One Thought Scares Me...

We Teach Our Children What We Wish Them to Know; We Don't Teach Our Children What We Don't Wish Them to Know

Richard Dreyfuss

• Publisher: Skyhorse
• Year: 2022
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• eBook ISBN:
  9781510776135
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

We've let the meaning of America be reduced to guesswork. It might not be too late. Our democratic republic is failing, and it shouldn't be a surprise. We can't fly a plane without training; we can't practice medicine without attending medical school. And yet we expect the American people to wield the full power of their citizenship, the product of the most revolutionary governmental thinking in human history, without any education. We no longer teach our children the Bill of Rights or Constitution. We don't teach the Enlightenment values that underpin them. We don't teach the critical thinking skills and mental agility necessary for our own sovereignty. We've stopped teaching civics, and now we can't have a civil political discussion. The American experiment may fail if we don't act. Richard Dreyfuss is a forceful advocate for civic education. His latest work, One Thought Scares Me…, explains how the lack of civics education in American education for the last fifty years has led to the deterioration of all aspects of the lives of us, the people. And it shows us the path to reclaiming our American ideals.

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 A Spiral of Decay
• Chapter 2 Why Civics?
• Chapter 3 America Has Meaning
• Chapter 4 A Shared Foundation
• Chapter 5 The Few versus the Many
• Chapter 6 The Tudors
• Chapter 7 A Personal History
• Chapter 8 An Imperfect Miracle
• Chapter 9 The James Dean Generation
• Chapter 10 A Crumbling Foundation
• Chapter 11 Unfair Capitalism
• Chapter 12 A Word from de Tocqueville
• Chapter 13 Technology Overload
• Chapter 14 A Civics Initiative
• Chapter 15 Teaching Active Citizenship
• Chapter 16 The Return to Senselessness
• Chapter 17 Toward a Healthy Democracy
• Chapter 18 Common Sense
• Chapter 19 A Call to Action
• Conclusion
• About the Author
• Acknowledgments