Christopher Phillips, author and specialist in the Socratic Method, posed his first question to the large crowd in attendance in the Sun Room at the Memorial Union on Tuesday.

The author wanted to know what word appears multiple times in China’s constitution, but never appears in the United States’ own Constitution.

Figured it out yet?

The answer is democracy. For a word that is so commonly used to describe our nation, it is not the chosen word used by our Constitutions framers. In fact, the way in which our government is described in our Constitution is as a Constitutional Representative Republic.

If you didn’t get the answer right, don’t worry, neither did the majority of those in attendance of Phillips’ lecture. The lecture, which encompassed the ideas of Phillips latest book, “Constitution Cafe,” posed many questions for those listening and received answers in the form of raised hands.

“How many of you have read the Constitution?”

A very small number raised their hands.

“How many of you like [the Constitution]?”

The crowd seemed surprised by this question and the majority of hands slowly raised, as if it was a trick question.

“How many of you have ever been asked if this is how you wish to be governed?”

Not a single hand raised.

“The framers never asked their fellow Americans what they wanted,” said Phillips, who then continued with a brief history lesson on our nation’s most important document.

Phillips has traveled the country to ask people what they think the Constitution should say, if it should be updated and if it represents the American people. He called these discussions “constitution cafrs” and wrote the ideas of his fellow Americans into his book.

The majority of people that Phillips talked to could find at least one thing in the Constitution they would change, whether it be the wording of a sentence, the adding of “he” and “she” to the document so women are represented, or changing the idea of an entire section of the document.

Phillips asked a wide range of people what they wanted in their Constitution, from the young, like a group of Boy Scouts, to the old.

“It gave them a deep understanding of the accomplishment of the framers,” said Phillips, who has written four books on political and Socratic philosophy and two children’s books. “I am trying to first spark a conversation about the Constitution.”

Carolyn Susa, freshman in pre-landscape architecture, felt that Phillips was “on to something” when it comes to the idea of possibly revising our Constitution.

“I think part of what’s great about a democracy is that it can be changed,” Susa said.

Phillips also pointed out in his lecture that Thomas Jefferson, one of our Founding Fathers, felt that the future citizens of the United States should continue to make changes to the Constitution in “the higher hope that we can continually work to better govern ourselves.”