American Education's Need for a New Founding

While higher education’s dysfunction has dominated headlines recently, the nature of the dysfunction suggests that America’s crisis of education –a set of educational crises – runs well beyond the campus. Encampments, shout-downs, and vandalisms do not sprout up organically. Students are fed a steady diet of anti-Western messages in classrooms well before they meet the tenured radicals in university lecture halls (and the moneyed organizations that will provide their tents), laying the groundwork for them to spend their campus years focused on agitating rather than learning. Their foils, the rare students who stand up for the fundamental goodness of the West – like the University of North Carolina frat bros who famously defended the American flag – do not speak academic jargon to justify their actions. They know which side they’re on. At home, in church, or perhaps in a subculture within their schools, they learned that their inheritance may not be perfect but it is worth defending.

But for the rest, especially in school districts where college is the presumptive destination, what is often called education is better identified as intuitional training. As the current wave of campus madness attests, students have developed intuitions that make them receptive to particular kinds of bad ideas before they even get to campus. They distinguish themselves in their applications with paeans to activism and social justice. They know what university administrators are looking for, and they put it into action when they get to the campus quad.

Students display their intuitional training by the causes they take up, using the language they are trained to pick up on and repeat. They lack the antibodies to spot the logical and moral flaws within the ideologies that dominate on campus because they have been trained to miss them. They do not see the limitations in oppression analysis. They are quick to call Israel a settler-colonial state without considering how that might be false and, indeed, deeply anti-Semitic. They gobble up myths about Indigenous harmony with nature and tribes to blame Europeans for all kinds of ills. They blame capitalism for war and poverty as if life before Adam Smith was peaceful and prosperous. They generally fail to recognize that life in the 21st century is borderline miraculous and pine for an imagined past that reigned before history unfolded. These ahistorical misconceptions would crumble if scrutinized by a teenager who knows how to ask hard questions – which only highlights how few such teenagers our high schools produce.

Its roots are primarily in the failure – an abrogation of responsibility at best, an intentional miseducation at worst – to instill future citizens with an appreciation for their society. Even putting aside the appalling reading and math competency statistics, which show that students are not adequately prepared to contribute to public life in many ways, their intuitions are being shaped towards ingratitude. That does not leave students inadequately prepared so much as corrosive to the society where they are counted on to be citizens. To put it generally, our K-12 schools have drifted far from their essential mission of forming citizens. If they are trying, somehow, to churn out patriotic reformers, as its defenders often say, they are failing. You can know them by their fruits. By the time students reach college, many have already absorbed a disposition toward radicalism – viewing education primarily as an opportunity to sharpen one’s revolutionary bona fides rather than learn, improve, and contribute to the public welfare.

Students thus arrive at universities unprepared academically and lack the civic and moral formation that would inoculate them against radical ideologies. They have not been taught to see themselves as beneficiaries of a profound cultural inheritance, but as critics ready to judge and transform society according to abstract theories they learned from teachers and influencers willing to share the West’s “true” history. Campus revolutionary role-playing is a problem but not an existential threat. American youth not caring whether America survives another generation, by contrast, is. A nation whose shared intuition is to self-destruct cannot long survive.

The recently released Phoenix Declaration (Declaration), produced by a team of scholars led by the Heritage Foundation’s Jason Bedrick, offers a vital corrective to this existential problem. At its core, the Declaration advances a vision of education that accounts for and corrects the misdirected shaping of intuition. It anchors a competing intuitional training in gratitude – both explicit and implicit.

Explicit gratitude manifests in the document’s emphasis on patriotic education and civic responsibility. Students should develop, in the Declaration’s words, “a deep understanding of and respect for our nation’s founding documents” while learning “the whole truth about America—its merits and failings—without obscuring that America is a great source of good in the world.” America’s goodness could be proved, but that is far too complicated a debate to have with each graduating class anew. It should be treated as axiomatic, the same way one loves family before acknowledging its flaws. We start with gratitude. When students are mature enough to put criticisms into perspective, there will be time to work through them.

But perhaps even more significant is the Declaration’s implicit gratitude – its recognition that education must build upon rather than break with the institutions and traditions that precede us. This appears in its affirmation of parents as “primary educators,” its insistence that schools work alongside rather than replace families, and its understanding that “true progress comes only by building on what has been learned and achieved in the past.” A school cannot turn students against the very people and institutions that entrust students to them. Parents are not just prior to schools in time; they symbolize the generations’ past who bring a family’s institutional memory to bear on the next generation. Parents have learned from those who came before them and want to pass on something specific to the next generation. Schools must honor the principle that they exist to facilitate the strengthening of a link in a chain. Doing so is a civic act because it strengthens the republic’s core unit: the family that transmits values and norms and metes out punishment when those norms are not honored.

