Education Remains the Key to Good Citizenship

By Richard Lorenc

Monday, January 19, 2026

 

One of the primary motivations for instituting compulsory schooling in the United States was the need to assimilate immigrants.

 

Today, however, it’s not so much recent immigrants who need the schooling, it’s native-born Americans. The more removed they are from the experiences and motivations of parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents who immigrated, the less they seem to understand, much less appreciate, the ideas and values that inspire America — ideas such as freedom of expression and religion, the rule of law, and the chance to spectacularly succeed (or spectacularly fail and have an opportunity to try again).

 

My own father immigrated to the United States with his parents from Poland when he was eight years old. All of the dinner-table conversations about the lives they left in Poland, compared with the better lives they lived here, helped mold my appreciation for our country.

 

With the notable exception of those brought to America involuntarily during the tragic era of slavery, immigrants have always understood America as the land of opportunity; that’s why they’ve come here. What they didn’t necessarily understand was the culture, language, and laws of the United States; that’s the role that education served.

 

The first compulsory school attendance law was passed in Massachusetts in 1852, with New York following suit two years later. This coincided with a large wave of immigration, largely from Ireland and Germany.

 

One newcomer was Patrick Kennedy, future President John F. Kennedy’s great-grandfather, who emigrated to Boston in 1848 or 1849 during the Irish potato famine.

 

Another arrival during this period was Michel Goldwater (who had changed his name from Goldwasser), a Polish Jew who had emigrated from Poland to France, then to London, and then, in 1854, to San Francisco. “Big Mike,” as he became known, failed as a saloon keeper and did okay as a peddler but later became wildly successful as a retail merchant in Arizona. His grandson, Barry, would serve 30 years in the U.S. Senate (1953–65 and 1969–87) and was the 1964 Republican presidential candidate.

 

The next wave of immigration, which occurred between 1880 and 1914, brought another 20-plus million new faces and countless new languages and cultures to the United States, mostly from Central, Eastern, and Southern Europe. As the new arrivals spread across the country, more and more states embraced compulsory schooling. By 1918, all of the then-48 states had compulsory education laws.

 

While some immigrants manage to succeed in America without learning our language, mores, and traditions, the children and grandchildren of most immigrants — as the Kennedy and Goldwater examples illustrate — assimilate, becoming all-American through and through.

 

The key to that has always been education.

 

Today, however, public education has gone astray. By virtually every measure, it’s not doing its job.

 

Huge numbers of U.S. students aren’t learning the basic reading, writing, and math skills they need to succeed in school, at work, or in life. The most recent (2024) National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reading assessment, for example, found that 69 percent of U.S. fourth-graders, and 70 percent of eighth-graders, weren’t “proficient” at reading.

 

Unfortunately for these students, reading is the key to learning. And unfortunately for our country, among the many important things that today’s students aren’t learning are the complete history of the United States and the thinking that produced the American form of government.

 

Again, consider the nationwide NAEP exams. According to the most recent (2022) NAEP U.S. history and civics assessments, just 13 percent of U.S. eighth-graders know enough about the history of our country to be considered “proficient” in the subject, and just 22 percent qualified as “proficient” in civics, which measures “knowledge and skills in democratic citizenship, government, and American constitutional democracy.” The results are not encouraging.

 

There is hope, however — in those same immigrants we mentioned earlier.

 

As Benjamin Ginsberg of Johns Hopkins University and Dorothea Israel Wolfson of the Hertog Foundation write in their new book, The Unmaking of American Citizenship: How Americans Learned Not to Love Their Country and What Can Be Done About It, coming to this country unites immigrants via a belief in quintessentially American principles. “Immigrants may come to America from all walks of life and all manner of places, deeply embedded in different languages, customs, and cultures. But in America, they are re-born, not under the earth as in Plato’s republic, but through two simple documents . . . the Declaration [of Independence] and the Constitution,” they write.

 

Today, with American society bitterly divided, civic education couldn’t be more necessary, not only for immigrants but for native-born Americans as well. This can’t be done in our schools alone. As Ginsberg and Wolfson make clear in their book, “If a sense of American citizenship is to be restored,” parents must take the lead and “push back” against both popular culture and the education bureaucracies. That’s best done in their homes.