Meet the Scholars Building a Founders-Based Curriculum
By TSU Program Team · · 3 min read
A four-course sequence is an unusual thing to build from scratch. Most civics offerings are a single survey course. This one runs in four movements, and each was designed to hand something specific to the next.
Courses 1 and 2: the roots and the founding
Dr. Luis Pérez-Feliciano was engaged to develop the first half of the sequence. Course 1 introduces the classical and Enlightenment ideas underneath American constitutional democracy — Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Augustine, Aquinas, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Montesquieu — and the enduring questions of justice, law, liberty, virtue, and the purpose of government. Course 2 narrows onto the founding era itself: the Declaration, the Constitution, the Federalist and Anti-Federalist debates, ratification, the Bill of Rights, and the questions about slavery and rights that the founding left unresolved.
Courses 3 and 4: the expansion and today
Dr. Mark P. Jones, based at Rice University and contracted as Senior Research Fellow for the initiative, developed the second half. Course 3 follows how American ideals were contested and expanded in practice, from abolition and the Civil War through Reconstruction and the Fourteenth Amendment, women's suffrage, and the civil rights movement, with Tocqueville, Lincoln, Douglass, Anthony, Dr. King's Letter from Birmingham Jail, and cases such as Brown v. Board. Course 4 is the capstone, and it is deliberately current: originalism and living constitutionalism, technology and free speech, polarization, the administrative state, federalism in public health, religious liberty, and recent Supreme Court decisions.
Read in order, the sequence makes an argument: that the questions in the founding documents are still open, and that citizens are the ones who answer them.
Why the full span
It would be easier to teach only the founding, or only the present. The sequence refuses both. A student who reads Aristotle on mixed government and then reads the separation of powers is not memorizing a structure — they are watching an idea arrive. A student who reads the Fourteenth Amendment after reading the Convention debates understands that the document was built to be argued with. In the 250th year, that is the more durable lesson.