• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Advertising
  • Write for Us
  • Job Board
  • Privacy Policy
  • Contact
    • Consulting
    • Advertising
  • Shop
    • Books
    • Shirts

The Educators Room logo

  • Start Here
    • Impact Statements: Teacher Expertise
    • Newsletter
  • Browse Topics
    • Content Strategies
      • Literacy
      • Mathematics
      • Social Studies
      • Educational Technology
      • ELL & ESOL
      • Fine Arts
      • Special Education
      • Popular Topics
        • Teacher Self-Care
        • Instructional Coach Files
        • Common Core
        • The Traveling Teacher
        • The Unemployed Teacher
        • The New Teacher Chronicles
        • Book Review
        • Grade Levels
          • Elementary (K-5)
          • Middle (6-8)
          • Adult
          • New Teacher Bootcamp
          • Hot Button Topics
            • Menu Item
              • Principals' Corner
              • Charter Schools
              • Confessions of a Teacher
              • Interviews
              • The State of Education
              • Stellar Educator of the Week
            • Menu
              • How to Fix Education
              • Featured
              • Ask a Teacher
              • Teacher Branding
              • Current Events
  • Podcasts
  • Courses
    • Practicing Self-Care to Avoid Teacher Burnout- An 8 Week Course
    • Becoming An Educational Consultant
    • Teacher Branding 101:Teachers are The Experts
    • The Learning Academy
    • Books
    • Shirts
  • Education in Atlanta
  • Teacher Self-Care
  • The Coach's Academy
menu icon
go to homepage
subscribe
search icon
Homepage link
  • Advertising
  • Write for Us
  • Job Board
  • Privacy Policy
  • Contact
    • Consulting
    • Advertising
  • Shop
    • Books
    • Shirts
×

September 17, 2019 Opinion

It’s Time to Replace the Fourth of July (Kind Of)

  • About the Author
  • Latest Posts

About Jeremy S. Adams

Jeremy S. Adams is the author of HOLLOWED OUT: A Warning About America's Next Generation (2021) as well as Riding the Wave (2020, Solution Tree), The Secrets of Timeless Teachers (2016, Rowman & Littlefield) & Full Classrooms, Empty Selves (2012, Middleman Books). He is a graduate of Washington & Lee University and teaches Political Science at both Bakersfield High School and California State University, Bakersfield. He is the recipient of numerous teaching and writing honors including the 2014 California Teacher of the Year Award (Daughters of the American Revolution), was named the 2012 Kern County Teacher of the Year, was a semi-finalist in 2013 for the California Department of Education’s Teachers of the Year Program, and was a finalist in 2014 for the prestigious Carlston Family Foundation National Teacher Award. The California State Senate recently sponsored a resolution in recognition of his achievements in education. He is a 2018 CSUB (California State University, Bakersfield) Hall of Fame inductee.
  • Don’t Expect Your Students to Attend Your Funeral - March 2, 2022
  • Teachers Have Known This for Years: A Generation Hollowed Out - August 3, 2021
  • Opinion: After Trump, Civics Can NEVER Be the Same  - January 16, 2021
  • FIVE Miserable COVID Truths Teachers Don’t Say Out Loud - December 18, 2020
  • A Message from the Year 2040: How a Year of COVID Learning Forever Changed My Life - November 23, 2020
  • Zooming into the Abyss: The VANISHING AMERICAN STUDENT - October 16, 2020
  • DON’T BE FOOLED: The Fall Will Be Difficult, But Teachers Were Demoralized Long Before COVID-19 - August 13, 2020
  • Teaching in the Midst of the Corona Crisis - March 18, 2020
  • Five OUTRAGEOUSLY OUTDATED Things in Modern Education - October 4, 2019
  • It’s Time to Replace the Fourth of July (Kind Of) - September 17, 2019
Print Friendly, PDF & Email

In my two decades of teaching civics to high school and college students, I can count on one hand the number of students who have ever been able to correctly identify September 17th as Constitution Day.

I don’t blame them. I get it. After all, the Fourth of July is my favorite holiday of the year. I love everything about it—the parties, the fireworks, the baseball games, the display of gaudy Americana clothing from head to toe. In fact, my patriotic passion reaches a feverish pitch on this day when I engage in my annual tradition of reading the Declaration of Independence from beginning to end.

But there is a problem. Most students mistakenly deem the Fourth of July as the birthdate of the United States of America. In fact, this might be the most common misunderstanding in all of American history.

The birth of the United States of America as a unified nation has almost nothing to do with the pomp and circumstance of July 4th celebrations and almost everything to do with a holiday on September 17th that has all but been forgotten: Constitution Day.

While the Declaration of Independence is the most powerful, lyrical, and significant statement of Justice in the history of human civilization, it is a document laced with revolutionary, not constitutional, language. Its chief aim was willful political estrangement from a tyrannical British crown, not the formation of an entirely new political unit. The Declaration severed allegiances, it ended British subjugation, and most importantly, it lodged universal justice in the dictates of natural law, not the whims of royal decree.

All of this is certainly worthy of remembrance and reverent celebrations on July 4th.

Instead, the writing and ratification of the American Constitution over a decade later represented a genuine genesis of democratic self-government. Click To Tweet

But none of these developments in 1776 actually created a new nation. Instead, the writing and ratification of the American Constitution over a decade later represented a genuine genesis of democratic self-government. In an era shrouded in deep and profound societal ignorance about American history and civics, it begs an uncomfortable but essential question of us: shouldn’t the day commemorating the signing of the document that birthed nationhood merit more legal recognition than Flag Day or the now much-maligned Columbus Day?

