In his commencement speech at the historically black college, Hampton University, last Sunday, President Barack Obama said, “education is what has always allowed us to meet the challenges of a changing world,” and, speaking to the Hampton graduates, he said, “You’re in a strong position to out compete workers around the world.”
But, he told the graduates, “What’s at stake is more than our ability to out compete other nations. It’s our ability to make democracy work in our own nation. Now, years after he left office, decades after he penned the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson sat down, a few hours’ drive from here, in Monticello, and wrote a letter to a longtime legislator, urging him to do more on education. And Jefferson gave one principal reason — the one, perhaps, he found most compelling. ‘If a nation expects to be ignorant and free,’h e wrote, ‘it expects what never was and never will b e.’
“What Jefferson recognized, like the rest of that gifted founding generation, was that in the long run, their improbable experiment — called America — wouldn’t work if its citizens were uninformed, if its citizens were apathetic, if its citizens checked out, and left democracy who those — to those who didn’t have the best interests of all the people at heart. It could only work if each of us stayed informed and engaged; if we held our government accountable; if we fulfilled the obligations of citizenship.
“The success of their experiment, they understood, depended on the participation of its people — the participation of Americans like all of you. The participation of all those who have ever sought to perfect our union .”
Written By Mike Bock
