By Joe Pitts
Monday, May 18, 2026
As America nears her quarter-millennium birthday, her
citizens are remarkably pessimistic and disillusioned about the American Dream.
A record number of us no longer anticipate high-quality lives in the near future.
Institutions integral to our functioning and way of life—courts, the financial
system, public schools, universities—have lost the faith of most Americans. Our major political
parties continue to diverge ideologically, with a majority of those under 45 saying that it’s important to date or marry someone with
similar political views.
These trends, coupled with a general malaise that most of
us feel but struggle to articulate, have led Paul Carrese to ask what we’ve all
been thinking: “Is it too late for America?”
Carrese is the author of a new book, Teaching America: Reflective Patriotism in Schools,
Colleges, and Culture. (Full disclosure: Paul was a professor of mine
and continues to be a close friend and mentor.) After spending his career in
academia contributing to civic education—first, as director of the United
States Air Force Academy’s academic honors program, and then as the founding
director of Arizona State University’s School of Civic and Economic Thought and
Leadership (ASU SCETL)—Carrese used a sabbatical to collect his thoughts and
write them down. Carrese is what you might call a self-aware academic: quick to
acknowledge the enormous privilege he and other residents of the Ivory Tower
have been afforded; profuse in his thanks to parents, students, and taxpayers
for extending this opportunity. Teaching America is the culmination of
his lifelong ambition to contribute to America’s civic flourishing.
When Carrese asks whether it’s too late for America,
anyone who knows him knows it’s an almost-rhetorical question. There is
something in him—a mix of Christian hope and old-school Yankee optimism—that
refuses to believe in American decline. But to understand Carrese’s carefully
considered hope, which he distinguishes from blind optimism, we must first
understand where he thinks American civic education has gone wrong, and why the
poor state of that education is so intimately tied to our national malaise.
A brief history of American civics education.
Despite the remarkable decentralization of early
America—spanning 1776 through the closing of the Western frontier in
1890—students across New England, the Deep South, and the burgeoning Western
frontier shared a mostly cohesive civic story. Gathering in schoolhouses and
huddling before hearths, students read William Holmes McGuffey’s McGuffey
Readers, Noah Webster’s Blue-Backed Speller, and The New England
Primer. In addition, most literate Americans read their Bible—usually the
King James Version—and the Old Farmer’s Almanac, a periodical containing
practical tips and tricks for farmers (very important in an overwhelmingly
agricultural society).
Looking back at these texts, the modern reader is struck
by how seamlessly the practical and the moral are woven together. “An honest
Man will receive neither Money nor Praise, that is not his Due,” wrote Benjamin Franklin in Poor Richard’s Almanack,
the predecessor of the Old Farmer’s Almanac, in a section that debates
whether or not red cedar trees or “leaf’d locus trees” produce better wood for
fence posts. At the beginning of many McGuffey Readers was a poem that several generations of children memorized:
The lark is up to
meet the sun,
The bee is on the
wing;
The ant its labor
has begun,
The woods with
music ring.
Shall birds, and
bees, and ants, be wise,
While I my moments
waste?
O let me with the
morning rise,
And to my duty
haste.
The New England Primer taught students the
alphabet with rhymes, all of which contained a moral lesson. (“In Adam’s Fall/
We sinned all,” was the rhyme accompanying the letter “A.”) American history,
as it was presented in the McGuffey Readers, was much less a thorough
academic inspection of our nation’s past, and much more a collection of moral
biographies of great men—more Plutarch than Herodotus. Students learned about
George Washington and his cherry tree, Marquis de Lafayette’s bravery, and the
Cayuga leader Chief Logan’s leadership.
Civics, as it was communicated to students for the bulk
of our history, was an education in history and morality. While there were
predictable regional differences—The New England Primer, a
product of Boston, struck a decidedly darker Puritan tone than the upbeat,
can-do attitude presented in the Readers, a product of Ohio—there was
significant overlap. American children, then, shared a common story.
