To save our democracy, the 19th-century French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville would tell us, start a book club. Join a church. Or, perhaps most crucially, volunteer at a local school or run for school board. The specific activity matters less — what’s essential is coming together with fellow citizens for a common purpose.

This may sound inconsequential when compared to the present challenges to our democracy, but it’s rooted in Tocqueville’s penetrating observations of early America. Having witnessed his own relatives falling to the guillotine during the French Revolution, he understood democracy’s dangers as well as its promise. In 1831, he journeyed to America to study its democratic experiment and distill lessons to guide France’s turbulent political evolution.

What he saw amazed him.

“Americans of all ages, all conditions, and all dispositions constantly form associations,” he wrote. They gathered in churches, town halls, libraries, charitable organizations, colleges and more. He watched Americans resolving disputes, pursuing shared goals across partisan lines, and investing in one another—practicing democracy. These local, face-to-face acts that were possible only in the emerging democratic social order trained citizens to act collectively and formed counterweights to centralized authority and to mass movements.

Yet this civic vitality did not emerge spontaneously: Education, Tocqueville argued, was its vital seedbed. “It cannot be doubted,” Tocqueville wrote, “that in the United States the instruction of the people powerfully contributes to the support of the democratic republic.” Early American colleges aimed to form citizens, not just workers. They taught not only practical skills but also the art of self-governance.

Education forms citizens. Citizens, working together, create and sustain........

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