Mr. McT is something of a local legend. Our very own Ridge High School class valedictorian, leading his class as student president at Dartmouth College, a successful career on Wall Street, serving on the Summit Common Council …whatever you can name, he’s probably done it! 

But in spite of all that Mr. McT has accomplished, we’ve neglected his passion for the actual subject he teaches. In honor of the true spirit of AP Gov, it’s time to interrogate Mr. McT and procure his deepest, darkest, funniest answers to the burning questions we don’t have time to ask him in class.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

IQ: Mr. McT, you always find ways to make class exciting and interesting—telling funny personal stories or dressing up as George Washington on Halloween, for instance—to draw students to the subject. What about you? What about history and government in particular attracted you to teaching it?

MM: What I love about history is that it’s like a story. It has villains and heroes, messages and meaning, morals you can draw from it. It’s real. History tells you something about today. It can inform you on why things are the way they are, but it can also inform you on why maybe we should think a little differently about some things. 

Government is a little different. To me, government in its best form reflects the values of the people it governs. The US government isn’t perfect and doesn’t work for everyone. But I think it’s got potential to, and it’s set up so that it can get there. You can’t change it unless you understand it. That’s why I’m excited to teach that: because we want the system to be better.

IQ: Even though there’s a lot of things that we need to fix, people don’t give enough credit to the US government in particular. It was the first democratic experiment of its kind, but it’s really easy to forget that because you take everything that comes with it for granted.

MM: I think that’s a great way to look at it. I wouldn’t want to live under any other government. I love ours with its flaws and its warps. But it does do a lot of good. Sometimes I have to stop myself because I can be a little cynical about it.

IQ: Like your IRS story. [Mr. McT had told our class about an extremely mundane tax encounter with the IRS that ended up extremely long to resolve.]

MM: Exactly, but the reality is, it does do a lot of good stuff. You have to be able to acknowledge that.

IQ: Earlier, you talked about how there are villains and heroes in history. So I have a question about the anti-heroes of history. Why or why not do you think it’s important to respect controversial figures like our own founding fathers, for example, despite things they may have done that we don’t agree with?

MM: It’s important to understand that they’re human beings. Everyone has flaws. When I look at figures like that, I want to recognize what their motivations were and what they were trying to do. That doesn’t excuse mistakes they made, but again, were they trying to be purposeful in one way? Or was this a byproduct of a decision they made, trying to do some good somewhere? I try to not judge from a 2023 perspective. You have to look at them and the world that they lived in. 

The founding fathers are a perfect example of that insofar as they lived in a time where most of the world enslaved other people. It’s abhorrent from our perspective, but that’s not the world that they lived in. But you also have to respect the fact that they were creating something brand new. Did they create something perfect? No. They set up a system to make it more perfect. But they set up a system where people could advocate for change. It’s hard to completely throw them out into the political dustbin because we’re thinking about them from today’s view.

IQ: The founding fathers weren’t trying to create a perfect union, but rather one that would adapt over time and be flexible. 

MM: Yes. The framers recognized that humans were flawed. Like Madison said, if men were angels, we wouldn’t need a government. We’re not. 

IQ: We’ve been hovering over the topic of the American Revolution for a bit, so let’s go into that. When we talk about who inspired it—people like Locke, Voltaire, Montesquieu— I have a personal bias in favor of John Locke. Which philosopher, thinker, or orator do you believe was the most influential on our revolution? Which one is your favorite?

MM: They all definitely had some interesting ideas. I just read a biography of Samuel Adams. He was really radical. I had never understood just how much he drove the revolution from getting from “We don’t like taxes” to “let’s do something about it”. He was hugely influential and he’s kind of taken a backseat to the other fathers, because a lot of people didn’t like him. 

They were really fixated on the idea that you have rights, and they need to be protected. I often talk to other teachers about it. When you look back on the “tyranny” they were suffering under, they were really just asked to pay a little money on their stamps. Did it affect their lives that much? No, but it was the philosophical principle that was violated, and they took a really strong stand against that. I think they recognized that if you don’t abide by these rules, where does it lead? 

