From Heritage Foundation, March 2, 1999.

Address by EDWIN J. FEULNER, JR., Ph.D., President, The Heritage Foundation

Delivered to the Heritage Foundation 25th Anniversary, Los Angeles Regional Meeting, Los Angeles, California, March 2, 1999

Today's program is devoted to the theme "Restoring Civil Society." To prepare the ground for this, I would like step back and ask you to think with me about a broader question: Just what is civil society?

Consider it this way: If someone stopped you on the street and asked you what civil society is, could you give them an answer that would set their hair on fire?

As people who are serious about building an America where freedom, opportunity and civil society flourish, we owe it to ourselves to think carefully about what those words mean. So let me take a few minutes to say how I would answer the question about civil society.

I think it is crucial to begin with the Founding Fathers, with the blueprint they drew for this nation. The Founders conceived of self-government as a thing to be carried out in two spheres: In one are the formal institutions of government, such as legislatures and courts. And in the other is a vast web of voluntary, informal associations such as families, neighborhoods, churches, civic groups, local schools, and a variety of cultural and charitable organizations. All of these associations in this second sphere, taken together, are what we mean by civil society.

So, if we're going to restore civil society, there are two things we need to get clear about.

The first is: How does civil society work when it works well? What principles account for its working well?

And the second is: What has gone wrong with civil society? What principles have had the effect of monkey wrenches thrown into its gears"?

I hope you were with us last night when we heard Professor James Q. Wilson deliver an insightful lecture on human nature. Today, in thinking about civil society, we can see that the Founders also possessed great insight into human nature.

For they understood that if we as citizens were not generally inclined to behave ourselves, there could never be enough legislators, laws, regulations, cops, courts, fines and jails to make us behave ourselves. If self-government is to work, the primary regulator of our behavior cannot be the external commands of law. It must come from the internal commands of conscience, informed by commonly accepted moral norms. And as the Founders plainly recognized, those norms are embedded in our Judeo-Christian heritage.

This is the twofold genius of the American experiment. The Founders knew that a properly constituted government was necessary for a free, self-governing people. But they also knew that it was not sufficient. And this raises an obvious but critically important question: Why are the formal institutions of government not sufficient to sustain freedom and self-government?

I think there are two answers to this question. First, although our Constitution provides a framework that gives us great latitude for making choices democratically, that framework doesn't tell us what to choose. For example, the framework permits taxation. But it doesn't tell us whom we should tax, how much we should tax, or what we should spend the revenues on.

Those "should" questions are ultimately moral questions. So the upshot is that formal institutions of government alone, no matter how ingeniously designed, cannot sustain freedom and self-government. Those institutions work only if we - the people - have adopted the right moral principles to guide the choices we make democratically. So that's one reason our constitutional framework is insufficient to sustain freedom and self-government.

But, as I said, it is insufficient for a second reason: Even when we have the right moral principles to keep our formal institutions of government working properly, those institutions cannot solve all problems or guide all choices. There some things - a great many things, in fact - that are simply beyond the power of government to accomplish. And it is those things that a healthy, functioning civil society will carry out - quite spontaneously - without any guidance or assistance from government.

Just think for a moment about the variety of perfectly routine activities that go on among average families in average neighborhoods - activities that, unfortunately, are far less common in the 1990s than they were in the 1950s.

Children, for instance, are given household chores to do - cut grass, wash dishes, take out the garbage - which nurtures in them a sense of responsibility to a community. And this begins in that smallest and most fundamental community, the family.

Parents make sure their kids do their homework - "No TV until the homework is finished!" Before children can develop a taste for hard mental effort, they must first develop a tolerance for it.

A teenage girl gets pregnant, and in homes throughout her neighborhood, other children are taught that a sense of shame attaches to such a gravely serious error of judgment. Dr. Samuel Johnson understood the importance of this: "Where there is yet shame," he wrote, "there may in time be virtue."

A father down the block is laid off from his job, and his family is going through rough times. Quietly, with respect and dignity, neighbors lend a hand in whatever ways they can, until he gets back on his feet.

A husband and wife are having marital problems, perhaps their children are getting in trouble at school or around the neighborhood. Neighbors invite the family to attend church, where they find a spiritual lift and a larger moral purpose that puts their problems into a more manageable perspective.

