How Can We Teach about the Founding of America to the Rising Generation?

The discussion for this Constitution Monday concerns the beginning of a year-long commemoration of the founding of America. On July 4, 2026, America will celebrate the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Kevin Roberts, Ph.D., is president of The Heritage Foundation and Heritage Action for America as well as the author of several books, and he wrote the following to start his article. 

Nearly 250 years ago, an extraordinary generation of Americans swore their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor to the cause of freedom. Determined to hand down the long-standing tradition of American self-government, our Founders took up arms, triumphed in a hard-fought war against the world’s strongest military power, and left us—their descendants—the greatest system of government the world has ever known. This is our inheritance. America is our birthright.

We can no more pay for such a princely gift than we can pay for the sunrise or the stars, but, as G.K. Chesterton reminds us, the way to pay for the priceless is to live lives worthy of the gift. That is what Americans today are called to do—to claim our birthright and keep alive what George Washington called “the sacred fire of liberty.”

Despite two and a half centuries of change, the United States is still at its best when its laws and policies—from immigration and national security to education and technology—reflect our founding principles.

This is impossible, however, if America’s future leaders are not familiar with the aspirations that inspired those who fought in the American Revolution and the powerful ideas behind the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

Unfortunately, much of this history has been forgotten. Many Americans today have grown up watching their sports heroes kneel during the national anthem and seeing their teachers refuse to say the pledge of allegiance. They have been told that they should be ashamed of our country, founded as it is on racism and sexism.

Roberts suggests in his article teaching correct principles about the founding of America will help to restore those principles in our nation today. However, we must first instill “curiosity about the Founding in their minds and a sense of informed patriotism in their hearts” before we can teach the rising “generation about the importance of the First Amendment, federalism, or the separation of powers.”

Roberts believes that the “best way to accomplish this [great task] is by recounting the remarkable stories of our Founders’ lives.” He reasons that by “encountering the lives and statesmanship of our greatest leaders, their vision for America, the challenges of the colonial world they lived in, and the sacrifices they endured to change that world,” we can be compelled “to reject the Left’s ahistorical accounts of their lives and legacies.”

To accomplish this important quest, we must believe that the best days for our nation lie ahead. We can recover the founding principles and instill them in the hearts of the rising generation. We must teach about “the courage that crossed the Delaware, the fortitude that outlasted that cold winter at Valley Forge, and the prudence that produced our Founding documents.” To teach properly, we must feel piety or “a deep sense of gratitude for what we have inherited.”

The Romans considered piety great among the virtues and it remains at the heart of any patriotic life. Unlike nostalgia and cynicism, which prompt passivity and stagnation, piety prompts action.

So, whether you are working in the classroom to remind a new generation about the moral truths and enduring principles that make America great, working in Congress to channel those truths and principles into good policy, or working in the courts to defend our Constitution’s original meaning, please take a moment today – as we celebrate 249 years of American independence – to learn more about the incredible lives of the men and women that founded our country, the patriotic piety their example rightly prompts in our hearts, and the civic action it spurs in our lives.

Let us never forget that, as Founding Father Benjamin Rush wrote, “Patriotism is as much a virtue as justice … Amor Patriae is both a moral and a religious duty. It comprehends not only the love of our neighbors but of millions of our fellow creatures, not only of the present but of future generations.”