Every day Americans scurry off in winter darkness to work physical construction sites and business-as-usual office settings. But where are folks scurrying off to work on social construction programs to build a better society and renew our nation’s traditional commitment to ethical living?

We are bending our ingenuity to perfect drone use, green materials, and smart machinery in construction technology. We gleefully bend our ingenuity to work on hands-free driving, water jetpacks, talking hearing aids, and Mars technology.

But where is the programming to develop wise leaders in society and, for example, in social media, rather than the current crop of non-stop exploiters? Where are the shops working hard to train elected officials from turning into oligarchs and monarchists, to help folks read and understand the Constitution, to promote rule of law and responsible citizenship, to promote more seriousness and less silliness in cultural entertainment, to put children, youth and mature adults in touch with history?

We have backslidden so badly in historical literacy that our schools and universities never think to include the Bible as a genuine secular history text, because it has some religion in it. In fact, it is a constitutional history of an exemplary democracy that has many lessons for public policy today. How have we come to misread it so badly?