The Declaration as a Pedagogical Tool

My goal as an instructor is always to engage students in a lively, close reading of the text of the Declaration. The conclusion of the document itself should arrest our attention and show us the seriousness with which we ought to approach the text. In the face of independence from a global empire, knowing the prospects of war, suffering, and death, the Declaration concludes, “for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.”

John Trumbull, The Declaration of Independence, oil on canvas, 1819. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

How does one teach the Declaration of Independence to students these days? By the time I get a hold of my students in a college classroom, they have been through a K-12 education system, with mixed results. Some of them may have attended schools that emphasized a civics education and learned a decent bit about the American founding, the history leading up to the War for Independence, and the political issues at play. Some may have received a rather paltry education, not really knowing much about the American Revolution or its causes. For at least some students in my classroom, I know this will be the first time they have read an American founding document closely and fully, regardless of whether they were supposed to have read any in the past.

So how do we approach teaching the Declaration to a room full of people, some of whom have barely read it and others who have read it so much that the preamble has become little more than background noise? What follows is a walkthrough of my preferred method for teaching the Declaration in a variety of courses—something I call disruptive reading. This method allows me to ensure students do not glaze over the hefty claims of the Declaration, allows me to elaborate on some essential historical context, and, most importantly, allows students to be excited about the text.

Rather than simply reading the text myself or launching into a lecture, I begin by asking for volunteers or cold-calling on a student to begin reading the document. Having students read aloud is nothing new or innovative, of course, but for this text particularly I want them to speak the words as they wrestle with them.

If these truths are “obvious” and “undeniable,” how are we to understand the fact that many people do deny them? Surely the truth, that “all men are created equal” (which I have a student read at this point) was not something equally obvious to all human beings throughout history.

The volunteer or voluntold student will thus typically begin (skipping the “Unanimous Declaration” part), “When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary…” and I say, “stop.” This point in the text is obviously earlier than the student expects to be stopped, and the class often begins chuckling a little nervously.

Here, I say something like, “now, I know you all are adults, and you generally know what words mean. But I want to focus on this word ‘necessary.’ What does it mean?” Students sometimes seem dumbfounded by the simple exercise of being asked to define a word, not because they don’t know what it means, but because they are so rarely asked to articulate explicit definitions.

However long it takes, I guide them to the conclusion that “necessary” means something that is essential, absolutely required, or a precondition for something else to occur. Here, I tell them, we find our first and strongest claim. Whatever comes after this word is being declared as “necessary.” It could not have been otherwise, at least at the point when the document is being drafted and ratified.

But whatever follows in this declaration was not always considered necessary; in fact, at one point, it was thought a great evil to be avoided at almost any cost. I remind my students that all through the “imperial crisis” period beginning around 1763, we find records of the colonists begging, pleading, negotiating, demanding things from Parliament and from the King, all on the basis of their rights as Englishmen. This was all done with the assumption, at least by most, that dissolution of the union between the mother country and the colonies was neither necessary nor beneficial. Instead, much of the communication in this period from 1763 to the opening of violent conflict in 1775 was written at least ostensibly with an eye toward preserving that union and the benefits of it. If what follows in this document is truly “necessary,” something must have happened to make it so. But now we’re ahead of ourselves, and we need a new volunteer.

The next student continues, “for one people to dissolve the political bands that have connected them with another—,” and I tell them once again to stop. At this point the laughter is audible, and what’s going to happen for the rest of the class becomes clear. I ask students, What claim is being made here? What radical statement is being made? In line with the previous discussion, this is that the American colonists and the English across the sea make up two distinct peoples, previously connected by purely political bands that now can and must be dissolved. Again, I remind them, this is new rhetoric compared to prior appeals. In dissolving these bands, the colonists claim that they “assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them.” This places them on level with any other nation on earth, a sovereign people. The preamble concludes by declaring that “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.” That is, they do not require permission, they do not need to justify themselves, but they do respect the world enough to explain why these things have become “necessary.”

