Essay Contest Winners
Kevin Flanagan
Rockhurst High School

"Citizen Responsibility and the Constitution"

Thomas Jefferson proposed that for any democracy to be effective, it must have educated citizens. The United States’ Constitution is useless if the democracy it created does not have an educated citizenry. The Constitution cannot safeguard the rights and liberties of Americans if Americans do not know what those rights and liberties are. It is each citizen’s responsibility to educate himself in order to preserve the meaning of the Constitution. State governments are likewise obligated to provide citizens access to good schools so that they have the means to become fulfill their responsibility and become educated. Otherwise, the Constitution loses all significance.

Many Americans fail to receive an acceptable education, with American children increasingly ranking behind students in most other developed countries on standardized tests. The danger in having an uneducated populous is that not only are uneducated people unsure of their rights, they cannot be expected to vote intelligently on issues and candidates either. Uneducated citizens tend either not to vote or to cast their votes based on petty reasons, such as advertisements or appearances. Recent elections have had very low voter turnout among the poorly educated and have been characterized by the importance of advertising and the likeability of a candidate outweighing the importance of stances and debates on issues. The result is that the few who are educated, mostly the wealthy, make the decisions and determine the rights and freedoms of the rest. A democracy without educated citizens ceases to be a democracy. It becomes an oligarchy.

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