Earlier this week, I expressed exasperation at the seeming irrelevance of what I used to teach in American government classes in the context of what’s going on now. Old standbys like “checks and balances,” “equal protection of the law” and “judicial review” seem to have been discarded in favor of what Lionel Trilling called “a series of irritable mental gestures.” I couldn’t imagine how I would teach the class now.

Luckily, I have the wisest and worldliest readers around, so I was able to ask them. And, characteristically, they (you!) stepped up. The most popular answer was to focus the class on the Constitution. In other words, if the government isn’t working, consult the owner’s manual.

One particularly ambitious example:

As an erstwhile political theorist, I admit liking this a lot. I’d add a few of the Federalist papers, but that’s a quibble. I’d also take “capitalist” out, since that’s more descriptive than aspirational. (As Oliver Wendell Holmes noted, the Constitution does not include Mr. Herbert Spencer’s Social Statics.) But the basic idea of walking students through the foundational logic of why the government was built and rebuilt the way it was could certainly help students understand what’s so deeply disturbing about the current moment.

It would also help disabuse many students of misconceptions about what is actually in the Constitution. I’ve heard the word “unconstitutional” used to describe nearly anything a given speaker thought unlikable or unpleasant. That’s not what it means. And the Constitution doesn’t include some lines that many people think it does.

For example, the phrase “separation of church and state” isn’t in there. Instead, the First Amendment refers to the free exercise of religion and to “establishment” of an official religion, protecting the first and forbidding the second. Nothing in it forbids basing political views on religious beliefs; in fact, that has been (and remains) commonplace. The First Amendment prevents any declaration of the United States as a “Christian nation,” but it does not prevent Christians from participating in politics or government. The First Amendment does not include a reference to “hate speech” one way or the other. Similarly, the words “free market” and “capitalism” are not in the Constitution, despite what many assume.

Another correspondent does paragraph-by-paragraph close readings of the Constitution and of George Washington’s farewell address in her classes. She reports that students are often astounded at how prescient Washington was. I’d probably be tempted to follow it with Dwight Eisenhower’s farewell address, noting that he was a Republican while saying those things. Addressing Eisenhower might also segue nicely to a discussion of the 22nd Amendment.

Of course, sometimes we have to get away from the classics. One thoughtful writer suggested,

The question of scope is a constant one. Should an intro class restrict itself to what used to be called civics, or should it address the broader context in which institutions operate? I’m sympathetic to the latter, given the history of a sort of strategic naïveté being used to give surface respectability to truly despicable actions. That’s where political science starts to cross over into sociology, economics and history, but I don’t think that’s a bad thing; disciplines are tools we use for understanding. Some topics, like some tasks, require multiple tools.

Brief comparisons to other countries’ systems can also be helpful.  For example, a parliamentary system with a prime minister is much less likely to have “divided government” in the way that a presidential system can.  A system with winner-take-all elections will have different outcomes than one with proportional representation. And shedding some light on the connection between the three-fifths rule in the Constitution and the Electoral College can bring some historical depth to discussions of the constitutive role of racism in America.

The common denominator to these suggestions, I think, is the need to step away from the current chaos to look at the big picture. How is the federal government actually set up? What are the actual ground rules? Why are they like that? (Madison’s “Federalist 10” is particularly helpful on this one.) What can we expect if those rules are broken?

Thanks to everyone who wrote in. You gave me hope. Let’s pass that on to students.