In 2013, Mississippi ranked 49th in the nation in fourth-grade reading. By 2024, it ranked ninth. Over those 11 years, the percentage of Mississippi fourth graders reading at or above the proficient level rose from 21% to 32%, even as proficiency rates declined nationally. A state once near the bottom of the rankings had become a national leader in reading achievement.

Mississippi’s progress followed sustained investments in research-informed reading instruction, teacher preparation, coaching, assessment, and implementation. Although researchers continue to examine the contributions of individual reforms, the larger lesson is compelling: educational improvement requires understanding how people learn, measuring results, and building the capacity to put evidence into practice.

The Science of Reading has helped establish a more rigorous foundation for literacy instruction. Now, researchers are calling for similar attention to mathematics. In a recent conversation with Rick Hess, cognitive scientist Daniel Ansari argued for stronger connections between research on how children develop mathematical understanding and the preparation and practices of teachers.

We need to bring that same ambition to civics.

Across the country, educators and civic organizations have developed outstanding resources to help Americans understand our constitutional system and prepare for the responsibilities of citizenship. Schools teach American history and government. Museums, libraries, and civic institutions create opportunities for learning, dialogue, and participation. Families introduce children to questions of fairness, rights, and responsibility long before formal instruction begins.

We also have important research on which to build. Yet the evidence about the state of civic learning should sharpen our sense of urgency.

The National Assessment of Educational Progress provides decades of data on students’ civic knowledge. Its most recent civics assessment, in 2022, found that just 22% of eighth graders performed at or above the proficient level, statistically unchanged from 1998. Average scores were also no better than they had been nearly a quarter century earlier. Despite decades of effort, we have not achieved sustained national improvement on this important measure.

Adult civic knowledge reveals similarly persistent gaps. The University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Constitution Day Civics Survey has documented periods of improvement and decline, with little sustained progress in recent years. Between 2023 and 2026, the proportion of adults able to name all three branches of government fluctuated between 65% and 70%. In 2026, just 9% could name all five First Amendment rights.

These findings are troubling, but they illuminate only one dimension of a much larger challenge. Knowing how government is structured does not tell us whether Americans can apply constitutional principles, evaluate competing arguments, engage constructively across differences, or exercise meaningful influence in their communities. Nor does it reveal whether they possess the confidence, motivation, and habits necessary for sustained participation in civic life.

We need rigorous research and meaningful measures of each dimension of civic formation: knowledge, skills, dispositions, habits, values, and efficacy. Just as importantly, we need to understand how these capacities interact, reinforce one another, and develop across a lifetime. Does greater constitutional knowledge strengthen civic efficacy? Do experiences of meaningful participation motivate deeper learning? How do civic habits and dispositions influence whether people use the knowledge and skills they acquire? Understanding these relationships is essential to designing experiences that contribute to lasting civic development.

There are important foundations for this work. Researchers at CIRCLE have advanced our understanding of youth civic learning, participation, and barriers to engagement. Evaluations by civic education providers offer evidence about individual interventions. Drawing on an extensive body of empirical research, the 2011 Guardian of Democracy report identified six evidence-based practices for effective civic learning, including classroom instruction, discussion of current events, service learning, and opportunities for students to participate in school and community life.

In a 2019 review of the research, Notre Dame political scientist David Campbell identified growing evidence that well-designed civic education can have meaningful, lasting effects on young people’s civic engagement. He examined the contributions of classroom instruction, extracurricular activities, service learning, and school culture, finding that effective civic education can be especially valuable for young people who have fewer civic resources and opportunities at home or in their communities. Campbell also warned that the available data remained limited and randomized studies were rare. He called for a large-scale, interdisciplinary research effort using multiple methods to develop a stronger understanding of what works.

These contributions provide an important foundation, but the evidence remains fragmented. National assessments reveal trends, studies of participation identify influences on engagement, and program evaluations illuminate individual interventions. What we lack is a coordinated body of rigorous comparative and longitudinal research that can tell us which approaches work best, whether their effects endure, and how different dimensions of civic formation develop together through successive learning experiences.

The next generation of civic learning should be guided not only by our convictions about what matters, but by rigorous evidence about what actually works. The goal is not a single curriculum or a standardized measure of citizenship, but a stronger foundation for designing and improving civic learning across different settings and stages of life.

An important distinction is between what an educational experience accomplishes in the moment and what learners carry forward. A program may demonstrate immediate gains in knowledge, skills, or efficacy, but how much of that progress do participants retain over time? Which approaches are most effective for different learners and settings?

Answering these questions requires interdisciplinary research drawing on cognitive science, developmental psychology, and comparative and longitudinal studies. It also requires looking beyond individual experiences to understand how civic formation unfolds across a lifetime. A classroom lesson, museum visit, family conversation, and community program may each contribute to civic development, yet we rarely examine how these experiences reinforce one another or create pathways to progressively deeper learning and participation.

Understanding how civic learning develops also requires us to examine whom our institutions are reaching. Many organizations excel at serving high-achieving students, highly educated adults, engaged families, and people already interested in history or government. Deepening their knowledge matters. Yet a national strategy for civic renewal cannot depend primarily on those already inclined to participate.

Making excellent programs available does not guarantee that less-engaged audiences will seek them out. We need to understand what sparks curiosity, lowers barriers, and creates meaningful invitations into civic life. Research should help us design more accessible entry points, understand what sustains participation, and expand opportunities in communities where civic infrastructure is scarce.

This work also demands institutional humility.

Educational organizations develop programs through expertise, experience, and conviction. We invest in them and take understandable pride in their accomplishments. Yet what happens when the evidence reveals that a program is not achieving its intended impact? Participants may enjoy an educational experience but retain little of what they learn. A program may increase factual knowledge without strengthening the capacity to apply it. An initiative designed to reach new audiences may primarily attract those already engaged.

Such findings should prompt improvement, not defensiveness. A serious commitment to evidence requires the willingness to challenge our assumptions, reconsider our methods, and redesign programs when results fall short of our ambitions.

Institutional humility must also be matched by the resources to act. Evaluation may reveal the need to redesign curricula, strengthen educator preparation, change delivery methods, or redirect resources toward more effective approaches. That requires time, expertise, and sustained investment.

This is a responsibility that civic institutions cannot shoulder alone. Major philanthropy must partner with researchers and civic organizations to support not only rigorous research and evaluation, but also the experimentation, redesign, and implementation necessary to translate evidence into better practice. Larger, better-resourced civic organizations have a particular responsibility to undertake this work on behalf of the field. They are better positioned to test new approaches and assume institutional risks that smaller organizations, operating with more limited resources and capacity, cannot reasonably be expected to take.

Equally important is a commitment to sharing what works and what does not. Making these findings available will help organizations of every size build on successful approaches, avoid repeating unsuccessful ones, and make better-informed decisions about their programs. The goal is a shared body of evidence that strengthens civic learning across the field.

