After the Constitutional Convention in 1787, someone asked Benjamin Franklin what kind of government had been devised for the United States. He replied, "A republic, sir, if you can keep it." John Dickinson, one of Delaware's delegates to the convention, agreed with Franklin completely. Earlier he had written: "Every government at some time or other falls into wrong measures.... It is the duty of the governed to endeavor to rectify the mistake." On December 7, 1787, Delaware became the first state to ratify the U.S. Constitution and accept its challenge to ordinary American citizens that they assume the responsibility for the security of personal liberties and the sound functioning of the government.
The republic created at the convention was far from perfect. The framers did not "remember the ladies," as Abigail Adams had demanded, and the struggle for woman suffrage required more than a century. Nor did the Philadelphia convention manage to reconcile the contradiction of a government based on individual liberty with the existence of African slavery. Sixty years later, Frederick Douglass could still cause an uneasy stir in a holiday crowd when he asked, "What is your Fourth of July to the slave?" But the framers committed themselves and future generations to the ideals of 1776: "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," and by allowing for amendments, Americans of the future were challenged to bring "one nation under God, indivisible," ever closer to a society which guarantees individual liberty and equal opportunity to all citizens. Today we live in a world of increasing complexity that the founders of the United States could hardly have imagined. Yet the republic endures, and the responsibility for its continued existence still rests in the hands of the citizens. "The glory of the world is the possibilities of the commonplace and America is America because it shows, as never before, the power of the common, ordinary, unlovely man," wrote W.E.B. Du Bois. "This is real democracy...."
Citizens must be educated in order to perform the essential tasks of maintaining the nation. Thomas Jefferson hoped that "the education of the common people will be attended to; convinced that on their good sense we may rely with the most security for the preservation of a due degree of liberty." An essential component of public education is the development of the knowledge, skills, and dispositions necessary for participatory citizenship. This commission has been charged to define the curriculum framework for schools in Delaware to use in achieving that end.