Please consider and discuss the following statements:  

(Participation Cards)

• Do we really understand the great challenges of citizenship?

• Any system that seeks to organize people is dependent upon the temperament and enlightenment of the people themselves.

• Citizenship carries with it duties and obligations not easily maintained without practice.

• “In a Republic, … each man must somehow be persuaded to submerge his personal wants into the greater good of the whole.” (Metaxas, If You Can Keep It, p.50)  

• “We are inescapably exceptional and therefore inescapably burdened with the responsibility to help others.” (Metaxas, p. 193) 

• With great power comes great responsibility! Spider-Man

• Without daily observance to higher principles - humility, balance, and responsibility - we (our leaders and ourselves) unknowingly contribute to a decaying society. 

• To make our democracy work, it will require a commitment by everyone in our society far greater than we’ve been making. 

(All Together Card) 

Democracy is that hard!

Discuss quotations: 

• “What the superior man seeks is in himself. What the ordinary man seeks is in others”. Confucius

• [The Founders] understood that without shared principles of humility and civic responsibility, the Constitution they had written—and the system of government it created—could not be sustained.

• “The foundation stone of national life is and will forever be, the individual character of the average citizen.” Franklin Roosevelt

(Additional discussion)

• If we could appreciate the complexity, would we choose to prepare our citizens differently than we do today? 

Resources:

•  If You Can Keep It, Eric Metaxas establishes the responsibilities of citizenship.

• 5000 Year Leap, Leon Skousen - a bipartisan, non-religious look at the framework and reasoning upon which our government was established.