If we believe that civic learning is essential to sustaining constitutional self-government, we should be equally committed to making it more effective. A Science of Civics offers an opportunity to move from conviction to evidence, from isolated successes to shared knowledge, and from measuring our efforts to demonstrating their lasting impact.

*With thanks to my friend and colleague Victoria Hughes, the National Constitution Center is beginning to convene a Science of Civics Working Group to help advance this effort. We plan to draw on expertise across research, education, civic institutions, and philanthropy.

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Self-government has always been fragile.

That may be an uncomfortable thought at a time when many Americans are anxious about the future of our constitutional democracy. Political divisions run deep. Trust in institutions is strained. A 2026 Pew Research Center survey found that 69% of Americans were dissatisfied with how democracy was working in the United States.

But fragility is not a uniquely modern condition. It is inherent in the nature of self-government. Government is made up of human beings, and human beings are imperfect. We have competing interests, different convictions, and deeply held disagreements about what is best for ourselves, our communities, and our country. We are capable of extraordinary cooperation and generosity, but also ambition, self-interest, suspicion, and division.

The American founders understood this. They designed a constitutional system that accounted for the imperfections of human nature rather than assuming that citizens and leaders would always act virtuously. Separation of powers, checks and balances, federalism, and protections for individual rights were intended to limit the concentration and abuse of power.

Yet institutional design could take them only so far. Constitutional institutions are necessary for self-government, but they are not sufficient. Our democracy also depends on the character of its people, their commitment to the common good, and their willingness to exercise the virtues of citizenship.

The founders’ own experience confirmed what the lessons of antiquity had taught them about the importance of character and virtue. Winning independence required extraordinary sacrifice and cooperation among 13 states with competing interests. When the Articles of Confederation proved inadequate, Americans had to negotiate a new constitutional framework and secure its ratification despite profound disagreements. Even after the Bill of Rights was ratified in 1791, the young nation continued to confront bitter political divisions, economic challenges, and foreign threats.

By 1796, George Washington had grown deeply concerned about the rise of political factions and sectional divisions. In his Farewell Address, he warned that the “spirit of party” was “inseparable from our nature, having its root in the strongest passions of the human mind.” Carried to excess, party passions could inflame divisions and open the door to ambitious leaders who sought power at the expense of liberty.

Washington also warned against the temptation for one branch of government to encroach upon another. He defended the necessity of “reciprocal checks” in the exercise of political power. “To preserve them must be as necessary as to institute them,” he insisted. His warning was rooted in an understanding of human nature: even those entrusted with constitutional authority could be tempted to exceed its limits.

Yet his defense of constitutional institutions was accompanied by an equally forceful appeal to civic character. “Virtue or morality,” he wrote, “is a necessary spring of popular government.” He urged Americans to promote institutions for the general diffusion of knowledge, reminding his fellow citizens that “public opinion should be enlightened.”

Washington understood that the machinery of government could not operate independently of the people entrusted with its care. Those who exercised power needed judgment and restraint. Those who selected their leaders needed knowledge and discernment. And all Americans needed a sense of obligation to the larger political community.

The challenges Washington feared soon became impossible to ignore. The election of 1800 exposed deep divisions between Federalists and Democratic-Republicans. An electoral tie between Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr sent the contest to the House of Representatives, where 36 ballots were required to determine the presidency. The transfer of power between rival political parties tested a constitutional system still finding its footing.

When Jefferson took office in 1801, he appealed to Americans to accept the constitutional outcome and “unite in common efforts for the common good.” Jefferson recognized the authority of electoral majorities, but insisted that majority power had constitutional and moral limits. The minority possessed “their equal rights, which equal law must protect,” and violating those rights would constitute oppression.

Political victory did not erase obligations to those who supported the losing side. Nor did it require Americans to abandon their convictions. “Every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle,” Jefferson declared. He urged Americans to restore “that harmony and affection without which liberty and even life itself are but dreary things,” warning against “a political intolerance as despotic, as wicked” as the religious intolerance they had rejected.

The peaceful transfer of power was a constitutional achievement, but its endurance depended on more than the rules governing elections. Citizens and leaders had to accept the results, exercise restraint, and respect the rights of those with whom they disagreed. Jefferson was not asking Americans to abandon their political principles. He was appealing to the habits of citizenship necessary to preserve liberty amid disagreement.

There is, however, a profound contradiction embedded in these appeals. Washington and Jefferson both recognized slavery’s injustice, yet both enslaved human beings while calling upon Americans to exercise civic virtue and defend constitutional liberty. Washington ultimately provided in his will for the emancipation of the people he personally enslaved, while Jefferson freed only a small number during his lifetime and at his death. Their complicated legacies reveal the distance that can exist between the virtues we profess and the values we live by. The virtues of citizenship demand more than conviction. They require the courage to put our principles into practice.

That contradiction would eventually bring the nation to its gravest moment of constitutional fragility, a true crisis: the Civil War.

In his 1854 Peoria speech, Abraham Lincoln condemned slavery as a “monstrous injustice.” He warned that its expansion enabled the enemies of free institutions to “taunt us as hypocrites” and placed Americans in conflict with “the very fundamental principles of civil liberty.” By 1858, The Kansas- Nebraska Act and the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision had weakened barriers to slavery’s expansion.

Here was the danger Washington’s appeals to civic virtue could not resolve through institutional design alone. The nation possessed a Constitution, a Congress, a presidency, and a Supreme Court. Yet institutions established to govern a free people were being used to secure and extend human bondage. Constitutional authority, without the moral judgment to direct its exercise, could become an instrument of profound injustice.

In his “House Divided” speech that year, Lincoln warned that “a house divided against itself cannot stand.” He did not predict the immediate collapse of the Union. Rather, he argued that the nation could not remain permanently divided between slavery and freedom. Within a few years, the conflict over slavery would erupt into a bloody Civil War, threatening the survival of the American experiment in self-government.

Lincoln’s answer was not to abandon constitutional politics. He sought to persuade his fellow Americans, build a political movement, and change the direction of national policy. At Cooper Union in 1860, he challenged Americans to stand by their convictions rather than yield to threats or political pressure. His closing appeal was unmistakable: “Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it.”

The Union’s victory preserved the nation, and the Reconstruction Amendments abolished slavery and established new guarantees of citizenship, equal protection, and voting rights. But those constitutional commitments depended on citizens and leaders willing to uphold them. As federal protections receded and white supremacist violence and discrimination took hold, many of Reconstruction’s immediate gains were dismantled. Disenfranchisement and Jim Crow segregation followed. These were failures of institutions and of the moral courage and political will needed to defend the rights those institutions were entrusted to protect.

Reversing those injustices required extraordinary courage from citizens and government leaders alike. Generations of civil rights advocates organized, marched, litigated, and risked their lives to demand that the nation honor its constitutional commitments. Their efforts, joined by leaders willing to act through the courts, Congress, and the presidency, helped dismantle legally enforced segregation and strengthen protections for voting rights.