We could list thousands of activities like these that are performed routinely in good families and good neighborhoods. Each is motivated by an internal moral impulse, done in obedience to an external command of law.

Put in simplest terms: Law and morality are not interchangeable.

This is what the Founders understood when they conceived a limited government. They understood that there are limits to what government can do, and if it exceeds those limits, it will do harm rather than good. This, in a nutshell, is how growth of the liberal welfare state has eroded civil society.

Not content with public policies that compensate for the frailties of human nature, liberals thought they could eliminate those frailties. They believed that if the charitable and neighborly functions of civil society were not achieving complete and perfect results, those functions must be placed under the coercive mechanisms of government. They believed that law could replace morality. And on that mistaken premise, the liberal welfare state was born.

Millions of character-shaping activities formerly done from personal moral motives - within families, neighborhoods, churches and philanthropic organizations - were increasingly commanded by law. Consequently, the fellow down the street who lost his job didn't experience the dignity and moral support that comes from caring neighbors. Instead, he got a check from the government, paid by nameless, faceless taxpayers he never knew. They helped him not because their conscience commanded it, but because the IRS did.

Neighborhood schools once reflected the moral and educational values of parents. But they gradually came to reflect the narrow interests of school bureaucrats and the so-called "progressive" fashions of educational theorists.

As one of many consequences, children have been taught that if sexual activity at their age raises any problems at all, those problems concern not morality but hygiene.

This has been reinforced by one government program after another offering services, support, counsel and comfort to pregnant teens and teenage moms. These comforting responses were not compatible with the old lesson that teen pregnancy is a shameful and gravely serious mistake. One or the other had to go - and it was the old lesson that went.

The principle behind these examples of cultural breakdown is not new. Pliny the Elder, a Roman scholar who lived nearly 2,000 years ago stated it precisely: "What we do to our children, they will do to our society."

A wide variety of moral responsibilities were once nurtured and transmitted through families, friends, neighbors, school teachers, religious congregations and local charities. During the last half of the 20th century, we have seen these responsibilities replaced in wholesale lots by a single legal duty: Pay your taxes, and government will take over the responsibilities.

Our good friend George Will writes, "If you want to understand your government, don't begin by reading the Constitution. It conveys precious little of the flavor of today's statecraft. Instead, read selected portions of the Washington telephone directory containing listings for all the organizations with titles beginning with the word National."

Well, I did that, and how many such organizations do you suppose I found? Two hundred? Three hundred? Five hundred? You might not believe this, but the number of organizations in Washington that have titles beginning with the word National exceeds 1,600.

That is a very rough indication of how widely the federal government has spread into the functioning of American culture - and how widely we have accepted the liberals' mistaken premise that the moral responsibilities of family and community can be nationalized and administered through law. As the scope and powers of government have expanded, the robust morality of civil society has atrophied. And the result of that atrophy is the colossal, multifarious mess we see around us today.

A self-governing society is a like a living organism. Civil society is its moral immune system, protecting the organism from a wide range of social ills that threaten its integrity. The only way to clean up the mess we are in today is to revive that immune system by restoring to civil society the moral functions that are essential for self-government.

That is an enormous task, but it is one that must be done. The very survival of American culture depends on it - and I am convinced that it can be done. Everyone at The Heritage Foundation is convinced of it. That is why we made a commitment to roll back the liberal welfare state and build an America where freedom, opportunity and civil society flourish.

Today's focus is on how we can gain some ground on the civil society part of that commitment. One segment of civil society where it is crucial to gain ground is education, because the quality of education a child receives will largely determine the quality of his adult life. Remember that ancient Roman's observation: "What we do to our children, they will do to our society."

That problem will be addressed specifically in today's panel on "Rebuilding schools and communities." So as a backdrop to that discussion, let me describe one approach we're having great success with at Heritage.

I wrote to you about it last year, in a letter about a remarkable man named Thaddeus Lott. From 1975 to 1995, Mr. Lott was principal of Mabel B. Wesley Elementary School in Houston, Texas. The school's profile is the sort that too many teachers have confronted as a mission impossible. The student body is 99 percent minority; 82 percent qualify for free or reduced-cost lunches; in 1975, every student in grades three through six was reading below grade level, and Wesley's teachers were the least experienced in the district. They still are today, with 65 percent having taught five years or less.

