News from the NEA
Annual Meeting, July 4, 2007
Richard Dreyfuss
Speaks About
Civics Education at
the NEA Annual Meeting
From the Web, January
23, 2008
Ladies and gentlemen, ladies and
gentlemen, there is only one thing that I fear today, and that is that I have
spoken about these subjects for never less than an hour and a half at a time and
then had a cup of coffee and done it again. So to try to do this in 15
minutes is going to be one h--- of a show. So I want to get right to it.
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Actor and civics education advocate Richard Dreyfuss
addresses the NEA Annual Meeting.
RA Action photo by Calvin Knight |
If you bought stock in a company,
let's say a pharmaceutical company, and you found out that the CEO of that
company didn't know about pharmaceuticals or care about what they were made of
or how they were distributed or how they were publicized or how they competed in
the marketplace, you could buy stock in that company again and bring suit for
malfeasance and stupidity, and that is what we are doing.
We do not teach civics in this country. Civics is the prepartisan tools of
civic expertise that teach us how to run a republican democracy. There are
in this country a dwindling amount of schools that can even say, well, we teach
civics.
We have a semester of civics before the 8th grade. That's not civics.
I have been spending three years at Oxford University. I am trying to
learn how to teach a curriculum, a curriculum that I don't invent. It's
3500 years old. It teaches reason, logic, clarity of thought, raising up
of the values of dissent and debate and civility and the skeptical questioning
talent to ask questions of our information industry. If it is a fair
question to ask -- if it is a fair question to ask, how much of the
English-speaking news industry is owned by one person, and if that answer is
anywhere between 30 and 55 percent -- and it is -- is it a fair question and is
it a fair discussion?
Rupert Murdoch and two other guys own everything you hear and see, and their
interests may not be your interests. We are responsible for this country.
We may live in Alexander Hamilton's nation, but we live in Thomas Jefferson's
paradigm, and that paradigm is that men and women are sovereign, and men and
women are the authority.
Who tutors -- who tutors the sovereign? Who tutors the son king? You
do. You are on the front line. You may not have started out as
heroes. You may not have ended up as heroes, but g------it, during the
time you have been teachers, you are heroes.
I believe that history can be told in a hundred ways, and one way is this.
It is the war between light and dark, and dark never loses. Never.
The darkness simply waits. And so while the darkness waits and the light
attempts to twinkle, it comes at us the moment we get lazy, the moment we get
stupid, the moment we stop risking what this nation is.
This nation more than any nation in history has meaning. Let Costa Rica
and Canada say they have meaning. There are two gifts that America has
given to the world without which this world would not exist.
One, there is a curse on mankind. It is a curse so well-known that we
never talk about it, we never discuss it. It is a curse that says that you
and yours will never rise. Your grandchildren are serfs. Their
grandchildren will be serfs.
You are a shoemaker. Your grandchildren will be shoemakers. And my
heel will always be on your neck until America said, now, wait a minute, if
you're lucky, if you've got guts, if you can take the cr-p that life throws at
you, if you can get here you might rise, and that one word difference is the
most important political message in 12,000 years of human civilization. No
nation, no organization, no group, no people, no religion, no race has ever
given mankind that statement. And that gift of opportunity was created
here by men, not heroes that we call men, but men who are heroes. One
gift.
Second gift, in Britain, Saxons and Picts and Vikings and Jutes all raped and
pillaged and killed one another for thousands of years until out of that morass
of darkness grew something called England. And we attribute to England
things of moral stature. And that is true of France and Germany and Russia
and everywhere else. Not here.
In this country, men sat down at a table and took a quill pen and wrote out this
is who we choose to be. And then they put that up on a wall so that
everyone on Earth could see, so that everyone on Earth could see when we fail
and everyone on Earth can see when we succeed.
The creation of the Bill of Rights and the putting it up on that wall was the
most perfect American gesture. It is naive. It is arrogant. It
is brilliant. It is brave. And it tells us who we wish to be.
Not who we are, but who we want to get to be. This nation is a process, as
it was said just now in the preamble.
When you read the preamble, you do not read of an event that occurred 200 years
ago in Philadelphia. You do not read of something that we celebrate and
pat on our backs. You read something that is ongoing. We -- we, the
people, who wish to form a more perfect union, establish justice, ensure
domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, there is no "we did it
already." It is "we are doing it." Never forget that. Never
forget that.
Here is a perfect day. On a given day in the next few years, there's going
to be a ribbon cutting at the National Constitution Center. And they are
going to cut a ribbon on a permanent exhibit which tells the story of the
enlightenment of the world that preceded the enlightenment and what it was and
what opportunity it gave us to actualize it. To actualize reason over
faith, intelligence over stupidity, scientific deduction over guessing.
You know, you're teachers. You know the secret. You know that smart
is better than stupid. Most people don't know that. And it's your job to
teach them that. It's your job to teach the most difficult puzzle. Kids
and parents know that they hate to say the phrase, "I don't know." They'll
do anything to avoid saying "I don't know." And they'll do anything to say
-– to not to say, "I've changed my mind."
You know that "I don't know" is at the basis of learning. You have to find
a way to change the approach so that people don't think that the phrase "I don't
know" is something to be feared but something to be accepted and embraced.
You have to revise the nature of teaching so that people know that it is not the
subject of civics that is boring. It is the word "civics" that is boring.
Civics itself is about as entertaining as a Cirque du Soleil. And I could tell
you versions of that story that could make your hair stand on end, and you have
to teach that now. You have to because we're not as lucky as our parents.
My father had the luck of being wounded badly in the Battle of the Bulge because
he went across to Europe to fight Hitler, because Hitler was the greatest civics
lesson on Earth, because Hitler meant every g -----n word he said. And we knew
it.
And so my parents' generation went, stopped their lives, went overseas, and beat
the h--- out of him and his ideas until they were gone.
We do not teach civics. It is either evidence of neurosis or evidence of
suicide, but we don't teach it, and you must teach it. You must teach it from
the fifth grade up. You must teach reason and logic and clarity and dissent.
You must applaud debate. You must applaud the process. You must remember that
America is at its basis a risk, that this museum must be a risk. And that if all
we do at this museum is pat ourselves on the back for something we did 200 years
ago and aren't we great, we have accomplished nothing but become another museum.
People should come to this museum and come out angry and uneasy and arguing and
American, because it is not easy to be an American. America does not happen by
itself. And government of the people, by the people, for the people shall perish
from this Earth unless you do your duty, unless we do our duty. I wish I had
more time. Thank you.
Dreyfuss on Mr. Smith Goes to
Washington
You saw a cut from "Mr. Smith goes to Washington." I'm going to tell you a quick
story.
When the Germans came into Paris, they told the Parisian theater owners, you
have one week to show any films you want and then we take over. They all
showed "Mr. Smith goes to Washington." We grew up with television, and
television had no money for programming. What did they do? They
showed us old movies. Twenty-four hours a day, they showed us "Mr. Smith
goes to Washington."
And John Ford, and I'm telling you, that made us love America. We give our
kids nothing to love America. And we have to remember, we must seduce, we
must brainwash our children into a love affair with the ideas of America or all
we've got is a country that is south of Canada and north of Mexico.
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