The experience of Reconstruction and the civil rights movements offers a powerful lesson. Constitutional guarantees matter enormously. But they cannot enforce themselves. Their promise depends on people willing to exercise power responsibly and summon the courage to secure liberty and equality for all.

Our history makes clear that self-government does not become fragile only in moments of crisis. Its fragility is ever-present, even when our institutions appear secure. The concerns many Americans express today remind us how uncertain the future of our constitutional democracy can sometimes feel. But history offers another, more hopeful lesson. At some of our nation’s most consequential moments, Americans have refused to surrender to despair or withdraw from civic life. They have organized, participated, and accepted responsibility for the country’s future. Moments of extraordinary fragility have also called forth extraordinary acts of civic courage.

That history places a responsibility on every generation, including our own. Concern about the future of self-government should deepen our resolve to participate, not diminish it. We need the judgment to distinguish principle from partisanship, the restraint to respect the rights of others, and the willingness to work with fellow Americans toward the common good.

These virtues demand more than civility or agreement. They require us to remain engaged across our differences, even when doing so is difficult. Sometimes citizenship calls for compromise and forbearance. At other times, it calls for moral courage and principled disagreement. In either case, we must believe that our individual and collective actions can make a difference.

We cannot reserve these responsibilities only for moments of grave crisis. The habits that sustain self-government must be cultivated long before they are tested. Families, schools, religious congregations, voluntary associations, and civic institutions all help develop the knowledge, character, and sense of responsibility we bring to public life. We strengthen these capacities through participation, working alongside others, navigating disagreements, and contributing to the communities we share.

I often return to an inscription in the rotunda of the Oregon State Capitol that has stayed with me: “In the souls of its citizens will be found the likeness of the state which, if they be unjust and tyrannical, then will it reflect their vices, but if they be lovers of righteousness, confident in their liberties, so will it be clean in justice, bold in freedom.”

I find those words both sobering and hopeful. They remind us that the character of our government is inseparable from the character and commitments of the people who sustain it.

Washington understood this when he insisted that virtue was essential to popular government. Jefferson echoed that responsibility in his appeal to the common good and his insistence that the rights of political opponents must be respected. Lincoln understood it when he called upon Americans to have faith in what was right and the courage to do their duty.

And Lincoln returned to this fundamental idea at Gettysburg. Amid the immense sacrifices of the Civil War, he called upon the living to dedicate themselves to the unfinished work of preserving “government of the people, by the people, for the people.”

More than a century and a half later, that work remains unfinished. Self-government is inherently fragile because it rests in human hands. Its endurance depends on strong constitutional institutions and on citizens who possess the character, knowledge, and courage to strengthen and sustain them.

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Resources 

• John Holbein and D. Sunshine Hillygus, Making Young Voters: Converting Civic Attitudes into Civic Action, (2020)

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Civic infrastructure looks very different from one community to the next. Some places have a dense network of institutions that regularly invite people into civic life. In others, those opportunities are much thinner. Until recently, that landscape has been difficult to see, much less quantify.

I recently learned about a remarkable effort to do exactly that from my wonderful colleague Ashley Berner at Johns Hopkins. The Mapping the Modern Agora project at the SNF Agora Institute analyzes more than 1.7 million nonprofit organizations to identify where opportunities for participation exist. Its MapAgora Dashboard makes that research accessible at the community level and gives us a much clearer picture of civic infrastructure across the country.

This matters because many of our civic challenges are still analyzed from a national altitude, through broad measures of trust, polarization, isolation, civic knowledge, and participation. Those measures are important, but they cannot tell us what civic life looks like in a particular place.

Mapping the Modern Agora helps us get closer to the ground and see something national averages obscure: Communities differ significantly in the civic opportunities available to the people who live there. Some places have relatively deep civic infrastructure, with many organizations offering recurring ways to join, volunteer, gather, and participate. Others have thinner infrastructure, where those opportunities are fewer, less varied, or harder to find. At the furthest end of that continuum are what researchers have called “civic deserts,” places where opportunities for civic learning, connection, and participation are especially scarce. The distinction is not simply about the number of organizations in a community. It is about whether people have multiple, durable pathways into civic life.

Those differences should shape how we think about investment. A community with relatively deep civic infrastructure may benefit most from targeted support that helps strong institutions reach more people, connect with one another, or expand work that is already succeeding. A place with thinner infrastructure may need more sustained investment in local leadership, institutional capacity, and new pathways for participation. And in civic deserts, the challenge may be more foundational: building or strengthening the institutions, relationships, and opportunities that make participation possible in the first place. The depth, duration, and form of investment should reflect those differences, with particular attention to places where civic infrastructure is weakest.

This is the logic of a place-based strategy for civic renewal. In many communities, the most important investments will be grassroots ones: supporting local leaders, strengthening institutions that already have trust and reach, connecting organizations that are working in isolation, and helping promising local efforts grow. The work should begin with a clearer understanding of what a particular community has, what it needs, and what is most likely to endure.

Local civic infrastructure, however, does not have to be built from scratch or built alone. National institutions often have missions, programs, expertise, and incentives that bring them into communities across the country, while philanthropy often wants to support work that can scale. The opportunity is to align those national ambitions with local capacity-building.

Better data can help make that alignment more intentional. National organizations can bring tested programs, professional development, research, convening power, and broader networks in ways that respond to the local landscape. Just as important, they can design partnerships that leave local institutions better equipped to carry the work forward by training staff, developing local leaders, strengthening relationships among organizations, sharing tools and resources that can be adapted over time, and helping institutions build the systems and confidence to continue the work on their own.

Philanthropy can support both sides of that equation: direct investment in local capacity and the scaling of effective national work in ways that strengthen the places where it operates. Done well, national reach helps build stronger local institutions, and those stronger institutions make national impact more durable. The aim is not simply to deliver a successful program in more places. It is to expand impact in ways that leave behind greater civic capacity than existed before.

If this is the approach, then the geography of civic opportunity should inform the geography of civic investment. Mapping the Modern Agora can help us make more intentional choices about where existing capacity can be strengthened, where local efforts deserve deeper support, where partnerships with national organizations could accelerate or extend good work, and where genuinely new infrastructure may be needed.

We should be able to return to the dashboard year after year and see and measure the change: local civic infrastructure thickening, more communities developing durable opportunities for participation, and more places gaining the capacity to sustain civic life over time.

The opportunity now is to turn that insight into a strategy for renewal. Civic renewal will not happen everywhere in the same way, or at the same pace. But over the next 15 years, we can become far more intentional about where we invest, what we strengthen, and what we build. If we pair better data with local leadership, sustained investment, and national partnership, then the geography of civic opportunity in America can change. Community by community, we can thicken the civic infrastructure that gives people more ways to gather, contribute, participate, and practice self-government together.

