Arne Duncan Quotes

I had become increasingly concerned in recent years about the lack of civics education in our nation's schools. In recent years, the schools have stopped teaching it. And it's unfortunate.

When you Google me, you'll find a lot of people don't like Richard Dreyfuss. Because I'm cocky and I present a cocky attitude. But no one has ever disagreed with the notion I represent, that we need more civic education. So far there's 100 percent support for that.

Civic education and civic responsibility should be taught in elementary school.

Half the states have stopped making civics and government a requirement for high school. Half.

A popular society must provide a school for citizens where through the best, most accessible and direct means they may be educated in the pure doctrine of Patriotism.

Let's summon the courage to insist on a minimal level of civic knowledge for the citizens empowered to decide our fate.

Even civics classes have almost disappeared from the schools. So things have not gotten any better.

We stand in the shadow of Jefferson who believed that a society founded upon the rule of law and liberty was dependent upon public education and the diffusion of knowledge.

I begin to feel like I was in the last generation of Americans who took a civics class.

I grew up in San Francisco. And so I'm informed in a certain kind of way about, you know, believing in democracy and believing in America. And I'm a very ardent patriot.

Civics is not only how to run the country before it's your turn to run the country; it is, in fact, the study of power, practical political power. And you must start that process at an age level when kids' brains are still open and malleable.

A constitutional democracy is in serious trouble if its citizenry does not have a certain degree of education and civic virtue.

On the diffusion of education among the people rest the preservation and perpetuation of our free institutions.

Essentially, social education is moral education, and moral education is preparation for citizenship... When Jefferson and others advocated public education, it was to prepare for citizenship in a new, constitutional, democratic society.

I believe that when you provide information to people, they become less fearful and they will engage more in their democracy if they are empowered with information.

We... are not really free if we can't control our own government and its policies. And we will never do that if we remain ignorant.

You can't be a full participant in our democracy if you don't know our history.

Today, public understanding of our past and our system of government is pitifully low.

Without an educated populace, democracy cannot sustain itself.

If they had taught a class on how to be the kind of citizen Dick Cheney worries about, I would have finished high school.

The values and voices of democracy are silent. Either we have lost touch with those values or, no better, believe they need not or cannot be taught.

Among the foremost benefits of free government is that education of the intelligence and of the sentiments which is carried down to the very lowest ranks of the people when they are called to take a part in acts which directly affect the great interests of their country.

Let us by all wise and constitutional measures promote intelligence among the people as the best means of preserving our liberties.

I rejoice in having so favorable an opportunity of felicitating the State of Rhode Island on the co-operation I am sure to find in the measures adopted by the guardians of literature in this place, for improving the morals of the rising generation, and inculcating upon their minds principles peculiarly calculated for the preservation of our rights and liberties. You may rely on whatever protection I may be able to afford in so important an object as the education of our youth.

… schools of liberty …. warehouses of disinterested patriotism