Teaching Students What It Means to Be an American

Combatting the identity politics of the extreme left and right provides the key to preserving our democracy.

The Statue of Liberty as seen from Jersey City, New Jersey. (Gary Hershorn/Getty Images)

The United States is celebrating its 248^th birthday at a moment when people across the political spectrum agree that the country’s experiment in liberal democracy is in deep trouble. 

A decade ago, it would have been unthinkable that the presumptive Republican candidate for president would be someone who had tried to thwart the peaceful transfer of power and speaks of suspending the Constitution. The threat to liberal democracy on the left is less stark, fueled by the power of culture, rather than the power of the state. But it too is chilling. More than half of very liberal college students say it’s acceptable to block fellow students from hearing speakers, (compared with only 13 percent of very conservative students.) College campuses have become deeply corrosive cultures, in which eight in ten students surveyed feel they can’t speak their minds. Illiberalism on the left rises as people become more educated. Antisemitism, a former Harvard dean notes, has taken stronger root in elite colleges than in other American institutions, from libraries to hospitals, because of the way students are being taught.

It is especially worrisome that the willingness to give up on democracy is much greater among young people than those who are older. Whereas only 5 percent of those over 65 said, “Democracy is no longer a viable system, and America should explore alternative forms of government,” a shocking 31 percent of youth ages 18-29 agreed.

Why now?

A central driver is the loss of a common American identity. White identity politics on the right is more openly embraced than at any time since the presidential candidacy of George Wallace more than a half century ago. And racial identity politics on the left, driven by once-fringe academic theories such as Critical Race Theory and anti-racism, have moved into the mainstream in teacher education schools, left-leaning nonprofits, parts of the media, and even portions of corporate America. When policy fights are seen as proxies for identity wars, those disputes become existential, which justifies cutting corners on democratic norms. White voters on the right who worry that they are losing majority control of the country are more likely to excuse authoritarian actions. Likewise, left-wing activists shout down speakers not on issues related to taxes or labor law reform but invariably on matters that touch on racial, ethnic, or gender identity.

As a result, an eerie consensus has emerged on the hard left and hard right that long-standing liberal democratic norms should be bent or broken to advance various ideological causes. In a multiracial democracy, people should be judged as individuals, but Donald Trump says the ethnic identity of judges tells him what he needs to know about whether they will be fair to him, while race essentialists of the left feel similarly confident that knowing the racial or ethnic identity of participants in a dispute is a pretty good guide to who is right.

The hard right speaks of “alterative facts” and the hard left about “my truth.” Trump questions the expertise of the “deep state,” and openly relies on nepotism to fill positions of public trust, while parts of the left see selection based on merit as a smokescreen for white supremacy and claim someone saying the most qualified person should get the job is committing a “microaggression.”

Critical race theorists, so deeply pessimistic about the permanence of racism, are no more enthusiastic about school integration than skeptics on the political right. Anti-racists, who think all racial and ethnic disparities are the result of racism, take a distrustful view of the academic success of Asians and Jews, while extremists on the right consider these groups less fully American than white Christians.

Trump labels the press the “enemy of the people” while campus activists protesting the war in Gaza hold signs calling for “death to mainstream media.” Both extremes would ban books, some for offending the sensibilities of whites, others because they represent “cultural appropriation.” On issues of academic freedom, the right calls for stripping professors of their tenure protections, while the left insists on loyalty oaths in the form of DEI statements.

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What is to be done? The late president of the American Federation of Teachers, Albert Shanker, suggested a better path. When asked the rationale for public education, he didn’t point primarily to the need to teach reading and math or prepare students for the workforce, though all those things are important. The fundamental purpose of public schools, he said, was “to teach kids what it means to be an American,” the shared history and values that derive from the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. By doing so, Shanker noted, public schools accomplished two miraculous objectives: they helped sustain a system of self-governance, grounded in individual rights, for over two centuries; and they instilled a shared national ethos and identity that provided the glue necessary to hold together people whose ancestors came from all corners of the world. 

