Civics & Civility Summit
November 2, 2007, Kansas
State University, Manhattan, Kansas
We learned from our
search on the web that Kansas State U. was going to have a Summit on
Civics and Civility on November 2, 2007, at K-State so we took a flight
to Kansas City the first of November, picked up a car at the KC
Airport and drove to Topeka.
We have made it a point
to visit State Capitols, Presidential Libraries, and historical
Churches in our moving around the states. This trip we visited the
Kansas Capital and the Phelps church.
Kansas had
restored the capitol and it is great to see these buildings saved.
Rich
Harrison & John Campbell in the Senate Chamber
John
Campbell, Phelps Westboro Baptist Church
(www.godhatesamerica.com)
To read more about
Phelps:
Phelpses found liable for
$10.9 million
Topeka Capital-Journal,
Nov. 1, 2007
From Topeka we headed for
Manhattan Kansas and had brought along the new Molly Ivins, “Bill of
Wrongs,” The Executive Branch’s Assault on America’s Fundamental
rights and we could not have chosen a better selection to put us in
the proper mode for the Civics and Civility Summit. This is
from the box that contained the 6 compact discs:
THROUGHOUT HER LONG
CAREER the cause close to Molly Ivins’s heart was working to protect
the freedoms we all value. Ivins got the idea for Bill of Wrongs
while touring America. In her travels Ivins met ordinary
people going to extraordinary measures to safeguard our most
precious liberties, and she intended this book to be a joyous
celebration of those heroes.
From illegal wiretaps,
the unlawful imprisonment of American citizens, and the undermining
of freedom of the press to the creeping influence of religious
extremism on our national agenda and the erosion of the checks and
balances that prevent a president from seizing unitary power, Ivins
and her longtime collaborator, Lou Dubois, co-author of Shrub and
Bushwhacked, describe the attack on America’s vital constitutional
guarantees. With devastating humor and keen eyes for deceit and
hypocrisy, they show just how severe these incursions have become,
and they ask us all to take an active role in protecting the Bill of
Rights.
The
Summit Goals:
• To better understand
the current state of civic understanding and civility
• To identify the civic
knowledge, skills and dispositions of Kansans
• To build an awareness
of civic programs available to schools and how
community members
can support these programs in their local schools
• To seek ways to focus
Civic Literacy for 21st Century Learning
• To identity civic
community needs and solutions for addressing those needs
• To learn about Kansas’
organizational capacities for public problem-solving
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John Crowell Campbell and
Lynn Vasquez, KS State Dept. of Education |
Additional Reading:
Civility report: Declining Morals threaten
U.S. democracy,
November 2, 2007, Originally published: May 28, 2007
Remedial civic education
KSU program finds we’ve got a lot to learn about our governance
Nov. 6, 2007
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