To instruct the mass of our citizens in these, their rights, interests and duties, as men and citizens...this brings us to the point at which are to commence the higher branches of education . . . . To develop the reasoning faculties of our youth, enlarge their minds, cultivate their morals, and instill into them the precepts of virtue and order.
There is no institution more vital to our Nation's survival than the American family. Here the seeds of personal character are planted, the roots of public virtue first nourished. Through love and instruction, discipline, guidance and example, we learn from our mothers and fathers the values that will shape our private lives and our public citizenship.
Democracy has to be born anew every generation, and education is its midwife.
No one is born a good citizen; no nation is born a democracy. Rather, both are processes that continue to evolve over a lifetime. Young people must be included from birth. A society that cuts off from its youth severs its lifeline.
The aim of university education should be to turn out true servants of the people who will live and die for the country's freedom.
A primary object should be the education of our youth in the science of government. In a republic, what species of knowledge can be equally important? And what duty more pressing than communicating it to those who are to be the future guardians of the liberties of the country?
It is an object of vast magnitude that systems of education should be adopted and pursued which may not only diffuse a knowledge of the sciences but may implant in the minds of the American youth the principles of virtue and of liberty and inspire them with just and liberal ideas of government and with an inviolable attachment to their own country.
America has but one main problem -- the character of the men and women it shall produce.
In kindergarten, you can learn how to be a citizen of the world.
We develop the kind of citizens we deserve.
We are bound by ideals that teach us what it means to be citizens. Every child must be taught these ideals. Every citizen must uphold them.... I ask you to be citizens. Citizens, not spectators. Citizens, not subjects. Responsible citizens building communities of service and a nation of character.
Schools exist in America and have always existed to train responsible citizens of the United States of America. If they don't do that, it's very hard to hold us together as a country, because it's shared values that hold us together.
Children, if your parents haven't been teaching you what it means to be an American, let 'em know and nail 'em on it. That would be a very American thing to do.
The goal, I think, of American education, for decades, and across many, many scholars, was basically to teach people broad lessons in how to live life, how to engage life, how to essentially be effective citizens and effective people.
My most fervent prayer is to be a President who can make it possible for every boy in this land to grow to manhood by loving his country--instead of dying for it.
Universities should be about more than developing work skills. They must also be about producing civic-minded and critically engaged citizens - citizens who can engage in debate, dialogue and bear witness to a different and critical sense of remembering, agency, ethics and collective resistance.
Our children should learn the general framework of their government and then they should know where they come in contact with the government, where it touches their daily lives and where their influence is exerted on the government. It must not be a distant thing, someone else's business, but they must see how every cog in the wheel of a democracy is important and bears its share of responsibility for the smooth running of the entire machine.
And we wonder what can be that 'philosophy of education' which believes that young people can be trained to the duties of citizenship by wrapping their minds in cotton wool.
No one is born a good citizen or a good democrat or a good leader; it takes time and education.
I have over and over again explained that the purpose of the Boy Scout and Girl Guide Movement is to build men and women as citizens endowed with the three H's namely, Health, Happiness and Helpfulness. The man or woman who succeeds in developing these three attributes has secured the main steps to success this Life.
"What greater gift can we offer the republic than to teach and instruct our youth?"
NCS - National Citizen Service is a fantastic programme. I want it to be available for every young person in the country.
Patriotic societies seem to think that the way to educate school children in a democracy is to stage bigger and better flag-saluting.
As young Americans, you have an important responsibility, which is to become good citizens.
All nations teach their children to be "patriotic", and abuse the other nations for fostering nationalism.
