Ed. Note. In celebrating the twentieth anniversary of the National Endowment for the Humanities, over the next year, we will be publishing articles on different aspects of the Endowment and its contributions to history and the humanities.
Maine, like many other states, has recently engaged in a general discussion on the quality of secondary education. Politicians, parents, and educators have explored virtually every aspect of the educational process. Out of this discussion at least one conclusion has become clear to many in the state. Good teachers continue their education for life; they are constantly sharpening their skills and enriching their minds. The Maine Humanities Council, with the support of an Exemplary Award from the National Endowment for the Humanities, has devised a program of inservice seminars that should help teachers pursue that enrichment. Starting this spring, the Master Seminars in the Humanities project will bring intensive offerings in the humanities to six local school areas.
One of these seminars, taught by a team of historians, political scientists, and classicists from Colby College, in Waterville, Maine, is entitled “The Idea of Constitutionalism.” The purpose of the course is to put the American Constitution into a larger historical perspective. With the coming of the bicentennial, tremendous activity and interest is being focused on our founding document and its essential role in American history. There is a tendency, however, in many of the simpler educational efforts, to treat the Constitution in isolation, as though because it was the conscious antecedent of American government it had no antecedents itself. The Constitution represents perhaps the most lucid and influential definition of consensual government in history, but our ideas of constitutionalism grew from an earlier matrix of thought about the meaning of liberty and the legal limitation of power. The story of America’s self-definition in terms of a much larger western tradition is one that needs to be remembered and taught, at least as an antidote to intellectual provincialism.
The aim of the seminar is to trace the intellectual history of the essential question of constitutionalism, which we see simply as the attempt to balance the power of government against other claims to authority, such as nature, social custom, law, or the rights of individuals. The course begins by considering the relationship of despotism to the social good of the state in Greek theory and moves on to Rome’s extraordinary reconception of the state as a bond of law, established by the people prior to any civil government. The Roman republic, as model and metaphor, is clearly an influence on European and American history. Following sessions examine the foundations of English liberty in the medieval limitation of sovereign power and carry this up to the Bill of Rights of 1689. By the seventeenth-century, Europe could see the rise of the modern, centralized, national states, and the dilemma of constitutional balance, particularly in England, turned on the defense of individual autonomy against absolute power. The same issue helped crystallize the American Constitution and remains with us today in the contest between individual and societal rights. The course goes on to trace the early history of our own constitutional struggle and ends with a session on the Constitution in modern American political culture—a case analysis of 14th Amendment issues and states.
The planners of the seminar thought that students should see and interpret important documents related to constitutionalism, so, in addition to secondary works by McIlwain, Wood, and others, each session is structured around primary documents, from Plato’s Statesman to the Magna Carta, from the Constitution itself to a speech by Edwin Meese. The teachers who participate in the project will go back to their classrooms armed with a file of documents that can allow their students to escape, for a moment at least, from the clutches of a textbook. The last session of the course should also be liberating. Students will be asked to assume roles suggested by the positions of current political and legal figures in an attempt to duplicate something of the interest and vitality of the PBS series The Advocates. The Constitution is, after all, still a living document.
The Maine Humanities Council and others in the state who are devoted to the idea that teachers want and deserve high quality intellectual experiences have met with many skeptics. The line is either that teachers are too jaded, too tired, or too incurious to pursue anything difficult, or that all they want is the quickest way to recertification credits. Fortunately teacher themselves have given the lie to this notion: content-rich courses designed to be challenging have been filled almost instantly, and few teachers have called the CEU and graduate credit that these courses bear the major attraction. Teachers are, plainly and happily, interested. The Master Seminars in the Humanities project, bringing humanist scholars together with teachers in a collegial atmosphere, is a step toward filling this need, a need that more educators should take seriously. Colby College faculty involved in this project include Ann De Vito and John Porter, classics, Joel Bernard and Richard Moss, history, and Sandy Maisel, government. For further information, contact the co-authors of this column: Professor Richard Moss, History Department, Colby College, Waterville, Maine 04901; and Dr. Richard D’Abate, Associate Director, Maine Humanities Council, PO Box 7202, Portland, Maine 04112.
Richard Moss is a professor at Colby College and Richard D'Abate is associate director at Maine Humanities Council.
