We The People
"We The People" introduces 5th-grade students to the study of constitutional government in the United States.
In studying We The People : The Citizens and the Constitution, students develop the ability to identify issues that require political action. They are encouraged through informed inquiry to make a personal commitment to accept the responsibilities associated with the rights we enjoy as citizens- responsibilities essential to the continued existence of a society based on the ideas of freedom, justice, equality, and human rights.
The curriculum is a book of the history of ideas not a conventional textbook or curriculum. It is designed to help elementary students understand the most important ideas of our constitutional system and how they were developed. Its intent is to provide students with knowledge about how the Constitution came into existence, why it took the form it did, and how it has functioned for the past two hundred years. The program employs a conceptually oriented approach that stresses the development of analytic and evaluative skills with an end project that asks students to apply their knowledge to a wide range of political questions and issues.
A fundamental hypothesis of the WTP curriculum is that education can increase a person’s capacity and inclination to act knowledgeably, effectively, and with responsibility. It follows that the role of educational institutions must be to help students increase their capacity to make intelligent choices for themselves- to learn how to think, rather than what to think.
As a capstone to the WTP curriculum, our 5th-grade students ran a mock hearing with a panel of judges consisting of TEA faculty and administration.