250 years in, American colleges should still teach patriotism

A Quarter-Millennium of Civic Formation: What American Colleges Owe Their Students

Provpnadvice.com – The latest Gallup survey delivers a number that ought to unsettle every institution charged with shaping the next generation of citizens. Only 30 percent of Americans aged 18 to 34 now describe themselves as “extremely proud” or “very proud” to be American. Among those 35 to 54, the figure climbs to 53 percent; among those 55 and older, it reaches 69 percent. The generational fracture is stark, and it arrives precisely as the nation prepares to mark its 250th year of continuous existence. That coincidence of timing makes the question unavoidable: are American colleges still performing their most fundamental civic function, or have they quietly set sail from the very project they were meant to sustain?

What Patriotism Actually Requires

Before the question can be answered, the term itself needs sharpening. Patriotism, at its core, means loving one’s country. It does not mean worshipping the state uncritically, nor does it mean reflexively endorsing every policy decision, past or present. Dissent aimed at policies or values that drift away from a nation’s founding commitments can itself constitute a powerful expression of patriotic devotion. The patriot who argues for correction is not the enemy of the country; the patriot who simply walks away is.

What patriotism does not permit, however, is abandoning the vessel because of its flaws — whether those flaws are real or merely perceived. It does not license the wholesale denigration and deconstruction of a nation’s history and values while offering no constructive vision to take their place. Judging by the openly anti-American turbulence visible on numerous campuses over recent years, a substantial portion of American higher education appears to have abandoned ship long before this anniversary year made the question inescapable.

The Chesterton Principle

G.K. Chesterton captured the paradox of genuine patriotic love with a line that still carries weight: true devotion to one’s country persists in spite of its defects, and even because of them.

“Men did not love Rome because she was great. She was great because they had loved her.”

The inversion matters. Greatness is not the precondition for love; love is the precondition for greatness. A country worth loving — warts and all, if for no other reason than that it is ours — requires citizens willing to work toward its betterment rather than simply narrate its failures.

The Only Vision of Its Kind

Beyond the basic loyalty owed to one’s homeland and fellow citizens, Americans inherit something singular in the history of political thought: the first nation founded explicitly on a vision of God-given human dignity and lasting human flourishing. No other polity in recorded history has built its constitutional architecture on that premise.

The language in which that premise was first articulated remains unsurpassed:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Those words, penned roughly 250 years ago, possess a durability and timelessness that no subsequent political document has matched. They are worth preserving precisely because they are demanding. The great reformers of American history — Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King Jr., and others — never needed to question the original vision. They needed only to hold it up and call the nation to account. Their essential question was: “These are our stated principles; will we abide by them, or won’t we?”

The Question Now

That same question confronts the present generation. Will American institutions continue to steward the vision the founding generation bequeathed, or will they abandon ship? Will the torch of liberty be carried forward for another 250 years, or will this be the generation that permits freedom to go extinct once and for all?

The answer will be determined — perhaps more decisively than by anything that happens in courtrooms or at ballot boxes — by what transpires in American classrooms, from kindergarten through the final semester of college. The founders, flawed heroes as they were, understood with clarity that a republic of this kind is untenable without a populace schooled in civic duty and capable of self-governance. Benjamin Franklin stated the principle without ornament:

“Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom.”

What the Return Looks Like in Practice

Forming such citizens is a basic, fundamental duty of educational institutions. It is no less an act of instilling patriotism than requiring the recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance or the instinctive rooting for one’s national soccer team simply because they represent the country. The distinction between civic formation and mere job-preparedness is not a trivial one; it is the distinction between a republic that endures and a republic that merely processes labor.

If the American experiment in freedom is to flourish over the next 250 years, it will do so because the education system re-learns what it looks like to form citizens of wisdom and virtue — young men and women capable of governing themselves and, in turn, stewarding their liberty for the good of neighbors and posterity.

In concrete institutional terms, that return would look like an educational vision of greater purpose than career placement alone. It would look like character formation and whole-person formation placed at the center of the curriculum. It would look like a renewed engagement with the great texts that formed the bedrock of American society — the kind of seminar recently established at Pepperdine University under the title “Roots of American Order.” It would look like the deliberate instillation of American values — faith, free inquiry, civic responsibility — woven into the fabric of undergraduate life rather than treated as optional extras.

The 250th anniversary is not merely a calendar milestone. It is a moment of reckoning. The Gallup numbers tell us where the generational sentiment already stands. What they do not tell us is whether the institutions meant to close that gap are still willing to try. The next quarter-century will be decided, in large measure, in lecture halls, seminar rooms, and orientation sessions across the country. The question the founders posed — will we abide by our stated principles, or won’t we — has not expired. It is, if anything, more urgent now than at any point since the ink dried on the document that first asked it.