We now move to the text of the Declaration proper. If the preamble states reasons for the document’s existence, this portion of the text explains the principle of the thing. I solicit a new volunteer, and they read, “We hold these truths to be self-evident—” and again, I stop them. Those who have read the Declaration before are quite used to reading “We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal” in one long breath. But at this point, it’s crucial that we have an idea of what “self-evident” means here. If we move on without such an understanding, we risk misunderstanding what follows.

Students typically begin by suggesting these truths are “obvious,” or “undeniable.” And, indeed, Jefferson’s early draft of the Declaration used the alternative phrase “sacred and undeniable” instead of “self-evident.” But if these truths are “obvious” and “undeniable,” how are we to understand the fact that many people do deny them? Surely the truth, that “all men are created equal” (which I have a student read at this point) was not something equally obvious to all human beings throughout history. Indeed, in John Adams’s 1765 Dissertation on Canon and Feudal Law, Adams makes the case that the feudal law, which established legal hierarchy between human beings, and the Catholic canon law, which established hierarchy between the laity and the church, distorted the minds of mankind for many hundreds of years. It was the loosening of these systems of law, Adams argues, that freed human minds and thus drove Europe and its colonial offshoots to pursue political liberty.

The historical record outlined by Adams does not suggest that the idea of human equality is obvious to all people throughout time. Instead, the idea of liberty can apparently be repressed. Does that disprove the claim of these truths to be self-evident? Or, as we can reliably expect our students to press us on today, doesn’t the fact that many of the men who signed this document (as well as the man who drafted it) owned other human beings cut against the idea that human equality is obvious to all?

Here, I typically ask students to bear with me for a digression. I think the concept of “self-evident” employed here can best be explained through Plato. In the Meno, Socrates engages in a dialogue with his friend Meno about the difficulty of gaining knowledge. In a famed “paradox,” Socrates and Meno struggle with how it can be possible to gain knowledge of what you do not already know. Wouldn’t knowing what you don’t know require knowing something about it in the first place? To attempt to resolve this tension, Socrates solicits the aid of a slave boy owned by Meno. Socrates draws squares in the dirt, explains some basic concepts about “area” to the boy, and then asks him how one might double the size of the square just drawn. After a few basic mistakes, with some minimal guidance, the slave is able to solve the problem, drawing a new square that has the base of the diagonal across the original square.

This, to Socrates, demonstrates something important: this slave boy was not educated in geometry, and yet was able to “discover” these geometric principles almost intuitively. No one taught him a formula or an equation or sat him down with a textbook. Instead, the solution became apparent, or evident, on the basis of other things the slave boy observed.

The point here is not to endorse Socrates’s complex doctrine of “knowledge as remembrance.” The point instead is to give students one possible example of something being “self-evident” in the sense of “apparent on reflection in light of certain observations.” This kind of “self-evidence” does not mean everyone will always agree. In fact, many people trying to solve the same problem make certain basic mistakes. It instead declares that certain things are obvious to those who engage in a certain kind of observation and reflection.

Space does not permit me to outline all the subsequent reflections we engage in as we read the Declaration slowly and “disruptively” in my classroom. The claims that follow in the Declaration are historical claims of wrongs done that the signers contend “[evince] a design to reduce [the Colonies] under absolute Despotism.” That design, they say, makes the government “destructive to the ends” for which it was established, namely, the protection of liberty. When government fails to do what it was established to do, this entitles its citizens to alter or abolish their system of government. All these concepts and more make fruitful ground for discussion with students—if only they can be forced to slow down, read them, and engage with them seriously. In a single document, we find theories of the origins of government, its purpose, and the source of its legitimacy, each of which bears lengthy discussion, historical and philosophical reading, and serious reflection.

In short, my goal as an instructor is always to engage students in a lively, close reading of the text of the Declaration. This, again, is nothing terribly new or innovative. Indeed, it’s the way I ask my students to read all their texts, time permitting: to avoid simply glossing over phrases and passages, assuming you already understand their meaning. Instead, students are encouraged to give due deference to the authors of the text, assuming instead that they chose their words carefully, that those words are laden with meaning, and that a good reader must take care to read closely. The conclusion of the document itself should arrest our attention and show us the seriousness with which we ought to approach the text. In the face of independence from a global empire, knowing the prospects of war, suffering, and death, the Declaration concludes, “for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.”