Why Young People Need a Patriotic Education

Patriotic education forms citizens who understand what is at stake, who appreciate the blessings of liberty, and who are prepared to defend them for future generations.

In classrooms across America today, too many young people are being taught to view their country not as a force for good, but as a source of injustice. The heroes of history are recast as villains. National pride is replaced by shame. The result is not a generation prepared to lead a free people, but one too often uncertain whether America is a nation worth defending at all. This article is from The American Spectator’s summer 2026 print magazine. Subscribe to The American Spectator to receive the magazine. That uncertainty would have deeply troubled George Washington. In his farewell address, he urged the American people to “guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism” and warned that narrow interests and factionalism could erode the unity essential to the survival of the Republic. Washington understood that the success of this great experiment in liberty would depend not only on our institutions, but on the character and convictions of the American people. Subscribe to The American Spectator to receive our summer 2026 print magazine. Today, the United States faces a crisis of civic confidence. For too long, elements of our education system have advanced a narrative that diminishes American ideals, emphasizing our failures while neglecting the extraordinary achievements that have defined our history. The answer is not a shallow or uncritical nationalism, but something far more enduring: a patriotic education rooted in truth. As C. S. Lewis noted in The Four Loves, “[I]t is possible to be strengthened by the image of the past without being either deceived or puffed up. The image becomes dangerous in the precise degree to which it is mistaken, or substituted, for serious and systematic historical study.”  That is precisely the task before us. A patriotic education does not ignore the imperfections of our national story. It places them in the context of a nation that has, time and again, striven to live up to its highest ideals. At its core, patriotic educati...