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Lately, it seems that everyone I talk to in the civic space is talking about Alexis de Tocqueville.

In conversations with philanthropists, educators, museum leaders, scholars, and civic organizations across the country, Tocqueville keeps coming up. So does Robert Putnam, whose work on social capital and the decline of American associational life is finding a new audience.

The reason Tocqueville and Putnam are resonating so deeply is that we recognize something in their writing about the condition of American life today. We can feel our civic fabric being pulled apart. We see it in the weakening of community ties, declining participation in civic and social organizations, and the growing number of Americans who feel disconnected from one another and from the institutions around them. Loneliness, polarization, and declining trust have become defining challenges of American society. The relationships that hold communities together have always been fragile, but the pressures on them today feel especially acute.

We are not returning to Tocqueville and Putnam simply because they help us understand what ails our civic life. Together, they offer a fuller picture of how we can address those challenges and work toward a period of genuine civic renewal.

The path toward renewal requires us to understand the relationship between the connections we hope to rebuild and the institutions that make those connections possible. Our civic fabric needs a civic architecture to hold it together. Relationships grow through institutions and associations that bring people together, give them common purposes, and create opportunities for sustained participation. In turn, those institutions depend on an engaged civil society to sustain them.

When Alexis de Tocqueville traveled through the United States in 1831 and 1832, he was fascinated by the American habit of forming associations. Americans organized themselves to establish schools, found hospitals, and build other institutions to serve their communities.

Tocqueville understood that a constitution could establish the framework for self-government, but it could not, on its own, cultivate the habits necessary to sustain it. Those habits had to be developed and practiced by the people themselves. Associations helped Americans learn how to organize, deliberate, compromise, lead, and take responsibility for shared concerns. They were both expressions of an active civil society and institutions through which Americans cultivated the habits of civic life.

Nearly two centuries later, political scientist Robert Putnam helped Americans understand what happens when those connections weaken. His landmark book Bowling Alone, published in 2000, documented declining participation in many forms of American civic life and popularized the concept of social capital: the relationships, networks, and norms of trust and reciprocity that help communities function.

The title captured the problem beautifully. Americans were still bowling. They were just increasingly doing so alone.

Twenty-six years later, we are still struggling to figure out how to bowl together again. Putnam’s diagnosis has been with us for more than a quarter century, yet we have not managed to reverse the weakening of the relationships and associations he documented. The pandemic accelerated our retreat from shared spaces and social routines, while digital life, polarization, and declining trust have placed additional strains on our connections to one another.

The 2023 documentary Join or Die, directed by Pete and Rebecca Davis, has introduced Putnam’s work to new audiences. Rather than offering another diagnosis of America’s civic challenges, the film shows people doing the work of rebuilding community and offers a wonderfully practical invitation: Join a club.

But that invitation reminds us of something essential: People need places to gather, organizations to join, and institutions that welcome them in. Sustaining those institutions is as important as encouraging Americans to participate in them.

Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation adds another dimension to this conversation. His work has focused public attention on the consequences of growing up in an increasingly phone-based world. But as families, schools, and policymakers consider healthier boundaries around technology, we should also ask what we are inviting children and teenagers to do when they put down their phones.

Where will they go? Whom will they meet? What opportunities will they have to develop friendships, discover shared interests, and become part of a community?

They need public parks, playgrounds, museums, libraries, recreation centers, and welcoming community organizations where they can discover that life beyond a screen is interesting and rewarding. Adults need those places, too. The young professional who moves to a new city, the parent looking for connection beyond work and family responsibilities, and the retiree seeking community and purpose all need opportunities to belong.

Amid so much of our lives moving online, people are increasingly seeking opportunities to connect face-to-face, discover shared interests, and enjoy one another’s company. Our civic institutions have an opportunity to meet that need. But we cannot simply ask Americans to become more connected. We have to make the alternatives to isolation available, accessible, and inviting.

Fortunately, much of the infrastructure we need already exists. Our museums, libraries, parks, houses of worship, community colleges, and local associations offer countless opportunities to gather around shared interests and purposes.

But the existence of civic infrastructure is not the same as its strength.

An institution can stand at the heart of a community without being central to the lives of the people who live there. A museum can house extraordinary collections and welcome fewer visitors. A library can offer programs that many of its neighbors never discover. A community organization can have a distinguished history while struggling to attract the next generation of participants.

If we want Americans to rediscover the benefits of association, we need to make better use of the institutions we already have. We need to help more people find their way through the doors, give them reasons to return, and create experiences through which shared interests become lasting relationships and opportunities to connect across differences.

But we also need to ensure those doors remain open.

The institutions that sustain civic life are more fragile than we often assume. Local museums, neighborhood associations, community centers, libraries, and other civic organizations face changing patterns of participation, rising costs, financial pressures, and the constant challenge of attracting new generations. History, longevity, and a valued place in a community are no guarantee of permanence.

That matters because civic infrastructure cannot be rebuilt once and then left to sustain itself. The places where people gather, learn, form relationships, and practice the habits of association require continual participation and investment. We cannot rebuild the habits Tocqueville admired if the institutions through which people practice them are weakening.

Sustaining them requires people who recognize their value and make them part of the ordinary rhythms of their lives: visiting, joining, volunteering, attending programs, bringing others with them, and building family and community traditions around these places. It also requires philanthropy that recognizes the importance of investing in institutions themselves, not simply funding new initiatives.

The reason everyone is talking about Tocqueville again is that we recognize what is at stake. But recognition is only the beginning. Together, Tocqueville and Putnam offer a roadmap for civic renewal, reminding us that the relationships that hold a society together do not sustain themselves, nor do the institutions through which those relationships grow. Both require our participation, our investment, and our care. We cannot hope to mend the fabric of American civic life without renewing the institutions that give it strength, shape, and the capacity to endure.

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Last week, Congressman Brendan Boyle came to the National Constitution Center to announce plans for federal legislation establishing a national commission to begin preparing for the 250th anniversary of the Constitution in 2037. You can read more about the announcement here.

As Center interim President and CEO Vince Stango shared during the announcement, we have an opportunity to “sustain the partnerships, infrastructure, and spirit of coming together that [America’s 250th] anniversary has inspired, and to continue deepening investments in the civic, educational, and cultural institutions that connect Americans to our constitutional story.”

The experience of America’s 250th helps explain why beginning this work now matters, and why we should approach what comes next with even greater ambition.

Congress established the U.S. Semiquincentennial Commission in July 2016, almost exactly a decade before July 4, 2026. But creating the federal commission was only the beginning. The broader national infrastructure took years to develop. It would not be until the end of 2024 that Semiquincentennial planning entities were in place across all 50 states, five territories, and the District of Columbia.