It is time to designate Constitution Day as a fully recognized federal holiday. In 2004, Congress declared September 17th to be “Constitution Day” and mandated all schools accepting federal funding present information about the Constitution on this day. In 2011, President Obama used his power to issue a proclamation that extended it to a week of observance, from September 17-23.

These are half measures. In America, we denote the importance of a day by making it a day of both celebration and rest. Take September 17th off. Add firework displays to mid-September. Fire up the barbeque and watch baseball—after all, it’s still summer.

The case for making such a drastic and admittedly provocative change is strong.

The word “united” in the Declaration of Independence—“The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America”—is a lowercase word because “united” is utilized by Jefferson as an adjective, not a noun.

As Yale Law School professor and constitutional scholar Akhil Reed Amar has rightly pointed out, “ . . . the thirteen colonies took care to synchronize their decisions as they headed uncertainly towards independence. Yet mere synchronization hardly meant that the thirteen necessarily became one indivisible nation in July 1776.”

The Articles of Confederation were no better in fashioning any notion of common nationhood, anchoring sovereignty solidly in state capitols, depriving the confederation of any significant taxing or regulatory powers over the states, and insisting that states vote as coequal blocks, a practice that only makes sense if states viewed themselves as independent quasi-nations.

In contrast, according to distinguished historian Joseph Ellis, the document created in Philadelphia during the summer of 1787 pivoted us away from a future that would look like a “western version of Europe, a constellation of rival political camps and countries, all jockeying for primacy.” Their task in Philadelphia, as Alexander Hamilton saw it, was to create a union forged in the light of “reflection and choice” instead of “accident and force.”

Most American students today take the “unum” in E Pluribus Unum completely for granted because they do not recognize or understand its constitutional genesis. They do not fully comprehend or appreciate the titanic achievements of the Constitutional Convention because they do not understand how close we came to mirroring Europe’s pattern of perpetual war, competition, and conflict. The union of the states into a common constitutional framework—instead of remaining as thirteen semi-autonomous states—was far from a foregone conclusion in the mid-1780s.

In fact, if polling had been present back then, the consensus among ordinary citizens almost certainly would have been that a confederation of thirteen independent states was preferable to a national union.

Fortunately, the Father of the Constitution, James Madison, knew better.

For over two centuries historians have marveled at the prodigiousness of Madison’s efforts during the spring of 1787 in preparation for the Philadelphia Convention. Madison was simultaneously studying ancient and modern history, critiquing the deep weaknesses of the current American confederacy, while formulating original theories of constitutionalism that eventually embodied themselves in a uniquely American brand of governance.

His detailed analysis of Ancient Greek, Dutch, and German confederacies empowered him to arrive at a stark realization about confederate arrangements: they were almost always transitory in nature, precursors to large-scale feuds and bloody disagreements, fueled by a narrow statecraft that usually ended in calamity.

He was determined to save America from such a fate.

   The solution to this problem was to shift the continuum of sovereignty away from the parochial and small-minded state capitols, towards a more nationalistic, unitary locus of power. While the final version of the Constitution left much to be desired in the mind of Madison, it ultimately fulfilled the Declaration’s promise of enshrining individual liberty as the paramount value of any future political arrangement.

Later amendments, court decisions, and laws that affirmed the Declaration’s ideals were only possible because of the document signed by thirty-nine men on September 17, 1787. We should pause on this day to reflect and appreciate the enormity of their achievement. Without them “We the People” would not exist as one people. There would be no “supreme law of the land.”

And worst of all, the dream of self-government might well have stayed a dream forever.

 

Related posts:

The Advantage of Disadvantage - Part II - A Book Review Yes, Teacher Leadership is for you! - A TER Book Review Emergency Paid LeaveHow the Expiration of Emergency Paid Leave Will Cripple Schools Teaching in a Pandemic: Help Teachers, Help You
« Are You A Double-Minded Teacher?
Are We Setting Unrealistic Behavioral Expectations? »

Reader Interactions

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Primary Sidebar

The Educator's Room was launched in 2012 to amplify the voice of educators. To date, we have over 45+ writers from around the world and boast over twelve million page views. Through articles, events, and social media we will advocate for honest dialogue with teachers about how to improve public education. This mission is especially important when reporting on education in our community; therefore, we commit our readers to integrity, accuracy, and independence in education reporting. To join our mailing list, click here.

What we do

At The Educator's Room, we focus on amplifying and honoring the voice of educators as experts in education. To date, we have over 40 staff writers/teachers from around the world.

Popular Posts

  • Whole Child, Whole Life: The Book Educators have been Asking for
  • Five Improv Games for Joyful Writing
  • Special Education
    Special Education: As IEP Goals Evolve, So Should School Offerings
  • Reflection on 8 Black Hands Podcast: Dr. Charles Cole III Speaks on All Things Education
    Reflection on 8 Black Hands Podcast: Dr. Charles Cole III Speaks on All Things Education

Featured On

Buy Our Books/Courses

How to Leave Your Job in Education

Practicing Self-Care to Avoid Teacher Burnout

Using Your Teacher Expertise to Become an Educational Consultant

Check out our books on teaching and learning!

The Learning Academy

Footer

↑ back to top

About

  • Privacy Policy
  • Disclaimer
  • Terms & Conditions
  • Accessibility Policy

Newsletter

  • Sign Up! for emails and updates

Contact

  • Contact
  • Services
  • Media Kit
  • FAQ

 

Copyright © 2021 The Educator's Room.