Yesterday, the Eisenhower Memorial Commission saw a revised proposal for the Eisenhower Memorial, designed by architect Frank Gehry. (More background on the proposal’s controversy here and here.)

With Eduardo Saverin, the Facebook co-founder, renouncing his American citizenship and Michele Bachmann withdrawing her dual citizenship (she had become a Swiss citizen in March), the rights and responsibilities of being an American citizen are still very much up for debate.

Writing for The Atlantic, former Clinton speechwriter and creator of the Guiding Lights Weekend conference on citizenship Eric Liu argues for the return of the amateur citizen. Unlike other fields in which the rise of the amateur is celebrated, “the work of democratic life,” he notes, “has become ever more professionalized.”

The Washington Examiner reports that revisions to the proposed Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial will be revealed on Tuesday.

Funded by the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, Teachers College at Columbia University has developed a social studies and mathematics curriculum to teach high school students about the federal budget and fiscal responsibility.

In their Wall Street Journal op-ed, Cheryl Miller and Jonathan E. Hillman argued that the military could strengthen ROTC on Ivy League campuses by creating new coursework and offering classes taught by its top officers. Now, the New York Times reports that Ivy League schools are hiring former military officers to teach, based, in part, on the popularity of Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s  seminar on leadership, which “is nearly as hard to get into as Yale itself: this past semester some 200 students applied for a coveted 20 spots.”

As another school year draws to a close, graduating ROTC cadets across the nation are being commissioned as officers in the U.S. military. This past Thursday, Gen. (Ret.) Colin Powell administered the commissioning oath to 13 Northeastern University cadets who were made 2nd lieutenants in the Army.

Over at Education Week, Erik Robelen writes that “as states seek waivers under the federal No Child Left Behind Act, one effect may be to chip away at the dominance reading and math have had when it comes to school accountability.”

Over the past year, the recently dedicated Martin Luther King Jr. (MLK) Memorial and the planned Eisenhower Memorial have renewed controversy about the meaning and purpose of public memorials. What do America’s memorials and monuments tell us about our nation and our identity as citizens? How should we memorialize past events and individuals? In this event, co-sponsored by the Program on American Citizenship and the National Civic Art Society, a distinguished panel will address these questions and comment on the MLK and Eisenhower memorials.

In a new report by AEI’s Program on American Citizenship, Cheryl Miller and the Center on Reinventing Public Public Education’s Robin Lake examine the role that charter schools play in strengthening civic education. As the report explains,

Charter schools provide an intriguing opportunity to rethink the role of public schools in preparing students to become informed and engaged participants in the American political system. As public schools of choice, charter schools are freed from many rules and regulations that can inhibit innovation and improvement. They can readily adopt best practices in civic education and encourage (or even mandate) extracurricular activities to enhance civic learning. With their decentralized approach to administration, they can allow parents and students a far greater role in school governance than they would have in traditional public schools.

Read more after the jump.

The U.S. Citizenship Test is a required step in the naturalization process. All U.S. citizenship applicants, with some exceptions, must pass the citizenship test before taking the Oath of Allegiance and officially becoming U.S. citizens. Do you have what it takes to be a citizen? Take the test after the jump.

From the Wall Street Journal: One year after Congress voted to repeal “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” elite universities such as Harvard, Yale and Columbia have ended Vietnam-era bans on the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) with highly publicized signing ceremonies among senior military officers and university leaders. Yet for all the fanfare, Yale is the only university that will have cadets training on campus next fall.

From The Weekly Standard: What exactly do we celebrate on Veterans Day? To be sure, we mean to honor the brave men and women, living and dead, who have fought America’s battles, past and present. But honor them how, and for what? About these matters, we lack a clear national answer.

From the New York Post: The re-embrace of ROTC by elite schools marks the end of a shameful chapter in our nation’s history. But ROTC cadets on these campuses—indeed, across much of the nation—still face serious obstacles to their aspiration to serve their country.