President Kermit L. Hall
"The Power of Comparison
in Teaching Civic Literacy"
July 10, 2006

The British science fiction writer H. G. Wells once remarked that history is "a race between education and catastrophe." Today, in the Age of Terror, the latter often seems to be winning. Violence, racial intolerance, and ethnic conflict punctuate our headlines, clog the Internet, and plague our world. We have, under such circumstances, a duty to ask ourselves what role education has in addressing these great problems. The challenge, of course, is not new.

Plato pondered 2,500 years ago the fact that while education can make people clever it cannot make them good. And history is replete with examples of peoples and societies that were well educated but evil. Nazi Germany comes immediately to mind. One of Adolph Hitler's chief lieutenants, Martin Borman, once explained that the only purpose of schools was to produce "useful coolies." Joseph Stalin called education "a weapon whose effect depends on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed."

What and how we teach, therefore, will determine the outcome of Wells's race. There is no doubt that an important part of winning that race is forging a meaningful link between learning and civic literacy.

John Adams, the second president of the United States, appreciated as much, when he observed in the wake of the ratification of this nation's constitution that "liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people." Leaders from other cultures have echoed his views. Ghandi, for example, reminded the followers of his Indian liberation movement: "Live as if you were to die tomorrow; learn as if you were to live forever."

So, I pose this question: What is it that we should be teaching in order to equip the next generation to exercise true civic literacy? This question becomes particularly critical when we realize that events of the last decade have produced reasons for both hope and despair. Institutions of democracy have swept vast parts of the globe while terrorism threatens the future of every experiment in democracy.

According to Freedom House, since 1987 the number of nations that can be considered free has doubled and the percentage of all nations that can be considered free has gone from 40 percent to 72 percent. Over the last decade, however, the annual incidence of terrorism worldwide has more than doubled. And running in parallel to these developments has been a new commitment to civic learning.

According to the Pew Charitable Trust, civic learning has become a priority in many countries and in some instances the progress has been dramatic. Pew reports that the young people best schooled in the arts of democracy are in Eastern Europe, a result of an unprecedented effort to make civic literacy one of the pillars of the emerging democracies of the previously totalitarian nations of the region. And constitutions and constitution making are very much in the news. In the past decade, new constitutions have popped up. For example, former apartheid South Africa now has what many believe to be a model document to promote equity, equality, and human dignity.

Not all recent constitutional change has been either smooth or good. In Serbia, Peru, and Venezuela, leaders have amended their constitutions to stretch out term limits. Citizens at all ends of Zimbabwe's political spectrum want to scrap their constitution, which is largely a relic of its colonial past and the tool of President Robert Mugawbee. And in Iraq Aristotle's idea of making the constitution fit the people is being put to a real test in attempting create a new democracy. These developments remind us that we neglect the obvious at our peril. Remember all of those speeches and articles about globalization, the international knowledge economy, and the development of a global village? Well, they are coming true, perhaps in not as orderly a way as we might wish, but true nevertheless.

Bismark's familiar line that the process of making laws could easily pass instead for making sausage can be applied to the emergence of the global village. It's turning out to be a chaotic business, especially when it comes to creating democracies out of dictatorships and oligarchies. For a reminder, you need look no further than Thomas Friedman's best selling book, The World is Flat. The Internet, the World Wide Web, and the computer generally have made workers in Bangalore as valuable, if not more valuable, than workers in Peroria. There may be peaks and valleys on our flat earth, but it is clear that the debate is no longer about whether the earth is flat but how we deal with it flatness. This seems an important point for those of us committed to the cause of civic education in this country or, for that matter, anywhere else in the world.

In that vein, the words of the English playwright George Bernard Shaw are worth heeding. He observed that those persons who would reform society would do well to first reform themselves. Or, to put it another way, teachers of democracy reform thyself. When it comes to civic education it is important to remember that there is a difference between teaching dull principles and dully teaching important principles. There is an old line that lawyers like to use. It says that a condition may be necessary but not sufficient to an outcome. The same holds for civic literacy. Content counts for a great deal; it is a necessary condition. But it is not sufficient.

