I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.
-- Thomas Jefferson
It's impossible not to believe that a large part of our public partisan polarity has to do with historical ignorance -- a truly pervasive lack of knowledge that severely distorts our perception of current events.
When as many as a third of our population have trouble placing the War of Independence in even the correct century (much less the actual year or decade), large swaths of Americans are beyond clueless in identifying critical particulars that shaped the successful path from ineffective Articles of Confederation to enduring Constitution.
Introduce Shays' Rebellion, for example, as a subject of discussion at your next Zoom meeting or to colleagues at work, and gauge the reaction.
There may be a history buff in your crowd who will speak up, if only to haltingly recall the name, and muster a few details from rote memory.
More likely, you'll encounter a crickets moment, with a lot of head-shaking, furrowed brows and blank stares. Once reminded, if they were A or B students in history in high school, some might start to remember vaguely the series of Massachusetts riots led by Daniel Shays in 1786-87.
The timeliness in proximity to the Philadelphia Convention is no coincidence. Indeed, its causes and effects were a prominent subject of discussion among the framers who would attend and lead in saving the U.S. from itself that summer.
But, honestly, who could expect any better under our current education system? History has been demoted, demeaned and devalued as a subject of learning. The average college graduate today can complete 16 years of formal schooling and only have a paltry handful of classroom hours dedicated to deep-dive details about the founding era.
We're not even trying to make sure that high school graduates, in whom the public education investment exceeds well over $100,000 in the poorest of states, know anything about U.S. history or, more specifically, about the history of our governmental form and structure.
With the flurry of bills being floated around the 93rd General Assembly, there's never been a better time to resurrect an education idea that might spark a national trend.
Let's get serious about adding an ongoing, age-appropriate K-12 constitutional class to our public school curricula. Let's make the central defining principles of American independence and self-government the true "common core" of our children's education. The more every child is exposed to all the discussions, debates and discourse about self-evident truths and forming a more perfect union, the better -- for themselves as citizens and for the country.
Such an initiative is a long-term investment, so starting ASAP isn't soon enough. Today's kindergartners will become voters around 2034. Imagine teaching them something new every single year about the U.S. Revolutionary War, the Confederation Congress, the Constitutional Convention, the Bill of Rights, the Federalist Papers, ratification and more.
Imagine the difference a full dozen years of in-depth, critical-thought study of founding people and events would make in their self-government IQ. They wouldn't just learn the time and place of Shays' Rebellion, but also the grievances published by its leaders, the problems the insurrection shined light on, and the role that illumination played in giving momentum to the call for a convention to remedy the faulty and ill-fated Articles of Confederation.
They would read the letters written among Abigail Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and others contemplating Shays' Rebellion, including the one that featured the quote at the beginning of this column.
In that letter, they would see Jefferson's reasoning as he identified three distinct forms of society as those: "1. without government, as among our Indians; 2. under governments wherein the will of everyone has a just influence, as is the case in England in a slight degree, and in our states in a great one; [and] 3. under governments of force, as is the case in all other monarchies, and in most of the other republics."
Comparative analysis is key to proper conclusions. Jefferson thought the first condition "not the best," but believed "the second state has a great deal of good in it. The mass of mankind under that enjoys a precious degree of liberty and happiness."
He conceded certain evils, including turbulent uprisings like Shays' Rebellion, but stressed comparison to the "curse of existence" under the last category, which he condemned as "a government of wolves over sheep" that must be seen to appreciate in its total atrocity.
"Weigh this [occasional turbulence] against the oppressions of monarchy," he wrote, "and it becomes nothing."
Given the underlying circumstances -- economic injustice caused by unpaid military service, debt and currency crises and heavy-handed taxation policies -- almost all of the 4,000 Shays insurgents were pardoned. The only persons hanged were two looters.
The only way to ensure effective learning of the history that produced American liberty is to teach it annually, in school, to our children. If they don't understand the past, they will undoubtedly misunderstand the present.
And that spells peril for our nation's future.
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Dana D. Kelley is a freelance writer from Jonesboro.