Yes...seems we must spell it out for the constitutional lawyers TOO!...always with an alternative translation...especially for those on the left...no need to figure out what the meaning of "The" is

My husband, a CPA and Sr. Tax Analyst for an intl. corp. planned to retire at 70, having held out past the Obama attempts to destroy the economy, he is still working part-time at 76! They keep bringing in thee young folks, who either fall asleep at their desks or fail to show up for work. So, they keep asking my husband to continue in his semi-retirement three days a week job. Being a very Left brain, Type A personality, this new lack of work ethic makes me crazy. McD's here is always a mess, cars lined up around the building, but no adult mangers, just more of the same they hire who don't show up or quit after a week.

One of my friends (age 64) recently took a job as general manager of a company that is owned by a couple of 30 somethings. (one is quite brilliant in his expert area.) The company was a success until recently and they realized they needed a hand from someone with more experience.
He has been giving the employees (all under 30s) plenty of chances to rehabilitate and become producers with work ethic. He has been setting an example, working 60+ hr weeks and constantly putting out fires created by the young and inexperienced. This week the hammer falls on the worst including a project manager who repeatedly misses deadlines and comes in late.
This is a new definition for the term "generation gap". People now over 50 may have to work til 80 until the next generation (now pre-teens) matures and can take on productive work. The current generation has so little work ethic in spite of their so-called education (and related debt.)
Obviously there are exceptions as there have been in every generation;^)

That's why a good editor can save a good book from being presented as trash.

Perhaps a simplified version of the Constitution and Declaration should be published so that our under-educated citizens can more easily read and understand them.

My whole life our society has been under attack from Russians and C{USA, mostly through stalth attempts to work from within the US, esp. schools. We have let our schools be place of indoctrination, until graduates can barely function. In the old days, a ninth grad education which is all some workers got, left them proficient in math. Not so today. Today, student sin high school are getting outside training to learn to have a conversation, to know you have to go to work every day, and on time! They are not getting this in government schools. They cannot understand the Bill of Right, cannot read "Atlas Shrugged", cannot even finish "1984". How can a society based on the Constitution endure with such ignorance, which was paid for by one of the highest per pupil spenind of any country!

the land of the free...BECAUSE of the brave...

It sounds like you think people today accept gov't as a Leviathan to keep them safe from themselves and others. They are less concerned with the details of how that Leviathan works. Do you think that's more true today or in 1776?

I do not know about "most people" (on Earth) but I do think that most Americans believe that they own their own lives and are morally free to do as they wish as long as they do not hurt others. But I also see in that that "most Americans" believe that the purpose of government is to control other people. A realistic "Pledge of Allegiance" would go, "I accept the govenment as a prevention against my own predatory nature; and I recognize that if not bound by the laws of society, I would be a danger to myself long before I could threaten others." Just sayin'...

As for "most people" (on Earth), I know that I have cited "Success of the WEIRD People." Western Educated Industrialized Rational Democratic people are not natural. Ten teams of anthropologists went around the world and gave people some basic college psychology tests on physical perception (optical illusions) and social behavior. As dangerous as it is to try to generalize our Paleolithic past from today's so-called "primitives" the fact is that here and now today, some hunters wait until everyone is asleep before they come home so that they do not have to share while in another tribe hunters come home boasting of their kills so that other people become beholden to them for food. Our social norms of personal production and sharing by trade are special to us.

I think that those social norms are at the room of our political rights, freedoms, and liberties.

I wonder how many people understand the basic idea that their life is theirs and the state is something humans construct to ensure people to not hit or steal in various times: the age of The Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights 1689, The Declaration of Independence, or our modern times.

It's not simple. There are people today who go to the financial aid office of a state college, borrow money with federal loans, and then complain later when the loans are hard to replay, "I did everything I was told." So we are far from some utopia of liberty. But I wonder how many people around the time of the Declaration of Independence would have felt like they had a duty follow their families' instructions, to provide care for ailing family members, to make up for original sin by submitting to God's will, to follow in their parents' career and life footsteps, and so on.

It feels like on the balance liberty is on the rise, but I don't know of the facts agree with that. I suspect many of those people at cookouts who could not follow the language of the Declaration of Independence agree completely with its tenor.

I have a reprint of Noah Webster's 1828 American Dictionary of the English Language from the Foundation for American Christian Education. I bought it about 20 years ago with egold that I earned writing content for a libertarian website.

Having a dictionary that is at least a hundred years old helps also. The meaning of many words have changed. Some radically!

Good point. The idea does not just apply to that Declaration. A good deal of government statements are difficult to understand not just because of complexity and vocabulary but due to bad writing. At the risk of being labeled a conservative, I see a trend of declining writing -and therefore also of reading- skills in business as well as government.
Solution?
Return to conventional education RRr, and efforts to write more clearly and when necessary more simply.

I see your point, one must be accustomed to the use of language at that time in history as well.

I actually kind of fancy that use of language...it sometimes creeps into my writings. I had a lot of trouble with that writing my first book.

Thanks to all the practice I get interacting with good writers here at the gulch.

Well, honestly, it does require a college education to understand the Declaration of Independence. Realize, of course, that it took Einstein and Planck to create the physics that we teach to children as algebra or just ideas. So, yes, in 9th grade or earlier, you can start teaching the the D of I.

That said, if you had to read such a document cold, not knowing it in advance, it would take a lot of learning to get it the first time. Aside from the ideas presented, the sentences are long and complicated.

That is just one reason why it is such a tribute to the people of the time. When they said that a commoner was "literate" they meant something in excess of what we understand by "educated."

Woodie wilson's, stalin like useful idiots with the help of revised history creating useless idiots.
To be fair, Many teachers I have talked to these days say they are forbidden from speaking of such things and they don't like it...but they do manage to encourage their students to read it and ask questions.

Accurate history is necessary to understand the sentiments behind the Declaration but it certainly doesn't require an undergraduate degree to understand it nor to read it.

One might say, there are many parallels experience these days with our current government.

Where is the reading level to understand the Declaration of Independence taught today? Who taught the teachers?