Peter Schram gives us some pithy insights into the learning of self-government, taking for an example the case of the six Iraqis submitting to education at Harvard. I hope you can read his entire essay which is only about 700 words in length:
Joe asked below, Iraqis at Harvard, what I thought of this visit by six Iraqis to Harvard, and the classes they would take or sit in on. It is, as you say, and the other links you note, very silly or worse to put such people through this pseudo-sophisticated claptrap (e.g., “Gender and the Cultures of U.S. Imperialism”). Other things aside, it doesn’t do anything for the Iraqis: It doesn’t engage them in conversation, it doesn’t teach them anything. I had some experience (well, perhaps a lot of experience) in doing such things with Estonians, Hungarians, Bulgarians, Romanians, et al) and the simple truth I learned is this: Begin at the beginning and let those thinkers who are the most clear on the ends and methods of republican government talk for themselves. They read Jefferson, Madison, and so on. They almost always focus on why human beings have a right to rule themselves and, once that is reasonably assumed, what do they do with that awesome power?
Here is a gimmick I once used. I am in the former USSR, about three months after the fall of communism. There are sixty secondary school teachers in front of me. We will be together one week. I am introduced as the teacher of the seminar on civics. I am said to be be an important and learned person who comes from the great big free country from far away. I approach, ignore the podium that would elevate me three feet above the others, stand eye to eye with them and the first words from my mouth is this: “Is the human mind free?” All sixty of them agreed that it was. Good I said, we agree on the only thing we have to agree on in order to have a conversation about these important things. When we finished the seminar a week later the women hugged and kissed me….well, so did the men. You know how those folks are, cultural differences and all.
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