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Justice Souter’s Civics Lessons

By KAREN LEE TORRE

Retired Justice David Souter has taken up a cause – better civics education in our schools. His urgings are unlikely to reverse a trend away from the ABCs, particularly in the nation’s urban schools. The justice is concerned that students are not properly educated on the role of the courts in our republic. I’m not sure I want Justice Souter’s view of that role to prevail – but in many ways it already does.

In too many public schools, the curriculum is the product of a politicized teaching establishment with activists controlling the content. Liberals predominate in public school faculties, and the leadership of the National Education Association drives the left-wing agenda. Rather than the core and essential subjects I and my elementary school classmates were made to focus our time on, too many kids today are subjected to a curriculum the gist of which boils down to “I’m a victim, you’re a victim,” and “Everybody’s the same, everybody’s entitled.”

The extreme, of course, is found in Chicago, where revolutionary bomb-throwing terrorist Bill Ayers was allowed a grip on the school curriculum. His brand of civics education would produce graduates contemptuous of the principles and fundamentals that made America great, but well-prepared for a job at ACORN. Will the justice take to the stage and orate against that? If they had their way, the Ayers-ACORN education establishment would eliminate Souter’s court and replace it with a politburo.

The glimpses I got into local schools through my clients were sad and alarming. New Haven schoolchildren can tell you more about Cinque and the Amistad than about Roger Sherman. Sherman was not only New Haven’s first mayor and an innovator who held numerous positions of civic leadership in Connecticut, he was the only patriot to sign all four of our nation’s great documents: the Continental Association, the Articles of Confederation, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

Symbolic of the deterioration of civic education and priorities of public tribute is New Haven City Hall itself. In front of it, you will see no likeness of Sherman, but you will see a very big statue of Cinque. That is not to say that New Haven’s distinction as the site of an interesting trial contest between good and evil is not worth teaching or memorializing, for it surely is. It is rather to say that group self-esteem and the pretense of equivalence between the like of Sherman and Cinque has not only displaced historical truths, but dismantled the very educational foundation for success in a competitive market economy.

In New Haven, a teacher could not use her class time to teach students English or literature. Why? They came to class with tape over their mouths – a school-sponsored exercise allegedly designed to teach them about the isolation felt by homosexuals. The teacher could not interact with her mute students. Her classroom was hijacked by the gay political lobby. The New Haven Register treated readers to a photo of city students slumped over in their chairs listening to a state public defender brought in by school officials to give a talk. His subject? How to avoid making any admissions if you’ve had sex with an underage girl and the cops want to talk to you about it. This is the liberals’ civics syllabus.

For years, my office posted a “top ten” list of amusing, and pitiful, telephone inquiries my staff fielded from those seeking an employment lawyer. Each inquiry, full of bad vocabulary and worse grammar, came from a product of Connecticut public schools, badly educated, and convinced he or she was entitled to a job or a promotion (or continued employment) despite being illiterate. To them, their deprivation was but a repeat of the victimization of their ancestral group – the principal lesson they derived from a public school education. Unable to meet standards and compete in the marketplace, they view the courts as the place to go to get their entitlement.

Of course for me, this culminated in watching Justice Souter essentially embrace the view of a firefighter who thought himself entitled to a promotion despite failing a competency test. Evidence that he did not even buy the books, much less study them, was of no matter. He belonged to a “victim” group and the role of the courts is to order him up the career ladder. Justice Souter’s civics lessons? Thank you, no. •

Karen Lee Torre, a New Haven trial lawyer, litigates civil rights issues in the federal courts. Her e-mail address is thimbleislands@sbcglobal.net