Amid the mass of celebrity gossip and scandal, actor Richard Dreyfuss, has a message worthy of some attention.

Dreyfuss has been in the news recently not because he’s been arrested, divorced or offensive. On the contrary, he has been drawing coverage because of his campaign to increase civics education in America.

The Academy Award-winning actor has gone back to school, studying civics and democracy at the University of Oxford for several years. Now, he’s using the mass media to try to teach Americans a lesson about their precious and fragile republic. It’s a system we too often take for granted and, if we don’t give it the attention it deserves, Dreyfuss says, it will simply disappear.

In a recent appearance on HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher,” Dreyfuss decried what he called “our partisan-addicted society.” Our partisanship, he said, makes us fearful of open discussion of complex ideas, the kind of discussion that should take place in civics classes in schools across the nation.

Skills like reason, logic, clarity, dissent, civility and debate are essential tools of democracy, he said, and “without them you can kiss this thing (democracy) goodbye.”

We may think these skills come naturally, but in our politically divided society that isn’t always the case.

“You have to teach it : if you don’t then you will lose it to fundamentalists of any stripe,” Dreyfuss said. “You will lose it to stupidity, you will lose it to the darkness.”

So is Dreyfuss being dramatic? Of course he is; he’s an actor. But he also has an important message for Americans and their public schools. In recent years, as U.S. schools have struggled to reach federal mandates for teaching math and reading, lessons about the wonders of our democracy and responsibilities of citizenship have sometimes fallen by the wayside.

Former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor also is among those fighting the battle for civics education, noting that civics isn’t a required course in many schools and citing a 2001 study that showed 57 percent of the nation’s high school seniors scored below the basic level in U.S. history.

So although Dreyfuss’ message sounds dramatic, it may be no more dramatic than the consequences for this country if residents don’t learn to appreciate and fulfill their personal responsibility for their own government. “Unless we teach the ideas that make America a miracle in government – a miracle,” Dreyfuss said, “: then it will go away in your kids’ lifetime, and we will be a fable.”

Could it happen? Could the government Abraham Lincoln envisioned in his Gettysburg Address, the government “of the people, by the people, for the people,” actually “perish from the earth”?

Observers often ask how various American leaders will be viewed by history. Perhaps the question we really should ask is how history will judge the individual American residents of today and the care or neglect they showed toward their “miracle” of democracy.