America’s 250th has generated extraordinary civic activity across the country. State commissions have built networks and partnerships. Cities and towns have organized around their own histories. Museums, libraries, schools, universities, historical and cultural organizations, philanthropies, businesses, civic institutions, and government agencies have found new reasons and new ways to work together.

That capacity is one of the great successes of this anniversary.

But if we are serious about learning from America’s 250th, we should also be candid about its limitations. The national celebration often felt fragmented. Some of that reflects a healthy diversity of histories, institutions, and approaches. A country this large should not commemorate its past through one centrally directed story or program. But fragmentation has also had consequences. Local, state, and national efforts developed on different timelines and with uneven levels of coordination. Much of the infrastructure required for a truly national commemoration came together relatively late. And, perhaps most importantly, we never established a sufficiently coherent set of civic goals beyond commemorating the milestone itself.

There has been no shortage of excellent programming, ambitious partnerships, or institutions doing meaningful work. What has been harder is connecting those efforts to a shared understanding of what we wanted to be different in American civic life because we marked the 250th anniversary of our founding.

Individual organizations have pursued important goals for civic knowledge, participation, institutional strength, and civic formation. But as a nation and as a field, we did not establish a sufficiently clear set of shared outcomes, or agree on how we would measure progress toward them, early enough to organize the full power of this moment.

That is a lesson worth carrying forward: An anniversary date, however powerful, is not itself a strategy. And an extraordinary collection of commemorative activities is not the same thing as a coordinated effort to leave American civic life stronger than we found it.

The years ahead give us the chance to do more. But first, we have to resist the instinct to wind down what we have spent so long building.

The civic capacity created for 2026 should not have a 2026 expiration date. Where state commissions have built meaningful relationships, expertise, and networks, we should work to keep them intact. Their mandates can evolve. Their programs should change. But the capacity to act together should endure.

The same is true of the partnerships among state and local governments, museums and libraries, schools and universities, historical and cultural institutions, philanthropy, business, and civic organizations. Those relationships took years to build. To allow them to dissipate now would be to surrender one of the most valuable legacies of America’s 250th just as it becomes most useful.

At the national level, Congressman Boyle’s proposal for a new bipartisan commission offers an opportunity to establish coordinating capacity early, while those networks are active and the experience of 2026 is still fresh.

This work does not need to wait for a new federal commission, however. These conversations are already happening at the state, local, and organizational levels, and I find that tremendously encouraging.

Across civic education, history, culture, philanthropy, higher education, business, government, and other sectors, leaders are already looking beyond 2026. Some are focused on the Constitution’s 250th in 2037. Others are looking through to the Bill of Rights’ 250th in 2041. They may use different language and frameworks, but many are looking toward the same horizon and asking versions of the same question: What can we build together over these years that would leave our institutions stronger, our communities more connected, and future generations better prepared for the responsibilities of self-government?

Now we need to make sure those conversations bear fruit.

The next decade should not be organized primarily around another countdown to another anniversary. It should be organized around what we intend to accomplish by the time we reach it.

That requires a clearer set of goals for civic knowledge, participation, and trust; a shared commitment to strengthening the institutions that sustain civic life; and a more expansive understanding of civic formation that encompasses learners of all ages, from early childhood through adulthood and across generations. It also requires us to hold ourselves accountable for progress. What do we want to be measurably different by 2037 and 2041, and what are we prepared to do together to make it happen?

We should establish better ways to understand the health of civic life over time, including an annual civic barometer that allows us to see where progress is being made and where challenges remain. We should become more rigorous about measuring the impact of civic programs and interventions, not simply their reach. We should connect researchers and practitioners to build a stronger science of civics and a better understanding of what works, for whom, and under what conditions. And we should strengthen the institutions capable of supporting civic learning and engagement across generations, long after the anniversaries themselves have passed.

The National Constitution Center is uniquely positioned to help lead this next chapter, and our own history helps explain why. The Center was born of the Constitution’s bicentennial, when Congress recognized that the anniversary should leave behind more than a national celebration. Through the Constitution Heritage Act of 1988, Congress established a private, nonprofit museum with a national mandate for nonpartisan constitutional education. We are ourselves an enduring legacy of an earlier constitutional milestone, entrusted with carrying its educational purpose forward. As America’s constitutional home, helping lead the country toward 2037 and 2041 is not simply an opportunity to participate in the next great anniversaries. It is a continuation of the work for which we were created, and a chance to help ensure that these milestones leave American civic life stronger for generations to come.

On a nonpartisan and collaborative basis, the Center can help bring together leaders working locally, statewide, and nationally; connect public initiatives with private and philanthropic partners; foster collaboration between researchers and practitioners; and help evidence, promising ideas, and effective models travel across state lines and institutional boundaries.

We can also help establish shared goals and measures of progress while supporting the many different ways that states, communities, and institutions contribute to them. And we can help sustain national attention and investment throughout the years leading to the Constitution’s 250th in 2037 and the Bill of Rights’ 250th in 2041.

This is the kind of leadership the Civic Decade requires: ambitious about the outcomes we seek, collaborative in how we pursue them, and committed to building the institutional capacity to sustain progress over time.

Diversity of effort need not mean fragmentation of purpose. States and communities should pursue priorities rooted in their own histories and needs. Organizations should bring their particular missions, expertise, and strengths. There should be many sources of leadership, experimentation, and energy. But we can pursue different programs in different places while working toward shared civic ambitions. We can learn from one another without imposing a single model. And we can hold ourselves accountable for progress without reducing the richness of civic life to a single number.

We enter this next phase with advantages we did not have at the beginning of the last national commemorative effort: state commissions and local networks, cross-sector partnerships, national relationships, hard-earned experience, and leaders and institutions across the country already looking toward the same horizon. We should keep that infrastructure intact. Then we should ask more of it.

By the time we reach 2037 and 2041, we should be able to point not only to extraordinary national celebrations, but to a stronger civic landscape because of the work we undertook together: institutions better equipped to serve their communities, Americans of all ages more deeply connected to our constitutional story, a richer understanding of how civic knowledge and habits develop, and partnerships capable of sustaining that work for generations.

That is an ambition worthy of the years ahead, and one we can begin pursuing now.

Let’s make 2026 the beginning of something that lasts. When we reach 2037 and 2041, let’s be able to say that we did more than commemorate our constitutional inheritance. We strengthened the institutions, knowledge, and civic habits needed to carry it forward.

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July Fourth has rituals Americans know by heart: fireworks, cookouts, parades, concerts, and family gatherings. Long before children understand the history of the Declaration of Independence, they know the day matters. They look forward to it.

Constitution Day feels different.

September 17 marks the anniversary of the signing of the United States Constitution in Philadelphia in 1787. And for most Americans, the place they are most likely to encounter Constitution Day is in a classroom or on a college campus.

There is a reason for that. Educational institutions receiving federal funds are required to provide programming about the Constitution each year. That requirement has created an important national infrastructure for constitutional education. K-12 educators introduce students to its history, ideas, and text through classroom activities and discussions. Universities host lectures and panels. Students hear from scholars and participate in debates and other programs.

