For many summers over more than a decade, I have had the pleasure of working with high school students attending the Great Books Summer Program. Great Books is a program for middle and high school students, devoted to an inquiry-based pedagogical model. Students engage in deep discussions of a set of texts selected by the instructor to guide them through a topic, subject or problem of our own design. Last year, for example, I taught two courses at the program’s Stanford campus: “From Harm to Repair” with readings ranging from Seneca and Aeschylus to James Baldwin and Desmond Tutu, and “From Law to Justice” in which we discussed works by Whitman, Camus, Ha Jin, Shakespeare, and Frederick Douglass, among others.

This year, I am inaugurating the program’s Scottish venue at the University of Edinburgh. I struggled for a bit wondering how to merge the Highlands locale with my ongoing concern for the truly frightening moment we face in the United States.  I have given many “Know Your Rights” presentations since mid-January, and each one seems to require more information as Constitutional Amendments fall like so many novice ice-skaters, not simply ignored, but ridiculed by the government. Even if the freedoms and liberties boldly proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence and later enumerated in the U.S. Constitution are, for many, more accurately described in the words of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr as “promissory notes,”, that is all the more reason to defend and extend them with all our strength and imagination.

As a Latin American historian, I found hardly any time to devote to the study of my own country’s history, and what little I once knew about colonial America and the early republic has long since retired, as the poet Billy Collins delightfully wrote, “to the southern hemisphere of the brain/to a little fishing village where there are no phones.” I’ve tried to remedy this in my retirement years, attempting grapple with first century of the nation’s history and to understand, among much else, what Jefferson and the “founders” understood when they wrote of “self-evident” truths, or “unalienable Rights,” or the “pursuit of Happiness.”

It wasn’t long before I came upon a host of Scottish Enlightenment thinkers (Francis Hutcheson, Adam Ferguson, Adam Smith, David Hume, among others) whose ideas were important to, and perhaps shaped, how Jefferson and other early republican thinkers imagined the country they were writing into existence. And so, my course emerged: We would discuss the impact of the Scottish Enlightenment on the ideas expressed in the Declaration of Independence. (I should clarify that it’s way above my pay grade to engage in the hotly debated question of whether one can credit these Scottish philosophers as the “hidden authors” of the Declaration. I’m much more interested in exploring with my students what they meant when they wrote of “happiness” or “Nature’s God” while examining the tensions they acknowledged between individual and communitarian freedoms.)

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