Until the 1960s, three courses in civics and government
were common in public American high schools: civics, problems of democracy, and
U.S. government. By the mid-’60s, civics education had earned a bad reputation,
in part for promoting a blind patriotism that many Americans viewed as
indefensible in light of the Vietnam War and Jim Crow. A new social studies
movement was pushing for an approach that deemphasized
knowledge-building and instead primarily encouraged students to pick apart
their history and engage in activism. “Democratic action now was the priority,
based upon either neglect of America’s distinctive principles—replaced by
‘democracy’—or explicit repudiation of America as mostly a fraud and a failure
across three centuries and more,” writes Carrese. The three civics courses
traditionally offered at the high school level were reduced to one semester-long class.
The classical view of civic education—one primarily
concerned with “how to perpetuate a particular constitution of a free
people”—was displaced. The new education emphasized the “critique of the polity
and its foundations … progress toward newer and more democratic vistas; and the
utility of narrower policy and technological dimensions of political, economic,
and social life,” Carrese writes. Explicitly rejecting the cultivation of
virtues associated with democratic citizenship, proponents of the new “action
civics” encouraged disassembly and deconstruction. For instance, at one
university, the new civics instruction included “marching in support of the
United Farm Workers; and breaking down ‘gender binary’ spaces in education.”
Whatever one’s thoughts regarding the merits of these particular actions, such
activities are not sufficient to replace the knowledge-based foundation of a
thorough civics education.
Conservatives typically point to changes in academic
philosophy and the introduction of certain European philosophers—Marx,
Foucault, Heidegger, etc—to the United States as a root cause of this shift.
Carrese doesn’t disagree that changes in the world of ideas played a role, but
he identifies an uncomfortable co-conspirator: the federal government’s
hyper-emphasis on funding STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math)
education throughout the Cold War and into our present age. In response to the
Soviet Union’s stiff competition, the United States doubled down on promoting
STEM, enabling the production of the engineers, scientists, and mathematicians
we needed to win the war against communism. All in all, this effort was a
startling success, and education can and should play an important role in
achieving immediately practical outcomes. But this shift has deprioritized
civics which, while of vital importance to the perpetuation of our way of life
and system of government, does not immediately offer tangible economic returns.
Today, education is mostly about workforce preparation.
Beyond the education sector’s broad shift during the Cold War, this is further evidenced by public opinion polling: 51 percent of
students’ primary motivation for pursuing higher education is “earning
potential,” compared to 29 percent who were primarily motivated by a “love of
learning.” “Becoming a better citizen” wasn’t even listed as an option. Insofar
as civics is taught, it’s an “add-on” to what are assumed to be more important
studies.
Reflective patriotism.
Today the civics space is divided between two extremes.
The critical-utopians, embodied by the authors of the 1619 Project and Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, hold that
America is “a fraudulent project grounded in racism, inequality, and
imperialism at home and abroad,” writes Carrese. On the other hand, a
defensive-nostalgic school of civics focuses on American triumphs and folklore,
“with minor attention to any failings to live up to the Declaration’s
principles of the equal natural rights of all humans to life, liberty, and the
pursuit of happiness.” A conservative, Carrese prefers the latter camp, but he
believes that civics education must not be understood as belonging to these
extremes.
“The idea of America, of We the People, always has been a
complex blend of ideas, principles, peoples, and traditions; and of triumphs
and failings,” writes Carrese. “It therefore always has been an argument.”
While civics education must incorporate debate and discussion at
age-appropriate levels—kindergartners, for instance, likely should not be
debating the morality of the Three-Fifths Compromise—it should not ignore
America’s past moral failings nor paint a rose-colored view of our history. It
should also teach students to understand these failings as just that: failures
to live up to the ideals upon which this nation was founded.
Carrese believes that the French diplomat Alexis de
Tocqueville’s “reflective patriotism” is a model for contemporary civic
educators to follow. Tocqueville observed that Americans combine “sentiment
with argument and questioning,” loving the people and soil they belonged to
while also loving the ideals upon which their nation was founded. In other
words, Americans of yore loved America because she was creedal—dedicated to
human equality—and because she was their country, teeming with people they
loved and land they esteemed. This sort of patriotism requires that educators
pass on certain virtues to the rising generation of Americans, such as civil
disagreement, civic friendship, and reflective patriotism itself. Opting for
either the total deconstruction of the American project or an overly
simplistic, nostalgic understanding of our past are roads to ignorance or
national divorce.