Facing these long odds, Mr. Lott did not despair. He led. He announced to his teachers that, henceforth, there would be no excuses for failure at Wesley Elementary. Poverty would not be an excuse. Lack of parental involvement at school would not be an excuse. Even parental drug abuse would not be an excuse. There would be no excuses - period.

Four years after Mr. Lott took over at Wesley, 85 percent of his students were reading above grade level. Last year the first-graders at Wesley tested 12th among the 182 schools in Houston's Independent School District, and their reading scores were in the 82nd percentile nationally. Mr. Lott now directs four charter schools in Houston.

We featured him last January in a Policy Review cover story, appropriately titled No Excuses. Later we brought him to Washington as our first Frank Walton Fellow and arranged for him to testify before Congress about his teaching methods. We held a conference at Heritage and brought in educators and education policy analysts to hear him speak. We later invited Mr. Lott to our Resource Bank meeting in Chicago, where he spoke to hundreds of representatives of think tanks from around America, and received our Salvatori Award for American Citizenship.

At the U.S. Supreme Court, Mr. Lott received the Jefferson Award for Greatest Public Service Benefiting the Disadvantaged. He was awarded by the National School Public Relations Association. The Board of Education for the Houston Independent School District gave him a commendation for Outstanding Achievement.

Nationally syndicated columnists picked up the story. William Raspberry, Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams all wrote columns about Thaddeus Lott. Education Week, the leading educational news weekly, ran a story on him. Mr. Lott appeared as a guest on Oprah Winfrey. The New York Times cited him in framing a story about education policy. Investor's Business Daily profiled him in their "Leaders and Success" column. National Review profiled his school and its curriculum.

After Mr. Lott spoke in Jacksonville, Florida, his curriculum was introduced in 11 of that city's schools. An interfaith group of black ministers in Louisville, Kentucky, made it their top priority to get his curriculum introduced into their city's schools. The Houston Chronicle ran a series on Mr. Lott, prompting that city to introduce major school reforms.

Soon Mr. Lott was besieged with invitations to speak at education conferences around the nation: The Apple Tree Institute. Empower America's "Nation at Risk." CEO America's "Liberating America's Children through School Choice." The Arkansas Policy Foundation. Headway magazine's conference on education. The "Reading Summit Conference" of the Education Leaders Council. The Texas Charter Schools Conference. The Claremont Institute's "California Leadership Forum."

I even got a call from Representative Bill Archer, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, asking how he could help showcase the work of Thaddeus Lott.

What I want to emphasize is that we generated all this by spreading the story of just one man - one local hero who was convinced that children in the worst of circumstances are capable of getting a decent education and rising above those circumstances.

Well, this set one of our executives, Adam Meyerson to thinking: Are there not more Thaddeus Lotts in this great land of ours? And if we found them, could we not multiply their successes many times over, just as we did with Thaddeus Lott?

So Adam proposed a project to Casey Carter, one of our Bradley Fellows at Heritage: He challenged Casey to find 25 more Thaddeus Lotts. But don't look for them in the suburban schools. Look in urban school districts, those with profiles every bit as challenging as the one Mr. Lott faced in Houston.

So Casey began looking. He studied the profiles of 400 urban schools and interviewed 118 principals. And he found 25 more educators who are as innovative and successful as Thaddeus Lott. One of them is here today. She is Nancy Ichinaga, principal of the Bennett-Kew School in Inglewood, California.

You will hear from her in just a few minutes. What I want to emphasize is that in helping local heroes like Nancy Ichinaga and Thaddeus Lott spread their success to other schools, we are marking real progress in building an America where civil society can flourish. We are enlarging and re-energizing the sphere of self-government that the Founders understood to be vital for a free nation, the sphere in which moral impulses and individual initiative - not commands of law - provide the motivating forces.

Having said all this, I cannot allow Heritage to claim the primary credit for this progress. You, the people of Heritage, are the ones whose foresight and generosity enable us to carry out our work. It is because of you that we can spread the success of these local heroes to every corner of this nation. So it is you who deserve the primary credit as we make progress in building an America where freedom, opportunity and civil society flourish.

For your unfailing loyalty and support, I salute you, and I sincerely thank you.