All of that matters. But it also means that Constitution Day can feel more like an academic observance than a civic holiday. Something assigned. Something attended. Something checked off the calendar. Compliance can create a program. It cannot create a tradition.

As we move through the Civic Decade, I think we should set a bigger goal for September 17: Make Constitution Day a civic holiday Americans actually know about and want to celebrate.

We do not need to sacrifice substance to do that. We should absolutely read the Constitution. We should study its history, debate its meaning, explore the choices made in Philadelphia in 1787, and ask how its principles apply today. We should put primary sources into people’s hands and, yes, give away as many pocket Constitutions as possible.

But Constitution Day could also learn a few things from July Fourth.

July Fourth understands the power of ritual. It gives us traditions we anticipate and return to. It brings people together across generations. It happens in public squares and backyards, at historic sites and around family tables. There is music and food, ceremony and celebration, history and fun.

And those traditions were built. Americans began marking the anniversary almost immediately, with public readings, music, feasting, toasts, and fireworks. Over generations, those practices grew and changed until they became part of an annual rhythm of American life. They created emotional resonance and social capital around the day. That matters. The celebration creates an invitation. Constitution Day needs more of that.

But the lesson runs in both directions. July Fourth can learn something from Constitution Day, too. The fireworks and parades are powerful because they draw us together. But celebration should also invite us to go deeper. Why did Americans declare independence? What did they mean when they wrote that all people are created equal? What obligations do those ideals place on us today?

The pomp should not be the end of the experience. It should be a doorway into learning more.

That is the balance I think our civic holidays need: joy and substance, emotional resonance and intellectual curiosity, traditions that invite us in and opportunities that encourage us to keep going.

Constitution Day already has a strong foundation on which to build. Observances happen in schools, colleges, museums, libraries, historic sites, courthouses, and communities across the country. Constitution Day is also Citizenship Day, and naturalization ceremonies give September 17 one of its most emotionally powerful civic rituals. There are classroom programs, debates, lectures, and community gatherings.

We do not need to invent Constitution Day. We need to build a broader culture around it.

At the National Constitution Center, we have been experimenting with that combination for years. Constitution Day is one of the biggest days on our calendar. Thousands of students come through our doors. New American citizens take the oath of allegiance. Visitors hear the Preamble read aloud. Students encounter historical figures, original documents, and constitutional ideas. Classrooms across the country join virtually. The general public joins us for serious conversations with leading scholars about a range of constitutional topics.

And pocket Constitutions are, quite literally, everywhere.

There is also birthday cake. Every year, our building fills with the sound of young people singing happy birthday to the Constitution. It is joyful. It is memorable. And it sits alongside the serious work of asking those same young people to read the Constitution, understand it, and consider what it means for their lives.

I think there is something important in that combination.

This year, we are widening the invitation further. The day before Constitution Day, we are opening Be a Civic Hero!, our first playful learning experience created especially for very young children and their families. We are also adding more children’s books and story hours, more opportunities for families to learn together, and more ways for our youngest visitors to enter civic life through curiosity, play, conversation, and exploration.

None of that makes the Constitution less serious. It gives more people a way in.

Now imagine more of that happening, in different shapes and sizes, across the country. A school might have a tradition students look forward to every September. A library might pair a constitutional conversation with a story hour for families. A historic site might hold a public reading of the Preamble or Constitution. A university might combine a lecture with music, food, or a student-led debate. A community might gather for a naturalization ceremony in a public space. A family might pull a pocket Constitution off the shelf at the dinner table.

Maybe there are even Constitution Day parades, neighborhood cookouts, and community celebrations of all kinds. September already marks a transition in American life: the return to school, to routines, and to a new season of learning. Constitution Day could become part of that rhythm, a moment of celebration that welcomes us back and then invites us to go deeper in the weeks and months that follow.

There should not be one prescribed way to celebrate Constitution Day. July Fourth teaches us that part, too. Its strength comes from a combination of shared national meaning and traditions that communities and families have made their own.

That is what Constitution Day can build toward: enough shared meaning that we recognize the day together, and enough room for people to make it theirs.

Some of it should be deeply substantive. Some of it should be ceremonial and celebratory. Some of it should simply be fun. And then we should do it all again the next year.

A child may first remember the cake or the story hour. Later, she may return with a question about the Constitution. Years later, the same holiday may prompt a conversation with her own family. The tradition remains familiar. The meaning deepens.

That, at their best, is what civic holidays can do. They give us something to anticipate and something to return to. They create shared memories while inviting new questions. They connect one generation to another without asking each generation to experience the day in exactly the same way.

Over the next 15 years, we have a unique opportunity to build that culture. By 2041, I hope September 17th feels different than it does today. I hope children know Constitution Day before someone assigns them a lesson about it. I hope families have traditions they look forward to. I hope schools, libraries, museums, universities, historic sites, and communities build on the celebrations already underway and make them distinctly their own.

And I hope July Fourth grows richer, too, as we find more ways to connect its extraordinary traditions to deeper engagement with the ideas at the heart of the Declaration.

Our civic holidays should not ask us to choose between learning and celebration. We need the parade and the primary source. The birthday cake and the constitutional debate. The story hour and the scholar talk. The traditions that make us want to show up, and the substance that makes showing up matter.

A strong civic culture needs both, too.

The best civic holidays invite us in with joy, give us something meaningful to return to, and leave us curious enough to keep learning after the celebration is over.

That is what Constitution Day can learn from July Fourth. And what July Fourth can learn from Constitution Day, too.

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How are you celebrating Constitution Day this year?

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Several years ago, while pregnant with my first child, I gave myself a project: I would assemble a cookbook of my grandmother’s recipes.

I gathered dishes I remembered from childhood, including Jewish holiday favorites that appeared on our family table year after year. I called relatives, compared memories, deciphered handwritten recipe cards, and tried to capture recipes my grandmother rarely made from precise instructions. Then I self-published the cookbook and distributed copies to my parents, siblings, aunt, uncle, and cousins.

I was thinking about the family I was about to begin. I wanted my children to have these recipes someday. But I also wanted our family to have a record of something we shared, an inheritance that could travel forward. I hope my two daughters will someday pass their copy to their children, my nieces and nephews will do the same, and another generation will inherit not only the recipes, but some sense of the family and traditions from which they came.

As I worked on the cookbook, I realized I was documenting much more than food. Each dish opened up memories of the people, traditions, conversations, and rituals surrounding it. The recipes were part of what my grandparents passed down to us. But so was everything that happened around the table. In many ways, that table was one of my first classrooms.

Jewish holidays in my childhood were full of rituals I came to understand gradually. There were familiar foods and prayers, people squeezing around the table, and stories retold often enough that everyone knew when to laugh. At Rosh Hashanah, there were apples and honey and the wish for a sweet new year.