What is also important is the conceptual framework and values in which that content is placed. The challenge is to equip students to be effective as well as affective citizens. The basic insight that every student needs is that law is a system of social choices backed by the authority of the state. And that is where a comparative approach - a comparative framework - offers real opportunities, since we know that different social circumstances and different schemes of government can yield-up different choices.

Remember, again, Aristotle's insight that the constitution should fit the people. Let me underscore that the emphasis is not just on "globalizing" our teaching, although doing so is a worthy task. It is, instead, to push our students, who will work, live, and compete in the global village, to appreciate, once again, that the choices before them are real AND that cultural differences mean that because something worked in one place it does not follow that it will work in another.

Still, in our new "flat world" there is also something to be gained by learning how others have gone about addressing such problems as:
separating powers and checking and balancing the institutions of government,
making a nation out of many separate ethnic, racial, and linguistic pieces,
providing for individual rights while maintaining the common good, and many, many more.

What are the virtues of a comparative approach? It has three overlapping advantages. First and most basic, comparison creates an awareness of alternatives, showing developments to be unique that without a comparative perspective might seem merely routine. Second, comparison, as a teaching method, serves as a primitive form of "experimentation."

Why did one culture accept as a constitutional strategy that another rejected, or never even contemplated? And why do some constitutional experiments work and others fail? And, third, the comparative approach also allows students to identify common problems and the patterns of action taken in response to them.

Let me draw on a simple American example. How long should a constitution be? Is shorter or longer better? The American federal Constitution is a brief and incomplete document filled with vacant constitutional spaces. The U. S. Constitution is about 7,500 words, long, even with its 27 amendments; only the Japanese Constitution, a document created during the American occupation following World War Two, is shorter, at less than 5,000 words. The rest of the world is a good deal windier in sketching its constitutional landscapes. The average constitution in the world is about 36,000 words.

The proposed Constitution for the European Union would have been more than 800 pages in length. India's is the longest of national constitution at 395 articles, 11 schedules, and 117,000 words. But it is not the longest. That distinction belongs to the state of Alabama, whose constitution is 340,000 words in length, longer than Herman Melville's novel Moby Dick.

Length may have something to do with longevity. The United States Constitution is the second oldest ruling document in the world, the oldest being the constitution of the state of Massachusetts, which has been in continuous operation since 1780. The simple matter of length also tells us something about the assumptions underlying these documents.
Different cultures do indeed have different ways of formally making social choices.

As we noted, the framers of the American Constitution preferred brevity to specificity, and they did so for a very good reason. A longer document would have made the compromises necessary to create the nation impossible to forge. The American constitution is a classic example of the old law that the less said, or in this case written, the better. Brevity is perhaps the best ally of compromise, one of the essential attributes of a stable political community. The genius of American Constitution depended heavily on its compromised beginnings, not just that there were founders smart enough to compromise. In fact, the great American abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison called the Constitution a "compromise with hell and a covenant with death" for its embrace of slavery.

The peculiar institution no where appears in the original document, but its reality cast a long shadow over the Philadelphia Convention of 1787 and the first seventy years of the American Republic. The question becomes, however, what happens when the reasons for the compromises no longer exercise the power that they once did? Many of the elements that demanded compromise in Philadelphia have long since been eliminated.
- Slavery is gone;
- The nation has expanded from thirteen states to its natural territorial borders and beyond,
- Commerce and industry now flourishes in both the North and the South, and
The Supreme Court has established its right to decide conclusively what the Constitution means.
While we may appropriately venerate the framers of the American nation, the simple truth is that the successes of their compromises have long since been realized.

Might it be that Americans with their eighteenth-century Constitution might now have something to learn from constitution makers of the twentieth century? That is, did the framers of the American Constitution in 1787 achieve a permanent insight into the relationship between democracy and constitutionalism such that the consideration of other structures is unwarranted? Or, was the insight of the framers subject to renewal and revisions in some of its most basic elements, such as separation of powers, federalism, and representation. The question seems appropriate because the compromises of 1787 and the subsequent 27 amendments to the Constitution did not result in greater democracy. Americans cling to the idea that they have not only our world's greatest democracy but the single best hope for spreading it to the rest of the world.

