Episode Details

Roosevelt House is pleased to present a discussion of 'One Thought Scares Me…: We Teach Our Children What We Wish Them to Know; We Don’t Teach Our Children What We Don’t Wish Them to Know' by Academy Award winning actor and advocate Richard Dreyfuss. In this urgent call to reconsider and reestablish the role of civics education in American schools, Dreyfuss explains how the lack of civics education over the last fifty years has precipitated the decline of American life—and how restoring civics to the classroom can help the country to reclaim its most important ideals. The author is in conversation with Jonathan F. Fanton Director of Roosevelt House Harold Holzer.

We can’t fly a plane without training… we can’t practice medicine without attending medical school… and yet, we expect the American people to wield the full power of their citizenship without any education— so goes the argument made in 'One Thought Scares Me,' delivered with the force of an Oscar-winning performance. In particular, Dreyfuss assesses the potentially dire consequences of not teaching children the Bill of Rights or Constitution, or the Enlightenment values that underpin them, or the critical thinking skills that he believes are necessary to our sovereignty. Among those potentially dire consequences, he says, is the disappearance from American discourse of civil political disagreement—and even the failure of the American experiment.

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