A sobering poll in the Wall Street Journal last week points to a collapse in the importance placed on patriotism, hard work, community involvement, and tolerance for others, particularly among the nation’s young people. A mere 23 percent of adults under age 30 say that patriotism is very important to them personally, compared to 59 percent of American senior citizens.

If young people are less personally invested in the values that once defined America, one source of the problem might be our public schools, which have drifted far from their founding purpose of citizen-making and forging a disparate people into a unified nation—an ideal best expressed in the national motto E Pluribus Unum (“out of many, one”).

A review of the mission statements of the 100 largest school districts in the US, which collectively educate more than 10 million children, reveals something both noteworthy and sobering: the words “patriotic” and “patriotism” occur in none of them. Even more startling: neither do the words “America” or “American.” The word “community” appears in about half of the adopted statements, but typically in anodyne phrases like “community of learners.” Twenty-nine include some variation of the word “citizen,” but more often than not in reference to “global citizenship.” The mission statement for Dade County, Florida’s school district, for example includes a call to “empower all students to be productive lifelong learners and responsible global citizens.” Philadelphia schools are charged to “ensure all children graduate from high school ready to succeed, fully engaged as a citizen of our world.”

Our earliest thinkers about American education would be likely dispirited by the collapse of patriotic sentiment, and aghast if they knew how far we’d drifted from the civic mission of schools. As education scholar E. D. Hirsch, Jr. noted in his book The Making of Americans, an “anxious theme runs through the writings of the revolutionary generation of American education theorists” such as Benjamin Rush and Noah Webster, and even the Founding Fathers such George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, who saw common schools as “the central and main hope for the preservation of democratic ideals and the endurance of the nation as a republic.”  

“It is well known that our strongest prejudices in favour of our country are formed in the first one and twenty years of our lives,” Rush wrote in 1798, in a famous essay calling for “one general, and uniform system of education, [that] will render the mass of the people more homogeneous, and thereby fit them more easily for uniform and peaceable government.” To call today for a “more homogenous” society would be to court cancellation. It will come as no surprise that references to “diversity” and “equity” are featured in at least one-third of school district mission statements.

The Journal poll showed a growing emphasis on money, which was cited as “very important” by 43 percent of respondents, up from 31 percent in 1998. This, too, is echoed in school district mission statements, which are far more likely to reflect the private ends of preparation for college (31 times) and career (33) than any public purpose. Neither is this a case of educrats imposing workforce imperatives on schools. A multi-year survey completed last year by Populace, a nonpartisan think tank, offered Americans a list of 57 goals for children’s K-12 education. The top priority was for students to “develop practical skills” including the ability to manage their personal finances. Understanding and knowing how to participate in a democracy ranked 23rd, while adopting “a shared set of American values” came in 37th.

We should not assume that school district mission statements are a reliable guide to classroom instruction, or the signals children receive about American life.  Schools are but one influence shaping our children’s views and values. But it is interesting to note that when the people responsible for setting expectations and overseeing the work of taxpayer-funded school districts ask, “What’s our role?” the evidence suggests the goal of developing “prejudices in favor of our country” no longer play any part of it.

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