Teaching the Constitution

On whether colleges should be forced to teach the U.S. Constitution (Speak Out, September), I’m with Professor Wayne. The answer is a resounding NO!!!

Learning about our Constitution should be a matter of choice on the part of both the college and the student. If a college were “forced” to teach the Constitution, or anything else for that matter, the implication is that the students, or at least some of them, would be “forced” to learn about it. Does that mean that all students would have to study the Constitution as a prerequisite for graduation? Who would enforce it? Would offering a course on the Constitution be a prerequisite for accreditation? What colleges would “have to” teach it: some colleges, all colleges, two-year institutions, four-year institutions, graduate schools? The issue is fraught with complications and potential inequities.

Among the myriad of problems and challenges we face in Iraq is the notion that a Constitution should be the foundation of all governments. I would never refute the fact that our Constitution was one of the greatest documents ever written and the need for it was clear, but let’s not take it out of context. The Constitution has worked as well as it has for us because at the time it was drafted, our country was brand new (in the big scheme of things), a collection of newly formed, loosely connected colonies whose ancestry was based primarily in western Europe and principally in the United Kingdom. A “law of the land” was nec-essary in an environment where theretofore there was none. In many (if not most) other countries and cultures where diversity like ours is minimal or nonexistent, the “law of the land” is rooted in centuries, even millennia, of custom, tradition and religion.  In a country as new and diverse as the United States, whose inhabitants come from all corners of the planet (some of whom have no intention of living out their lives here), who are we to decide who should and shouldn’t study American history? Our Constitution may serve as the common fabric of our laws and may be very interesting to study for aficionados of American his-tory, but forcing students to study it would be tantamount to forcing people to study physics. It would be quite cumbersome to live without our Constitution, impossible to live without physics, but to have either one shoved down our throats? For what purpose? It would behoove us to study the histories of other countries to discover what makes ours so great.

Danny Eitingon
Minneapolis

Reading William Scheuerman’s Off the Tower essay in September (“Bankruptcy Reform: Pigs are at the trough”) gave me an idea. I think AFT On Campus could use a monthly column entitled “Thank You, George Bush.”

The thankers could be credit card companies, oil companies, financiers who need your Social Security money, mercury emitters who’ve been let off the hook, water polluting industries who are still at it, wealthy beneficiaries of GWB’s tax cuts, and al-Qaida for his providing it a platform.

David Perelman
Elkins Park, Pa.

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