ABSTRACT
INTRODUCTION Citizenship and citizenship education are two of the oldest ideas in political theory, and scholars are showing new interest in both. Through every era of recorded history, these ideas have been present, linked, and contested. Jefferson’s view, summarized here in his plea for public education, is a distillation of centuries of Western writing on the subject-beginning with the Greeks (especially Plato and Aristotle), the Romans (Cicero), and then the daring thinkers of the Renaissance who jettisoned theism (Machiavelli) and of the Enlightenment who constructed reason, rights, and individuals (Locke, Rousseau). This tradition set the precedent for what followed in the United States. When Elizabeth Cady Stanton and her associates met at the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848 and ratified the Declaration of Sentiments, or when Martin Luther King, Jr. addressed the crowd at the March on Washington more than a century later, they were mobilizing the civil rights principles of the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution to advance their own causes. The woman suffragists famously altered the second sentence of the Declaration of Independence to read: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal . . .” (Stanton, Anthony, & Gage, 1889, p. 70). Similarly, King demanded not an alternative to the founding principles of the United States but their fulfillment. “Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy,” he said.
