Teaching Students to Love America Again
This story raises questions about governance, accountability, and American values.
A civilization doesn't maintain itself. Someone has to actually tell kids the thing is worth keeping, and for a couple decades now a lot of classrooms have treated that as an embarrassing thing to say out loud. Look at what passes for American history in a lot of schools now.
New Republican Times Editorial Board
They are inheritors of the country’s achievements, and it’s up to them to maintain this great civilization.
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New Republican Times Editorial Board
A civilization doesn't maintain itself. Someone has to actually tell kids the thing is worth keeping, and for a couple decades now a lot of classrooms have treated that as an embarrassing thing to say out loud.
Look at what passes for American history in a lot of schools now. Founders reduced to their worst moments, institutions taught as obstacles to overcome rather than achievements to steward, the whole story flattened into a grievance list. Kids come out knowing what's wrong with the country and almost nothing about why it worked in the first place, why people still risk everything to get here, why the system they're inheriting is rare in human history rather than the default.
You don't have to sand off the hard parts to fix that. Teach the slavery, teach the internment camps, teach the mistakes. But teach them inside a story where the country also ended slavery, beat fascism, and built something people are still lining up at the border to join. Kids can hold complexity. What they can't do is love something they've only been taught to distrust.
That's not indoctrination. It's just handing them the whole inheritance instead of half of it.
Commentary written with AI assistance by the New Republican Times Editorial Board.