No one announced that we were about to receive a lesson in Jewish tradition. We learned by participating. We tasted the food, heard the prayers, listened to the stories, and watched our parents and grandparents return to the same rituals year after year. Before we could explain why these traditions mattered, we knew they mattered because the people we loved made time for them and invited us to be a part of them.

And there was also what happened under the table. After dinner, while our parents and grandparents lingered over coffee and pastries, my siblings, cousins, and I gathered beneath the dining room table. We played, whispered, giggled, and tied the adults’ shoelaces together, waiting to see what would happen when someone tried to stand up.

But we also listened. Above us, the adults talked about family and work, but also politics, elections, and what was happening in the country and world. We caught fragments of conversations we did not yet fully understand. We heard people agree and disagree. We began to learn what the adults in our lives cared about, what questions they wrestled with, and how they made sense of the world.

Looking back, I see that the learning above and below the table was connected. In the same place where my grandparents taught us what it meant to inherit a religious and family tradition, they were giving us our earliest glimpse into what it meant to participate in a larger civic like.

None of it looked much like a lesson, and that was precisely the point. So much of what one generation passes to another happens through ordinary experiences: meals shared, stories repeated, questions asked, conversations overheard. Children learn what matters by noticing what the adults around them choose to remember, discuss, celebrate, question, and pass along. That is also how much of our earliest civic learning happens.

And, importantly, the exchange does not travel in only one direction. Children ask questions adults have stopped asking. Their curiosity can send parents and grandparents searching for answers themselves. Intergenerational learning is not simply knowledge transferred from old to young. At its best, it is a habit of learning together across generations.

That is why I keep returning to the cookbook, especially this Rosh Hashanah as my beloved grandmother, now 90, faces serious health challenges.

A recipe itself is an act of intergenerational learning. Someone teaching you how to make something. You learn it, perhaps change it, and eventually teach someone else. The recipe survives not because it sits untouched on a shelf, but because each generation picks it up, engages with it, and passes it along. Traditions work much the same way and so does civic life.

Now another generation is gathering around our family tables. My children and nieces and nephews are forming their own memories and asking their own questions. Someday, I hope our cookbooks travel another generation further, their pages stained from use, some recipes followed faithfully, others adapted, and perhaps new ones added alongside the old.

The most important thing my grandmother passed along, however, cannot be measured in teaspoons or cups. The essential ingredient running through every recipe is love: love of family expressed through gathering, feeding, teaching, and remembering, and love of learning, questioning, and exploring together.

Perhaps that is the most important lesson for intergenerational civic learning too. We do not teach children to value their traditions, communities, or country simply by telling them what they should know. We invite them into something we value. We make room for their questions. We explore alongside them. And eventually, we trust them to carry it forward.

That is how traditions endure. It is how families pass along what matters, and it is how each generation begins to find its place in our civic life.

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I was 13 years old on September 11, 2001, sitting in my middle school math class in Richboro, Pennsylvania, next to my twin sister.

Before our class knew what was happening, students began being called out of the room. Some had parents who worked at the World Trade Center. Others had parents who worked for airlines. Eventually, we learned about the attacks, but what I remember most is the uncertainty that followed.

And I remember the sky. It was a perfectly clear September day, an almost impossibly beautiful blue. Yet the very openness of it felt unsettling. We did not know whether another plane might come or whether the attacks were over.

Twenty-five years later, I am 38, soon turning 39, and raising two young daughters for whom September 11 will always be history.

When I pass the steel beam recovered from the World Trade Center at the National Constitution Center, the distance of 25 years disappears in an instant. I see the towers again. I think of the family friends who lost people they loved. I still tear up reading the stories of mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, who never came home. The shock, grief, and uncertainty of that day still feel startlingly raw, as vivid as the clear blue sky that September morning.

My daughters will know September 11 differently. They can learn what happened. They can hear the stories and stand before the objects that remain. But they cannot bring their own memory of that day to them. The beam is the same. What has changed is the generation standing before it.

That is part of what makes this 25th anniversary so significant. We remember first the nearly 3,000 people whose lives were taken and the families forever changed that day. But we are also reaching a generational threshold. For those of us who lived through September 11, the day remains vivid memory. For millions of Americans, it has always been history.

How do we bridge that difference? The answer to that question is ultimately about civic memory.

Preserving history and preserving civic memory are closely connected, but they are not quite the same. Historical preservation safeguards the record: the objects, documents, testimony, places, and other evidence that allow us to know and understand what happened. Civic memory carries the human meaning of that history from one generation to the next.

Living memory begins with “I remember.” Civic memory becomes especially important when the people encountering that history can no longer say those words themselves.

Objects can help bridge that distance. Americans have long preserved physical witnesses to consequential moments in our national story: George Washington’s Revolutionary War headquarters tent, Thomas Jefferson’s writing desk, the flag that flew over Fort McHenry, soldiers’ letters sent home from war, belongings carried by immigrants beginning new lives, artifacts from Pearl Harbor, objects that traveled to the moon, and signs and banners carried by Americans seeking greater liberty and equality.

Their power is not simply that they are old or historically significant. They give physical form to experiences we can no longer witness ourselves.

September 11 left its own material record. We preserved massive pieces of steel, damaged fire trucks, and fragments from the sites of the attacks. But we also preserved identification cards, shoes, keys, photographs, handwritten notes, and personal belongings.

The ordinary objects can be among the most powerful. A set of keys reminds us that someone left home that morning expecting to use them again. A pair of shoes belonged to someone who expected to walk back through the door. A firefighter’s helmet was worn by someone who answered a call.

Objects make history particular. They narrow the distance between a national event and the individual lives within it. They remind us that history is lived by people going about ordinary lives until, sometimes, history intervenes.

But objects can only bear witness. They cannot tell the whole story. A steel beam can testify to the destruction of the World Trade Center. It cannot tell us about the people who arrived at work that morning, the firefighters selflessly climbing up the stairs as others ran down, the families waiting desperately for news, or the passengers and crew aboard Flight 93 who understood what was happening and acted to sacrifice themselves to save others. For that, we need human stories.

That is what makes objects and stories so powerful together. The object gives the story physical presence. The story tells us whose keys they were, who wore the shoes, who was waiting for someone to come home. Together, they allow another generation to encounter not only what happened, but also the people who lived it. That is how the historical record becomes part of civic memory.

And civic memory requires stewardship. Museums, memorials, archives, and historic sites preserve the evidence, voices, photographs, testimony, and context that allow each generation to encounter the past anew. Families and eyewitnesses contribute their own memories and stories. Institutions safeguard the record. People share what they remember. From both, civic memory is carried forward.

For my generation, September 11 still exists at that intersection. I can stand before the World Trade Center beam and bring my own memory to it. My daughters cannot. They will encounter the same steel, photographs, voices, and personal belongings without the math classroom, the uncertainty, or that impossibly blue September sky. Their connection will necessarily be different. It will come from what we preserve, what we tell them, and the questions they bring to both.

