By Ralph Nader (2012)
Editor’s note (context & sources): This article draws from Ralph Nader’s 2012 Fall Convocation remarks at Gettysburg College and includes descriptive material provided by the College about the event’s origins and purpose. It also incorporates analysis and framing from Dorothy Lennon’s Aug. 11, 2025 article, “The Oligarchy Pushes Corporate Vales to Destroy Civic Values,” which recounts Nader’s key questions to students and situates his career within broader corporate–political dynamics. Full references appear at the end.
We teach our children how to shop, not how to show up. By adolescence, most American kids know their way around malls, drive-thrus, and brand names. But ask how many have sat through a town meeting, witnessed a city council vote, or watched a judge swear in a jury—and the hands fall. That is not a minor parenting choice; it’s a civic emergency. If freedom is, as Cicero put it, participation in power, then childhood without civic practice is freedom unlearned.
This is a plea to parents, teachers, and students: reorient childhood’s field trips. Fewer burgers, more townhalls. Fewer aisles, more public forums. Fewer “likes,” more questions at the microphone. A republic cannot be maintained by spectators raised in food courts.
Why this message—and why now
About Fall Convocation. In 1984, a group of Gettysburg College students created Fall Convocation because the campus wasn’t gathering often enough to wrestle with current issues. The tradition continues as a campus-wide forum for engaging ideas and advocating change in our nation and world. In 2012, I spoke there as a consumer advocate, lawyer, author, and former Green Party presidential candidate—an opportunity to connect the struggle for justice to that year’s presidential race and, more importantly, to the daily work of citizenship.
The diagnostic moment. As Dorothy Lennon recounts, I asked students a simple sequence:
How many of you have been to McDonald’s? To Starbucks? To Walmart?
(Most hands went up.)How many have attended a city council meeting? A town hall with your member of Congress? Visited a prison as a citizen observer?
(Hardly any hands.)
The point wasn’t shaming. It was diagnosis. There has been such a corporate capture of culture that the thought of fulfilling our civic responsibility doesn’t even cross the mind. We grow up commercial; we do not grow up civic.
Charity or justice? Teach the difference early
We praise children for charity—donating canned goods, serving at a soup kitchen. Good. But charity addresses symptoms. Justice addresses causes. A child who learns to serve on Saturday and stays silent on Monday about why the pantry is needed is being tutored in half-citizenship. Parents can close the gap with a habit as simple as asking, after every charitable act, “What produced this need—and who has the authority to fix it?”
Justice education is prevention education: safer cars before injuries, clean air before asthma, living wages before hunger. It trains children to track problems back to policy and power—not just pity.
Curiosity. Concentration. Imagination. (Pack them for the townhall.)
Albert Einstein said he had “no special gifts, only a passionate curiosity.” Isaac Newton credited his edge to the ability to keep a problem in mind longer than his peers—concentration. William Blake answered, “I live with my imagination.” These are not museum quotes; they are parental lesson plans.
A curious child will ask a school board why a playground has peeling paint. A focused child will read the budget line items. An imaginative child will propose a better design. Civic life rewards these muscles. Screens weaken them. Townhalls strengthen them.
“Growing up corporate” vs. growing up civic
As Lennon writes, more Americans have visited Walmart, Starbucks, or McDonald’s than a town hall or city council meeting. That saturation shapes expectations. When children “grow up corporate,” their map of power is commercial: what to buy, where to buy, how to buy. When they “grow up civic,” their map is public: what we own, how it’s governed, whom it serves. The first teaches impulse; the second teaches accountability. Parents decide which map their children memorize.
Three questions to ask power (teach them early):
- Where is your evidence?
- What is your legal authority?
- Do you have skin in the game?
These turn spectators into investigators—useful at a budget hearing, a school assembly, or a congressional town hall.
A brief civic history parents should share
For over four decades, the consumer movement showed that organized citizens can win life-saving reforms. Under relentless pressure from public-interest groups, we secured seatbelts and airbags, created watchdog agencies (EPA, OSHA, CPSC), strengthened the Safe Drinking Water Act, improved food safety, and opened government files with the Freedom of Information Act. That record didn’t appear by magic; it came from tenacity, facts, and mobilized public sentiment.
Corporate America noticed. In 1971, corporate attorney Lewis Powell circulated his now-famous memo urging business leaders to organize systematically in politics, academia, and media—a blueprint for the modern lobbying and think-tank ecosystem. He mentioned me by name. Months later, he was nominated to the Supreme Court. By the Reagan era, the combined force of corporate PACs, K Street lobbyists, and well-funded think tanks crowded citizen advocates out of key corridors. When I ran for president with the Green Party in 2000, many in the two major parties reduced the message to “spoiler” talk rather than debate the substance. But the way out was never to retreat from citizenship—it was to deepen it.