Yet as other observers have noted, one of the central characteristics of the American people is their ability to hold contradictory ideas simultaneously, and such is clearly true when it comes to democracy. Take the simple question posed by political theorist Robert Dahl in the form of a title to his provocative book: How Democratic is the American Constitution? The answer, Dahl concludes, is not very. There are real limitations on American democracy. These include matters of representation of large versus small states in the Congress. The smallest state in America has the same number of senators as the largest state. The method of selecting the president is far from democratic. Americans tend to look down their noses at their neighbors to the South, but the recent hotly contested Mexican presidential election went to the person who actually won the most votes. In the United States that is not always the case. Americans choose their president through the Electoral College.

That institution badly under-represents the larger states in voting for the president. One elector in New York, for example, represents about 500,000 people; while each elector in Wyoming represents fewer than 200,000 people. America's most visible elections, those for president, have frequently been decided by less than a majority vote. In fact, on eighteen different occasions, a president has come into office with less than 50 percent of the popular vote, the most recent example in 2000. John F. Kennedy in 1960 won about two-tenths of a percent more of the popular vote than did Richard Nixon and became President. That is Kennedy had about 100,000 votes more than Nixon and won. Al Gore in 2000 won half a percent more of the popular vote than did George W. Bush and lost the presidency. That is Gore had 400,000 more votes than did Bush and lost.

Or take the example of so-called faithless electors. These are individuals designated to cast their electoral votes in the states who actually disregard the popular vote and instead throw their support to someone else. In that tight 1960 presidential election, fifteen of those faithless electors cast ballots for Harry Floyd Bird, a segregationist from Virginia, even though his name did not appear on any ballot and no one every voted for him. He owed his votes to faithless electors who ignored the popular vote in their states and cast their support for Byrd. America's system of winner-take-all elections badly under-represents minorities in the political institutions of the nation. Other nations, however, have developed schemes of proportional representation that provides to groups a presence in the legislature based on the proportion of votes they secure. And finally, when it comes to other measures of democratic performance, the United States fares badly.

When compared with twenty-two other enduring democracies, the United States has the largest budget deficit, the eight highest rate of unemployment, the fourth highest ratio of rich to poor, the seventeenth lowest expenditure for the welfare needs of its people, the nineteenth lowest expenditure on foreign aid, and the lowest turnout in major national elections. These numbers should appropriately remind Americans of the old line about people living in glass houses casting stones at others.

What is even more compelling is that when it comes to rights, the United States is one of the few nations in the world that founds its liberty on negative prohibitions against government rather than positive statements in support of individual rights.

The American Constitution and its Bill of Rights are a litany of "thou shall nots." And American is also unique for the reliance it places on judicial interpretation of a relatively brief Bill of Rights to defend those rights. When it comes to rights, more often than not it has been the Supreme Court that has filled in the vacant spaces of the nation's brief document. Sometimes in the support of liberty; sometimes in restraint of it.

The First Amendment provides that Congress shall make "no law" that abridges freedom of speech or the press, but since World War One the justices have accepted that what seems an absolute guarantee is, in fact, not. To paraphrase Justice Robert Jackson on these matters, the Constitution is not a suicide pact. That means that Court has limited some forms of speech in order to preserve the nation. And by and large it has been the Court that has driven new meaning into the Constitution. Since 1789 the federal constitution has been amended twenty-seven times. Some of those amendments, such as the 13th, 14th, and 15th have been essential to framing American liberty, but it has been the Supreme Court that has served as the nation's on-going constitutional convention. There has never been a second constitutional convention and there is little will to have another one anytime soon. That is because the Supreme Court has come to be a continuing constitutional convention. The justices meet yearly and their decisions shape, define, and redefine the Constitution's meaning far more deftly, but not nearly as democratically, as could a constitutional convention.

