Shilo Brooks
Shilo Brooks is President and CEO of the George W. Bush Presidential Center and a Professor of Practice in the Department of Political Science at Southern Methodist University. He previously served as Executive Director of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions and writes and lectures on American democracy, political thought, civic leadership, liberal education, and the ethics of science and technology.
Liberal Education Is a Condition of the American Republic
Shilo Brooks, president and CEO of the George W. Bush Presidential Center, argues that America’s 250th anniversary should be treated as a test of civic formation, not an exercise in commemoration. In a conversation with the Aspen Institute’s Todd Breyfogle, Brooks makes the case that self-government depends on liberal education: citizens reading seriously, examining their own false convictions, practicing moderation, and learning to argue without contempt. His warning is that civic ignorance is not just an educational failure but a constitutional problem for a republic in which the people are meant to rule.
The Declaration’s Promise Now Depends on Political Reform and Shared Symbols
At the Aspen Ideas Festival session “General Assembly: The Idea of America,” Danielle Allen, Martha Jones, Shilo Brooks and Reihan Salam treated the Declaration of Independence as a living inheritance whose authority now depends on more than anniversary reverence. Their shared dispute was over what must sustain its claim of equality in a changed country: Allen emphasized institutional reform and democratic accountability, Jones insisted on confronting slavery, citizenship and present contradictions, Shilo Brooks stressed the moral and philosophical force behind equality, and Salam argued that a credal nation still needs a culture capable of carrying shared symbols across demographic change.