In this year’s annual Constitution Day Lecture, guest lecturer Richard Gamble reexamines the Founders’ debt to the Classical past, the way they remade that tradition, and their vision of education’s place in a modern republic with his lecture “The Constitution and Liberal Education”. The lecture will take place on Thursday, September 15, at 7:30 PM, UC Auditorium. Refreshments will be served and the public is invited to attend.
The generation of 1787 left a mixed legacy that continues to shape how we think about our schools and civic virtue. America’s Founders believed that a flourishing republic demanded an educated citizenry. Only an intelligent and virtuous people could maintain self-government.
But precisely what kind of education would meet that need? Would statesmen emulate the wisdom of antiquity or pursue the new learning of the Enlightenment or perhaps urge their fellow citizens to take up the practical knowledge needed to solve the problems of a changing world?
Richard M. Gamble is Professor of History and holds the Anna Margaret Ross Alexander Chair in History and Politics at Hillsdale College in Hillsdale, Michigan. His publications include The War for Righteousness: Progressive Christianity, the Great War, and the Rise of the Messianic Nation (ISI Books, 2003), the chapter on World War I for the Cambridge History of Religions in America (Cambridge UP, 2012), In Search of the City on a Hill: The Making and Unmaking of an American Myth(Continuum, 2012), and a history of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” forthcoming from Cornell University Press in the new Religion and American Life series.
“The Constitution and Liberal Education” is sponsored by the UTC Center for Reflective Citizenship with support from The Apgar Foundation and The College of Health, Education, and Professional Studies.
