America turns 250 this year.
The celebrations have begun. Fireworks, parades, speeches, concerts, reenactments, and patriotic imagery have filled town squares across the country, with more commemorations still to come. A nation that has endured for a quarter millennium deserves to celebrate its achievements.
But anniversaries should be more than commemorations. They should be moments of reflection.
The question facing America at 250 is not whether we still love our country. It is whether we still know it well enough, and have been formed well enough, to preserve it.
Americans remain intensely engaged in public life. We argue about politics endlessly. We consume news around the clock. We debate public policy, elections, courts, schools, culture, speech, religion, and nearly every other question that touches our common life.
But intensity is not the same thing as understanding. And argument is not the same thing as citizenship.
Beneath our national engagement lies an uncomfortable reality: too many Americans possess only a fragmentary understanding of the institutions, principles, history, and perhaps most of all the virtues that make self-government possible.
This matters more than most of our ever-changing political and policy disagreements.
A constitutional republic cannot function indefinitely on emotion alone. It requires citizens who understand the framework in which freedom is able to thrive. Rights, responsibilities, checks on power, the rule of law, representative government: these are not inherited automatically. Each generation must learn them anew.
The founders understood this. They worried constantly about whether liberty could survive without an educated citizenry. They knew that self-government was not self-sustaining. A free people must possess enough civic knowledge combined with virtue and character to distinguish constitutional principle from political rhetoric and enduring truths from passing passions.
Knowledge alone is not enough.
Many states already require students to take government, state history, or civics before graduation. That is a good start. But a course requirement is not the same thing as civic readiness. A semester of government can introduce students to the machinery of American self-government. It does not, by itself, form the habits required to sustain it.
Civic knowledge without civic virtue is incomplete.
The American republic depends not only on citizens who know their rights, but on citizens formed in the virtues that make liberty possible: truthfulness, courage, restraint, responsibility, gratitude, civil disagreement, and respect for the rule of law. Civic knowledge tells students how the system works. Civic virtue teaches them why it is worth preserving and how free people should conduct themselves within it.
That challenge has not disappeared. If anything, it has become more urgent.
Americans today can access more information in a single afternoon than previous generations encountered in months. Artificial intelligence can answer questions instantly. Social media can distribute ideas globally in seconds. Yet access to information is not the same thing as understanding.
AI can retrieve facts (though they are not always correct), summarize arguments, and produce answers in seconds. What it cannot do is form character. It cannot teach a young person when to speak, when to listen, how to disagree honorably, or why truth matters even when falsehood is useful. The faster information moves, the more urgently schools must teach the virtues that help students be discerning and to use knowledge wisely.
That is why America’s 250th anniversary celebrations should be accompanied by a serious civic challenge. Every American high school should be able to tell families not merely whether students take a government course, but what civic knowledge and civic virtues a graduate is expected to possess.
Not a partisan catechism. Not a political test. A clear public standard for civic formation.
Every graduate should understand the central premise of the Declaration of Independence: that rights do not come from the government but belong inherently to every human being.
Every graduate should understand how the Constitution divides power, why checks and balances exist, why federalism is not an old-fashioned concept, and why the concentration of power has always been viewed as a threat to liberty.
Every graduate should understand the Bill of Rights, not merely as a list of protections, but as a statement of the fundamental relationship between citizens and government.
Every graduate should understand the defining constitutional struggles that shaped the nation, from the founding through the Civil War, Reconstruction, civil rights, and beyond.
And every graduate should understand that citizenship is not merely a status. It is a responsibility.
None of this is beyond a teenager. We have seen students rise to serious expectations when adults are serious enough to set them. Students can wrestle with the Gettysburg Address. They can study the Federalist Papers. They can learn the logic of the Constitution. They can practice civil disagreement, reasoned argument, and respect for truth.
Nor is any of this partisan.
A citizen who understands the Constitution may vote Republican, Democrat, independent, or something else entirely. Civic literacy does not dictate conclusions. Civic virtue does not require agreement. Together, they provide the foundation upon which free people can disagree intelligently and thrive together responsibly.
Indeed, civic formation may be one of the few genuinely unifying causes left in American life. Every parent should want it. Every educator should value it. Every elected official should support it.
For 250 years, the American experiment has endured through wars, depressions, social upheaval, political realignments, and periods of profound national division. Its survival has depended not merely on documents and institutions, but on generations of citizens who possessed a basic understanding of what those institutions were designed to protect and enough civic virtue to protect them.
That inheritance is not guaranteed.
Virtue is not downloaded. Judgment is not automated. Citizenship is not absorbed by accident. These things must be taught, practiced, and expected.
The most valuable gift we can give America on its 250th birthday is not another celebration of our past. It is a renewed commitment to ensuring that future generations understand the remarkable inheritance they have received and are formed in the virtues required to keep it.
PHOTOS: RECORD FIREWORKS SHOW LIGHTS UP DC FOR AMERICA’S 250TH BIRTHDAY
The fireworks will fade. The speeches will end. The republic will remain.
Whether it thrives for another 250 years depends, in no small measure, on whether Americans know enough, and are formed well enough, to preserve it.
Dr. William J. Bennett is a former U.S. secretary of education, author of The Book of Virtues: A Treasury of Great Moral Stories, and chairman of Resilience Learning. Ron Packard is the founder of Accel Schools, one of the nation’s largest charter school service providers, and previously founded K12 Inc. Together, Bennett and Packard are pioneering Jefferson Classical Academies, a national network of tuition-free classical online schools.