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Hi, I'm Corey Turner.

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

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 Jeffrey, 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. And I'm sitting

back like, yeah, I've been waiting for this. Like, I was just going to go there, 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, until her historian dad pointed it out.

...