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Hi, I'm Corey Turner.

I'm Anya Kamenetz, and this is NPR's Life Kit.

In this episode, we're going to talk about civics and how to raise kids who are confident, active citizens.

And we're going to start with a story about a father and a founding father.

The father is Hassan Kwame Jeffries, a history professor at the Ohio State University who gave a TED talk just before the

pandemic about a trip he took to James Madison's cellar. I feel these ridges in the brick,

and it takes a second to realize what they are. What they are are are tinyprints because all of the bricks at James Madison's estate

were made by the children that he enslaved. Hassan, who is black, has three daughters, and his

oldest, who's in fifth grade now, recently started learning civics in school, specifically about the Constitution.

And I'm sitting back like, yeah, I've been waiting for this.

Like, I was this going to go down, right?

Last night, she was like, yeah, you know, we were challenged to memorize the preamble.

I'm like, okay, go ahead, memorize it.

But we're going to have a conversation about its applicability afterward.

And it was so interesting because she started talking about the founders.

So Hassan's daughter had been at the audience at that TED talk he did,

but she hadn't quite put it together that that James Madison was the same James Madison

who helped

write this constitution that she was learning about. Yeah, she didn't realize it, that is,

...