The importance of civic education is something every American seems to agree on. All U.S. states mandate some form of it in public schools, with 40 states requiring students to pass a civics course to graduate high school. And despite the wave of universities jettisoning their general education classes, many still require some form of American heritage or civics class.
However, underneath the surface, these classes are often taught in a way that undermines citizenship. In what follows we discuss these pitfalls and make a few proposals for rehabilitating civic education. In sum, we suggest that:
- A new paradigm is needed for understanding America’s heritage.
- Forming students’ love for the United States should be the primary goal of American heritage and civics classes.
- We can best help future citizens love their nation by focusing their attention on the most formative, heroic, and beautiful parts of its tradition.
The Use and Abuse of Civics
If you check in on your local college’s American heritage class, you will likely find it’s doing the opposite of what it was intended to do.
At its best, well-meaning professors and teachers have turned the gripping story of America into dry-as-dust litanies of “key terms” and facts. Students read mangled “excerpts” amputated from poor, unsuspecting speeches—all of which are promptly forgotten—while “teaching” is often relegated to showing video clips in class.
At its worst, civics has been overtaken by globalist rabble-rousers who want to destroy the very concepts of citizenship and patriotism altogether. The 1619 Project curriculum’s widespread use in public schools is well known. But disproportionate emphasis on it obscures the fact that civics classes in many K-12 schools and institutions of higher education have long been little more than thinly veiled versions of the Two Minutes Hate.
Narrowly focusing on racial and sexual oppression, these classes twist American history into a heavy-handed melodrama of abuse, grievance, and self-interest. The goal is to manufacture woke activists bent on overturning the rule of bourgeois oppressors. Virtue consists of being inclusive “global citizens,” and vice of being exclusive and patriotic. The all-but-explicit goal of such classes is to form rebels, not citizens.
These pedagogies actively undermine our nation’s civic life. We must bear in mind that the substance and root of America lie in our particular affections, traditions, and habits. These—and these only—should form the basis of American heritage classes.
What Is Our American Heritage?
We Americans show that we are the heirs of Western civilization by our instinctual faith that people ought to vote for their rulers—a tradition of self-government stretching all the way back to ancient Greece and Rome. But we are a particular kind of Westerner, interpreting this tradition in light of the distinct habits and loves of the English-speaking peoples from which our culture sprang. The British developed specific notions of the rule of law, the rights of citizens against government, and concrete protections for those rights (like the jury system).
However, we Americans are far more fervently attached than our British cousins to the idea that government comes from consent, and that people have equal, individual rights. We believe there are certain things a government simply ought not to do. To advance the common good, we rely not on the state but on churches, charitable associations, and voluntary groups of citizens.
Our foundational charters explicitly base our civic order on these premises. Perhaps most Americans can no longer explain why these principles are so. But that they are so is still taken for granted. Underlying these instincts is a long tradition of constitutionalism and Christian natural law theory, derived from our Founding and the colonial era. Modern Americans may assume that all people think as we do, but the fact is that these principles were first fully developed in America, and are held nowhere else as fervently. Here, then, we have the basis for a distinctly American culture and heritage.
This is contrary to the “melting pot” thesis often emphasized in modern American heritage classes, which downplays or denies a distinct American heritage by portraying the nation as an endless flux of immigrant subcultures. Those who came for a “new and better life” flocked here not merely because of the boundless opportunities, but because of the just and mild laws that encouraged ownership of property and enabled those opportunities.
Those laws were, and are, the outworking of the early American character: industrious, independent, religious, and self-controlled. These ideals are central to our heritage—the headwaters of our cultural stream—and should be the primary focus of American heritage education. They bind all Americans together as equal members of one national family, regardless of ancestry or birthplace.
American heritage classes should showcase what is most formative and central to the story of our nation: those people and things that were foundational to creating and preserving the conditions for the “pursuit of happiness” that is our American birthright.
The fundamental aim of American heritage and civics classes should be to form affection, reverence, and gratitude for our inheritance, not just to fill students’ heads with facts about it, or worse, use it to cultivate “critical thinking skills” where students criticize our heritage before they even understand it. After all, what does it profit a citizen if he knows a laundry list of key civic terms and facts, yet despises his nation?
A successful American heritage class teaches the Constitution and facts of our civic life, of course, but it does so to inspire love for them. Teachers and professors should keep in mind that the objective is not to paint a complete historical picture that examines every nuance of every era, branch of government, or foible of every major figure (this is better left to a more specialized American history or government course). This by no means excludes honest teaching about our nation’s sins, villains, or struggles to maintain virtue.
Instead, a successful class contextualizes those struggles and shows how we have had to fight to live up to our ancient principles despite constant temptations to abandon them. Without this underlying reverence for their nation’s past, why would citizens be willing to endure the cost of resisting new evils in the present and the future?
