3/10/2025

Last week’s curation at RealClear’s American Civics portal features the Jack Miller Center’s Tom Kelly at RealClearEducation with a piece titled “Civics Needs Pluralism.” Kelly discusses how the JMC's National Summit on Civics Education last November showed how pluralism rightly understood is part of a quality civics education. He writes that because we live in a time of “varied system of education,” civics reformers must focus on religious schools, classical schools, and community colleges – “current initiatives that are sometimes left out of the national civics conversation.” Subjects like citizen character, Kelly notes, have also tended to be left out of civics. “It may well be that in secularizing schools, we’ve gone too far and unwittingly undermined our ability to cultivate civic virtues such as courage.” Kelly ends the piece by noting that if civics reformers “who are working to strengthen civics believe in genuine pluralism, we’re going to have to show it by embracing genuine differences. JMC’s National Summit on Civic Education will continue to do exactly that.”

At RealClearHistory, JMC fellow Christopher Curtis writes about the famous Supreme Court case Marbury v. Madison. Far from Chief Justice John Marshall inserting himself into the political tumults between the Federalists and the Republicans, Curtis instead argues that Marshall “effectively assuaged this drama by emphasizing the rule of law as inherently distinct from political action.” He writes that in his opinion from the bench, Marshall “remained focused on the legal questions of the case,” used neutral language, and “paid no heed to the partisanship motivating [William] Marbury’s circumstance.” Above all, for Marshall, “the exercise of judicial province by the Supreme Court was circumstantial,” and “was always dependent on the presence of a proper legal question.” The Chief Justice, Curtis concludes, “did not espouse it as a constitutional power but, in the language of the common law, as the proper function of the judiciary.” Marshall is undoubtedly a model for judges today.

Original Posts

What We Can Learn from George Washington Today

Bradley Jackson, RealClearAmericanCivics

February 22nd marked the 293rd anniversary of George Washington’s birth. It seems that few Americans, however, really know the man or understand what makes him important. Some accoun...