Today, America is facing four profound and interrelated challenges:
As America grapples with these difficulties, schools and universities offer a crucial opportunity for a better path forward. To counter rising illiberalism, foundations and researchers have pushed for sensible reforms such as enhanced civics instruction and accountability. The more profound challenge, however, lies in shaping a shared American identity.
In his biography of teacher union leader Albert Shanker (1928-1997), Richard Kahlenberg highlights a story told by former Tennessee Governor Lamar Alexander. A group of education leaders was stymied when asked a basic question about why America has public schools. Shanker provided a provocative answer: “to teach children what it means to be an American.” Shanker believed that beyond literacy and job skills, public schools must instill shared democratic values to ensure the survival of America’s unique experiment in self-governance. Without this common foundation, Shanker warned, the nation risked fracturing into isolated factions. Because American national identity does not derive from a particular ethnic heritage, he said, the nation’s civic creed is the only thing holding us together. Today, almost three decades after Shanker’s death, America is increasingly divided, and its commitment to common democratic principles has grown weaker.
To address these challenges, the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) has launched the American Identity Project, directed by Kahlenberg and guided by a stellar advisory group of prominent Americans, that asks: “As our nation celebrates its 250th birthday, what does it mean to be an American today?” In a highly polarized country, what precisely are the best ideas and aspirational values that bind together what author Heather McGee calls a nation of “ancestral strangers”? In addition, once those American values are identified, what are the best ways to instill them in school children? What exactly should the public schools and colleges be doing to teach a common American identity that inculcates a deep and healthy sense of what Alexis de Tocqueville called “reflective patriotism” that encourages debate about how to live up to the country’s lofty ideals rather than blind loyalty to the nation?