The Heroic Foundations of Our Heritage
If the aim of American heritage classes is to form citizens who love their country, teachers should view themselves as curators, gathering the most heroic, excellent, and beautiful parts of our nation’s past for their students to enjoy.
We include here what we hope is a suggestive, though not exhaustive, list of figures and topics that are central to the story of our American nation. Our hope is that it will help teachers focus on key figures and themes.
The best way to learn about these individuals, documents, and artifacts is by getting as close to them as one can. Use primary sources—but avoid small excerpts, which lose coherence out of context and prevent students from encountering the beauty of the original document. Read Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address in its entirety, study all five paintings in Thomas Cole’s “Course of Empire” series, and listen to Stephen Foster’s “Hard Times Come Again No More.”
Heroic Statesmen and Warriors
Deserving of primary attention are those who founded our nation and secured the conditions for our freedom. Without the sacrifices of men like John Winthrop, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Ulysses S. Grant, America as we know it would not exist. To this day our character as a people has been cast in the mold these heroes created and preserved.
Many American heritage or civics classes discuss the Declaration of Independence’s philosophical preamble, but neglect its solemn conclusion—that “we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.” Our founding fathers swore to uphold this oath to establish our nation—and all remained true to that oath despite many suffering grievous loss.
Of the 56 signers of the Declaration, 12 fought as soldiers in the War for Independence, five were captured and imprisoned, 17 lost their property at the hands of the British, and five lost their entire fortunes helping finance the war. Even those who didn’t fight on the battlefield (for instance, John Adams, John Jay, and Thomas Jefferson) sacrificed their ease and wealth to help navigate our nation’s early crises. Such heroic courage should be a centerpiece of any American heritage class.
Along with the statesmen already mentioned, others should be emphasized, including Thomas Jefferson, John Marshall, and Andrew Jackson. Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Lyndon B. Johnson and other 20th-century Progressives and their heirs who critiqued the Founding and—for better or worse—succeeded in refashioning the government along centralized, European lines should be studied as well.
Foundational Political Documents
Next in order of importance are the organic laws through which the statesmen and heroes of our past gave form and structure to our nation. These include the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, the Northwest Ordinance, the U.S. Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and later amendments like the 13th and 14th, as well as the Federalist and key Supreme Court decisions that interpret the Constitution.
These laws are the culmination of a centuries-long struggle that began in Greece and Rome, reaching its climax in the 17th and 18th centuries as the American people fought for self-government. Students should be inducted into the full drama of their creation, including the cast of characters and events that brought about the American republic.
Pioneers, Pastors, and Reformers
Our happiness as Americans is often affected by forces that emanate from society even more than from government itself. American heritage classes should praise those citizens who demonstrated heroic virtue, whether they served the common good by opening up new lands for settlement (Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, Kit Carson), reforming societal ills (Frederick Douglass and Ida Tarbell), or acting as spokesmen for the American church and conscience (Jonathan Edwards, Charles Finney, Fulton J. Sheen, and Billy Graham).
Artists, Writers, and Inventors
The virtuous “pursuit of happiness” is impossible without beauty, leisure, and industry. Our nation’s creators have profoundly influenced the culture that is our heritage. Students should know the fathers of American art, especially Thomas Cole, who founded the Hudson River School of landscape painting and immortalized the landscape of our continent. They should know Winslow Homer and his 20th-century descendants in the Ashcan school and the Wyeth family.
Writers and poets who defined our national consciousness should receive attention, particularly Robert Frost, Mark Twain, Washington Irving, Owen Wister, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Louisa May Alcott, and James Fenimore Cooper. Similarly, musicians should be emphasized like Stephen Foster, Miles Davis, Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan, and Johnny Cash, as well as those outstanding scientists and inventors who paved the way for the material blessings we enjoy today: the Wright Brothers, Robert Fulton, Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, and Henry Ford.
National Songs and Symbols
Finally, no American heritage class is complete without studying the anthems and symbols of our national life. Students often only know these superficially. Once they are introduced to the symbolism, stories, and meaning behind them, their appreciation of their nation often deepens considerably.
Apart from obvious examples like the American flag and the national anthem, teachers should dwell on the poetic lyrics of “America the Beautiful” and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” the reasons the nation adopted the Pledge of Allegiance, the symbolism and classical roots of the Great Seal of the United States, and how Columbia, Lady Liberty, and Uncle Sam came to be the visual embodiments of our people and traditions.
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Admittedly, what we have laid out here is a lofty view of American heritage and civics classes—one that requires far more than merely knowing what a textbook says. But we are convinced that our heritage and our students deserve no less.
Our conviction is quite simple: these classes exist to form virtuous American citizens, and unless they are accomplishing that, they are failing our students and our nation. The celebration of our semiquincentennial has brought to the fore a sense that renewal is at hand and possible. There is no better time to reform American civic education. May we not waste it.