Why do we revere books we haven't read?