Commentary
This is an abridged version of Professor Coll’s essay in the Winter 2023 issue of The American Experiment, the Jack Miller Center’s historical journal.
How do we educate our students for freedom?
After all, many of them arrive in college today believing that the United States is systematically oppressive, hopelessly unjust, and that there is not much worth celebrating or defending about our country (or so they have been taught).
So I often start my class by asking them a simple question: “Out of the world’s twenty largest countries, in which country would you rather live?”
I pick the world’s twenty largest countries because size matters. The larger a society’s size, the more complex will be its social, economic, and political problems. There is also the difficulty of maintaining freedom and representative government in the midst of sharp political differences and quarrelling factions and interest groups….