The Declaration’s emphasis on cultural transmission stands out because it has become so counter-cultural and conservative–coded–though it simply seems obvious in the abstract. It rightly notes that “a civilization survives only if it intentionally transmits its history, traditions, and values—including its yet unrealized aspirations—to the next generation.” This careful formulation acknowledges both the achievements and the unfinished work of our cultural inheritance. It suggests that reform should proceed through engagement with, rather than rejection of, tradition. But contrary to the reflexive progressive response to pro-America-history initiatives, it does not whitewash our history. It incorporates the good with the bad to tell a story about who Americans are and why we invest in this country. Framing the story as fundamentally good, even heroic, doesn’t whitewash the bad. We are not perfect, but our aspirations are as worthy as any, which is part of who we are.

At a time when college students seem unusually quick to adopt other nations’ myths (in every sense of the word), to excuse China’s reprehensible treatment of minorities or Iran’s fomenting terror abroad with justifications offered by CCP leaders and Ayatollahs, a pro-American corrective is welcome. What prevails now is not skepticism of all nation’s myths but a focus on “complicating” patriotic American narratives that merely turn students against their home nation and push them into the arms of evil regimes.

The Declaration has gained encouraging momentum, with signatures from public intellectuals and prominent educators. The signatures of two state education secretaries are especially promising. They and their colleagues will be responsible for turning principles into action. But the crucial questions remain: What concrete reforms are available? Do any stand a chance of being implemented?

There are pathways, but they may meet significant resistance from those who tragically consider gratitude a partisan value. All will require a little bit of innovation and much larger doses of courage.  

First, states should review their social studies and civics standards to ensure they align with the Declaration’s vision of grateful education that neither whitewashes nor demonizes American history. This means developing curricula that help students understand America’s founding principles and how Americans have struggled to live up to them. Martin Luther King Jr.’s articulation of the founding documents as “promissory notes” should be the framing rather than teaching future Americans that our Declaration of Independence and Constitution are mere facades to cover bigotry and human rights abuses.

Easier said than done, to be sure. But the first step is to stop outsourcing curriculum development and teacher training to leftist non-profits and universities that inculcate revolutionary fervor. Cutting ties with such institutions will also be unpopular. Those who agree that the Declaration has identified something important and worth fixing must stand firm.

Second, school districts should strengthen parent engagement and transparency. The Declaration’s emphasis on parental rights could be realized through regular opportunities for curriculum reviews with parent input, clear processes for addressing concerns about instructional materials, and improved communication about student performance and classroom content.

Third, teacher preparation programs must either be reformed or abandoned. Future educators should be trained to view themselves as transmitters of cultural knowledge rather than agents of social change. This means grounding teacher education in content knowledge and proven pedagogical methods rather than ideological theories about education’s transformative role. It also means vetting teachers for subscription to faddish pedagogical methods, such as rejecting phonics in reading in favor of whole-word or picture-based approaches. Teachers certainly cannot be drawn from ideologically captured institutions that teach oppression analysis and frame the teacher’s proper role as advancing leftist social theories.

Fourth, states should expand educational choice while ensuring that all schools receiving public funds commit to basic civic principles. Competition forces all schools to be their best and to conform their standards to the people who fund them for their common welfare: taxpayers, especially parents. One useful way this happens is competitors to public schools emphasizing the opposite habits of mind as public schools do. A key intuition schools can shape is the paramount value of agency. The Declaration properly notes, “Students must be held accountable for their behavior, both to learn that their choices have consequences and to maintain the order necessary for learning to proceed.” If public schools cannot discipline students because they believe for one reason or another that they are not agents – they are objects acted upon by external forces – they deserve to see students go elsewhere. Schools that empower students to see that actions have consequences, laying the groundwork for them to ask those probing, necessary questions about how the world works, will benefit.

The Phoenix Declaration offers a framework for this renewal by reminding us that education’s primary purpose is not to remake society but to prepare individuals to take their place within it – as family members, citizens, and bearers of a cultural inheritance. That is how salutary reforms take shape. It is how we can live together as common stewards of a shared enterprise. This vision of education, grounded in gratitude rather than grievance, offers our best hope for healing America’s civic fabric.

The task ahead is formidable. But we already possess the intellectual and moral resources needed for educational renewal. The challenge is not to invent new principles but to recover and apply those that guide American education at its best. Doing so will elicit shrieking from constituencies with everything to lose from the Declaration’s success because they only benefit from the sorry state of our educational culture. It will take a lot of courage to tell teacher’s unions, activists, professors, and other experts that they are wrong. Yet they are – not on the facts, which are not in question, but morally, for fighting tooth and nail to perpetuate a system of intuition-shaping that promises only harm to this great nation. Taking back the means of instruction is a noble and important cause worth making enemies over.

Tal Fortgang is legal policy fellow at the Manhattan Institute.