Larry Wharton, an intellectual provocateur and former educational colleague of mine, blogged that he is distraught because heated dialogue in our nation cripples critical thinking and stifles action. He believes we should teach critical thinking beginning in high school, but we must have an essential set of shared national values that will guide our critical thinking on policy issues.

By critical thinking he means we are able to evaluate proposed national policies against a set of shared values, and then choose policies that fulfill those values. I propose seven values: life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, justice, health, domestic tranquility and common defense.

Wharton warns values may be ignored in policy debates by obstacles to effective critical thinking. Two barriers are the way we mishandle information. We treat new data as confirming what we already believe, and ignore sources that are too biased. Most of us accept news from confirmatory TV channels from hundreds of possibilities.

Two other obstacles are our personalities and motivations. Some prefer people values, while others abide by theoretical principles. Finally motivators may be disruptive by driving some to control, while others prefer to participate.

Education could make us aware of these obstacles and acknowledge them, helping us understand and listen to different perspectives.

There are two unconscious obstacles that may freeze our positions: fear and certainty. Whatever the reasons behind each, they both interfere with democratic processes on which our republic is founded. Our republic requires that from time-to-time we live with decisions that ramp up our fears or injure our egos. 

So given Wharton’s ambitious educational drive to overcome those limitations, he requests our five enduring values for our nation.  I reread our Declaration of Independence and US Constitution to distill an underlying set from our founding heroes.

First is the famous, “All [people] are created equal, with … rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”  

The Constitution’s Preamble declares its purpose as: “To form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare (at that time welfare was defined as health, happiness or prosperity, or in one word, well-being), and secure the blessings of liberty.

These values summarize into life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, justice, health, domestic tranquility and common defense. There are seven, but far be it from me to eliminate two values from the framers of our great nation.

For comparisons I found two organizations that stress values-based critical thinking. The American Values Network incorporates faith-based debate on moral issues in “preserving our values and heightening awareness of the key ingredients required for a prosperous society.”

The organization produced a Moral Values survey of US citizens in 2006 asking how people vote their values. The most frequent national values were eliminating poverty, guaranteeing access to health care and protecting personal freedoms and individual choices. Our founders’ seven cover them under life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, justice and health.

The second source I found was American Solutions. Their values begin with the Declaration of Independence statement. They emphasize individual actions guided by thought and moral conscience and a duty to take personal responsibility. Government’s role is to protect those rights with free enterprise and incentives as opposed to regulation and bureaucracy. The founders included these values under life, liberty, pursuit of happiness and insuring domestic tranquility.

The framers of our federal government explicitly wrote seven values into our Declaration of Independence and constitution. The values are life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, justice, health, domestic tranquility and common defense. Let’s learn how to limit policy debates to evaluate a policy’s ability to fulfill those seven values.