ABSTRACT
The title of this essay expresses an optimistic, reconstructive hope: that the American formation of civic identity, as a shifting and contradictory set of ideas, values, and principles, contains a vast untapped potential for social transformation and democratic renewal.1 Broadly conceived, the paper develops a strategy for educating this potential by applying a concept of love (eros) to a critical reading of the “pursuit of happiness” clause in the Declaration of Independence. At the center of the strategy is the claim that the pedagogic construction of democratic citizens can be deepened and extended when grounded in an explicit theory of educational eros. To better achieve “the nation,” to make America more democratic, more just, and therefore more beautiful, I believe part of our task as public pedagogues must be to creatively re-politicize the iconic meaning narratives of American identity. I argue that the “inalienable right to the pursuit of happiness” as one of these narratives, has for too long been treated in classrooms as if its meaning is permanently settled. This dominant pedagogical bias against reexamining vital political ideas, such as the pursuit of happiness and the like, tames the power of the national scripture and gives the phrase a politically static, conservative cast, one that, for example, could never be expected to disturb the moral legitimacy of America’s antidemocratic, oligarchic structure of public education. I want to disturb this legitimacy. What my alternative stance implies is that iconic phrases such as “the pursuit of happiness, the right to revolution, to insure domestic tranquility, to promote the general welfare, We the People” among others, ought to be pedagogically reconceived and mined anew for their capacity to intensify our encounter with the contradictions in American culture.2