As for the Enlightenment thinkers, I really like Voltaire. He really gets the ideas of free speech and basic freedoms. These basic rights you have, we take a lot of it for granted. But if you look at current events today, they are being debated right now: what does it mean to have free speech? What’s protected? What goes too far? This is why what we talk about here is so important. Some people say the government should have the ability to restrict more, particularly with “hate speech”. But then you have to define that. Who gets to put the definition on that? Where does it cross the line? Everyone agrees that there is a boundary, but society debates what it is. And who gets to make that decision? These are all very interesting and very modern questions people are grappling with.

IQ: That question of the limit of free speech—people are going to be arguing about that for basically eternity. With Obergefell v. Hodges, for instance, I can see both sides. Yes, you’re discriminating against someone based on their sexual orientation. But at the same time, you shouldn’t be forced to make that cake. That’s forced labor. 

MM: Right, and these are difficult questions, because both sides of the argument make sense. How do you adjudicate that? 

IQ: We were just talking about how these are relevant and why we should pay attention to these issues. But the sad truth is that a lot of people are very civically unengaged. Not just kids, adults, too. Some of them don’t even know, for example, who the big players are in our presidential election. They say that these kinds of things don’t personally affect them that much. What would you say in response to that?

MM: It’s pretty troublesome. One thing that the country was good at, particularly at the state level, was creating an education system. Our education system was an investment that we made that has paid huge dividends. Society doesn’t value investment in education the way it should. It’s very difficult to see what the return on your investment is. That’s a reason you can argue teachers are underpaid—it’s because you don’t realize what the return you get on their teaching is. 

The sad thing is now, there are so many different ways people get news or information. And they don’t have a good understanding of the system. That’s why I worry. Ever since the advent of the smartphone, there’s been such a pull on people’s attention. I’m a high school teacher. I’m competing for students’ attention with companies that have billions of dollars invested into monopolizing young people’s attention. How do I compete with that? I don’t have billions of dollars to plan my lessons so that you’ll be mesmerized and get a dopamine hit every time! You look at how and where people learn now—fromTikTok and Instagram reels. I don’t want to demean those things, but the algorithms only give you what you want to hear.

IQ: I read an article about that. Social media companies are always analyzing how long you spent on each post, whether you liked it or not—that kind of thing. 

MM: They’re never challenging you. They’re giving you what you already want to hear or agree with. 

IQ: That can reinforce opinions people have on government, politics, or policy.

MM: It’s this self-perpetuating little bubble that people live in. Your ideas have to be checked and have to be challenged in order to learn and understand perspectives. No one’s always right.

IQ: Over time, you just keep shifting towards an extreme of one perspective. Also, anyone can put things on the internet. You don’t actually know whether the information’s accurate or not. Let’s shift back towards a more history-related topic. Regarding the tendency of history to repeat itself, what does that say about humanity as a species? Does it mean we’re doomed to make the same mistakes over and over again? What’s the outlook?

MM: I think I’m optimistic that humans can get it right. That doesn’t mean they will. I wish you could say we could get to a perfect place someday, but it takes effort. Most of the world suffers under totalitarianism to the detriment of people who live in those systems. That tells you that you have to understand how our system prevents that and how we can push it in different ways to be better. Most of history is bad. Understanding that gives you tools to do something different. 

IQ: But it gives you the chance of effecting that change, just understanding that it could happen. 

MM: Humans tend to cut corners and take the easy way out. If someone promises you this is the easy way to go, even with a tradeoff, people say they’re okay with that. And you get societies where people don’t push back or don’t understand what the longer-term implications of doing that are. Your rights get eroded little by little. Like Nazi Germany—no one stood up when this happened, no one stood up when that happened. And finally, no one stood up for you because no one was left. When you surrender your freedoms in little bits and pieces, it never comes all at once. 

IQ: You don’t even notice it until it’s all gone.

MM: These are the things where understanding history is crucial. So you can recognize the patterns and stand up. If somebody’s rights are infringed upon, it’s happening in other places, too. If you understand what happens in history, you will fight like anything to protect someone you don’t even know. Because it could be you someday.

IQ: This last one is a funny one. If your daughter didn’t force you to dress up as George Washington, which historical character would you have gone as?

MM: Good question! I was thinking of trying to do Henry VIII (it was probably too chilly to be Julius Caesar). 

IQ: You would have had to bulk up your physique to get ready for it! 

MM: I would have had to stuff a pillow under my shirt. 

IQ: Iconic. Thank you so much, Mr. McT!

MM: Thanks, Izzy, this was great!