My favorite magazine by far was “Constitution,” published by the Foundation for the U.S. Constitution.  No longer in existence, it was full of riveting stories — for students and adults — with beautifully reproduced historic documents, portraits and paintings of how we came to be distinguished from all other nations.

Such a magazine, in print or digitally, is sorely needed now. Interactive civics classes have been replaced by testing and retesting assembly lines of students so the state can evaluate whole schools rather than individual, evolving citizens. David Souter warned in May, as he was retiring from the Supreme Court, that surveys show many Americans cannot name the basic three branches of government (executive, legislative and judicial). He stressed that “(we need) to start the re-education of a substantial part of the public.”

Souter’s concern about “the restoration of the self-identity of the American people” was the urgent theme in the first issue of “Constitution” (Fall/1988) in Lynne Cheney’s article “A Fading Heritage.” At the time, she was chairwoman of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

I have not spoken with Lynne Cheney for a long time, figuring she would hardly welcome my call after what I’ve written about her husband, former vice president Dick Cheney.  But I continue to find her article energizing and disturbingly contemporary.

“Consider,” she wrote then, “how little history is required of our students.  Once it was taught every year kindergarten through 12th grade; now many states require but one year.”

Cheney quoted a political philosopher who had been chosen in 1986 as the Jefferson Lecturer by the National Council on the Humanities.  Leszek Kolakowski emphasized in that lecture that among America’s young, “the erosion of a historically defined sense of ‘belonging’ plays havoc in their life and threatens their ability to withstand possible trials of the future.”

“Havoc,” for example, surely exists among those of our young whose acute need ‘to belong’ somewhere brings them into the increasingly brutal gangs, not only in urban centers. And many other youths, including in prestigious lower schools and colleges, would be very hard put to say why we have the First, Fifth, Fourth and Ninth Amendments in our Constitution, let alone tell why they could be so important in their own lives. 

And how many in or out of school have a meaningful or scant knowledge of such contributors to the roots of this nation as George Washington, Tom Paine, John Marshall, Frederick Douglass, Mark Twain or Elizabeth Cady Stanton?

As Kathryn Sinclair, a high school student in Murfreesboro, Tenn., engaged in a First Amendment battle with her principal 25 years ago, asked me: “Why don’t the schools teach why we’re Americans? So few people know.”

A quarter-century later, sadly, there still isn’t a reassuring answer for her.

(Nat Hentoff is a nationally renowned authority on the First Amendment and the Bill of Rights.)