The Endangered Virtues essay series is an online volume, written by members of Hoover’s Boyd and Jill Smith Task Force on Virtues of a Free Society that rests on several shared convictions: that the American constitutional tradition is a source of wisdom about the mutual dependence of liberty and virtue and the tension between them; that the tradition places primary responsibility for the cultivation of the virtues on which liberty depends not on government but on the institutions of civil society, particularly the family and faith but also on education, work, and civic life; that in recent decades and owing to a variety of causes—social, cultural, economic, and political—those virtues and the sources that sustain have been exposed to danger and are weakening; and that renewing the virtues and the sources that sustain them is an urgent task.

There seems no easy way around the conclusion that the citizenry's civic knowledge is in a state of grave disrepair. As citizenship becomes more passive, civic knowledge becomes more unnatural--the consequence of schooling rather than doing. Yet civic knowledge, especially about constitutional essentials and recent political history, remains an essential virtue for citizens. Civic knowledge is the basis for holding opinions, and having opinions is empowering, not only because the opinionated argue and agitate, but also because they vote.