Hi, I'm Corey Turner.

I'm Ani Kamenets and this is NPR's Life Kids.

In this episode, just one day before the big election, 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 Jeffery, a history professor at the Ohio State University who

gave a TED Talk just before the pandemic back in February 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 tiny handprints 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.

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

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

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

I'm like, okay, let's go ahead and memorize it, but we're going to have a conversation

about its applicability afterward.

And it was so interesting because she started talking to my profounders.

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.

...