This is one of the easiest ways to share your ideas on Politicolor. Every week we ask our contributors two questions and post their answers in an effort to help you find good ideas on the web. Because effective citizens are informed citizens… What didn’t you know last week? Arachne at her loom, after an [...]
Posts under ‘2007 National Academy’
Weekly Wavelength
The summer circuit has begun. A few of our regular contributors are on their way to Orange, Virginia for the NEH Landmarks Institute at Madison’s Montpelier. So, I’m finally posting this today courtesy of free wifi at Hyperion Coffee in Fredericksburg. Here’s what your favorite group of civic-minded thinkers are thinking this week: What didn’t [...]
Weekly Wavelength
Summer vacation has either started or is very near for most of our contributors in the classroom. I think it shows in the diversity of ideas shared this week–including student portfolios! What didn’t you know last week? Great in-depth reporting by NPR and ProPublica about Traumatic Brain Injury from Afghanistan and Iraq and the lack [...]
Exploring the Orange Box
It’s been almost three years since the National Academy (’07 in da house!), so I’m not sure whether Will and Co. have progressed with the orange box or not. Last I knew, there wasn’t any great philosopher linked to that great conundrum called civilization. The word alone conjures the pulse of Tchaikovsky’s “1812 Overture,” or [...]
Knowing Political Knowledge
In The Politics, Aristotle suggests political knowledge is sovereign knowledge: In all the branches of knowledge and in every kind of craft the end in view is some good. In the most sovereign of these, the capacity for [leadership in] political matters, the end in view is the greatest good and the good which is [...]
Make a Pledge to Be Here
Discussion happens here if we make it happen. We each need to find a way to step into the forum and make a pledge to be here. Kallan, an Academy participant this year writing as Federal Teacher, made a pledge to give Politicolor 20 minutes a month and asked alumni to do the same. A [...]
My Serial of Boxes (A Post Script)
Yesterday, we concluded the We the People text, returning again to the politicolor boxes! The role of citizenship emerged, and I invited the students who wished to submit a pledge to be active. As you may note, not all of my little citizens chose to record a pledge, which is beauty unto itself. Have a [...]
Project Citizen
Having been briefly introduced to Project Citizen at the National Academy, I decided to try it out this year. It’s an ideal, outcome-based activity as much about the journey as the finish. And the great thing about the finish is that it’s really just the beginning, for students receive the tools to research and formulate [...]
National Academy 2008: Is it Over?
The Rangeview building is nearly quiet this afternoon. It isn’t that the exchange students all went to the beach today but that this year’s National Academy has run out of time. The machines still hum but the electricity of rigorous academic work is missing. From a discussion of constitutional citizenship befitting an intelligent people to [...]
On Theory, Poetry, and the American Constitution
I think to appreciate or even tolerate this post you have to accept at face value Will Harris’s assertion that Americans “live in a theory.” The theory is derived from the Constitution and includes such central organizing ideas as innovation, wholeness, inquiry, optimism, order, deliberation, and covenant to name a small and perhaps unrepresentative subset. [...]
stepwinder
