America has a big birthday party coming this July 4. It marks the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States as an independent nation dedicated to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Civic and educational organizations are preparing for it now. So are Congress and President Trump and his Education department. But there are competing ideologies afoot and plenty of friction.
This semiquincentennial celebration could be a civics lesson for all of us (children and adults) centered on the American Revolution and the Declaration of Independence. There’s a lot to be known about them—the causes, conditions, characters, and debates—and most of us don’t know more than bits here and there. Civic education in schools naturally will play a big role, for it proceeds on the expectation that students will grow into citizens sufficiently caring and knowledgeable to maintain a democracy (aka a republic).
There are two things to know before I get to news about the birthday party. First, Civic education is in the school curriculum not only in the U.S. but in virtually all nations. And it is specific to regime type. Nations ruled by democratic regimes have it; nations ruled by autocratic regimes have it, too. Children in China pledge allegiance to collectivism and the Party, in Singapore to civic harmony and unity “regardless of race, language or religion,” and in the United States “to the republic.”
Second, the purpose of civic education in schools around the world is conservative: regime maintenance. It is geared to keeping the current system, to preserving the political status quo. In Philadelphia, for example, as the Constitutional Convention was closing, Ben Franklin was asked what the convention had accomplished. “We’ve given you a republic,” he replied. “Can you keep it?” At the time Ben said this, a republic was not the status quo in the U.S. or anywhere else but an experiment toddling into an uncertain future. Two and a half centuries later, we have managed to keep it—the oldest republic in the world and again on the brink.
The conservative stance of civic education in the US, as elsewhere, needn’t put off progressives since, in the U.S. case at least, the status quo includes the means for change: legislation, elections, protest, and amendments to the Constitution. (Yes, the Constitution was meant to be changed; this is the subject of its Article V.) Of course, the latter is slow and rigid, which is why only 27 amendments have been ratified in the nation’s history and why Americans today look for change not so much in the amendment process as in elections, the courts, and executive orders from the President.
To re-cap, virtually all nations have civic education in their schools. It reflects the nature of the particular government, its political orientation is conservative, and its purpose is to build knowledge and loyalty—patriotism—for the present system. And to one degree or another, change is permitted in line with the regime’s principles.
Civic education’s bias toward system-maintenance means different things to different interest groups and factions, of course. This is glaringly obvious in the U.S. where birthday party preparations are proceeding on opposing platforms, one partisan and the other bipartisan: Task Force 250 and America 250. There are big differences between the two over branding, leadership, style, and narrative emphasis—how America’s story is told.
Task Force 250 is a MAGA initiative created by executive order and headquartered at the White House. In leadership roles are the Department of Education, the America First Policy Institute, and Moms for Liberty. A launch video, partisan to the hilt, allows us to peer into this platform’s ideology. The school system is shown to be in flaming apocalyptic crisis, is accused of teaching “hatred of America,” and is now being restored to former glory by President Trump and Secretary McMahon. A National Garden of American Heroes is planned.
America 250 is created by a bipartisan Congressional commission. Here you’ll find an appreciative, compromising, centrist program consisting of field trips to historic sites, testimonials from everyday Americans, volunteer activities, and suggested viewing of Ken Burns’s new documentary The American Revolution. Former presidents Bush and Obama and their wives are co-chairs of the commission, and Washington state has an affiliated local committee to coordinate our state’s official activities. Ours is chaired by the Lieutenant Governor.
And now the White House task force is trying to commandeer the Congressional commission. The Atlantic magazine called the result a “war over American’s birthday party.”
A little more background should help. We find three general political orientations to civic education in the U.S. On the right is a celebratory patriotism that emphasizes national pride and victories. Versions of this can be found on the center-right as well as, today, the far MAGA-right.
On the left is a critical patriotism that emphasizes inequality and underachieved ideals. Here are the brutal repressions of yesterday (and today) that demonstrate the gap between reality and the ideal of “liberty and justice for all.” Versions of this orientation are found on the center-left as well as the far left, as in the 1619 project. The latter centers the American story not on independence and the American Revolution but on oppression and the many decades of slave labor on which the U.S. founding relied (1619 being the year the first ships with African slaves arrived in Virginia).
A third approach falls in the center, and we might call it reflective patriotism. It grasps the reality of pluralism and allows for multiple perspectives, complexity, compromise, and plenty of support for students to think for themselves. It concentrates on knowledge of government as well as democratic dialogue and experience through student councils, elections, homeroom meetings, service-learning projects, debates, and the gamut of student mixers from after-school clubs to sports.
The three patriotisms and their names are rough, but they do suggest the range of approaches toward civic education.
The nonpartisan centrist approach is what I see in the vast majority of cases I have studied, and it is reflected in Congress’ America 250 project. Teachers routinely avoid radical discourses, whether jingoistic pride and praise or bitter lamentation and critique. In the elementary grades, teachers focus on teaching students to get along with one another, talk across their differences, and learn the fundaments of history, government, and geography. In middle and high schools this work continues with greater depth, breadth, and complexity.
For me, the centrist approach—pluralist, inclusive, reflective—is the logical sweet spot for civic education in U.S. schools. Civic education has little room for hyperbolic partisanship (except as an object for study) and, anyway, there’s hardly time for it. So much instruction is needed just to teach the basics: What is democracy? What are the alternatives? What are its values? How does it work? Why is it fragile? How are conflicts resolved? What are the rights and responsibilities of citizens? Can we all get along?
If you want, you can take a seat at the semiquincentennial party right now, whatever kind of patriot you are. You could begin by reading the Atlantic’s November 2025 issue The Unfinished Revolution. It is a companion to the new Ken Burns’s series, which you could watch with friends and family. Neither jingoistic nor woke, the new issue recognizes that America’s experiment “is under extraordinary pressure at the moment,” which makes this a good time to deepen your knowledge, express your patriotism, and support civic education in schools.
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