No responsible educator would advocate teaching chemistry without a laboratory. No good chemistry teacher would assign her students textbook readings, then furnish them with chemicals and test tubes and say, “You've read about it—now experiment.” Obviously, that would be a scenario for disaster.
Yet U.S. educators may be doing something analogous when teaching students about democracy and the First Amendment, said Charles Haynes, senior scholar at the First Amendment Center.
Charles Haynes
“Freedom takes practice,” Haynes said. “We can teach about the elements of freedom; we can talk about them; we can tell students how the government works or ought to work—but unless they have a laboratory experience, it is dangerous. Freedom can't be taught out of a book. It has to be lived; it has to be practiced.”
That desire to give students a laboratory experience in freedom sparked the creation of the First Amendment Schools Project, which is cosponsored by ASCD and the First Amendment Center. (In May, Haynes announced 11 schools receiving grants to serve as models of democratic communities. To find the list, go to the First Amendment Schools Web site at http://www.firstamendmentschools.org/).
This initiative is designed to transform how schools model and teach the rights and responsibilities of citizenship. The project serves as a national resource for all schools—K–12, public and private—that want to affirm First Amendment principles and put them into action in their school communities.
For more information about the First Amendment Schools Project, contact ASCD's Mike Wildasin (1-703-575-5475, mwildasi@ascd.org) or the First Amendment Center's Sam Chaltain (1-703-284-2808, schaltain@freedomforum.org).