One of the reasons that Thomas Jefferson so hated the judiciary was it rendered useless his concept of revising the Constitution by popular means every twenty years or so. The most undemocratic of the three branches has ended up stealing the process of constitutional change from the most democratic branches. Ironically, in many instances its work has been to make the nation as a whole more democratic. If ever there was an example of why it is important when thinking about constitutional change and democratic process not to be tyrannized by dichotomies, then the American Supreme Court is it.

The American Constitution's meaning is now contained in 543 volumes of reports of the Court's decisions, one of history's greatest continuous streams of law-based decision making. And all of it done by unelected justices who hold their terms of office during good behavior. We have come to rely on the law in ways that are truly impressive.

No other nation on earth has so taken to heart the idea of "one nation under law." America places a substantially greater premium on lawyers and the adversarial process than does, for example, a country like Japan. It has one lawyer for every 9,000 people; the United States has one for every 235 people. There are more than one million lawyers in the United States. And by most measures the United States is among the world's most litigious nations. Depending on where you are on the political spectrum this bounty of lawyers and law suits is either a disaster or a necessary condition to accommodate unprecedented racial, gender, economic, and technological change sweeping our society.

But it is one of the ironies of American democracy that one of its least democratic institutions has often been one of its most important driving forces for democratic change - whether in matters of race relations, civil liberties, voting rights, or abortion. What the figures reveal, in any case, is that it is a distinctly -- indeed, almost a uniquely -- American response to broader issues that beset the entire planet. Much of the explanation for this uniqueness stems from the American approach to rights. Americans have historically placed tremendous weight on individual rather than group rights, and they have, as a result, turned to courts and lawyers to pursue and defend those rights through the interpretation of a briefly written constitution. Most countries of both the developing and industrialized world have taken a significantly different approach, one in which they have developed social constitutions. These documents not only weigh group rights more favorably than individual rights, but they are also considerably longer than the American federal Constitution and are studded with positive substantive guarantees, not negative prohibitions.

Consider, for example, the social constitutions of the Philippines, Nigeria, and Brazil. The governing documents of those countries offer extensive written guarantees to economic rights, equality for different ethnic groups, and rights of the urban poor. The Philippine Constitution, for example, declares "Filipino" to be the official language, and it obliges government to:
promote agrarian land reform,
equality for women,
better family life,
free public education,
health care,
and urban housing.
It even provides that each person has a right to participate in sports which the government is duty bound to promote.

In short, the Filipinos ask a great deal of their constitution, although one can look at the history of that nation to understand why these provisions would be included. Documents such as that of the Philippines contrast sharply with the American Bill of Rights, which makes only broad promises and makes those promises legally not politically enforceable. In essence, countries around the world are attempting to use social constitutions for the purpose of radical reform -- they seek through their declarations or bills of right, for example, to invent as well as interpret society. These are, moreover, often lengthy documents -- Nigeria's constitution has 279 articles; Brazil's has more than 400;
and the Philippines has almost 200 articles. Moreover, in each of these countries, the judiciary remains relatively weak, a condition that contrasts sharply with the American experience.

In many countries the power of the judiciary to interpret the constitution is often frustrated by military force, by an aggressive legislature, or by a system of government organization that does not allow for what is deemed legal to be conclusive in matters of political dispute.

An interesting variant is the Charter of Rights in Canada, hardly a developing country. Its new constitution grafted a Charter of Rights and Freedom and judicial review onto a federal parliamentary system, but that constitution contains a novel provision, section 33, which permits parliament to suspend major individual rights for up to five years. Section 33 creates a set of circumstances in Canadian constitutional law far different from that in the United States. To begin with, the provision means that parliament can checkmate the judiciary, should it think that the judges are getting out of control -- becoming what critics of the American Supreme Court call the "imperial judiciary."

As important, the section is one element of the Charter that shows that even within the Anglo-American legal orbit, rights can appear in strong, but not absolute, form. As important, Section 33 also creates in the Canadian constitutional system an opportunity for the courts and the legislature to engage in a unique dialogue. One of the chief causes of the failure of democratic government is the truncated nature of such discussions. In the Canadian instance, however, the opportunity exists for a deliberative judicial consideration of a difficult and perhaps divisive constitutional issue and an opportunity for electorally accountable officials to respond, in the course of ordinary politics, in an effective way. What all of this adds up to is that the American scheme of rights, as set forth in the majestic generalities of the Bill of Rights, is unique for the great reliance it places on judicial review for protection of those rights.

