Ken Burns

You want to build, as our founders said, these well-rounded citizens.

Remember, we invented that.

Everybody up until the point –

of our revolution, we're subjects, right?

And Jefferson says a few phrases beyond the famous second sentence.

He goes, all experience has shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable.

Meaning, the whole history of human beings is like, okay, I'm going to be under the aboot of an authoritarian.

I just, you know, that's my lot.

I'm just going to accept it.

And he's going, no, central to the success of this new thing you were creating, citizens,

Was the responsibility to educate and to be educated and to do that your lifelong.

In fact, he could have said Jefferson could have said life, liberty and property.

He didn't.

He said the pursuit of happiness.

That was not the chasing of happiness.

objects, things in a marketplace of objects, but it was lifelong learning in a marketplace of ideas.

It was making the story of how we acquire virtue.

And they used that word all the time.

They imported it from the classical.

They went over the Dark Ages, over the Middle Ages, over the medieval period and pulled back from classical times this idea of virtue, of temperance, of tolerance and all of that.