Two hundred and fifty years ago, the Founders staked everything on a bet about human character. John Adams named the terms in 1776. "Public Virtue cannot exist in a Nation without private, and public Virtue is the only Foundation of a Republic." They did not expect liberty to sustain itself. It would live or die by the quality of the citizens who inherited it, and those citizens had to be formed.

Thomas Jefferson identified the tool that would form them. "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." He pressed for a school in every ward because he grasped a plain truth. People who cannot read the laws will not govern themselves for long. Education was the engine of the American experiment, and it still is.

So measure the country against the standard its Founders set. On the 2022 Nation's Report Card, only 22 percent of eighth graders were proficient in civics, 13 percent in United States history, and 40 percent could not reach a basic level in history at all. Civics scores fell for the first time since the exam began in 1998. The slide started well before the pandemic and deepened through it.........

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