But this is not the only way to preserve rights. In America it has become both a necessary and a sufficient condition. But does not hold in much of the rest of the world.

Let's take one example, South Africa. It is the single most interesting national constitution today. It contains a lengthy list of socio-economic rights, which the drafters hoped would assist those disadvantaged by Apartheid and those who were poor and vulnerable. The relatively new South African Constitutional Court has required the government to implement these rights, but it is in the position of making sure that positive rights are executed not determining solely when government has violated a prohibition on its powers, as is the case in the United States.

The United States Supreme Court has been unwilling to find socio-economic rights in the United States Constitution, in part because of separation of powers concerns. Congress makes the law; the executive interprets the laws; and the Court interprets whether either or both of them have exceeded the negative limitations in the Bill of Rights. The South African Constitution's Bill of Rights attacks the problem differently.
While the American Bill of Rights depends on brief, negative prohibitions, the South African Constitution values specificity and positive declarations. Whereas the United States Supreme Court implies the existence of certain fundamental personal rights in the liberty provision of the Fourteenth Amendment's Due Process Clause, the South African Bill of Rights specifically enumerates these rights.

The South African Constitution affirms the primacy of human dignity and substantive equality. Section 12 of the Bill of Rights addresses the "freedom and security of the person." This section specifically bans torture, cruel and inhumane treatment, general violence, detention without trial, and deprivation of freedom without just cause. It further provides that everyone has bodily and psychological integrity, including the right to make reproductive decisions. Section 14 encompasses the right to spatial privacy: privacy in one's home and of one's possessions. Section 21 guarantees freedom of movement and residence. There is a lengthy equality provision in Section 9. Section 10 protects human dignity, a provision, by the way, only matched by the constitution of the state of Montana in the American experience; and Section 11 says that everyone has a right to life.

The South African Bill of Rights also employs the flexible proportionality analysis used in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and in Germany's Basic Law, rather than the tiers of scrutiny applied in United States constitutional jurisprudence. The first issue addressed in any South African rights case is whether there has been an infringement of a granted constitutional right not whether the government has exceeded its authority. Unlike the American experience, which provides that protections only apply against state actions - that is measures taken by the state or its agents and not private citizens -- the South African Constitution extends in certain cases against private acts of discrimination. Lest you think the South African Constitution is all pie in the sky, it is worth noting that its Bill of Rights also contains a "Limitations" Clause. That clause sets the standard by which a right may be limited. The Limitations Clause requires the Constitutional Court of South Africa, as it hears cases, to balance several factors, including:
the nature of the right,
the purpose of the limitation,
the nature and extent of the limitation,
the relation between the limitation and its purpose,
and the possibility of employing less restrictive alternatives.

The Court's overall responsibility is to determine whether the infringement on the right is proportional to the resulting societal benefit. The South African Bill of Rights provides explicitly that international human rights law and foreign law generally must be used to determine controversies. Furthermore, the South African Bill of Rights requires that the government undertake affirmative action programs. The Constitution provides for eleven official languages in contrast to the American Constitution which provides for none. It also contains a provision regarding how the government can carry out property redistribution--an important provision given the land seizures carried out under Apartheid.

And finally, the South African Constitution also mandates the existence and protection of socio-economic rights. These include rights to:
housing,
health care,
food,
water,
social security,
and education, among others.

Several cases have interpreted these provisions. Critics argue that such language guarantees too much without the economic and political wherewithal to fulfill those promises. When promises go unfilled, the argument goes, a lack of legitimacy quickly follows. The people lose faith not just in government, but in the idea of constitutionalism itself. Perhaps, although the experiment in South Africa is too recent to race to that conclusion.

