On Teachers & Liberty

One of the most enduring loves that occupy the heart of our culture is the love of liberty. Among liberty’s best standards in modern history is American liberty, a position heralded by the impelling power of our Founding documents and ideals, the unparalleled place our country holds as a desired destiny for peoples of all backgrounds, and the leading role we have played in resisting the greatest historical threats to liberty.

It is all too common today to disparage America for her flaws, as if she were exceptional in that regard. The genuinely liberal mind (as in intellectually free), however, recognizes that, despite our flaws, there is much to remember and revere in our history. A full memory includes the Founders’ remembrance: Under the threat imposed by Crown and Parliament, they recalled and reclaimed for themselves and for their fellow colonists the rights any human can rightly claim as matters of God’s benevolence and nature’s law. It includes Lincoln’s force of memory: In the face of slavery, an institution entirely at odds with American liberty, and the Confederacy that kept some four million Americans in bondage, he found renewed moral will by recalling the Founding, with the Declaration of Independence at its heart. Martin Luther King, Jr., found similar inspiration one hundred years later, invoking the Declaration and the Constitution for their truth and for the bearings they provide for us today.

Each of those great American voices spoke to our humanity: to the universal longing each of us has to be free. All three recognized that freedom comes at a cost that must be paid and that it is only maintained by heroic diligence.

What does all this have to do with us—teachers? There is a real sense in which teaching plays a role in each feature of genuine liberty. In passing on our cultural inheritance, teachers cultivate true memory among their students, resist the cultural forces that would occlude what ought to be remembered, and maintain the rigor and focus by which liberal minds are free from forgetfulness and falsehoods concerning the past.

That means that the culture of liberty is in no small measure dependent on your remembrance, right judgment, and unflagging commitment to what we have inherited. By the culture you foster among your students, they can rediscover for themselves the origins of the freedom they share with our forebears and with those, in turn, for whom they are responsible.

Andrew J. Zwerneman is co-founder and president of Cana Academy. He blogs weekly at www.canaacademy.org and is the author of History Forgotten and Remembered (2020) and The Life We Have Together: A Case for Humane Studies, A Vision for Renewal (2022). Monthly, Andrew leads the Great Seminar Webinar Series.