"We the People ...".

• Author: Abadin, Ramon A.
• Position: President's page

"We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."

Those words changed the course of history. They were written and signed in 1787 by people victimized by an oppressive monarchy. They wanted to establish a form of government where the people--not the monarch, not the government--are empowered to manifest their own destinies. Those words form the basis of our constitutional, democratic government and support the tenets of individual rights, religious rights, freedom of association, and freedom of speech, to name a few. Those words and our Constitution also form the basis of the structure of our government that has attracted hundreds of millions of immigrants from every country in the world who seek freedom, justice, and the right to self-determination.

We Americans take for granted these liberties provided to us and assume (never a good idea) that everyone lives this way or that these rights can never be changed. We know that's not the case. The only way to guarantee protection of our precious constitutional, democratic government is to ensure that every American is educated in the basics of our unique form of government.

More education is clearly needed. A national survey by the Center for the Study of the American Dream at Xavier University showed that 85 percent did not know the meaning of "the rule of law" and 82 percent could not name "two rights stated in the Declaration of Independence."

Civics education, taught at the earliest level to young children, provides the lifelong foundation for individuals to understand just how precious and unique our system of government really is. When children are educated about civics, they will grow up to be adults who understand and protect our precious form of government.

Recently, I was the guest speaker at a naturalization ceremony in Pensacola, where 66 people from Mexico, Kenya, the Philippines, Sweden, Canada, Spain, Russia, South Korea, and India gathered to officially take the oath as new U.S. citizens. It was the joyous culmination of an often difficult legal process filled with paperwork, interviews, and tests (including the civics test that one in three native-born U.S. citizens failed, yet 97.5 percent of...