What is worth remembering is that South Africa's constitution was as much a product of the history of that nation as was America's of its history. Colonial occupation, slavery, the existence of an indigenous people, and mass immigration all shaped South Africa. So, too, did a troubled history of race relations. All of these developments paralleled similar patterns in the United States. It is no accident, then, that during the early 1960s Birmingham, Alabama was known as the Johannesburg of America. The new constitutional rules in South Africa, however, are of much more recent vintage. They were set in the context of a modern history of state terror waged by one of the world's most effective secret police agencies and framed by racial apartheid.

Those long listing of rights were based on the sobering experience that black South Africans had with torture, detention, and eavesdropping, all issues now sounding in the American constitutional system.

When South Africa went looking for models to address these matters, however, it did not turn to the United States. Instead, it drew on the experience of European social constitutions, notably that of Germany. While Americans today wrestle about the scope of liberty and look to the Supreme Court to superintend the actions of the President in the midst of the war on terror, South Africans have not just explicit written guarantees dealing with matters of privacy, torture, and detention but also mechanisms to be used when the security interests of the state outweighs the liberty interests of the people. It is still an open question who has the best Constitution. As Aristotle said, make the Constitution fit the people.

Still, that America does not have a social constitution tells us what we do value. And what Americans seem to value in their Constitution is its limits on the authority - the agency - of government and processing filling in its meaning through judicial interpretation rather than a more democratic process, such as a constitutional convention. Now the justices are turning their constitutional gaze even further afield - to foreign treaties and international human rights documents. And they are doing so in order to settle disputes in the United States ranging from the constitutionality of sodomy laws, to abortion, and to the restraints that the Geneva Convention places on President Bush to establish military tribunals to try terrorists. These same matters have already been anticipated in South Africa's ruling document. When viewed comparatively with the United States, the example of South Africa offers a compelling teaching device.

That approach affirms that there was nothing inevitable about the outcome of the controversies that produced our present constitutional and legal order. The basic point is clear enough, however. The American system of rights relies heavily on courts and judges to protect basic rights. The lessons of South African history, however, have taught a newer generation of constitution writers that being explicit and making the state specifically responsible for rights is better than leaving the matter to judges exclusively. That review comes after the fact, after a law has been enacted.

Other nations, however, have settled on schemes of judicial review and court organization different from that in the United States. Practices that we reject out of hand other nations have embraced with enthusiasm.

Take, for example, the practice in many nations of enquiring about the constitutionality of a law before it goes into effect, something that is not possible in the American system. In France, for example, the Gaullist constitution of 1958 established the French Constitutional Council. It was designed primarily to ensure that parliament would not undermine the important powers given by that constitution to the president. Unlike the American Supreme Court, the French Constitutional Council is an expressly political body. It has nine members who serve nine-year nonrenewable terms. The president of France, the president of the Senate, and the President of the National Assembly each name three members. Unlike the modern American Supreme Court, the Council has been dominated by politicians, especially former ministers of the French government.

The Council judicial review is a priori and abstract; that is, the Council acts before a case is brought and it does so based on theoretical -- abstract -- concerns about the appropriateness of the legislation rather than a concrete case in which a party sues claiming some real, not imagined, injury. The Council reviews laws after their adoption by the parliament but before their official promulgation. The nation's leading political figures -- the president, the prime minister, the presidents of the branches of parliament -- may invoke judicial review by referring laws to the Council, as may the sixty members of either branch of parliament. Yet this highly political form of judicial review has proved more than capable of protecting the rights of French citizens. In January, 1982 the Council held that major aspects of the socialist nationalization program violated a constitutional principle embedded in the 1789 Declaration of Rights against taking property without just compensation. The Council also thwarted the Socialist efforts to end the hold of media monopolies over the distribution of news in France.

Taken together, the examples of the Philippines, Canada, South Africa, and France teach important lessons about the value of comparison. First, it is important, at least where matters of judicial review are involved, to recognize how unique the American system is. Americans, of course, revel in their sense of exceptionalism, and that sense of being special helps to explain why they so often view themselves as having a near messianic role in converting the rest of the world to American-style democracy. Whether such hubris is good or bad I leave to you to decide, but it is a fact of the modern world. Yet, in the case of judicial review, we should recognize that the American approach is only one way of invalidating the actions of government as unconstitutional.