In recent decades, K-12 schools and colleges have moved dramatically away from this vision. Out of an understandable but false sense of security, they have placed far more emphasis on economic competitiveness than democratic citizenship. Teacher education programs, out of a genuine concern about racial achievement gaps, also took a wrong turn on issues of social cohesion. Rather than teaching a common American identity, they encouraged young teachers to believe that racism is pervasive and unceasing, so public schools need to strengthen student racial identities to steel them against inevitable discrimination. These education schools emphasized the terrible history of slavery and segregation, and left out the redemption part of the story. One study of the mission statements of the 100 largest school districts found that the words “patriotism,” “patriotic,” “America,” and “American” didn’t  appear in any of them.

In 2023, only 39 percent of those polled said they were extremely proud to be American, down from 70 percent in 2003. Young people were the least likely to express pride. In red states, conservatives capitalized on the cultural disconnect between public schools and the general public to advance privatization efforts with more success in the last few years than in the previous fifty. Tragically, these schemes, which send students of different religions to different types of schools, only Balkanize the country further.

It is time to take up Shanker’s call and teach students what it means to be American today. For young people who might understandably be frustrated with America, embarrassed by leaders like Trump, or angry that housing is unaffordable, it is important to devote more time to teaching them the tremendous contributions America has made to the world as a beacon of liberty. Policymakers should provide more time, resources, and accountability for students to learn their civic inheritance and shared American history. All states should require civics in high school and require students to pass a rigorous exam in order to graduate. It makes no sense from a national perspective that the federal government spends 1000 times more money on STEM education than on civics. 

Schools should spend more time teaching what it is like to live in non-democratic countries, so that students will come to recognize that four-fifths of the world’s population lacks the ability that U.S. citizens possess to criticize their government without fear of reprisal. Doing so could inspire the high levels of American patriotism found among immigrant groups, who know from first-hand experience the comparative blessings of the American system.

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Schools should teach that America is exceptional—not because Americans are better people than others—but because we have set up a system of rights that, over time, have become available to people who come to this country from all parts of the world. To get at the core of American identity, students should ask: if a foreign country invaded the United States, what monuments and artifacts would be most important to try to preserve because they go to the essence of what it means to be an American?

For me personally, the most important monuments to our nation’s values start with the National Archives, home of the essential documents of our liberal democracy—the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, and the Emancipation Proclamation. I would also include the Statue of Liberty, symbolizing America’s openness to legal immigrants from across the world no matter their racial or ethnic origin. And I would want to protect from attack the memorials to Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr., who helped America live up to its declared values, and would encourage people to see the Wright Brothers National Memorial in North Carolina, a symbol of American ingenuity and free enterprise.

The lessons in the textbooks will only take firm hold if they are reinforced by the daily experience of students. To maintain social cohesion, and underline democracy’s message that we all have equal rights, officials should take strong steps to bring children of different racial, ethnic and economic backgrounds together to learn—not through compulsory busing but through public school choice and housing policy. Community service programs in school and national service programs after high school graduation should be used to bridge divides and ignite patriotic sentiments. The federal government can support these various policies through a race to the top program to sustain promising practices centered around teaching balanced history and civics education, and promoting school integration, and community service.

The stakes of teaching American identity are enormous. Human beings have a natural yearning to identify with groups that pursue a larger purpose. If educators don’t help students develop a reflective patriotism, extremists will offer false alternatives centered around race or ethnic identities. The good news is that the public supports a better path. Instilling a renewed sense of American identity could inspire a “patriotism dividend,” a strong sense of national community that has provided the precondition for all this country’s great movements for social change over time. Best of all, it could help put America on better footing to sustain its grand experiment in liberal democratic governance for another 250 years—a worthy goal to ponder this July 4^th holiday.

Richard D. Kahlenberg, Director of the American Identity Project at the Progressive Policy Institute, is author of Tough Liberal: Albert Shanker and the Battles Over Schools, Unions, Race and Democracy. This essay is adapted from “Teaching Students what it Means to Be an American,” published by the Progressive Policy Institute.

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Editor’s note: The Liberal Patriot newsletter will not be published on July 4th. Happy Independence Day!