Lesson for families: Institutions, left unattended, drift toward concentrated power. The antidote is not cynicism but participation—persistent, informed, organized.
From knowledge to action: the civic personality
We know more than we do. That gap isn’t an intelligence problem; it’s an application problem. The bridge from knowing to doing is what I call the civic personality: resilience, shared credit, patience, and fire in the belly. Children absorb it the way they absorb any habit—by seeing it practiced.
Bring them to the “boring” parts of democracy: the roll-call vote, the ordinance markup, the budget amendment. Let them watch you speak for three minutes at the mic without flinching. Let them see you lose, come back, and win on the second try. The lesson is not only that power can be challenged; it’s that persistence is power.
A parent’s syllabus: three civic labs to start this month
1) Congress 101 (or City Hall 101).
Pick your U.S. representative, state legislator, or city council member. Track them weekly with your child. What votes did they cast? What funds did they accept? What hearings did they skip? Post the facts on a simple blog or school bulletin. Knowledge, consistently shared, builds leverage.
2) Citizen Science.
Turn chemistry and biology homework into community service. Test water for lead and cadmium. Take soil samples near playgrounds. Log air quality near truck routes. Share results with agencies and local media. Science for the people is the fastest way to show kids that numbers can protect neighbors.
3) Freedom of Information Fridays.
One afternoon a month, file a simple public-records request with your child: school maintenance logs, vendor contracts, police use-of-force summaries. When the documents arrive, read them together and decide on one follow-up question. Democracy runs on paper—and it’s empowering to read it.
Equal stages for all: fix the forum, not just the vote
A healthy democracy offers real options and real leverage. That means debates and townhalls should include all ballot-qualified candidates, not just two pre-screened by big donors. If your library, school, or civic center hosts politically flavored events, insist on equal access as a condition of using public venues. Let your child help write the ground rules: equal time, shared questions, posted RSVPs.
When stages are fair, young people learn that fairness isn’t a sermon—it’s a standard we enforce.
The $15-billion thought experiment (train the imagination)
If 17 public-spirited billionaires handed you and your child $15 billion to improve America in one year—how would you spend it? On what mechanisms? With what timeline? For which communities first? This is not a game; it’s a discipline. It forces kids to imagine institutions worthy of their ideals: watchdog groups in every congressional district, public-interest law clinics, neighborhood ombuds offices, universal broadband with public oversight, free civics apprenticeships for high-schoolers. Imagination is the mother of organization.
What campuses owe our kids—and what kids can demand
Every university should teach civic skills, not just civics history: how to run a news conference, draft a petition, analyze a budget, map a power structure, use the Freedom of Information Act, organize a watchdog group, design a fair public forum. If your local college doesn’t offer it, push for it. If your school board doesn’t host nonpartisan debates, insist that it does. Children who see institutions bend toward fairness learn that fairness is not an abstraction; it’s a habit.
Practical steps for parents (swap a habit, change a life)
- Swap one outing a month. Townhall instead of take-out. Council chamber over checkout line.
- Bring a notebook. Model how to take names, record votes, and write follow-ups.
- Ask one question at every meeting. Let your child draft it.
- Follow one issue for a year. Safer crosswalks, bus shelters, clean school air, translation at public meetings—win something real.
- Celebrate process, not just victory. Civic joy blooms when kids feel the doing counts.
A country that teaches its children to consume more skillfully than it teaches them to govern will get more consumers than citizens—and consumers will always be ruled by citizens. Reverse the lesson. Raise citizens.
Stop by the council chamber before the combo meal. Take the long way home by the library auditorium. Let your kids see where power gathers—and how ordinary people, prepared and persistent, can make it listen. The golden arches will still be there tomorrow. The public microphone may not.
Townhalls, not McDonalds. That is how you grow a democracy.
References
- Gettysburg College Fall Convocation (2012) — Event Description. “In 1984, Fall Convocation was initiated by a group of Gettysburg College students… Today’s Fall Convocation continues this tradition… Ralph Nader… will relate the struggle for justice to the outcome of the 2012 presidential race and share ways to inspire us to take charge of America’s democracy.”
- Dorothy Lennon. “The Oligarchy Pushes Corporate Vales to Destroy Civic Values,” Aug. 11, 2025. Recounts Nader’s 2012 Gettysburg exchange with students (McDonald’s/Starbucks/Walmart vs. townhall/city council/prison visits), summarizes Nader’s reform record (airbags, seatbelts, FOIA, EPA, Safe Drinking Water Act, food-safety reforms, right-to-know), the 1971 Powell Memo, and the later corporate–political response that narrowed civic space.
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