Second, the power of comparisons begins to move our students and their teachers toward giving real meaning to the concepts of globalization, internationalization, and multi-culturalism. There is, in the end, a far richer, more complex, and ultimately more challenging vision of who we are as a people if we are willing to take account of how we compare with others, in other places, trying to make the same social choices. Third, a comparative approach is an inherently cosmopolitan approach, and in a flat and terrorized world, that approach holds the greatest promise of keeping a sophisticated finger on the pulse of liberty.

All of this talk of comparisons, either internal or external, may strike some as pie-in-the-sky thinking, or worse, it could be seen as unpatriotic. In the United States, the argument runs, we cannot get our students to understand the American system, let alone that of another country, even one so close in language, culture, and geography as Canada.

Others argue that we are in the midst of a scientific, mathematical, and technological arms race that leaves us precious time to teach about our own system, let alone other systems. Then there is the "why fix it, if it is not broken" argument. After all, America's done pretty well for more than two centuries. Why change now? America is doing just fine with its current constitutional arrangements after two hundred years. The answer to each of these complaints, of course, is that the absence of a comparative dimension in building civic literacy may well explain why students neither appreciate nor understand their own system as well as they might. We tend, after all, to understand best that for which we have a reference point. So, what seems the luxury of comparison may turnout to be a necessity for self-preservation in a dangerous world.

With that thought in mind, I offer two recommendations, one modest the other more ambitious. The modest proposal would be that we encourage teachers to broaden their vision of cross-cultural and international studies of law and law-related subjects. That broadening process would begin, moreover, when teachers are themselves students. We do not have to overhaul the curriculum to do so, we just need teachers educated about the ways in which other nations have gone about addressing the critical and often enduring issues of today. Doing so would help to prepare teaches who understand that at certain key points in teaching about the American system they can actually achieve more by teaching less about "us" and more about "them." The more radical proposal would be to shift conceptual gears entirely.

It would require a strongly thematic and value-based approach. That approach would look less to having students understand our system the way a twentieth century auto mechanic would and more to having them appreciate it the way a twenty-first century computer programmer would. What counts are the connections, not the individual pieces. One of the cardinal virtues of a comparative approach is that it reminds us of the wisdom of John Kenneth Galbraith's observation that "politics consists of choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable." A comparative approach, of course, would require a radical redesign of teaching materials, a more open and accepting approach to the world around us, and a sophisticated new undergraduate curriculum for future teachers of government, civics, and law in grades K through 12.

Such an approach sounds distinctly like, I might add, the Civic Mosaic Program in which you are all engaged.

Which brings us back to H. G. Wells and his reminder that history is a race between education and catastrophe. That insight holds importance for all peoples, but it is especially poignant for Americans. After two hundred years of continuous constitutional government America is surely one of history's most successful democracies, even if it is not as democratic as Americans believe. But times have changed, old compromises have faded, and the question now becomes whether Americans have anything to learn from others? The value of a comparative approach in addressing Wells's contest is that it increases the fullness of our knowledge about constitutionalism, law and democracy. That, as I said at the beginning, however, is merely the necessary condition.

The sufficient condition is the conceptual framework and system of values that gives meaning to that content. And that is where the power of comparison really makes a difference in teaching civic literacy. It offers just such a framework and just such an opportunity to begin to make value judgments about how best to balance liberty and security in such a way that the American system retains its legitimacy at home and its influence abroad. The power of comparison in teaching civic literacy has special importance for our newly flattened earth. It offers this and coming generations a way to teach about how the ambitions of democracy can be realized without turning the American Constitution into an example of Justice Jackson's suicide pact. Americans should be the good pragmatists that they have always been.

And we would all do well in this age of ideological polarization to remember the words of Richard Nixon: "Idealism without pragmatism is impotent. Pragmatism without idealism is meaningless. The key to effective leadership is pragmatic idealism." That by the way is the essence of the American constitutional experiment. Americans should be smart enough to realize that they just might have something to learn from new, more recent constitutional architects. If they do, they will at least having a fighting chance to win Wells's race between education and catastrophe.