“We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the
imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the ‘ideas’ with which
we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual
experience,” wrote Joan Didion. This same lesson extends beyond writers,
to whole nations. How we understand the facts of our shared history is just as
important as cataloging them. A restoration of our understanding of civics
demands more than a curriculum update. It will mean treating education in
American citizenship as a core function of our education system.
A Sputnik moment for civics.
On the top floor of a concrete and glass structure
reaching up to the Arizona sun, a ragtag group of academics, administrators,
and students is on the frontier of America’s civic revival. Or so they say.
(Cards on the table: I was one of them.) ASU SCETL was founded in 2016 by an
act of the Arizona State Legislature, signed into law by then-Gov. Doug Ducey.
The school’s founding mission statement, written by
Harvard academic Harvey Mansfield, describes the project well: “In sum, our new
school looks outward to humanity and inward to America. Its ambition is to
teach critical minds and to puncture complacency—and it tries to be both proud
of genuine greatness and humble about human imperfection.”
SCETL was the first in a movement of civic centers across
the nation. Since its founding, 12 states have established such centers,
including Arizona, Texas, Ohio, Florida, North Carolina, and Tennessee. While
they vary in scope—some are full schools with tenure-track faculty, others are
sub-departments—they were all established at public institutions with the
express purpose of reinvigorating American civic education. They teach classes
about everything from constitutional law to the philosophical influences of the
founding generation to national security policy design. Offering certificates,
bachelor’s degrees, and in some cases master’s degrees,
their intent is to reinvigorate civic education at the university level and to
prepare a new generation of leaders steeped in American history and schooled in
civic virtue. “If a subject is not seriously encountered or required in higher
education, it will not be taken seriously in [K-12] schools,” writes Carrese.
The civics reform movement has also gained some ground at
the K-12 level. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation (which sponsors Dispatch Markets)
recently launched the National Civics Bee, enabling students across the nation to
compete in a Spelling Bee-style competition that tests students on their
knowledge of American government and history. And state legislatures across the
nation—in Arizona, Colorado, Virginia, and 27 other states—have started requiring high schoolers to pass the American citizenship
test before earning their high school diploma.
In 1957, the United States’ primary threat was the Soviet
Union. But: “The threat America faces now is, primarily, ourselves; our
inability to understand, appreciate, and sustain our republic,” writes Carrese.
Confronting that threat will require reincorporating civics education as part
of the main course of American education, not a side dish. Robert Pondiscio, a
senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, describes the crisis succinctly:
The erosion of
civics is therefore not simply a failure of pedagogy or curriculum, but a
failure of purpose—a reordering of priorities that helps explain why civic
education today feels so thin and peripheral. We have not merely forgotten how
to teach citizenship; we have largely stopped believing that forming citizens
is what public education is for.
Dawn or dusk?
America has always been a nation with grand ambitions,
and yet also a nation with enough conscience to doubt its own destiny. We were
founded by men who simultaneously despaired for our future and believed us capable of
accomplishing what nearly every political philosopher once believed impossible:
creating and maintaining an extended republic.
With the benefit of hindsight, many of the founders’
doubts about the American project seem misguided. But we forget that many
alternate futures were once possible. The founding generation could perceive
the sun hovering over the horizon, but it was not until several generations had
passed before anyone could be sure that it was the light of dawn, and not the
light of dusk, that shone down on our forebears. This is the curse of the
present: Everything old was once new, but not everything new will grow old.
Carrese and his compatriots in the civics movement hold
out hope because they refuse to be bystanders as our nation nears its 250th
birthday. They are encouraged by recent efforts to reprioritize civic education
even if they believe they are only a beginning. They recognize that neither
renewal nor decline, dawn nor dusk, is inevitable—America’s genius is that we
make our own luck at least as often as we stumble into it.
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