Keepers of the Nation’s Conscience
To receive an award named for my dear friend and mentor, Sandy McDonnell, is the greatest honor of my life. Thank you Character.org for the privilege of supporting our extraordinary staff and serving with our dedicated board.
Let me take this opportunity to also thank family and friends, especially my beloved husband Christopher who gives me love and strength each day.
Since the founding of this organization some 24 years ago, schools and communities like those represented in this room today have done life-changing work to instill strong civic character in many thousands of young people in this country and around the globe. But we know that the work of building strong character is an ongoing effort, a commitment that must be renewed in each generation.
When thinking about how to lift up and celebrate our shared mission on this occasion, I returned yet again to a favorite quotation from Benjamin Franklin—written in a letter to a friend in the year the Constitution was drafted:
Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.
The first sentence is so often quoted, it has become a cliché of self-congratulation in a country that is often weak on self-reflection. But it is the second sentence that should give us pause. Franklin reminds us that our experiment in democracy and freedom is fragile. Absent civic virtue among the people, this experiment will surely fail.
No one is born with civic virtue; it must be continuously modeled and taught in our homes and schools. You know this or you would not be sitting here today. A great deal is at stake in the work that you do in classrooms across America. In no small measure, your work is what stands between us and the authoritarian rule and sectarian violence now enveloping much of the world.
I have fought all of my life for liberty of conscience—religious freedom—for people of all faiths or none. Today, more than three fourths of the world’s people live in places with high restrictions of freedom of conscience, a condition that is the leading cause of oppression and violence across the globe.
As we gather here today, Rohingya Muslims are facing genocide in Burma, Christian communities are being obliterated in Iraq and Syria, Christians and Muslims are at war in northern Africa—and the tragic list goes on. And in this country, religious and political divisions are tearing us apart. White supremacy, Islamophobia, and anti-Semitism are surging, threatening to turn our public square into an angry, hostile, and even violent place.
If we seek to create a more peaceful world—if we aspire to build an America where people can live peacefully with their deepest differences—then we must fight to protect liberty of conscience, the freedom for each of us to follow our God, to follow what our deepest convictions require. This is what Roger Williams famously called “soul liberty.”
But freedom is not sufficient. “Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom.” That is why for the past 23 years my vocation has been liberty of conscience, but my avocation has been character education. Just as conscience requires freedom—so freedom requires conscience. Only people of conscience are capable of acting with compassion, making difficult moral decisions, and, in these ways and others, building a more just and free society.
The inseparable link between freedom and conscience was brought home to me most powerfully some years ago when I was standing in the Garden of the Righteous at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem. Our guide was relating stories of the Righteous—non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews—as we looked at the trees planted in their honor.
During a pause in the narrative, one of our group, Richard Foltin of the American Jewish Committee, said almost inaudibly: “Not all of them are named.” I turned and asked, “Richard, what do you mean?” He said: “I am standing here now because of a man whose name I do not know.” When pressed to explain, he told this story:
“My parents are Holocaust survivors,” he began. “When my father arrived at Auschwitz, they were separating those who would be killed immediately from those who would be put to work. A guard called out, ‘Is anyone here a welder?’ And my father shouted, ‘I am’—although he actually knew nothing about welding. They sent my father and a few others to the welding shop and told them to make a sample of their work for inspection. My father stood there looking at the equipment, despairing over what to do. Then, almost imperceptibly, the German foreman in charge of the shop slipped a finished piece of work in front of my father. My father picked it up and took it to the guards—and he passed inspection. Throughout the rest of his time in the camp, the foreman continued to secretly help my father—to cover for him when necessary. And my father survived. They didn’t speak. We don’t even know his name.”
When Richard ended his story, I could not help but wonder: Why did that nameless German risk his life for a Jew he did not know? More broadly, why did any of the thousands— now called the Righteous—respond with compassion and courage when so many millions were either complicit or indifferent? Rescuers came from all walks of life, had varying degrees of education, some were religious and others were not. But they had one thing in common: when faced with a choice, they acted to save others—risking and in some cases losing their own lives. Only people of conscience have the courage to care in such extreme circumstances. They did not have time to think about it; they acted spontaneously from the heart.
Shaping the conscience of young people is what teachers and administrators committed to character education do every day. Together with parents, faith communities, and others, schools and classrooms of character are places where we model and teach the habits of the mind and heart that define people of good conscience. The test of conscience is not just in the life-threatening moments—the tests come every single day.
Who will stand up when a fellow student is harassed for wearing a headscarf? Who will step in when a transgender student is mocked and bullied? Who will speak up when students are called names, shamed, or shunned? By what you model and teach, you prepare young people to pass those tests—to have the courage to care. And by so doing, you prepare them to be citizens who will defend and protect freedom and democracy—not just for themselves, but also for others.
Yes, I want to see schools graduate people who can do the math, read the books, understand history and science. We need an educated citizenry. But I want even more to see schools graduate people with civic virtue and good character. What matters more than academic achievement is how people use what they know to serve the common good by working for a more just and free society. Germany in the 1930s, lest we forget, was arguably the most educated society in the world.
Some years ago, a reporter asked Justice Hugo Black—a former KKK member who became one of the 20th century’s great defenders of human rights—to describe the role of the
Supreme Court. “I believe,” he replied, “that the Supreme Court is the keeper of the nation’s conscience.” That has a nice ring to it, especially when we recall such courageous and moral decisions as Brown v. Board of Education.
But as much as I appreciate the vital role of the High Court in upholding the Constitution, I would save that honorific for you—the teachers, counselors, administrators, staff members—who by what you do to instill civic virtue in our young people are the true keepers of our nation’s conscience. Thank you for who you are—and for what you do each and every day.
Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom.