We cannot give the next generation our memories. What we can give them is a rich enough historical record, filled with evidence, humanity, and complexity, that they can enter the history for themselves and participate in the civic memory that surrounds it.

Twenty-five years from now, fewer people will be able to say “I remember.” Eventually, no one will.

The beam will remain. So may the fire trucks, the shoes, the keys, and the photographs. They will be part of the historical record. But the civic memory of September 11 will depend on what we do with that record: which voices and stories we preserve, how faithfully we connect them to the objects that remain, and how we invite each new generation to encounter them.

That is the responsibility this anniversary places before the generations that still remember: not simply to preserve what remains, but to preserve what it means. So that long after no one can say “I remember,” another generation can still understand why we do.

What do you remember?

This week at the National Constitution Center, our Civic Spark Studio will become a Reflection Studio, inviting visitors to share personal memories and reflections of September 11 as part of preserving our civic memory. If you’re in Philadelphia, I hope you’ll stop by and add your voice. You can also share your reflection here in the comments below.

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Trivia night at a museum. Game night at a library. Cocktails and crafts at a historic site. A concert in a public garden.

These may not look like civic programs, but they can open the door to civic institutions for people who might not otherwise see a place for themselves inside.

I spend a lot of time thinking and writing about children and families. I believe deeply that we need to start civic learning early, give families opportunities to learn together, and build habits of curiosity and engagement that can last a lifetime.

But civic learning cannot end when childhood does. To make civic learning truly lifelong, people need lifelong relationships with the institutions that provide it.

For children, civic institutions offer clear on-ramps. Schools organize field trips. Teachers introduce students to museums and historic sites. Family programs give parents, grandparents, and children a reason to visit and learn together.

As young people get older, however, those built-in invitations become less frequent. Eventually, they leave school altogether. Adults without children may have fewer natural reasons to walk through the doors of a museum or historic site. If visiting civic institutions is not already a personal interest or habit, there may be nothing prompting them to begin.

When those built-in invitations fall away, we need to create new ones.

Young adults and adults without children are not necessarily uninterested in history, ideas, or civic life. The question is how to create invitations that fit this stage of life, and that is where we can get creative.

An 18-year-old may not choose to spend Friday night at a history museum to see an exhibit, but he might come for a game night with friends. A 24-year-old may not sign up for a lecture, but she might show up for crafts or trivia.

Civic institutions have experimented with experiences like these for years: trivia nights, cocktail hours, after-hours events, concerts, crafts, and games. We have dabbled in them at the National Constitution Center, too. But too often, programs like these remain at the edges of our work rather than becoming a sustained strategy for reaching audiences we otherwise struggle to engage.

Part of the reason is that they can look more social than educational. That can make them seem peripheral to the mission, or less worthy of sustained philanthropic investment than exhibits, school programs, scholarship, and other more traditional forms of civic learning.

I want to challenge that assumption.

Consider the size of the audience we are talking about. Tens of millions of young adults and adults without children are moving through stages of life in which the built-in invitations to civic institutions are fewer. Reaching them more intentionally could significantly expand who civic institutions meaningfully engage.

And the case for creating these new invitations extends beyond civic learning. Americans are spending less time together. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ American Time Use Survey, the share of Americans age 15 and older who spent time socializing and communicating as a primary activity on an average day fell from 38% in 2014 to 30% in 2024. The average time spent on those activities also fell, from 43 minutes to 35 minutes.

Civic institutions have something valuable to offer in response: spaces built for public purpose where people can gather, spend time together, and connect face to face.

Research from the American Alliance of Museums suggests that making greater use of those spaces for social experiences can also help museums reach less-engaged audiences. In 2025, 43% of casual museum-goers and 45% of sporadic museum-goers said they only visit museums with family or friends, compared with 31% of frequent museum-goers. AAM also found that younger adults are more likely than older adults to want interactive experiences such as creating together and playing games or challenges. And for some less frequent visitors, museums may simply be “off their radar,” rather than places they have decided not to visit.

A social experience can address both needs at once: giving people a place to spend time together while inviting them into a civic institution where they can encounter history, ideas, objects, and questions they might not have sought out on their own.

But we have to get the calibration right. If these experiences are going to reach new audiences, a fun night out cannot feel like an educational program in disguise. The social experience has to be genuine: Come for trivia, the food and wine, or a night out with friends. But while you are here, learn a few things with us.

That learning can be light but intentional. A trivia night can weave questions drawn from the galleries into a broader game. A craft night can introduce a story or object that gives what people are making greater meaning. An after-hours event can pair food and wine with a historical period. The experience should be worth having in its own right while leaving room for curiosity to take hold. Someone comes for trivia and encounters an exhibit. Friends come for an after-hours event and discover another program they want to attend. One experience creates a reason for the next.

During the Civic Decade, we have a generational opportunity to strengthen not only what Americans know about our history and system of government, but also their relationships with one another and with the institutions that sustain civic life. That requires thinking more expansively about who receives an invitation to participate, how we sustain those relationships across different stages of life, and what might bring people through the door.

Philanthropy has an important role to play. Exhibits, educational programs, scholarship, and civil dialogue remain essential. But joyful, social experiences deserve serious investment, too. Creating opportunities for people to gather and connect while welcoming new audiences into civic institutions is not peripheral to lifelong civic learning. It is part of building it.

The trivia night is not trivial. Done with purpose, it can give people a place to find one another and, in the process, help more Americans find a place for themselves in civic life and civic learning.

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Resources 

• Lindsey Cormack, How to Raise a Citizen (And why it’s up to you to do it), (2024) 

Stay Connected and Learn More 

• Stay connected with Civic Parenting—follow, rate, and review the show wherever you listen. 

• Questions or comments? Email podcast@constitutioncenter.org. 

• Follow @ConstitutionCtr on social media, explore more activities and programs designed for families from the National Constitution Center, or subscribe to receive our family resources email newsletter. 

• Support our important work by making a donation today. 

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This fall, millions of children will walk into classrooms carrying new backpacks, sharpened pencils, and all the nervous excitement of a new school year.

One of them will be my daughter Sophie.

She starts kindergarten in a few days, just weeks after celebrating America’s 250th birthday and her own fifth birthday. On July 4, Sophie and her younger sister, Charlotte, joined me and my husband at the National Constitution Center for the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Amid the crowds and celebration, they were beginning to encounter the American story for themselves.

For Sophie, it was one of her earliest experiences with American history. For me, as both her mother and someone who spends every day thinking about the future of civic learning, it was impossible not to think about what comes next.

Sophie is beginning formal schooling at an extraordinary moment.

The 250th anniversary of the Declaration is not a culmination. It is the beginning of a much longer sequence of anniversaries and, with them, an extraordinary opportunity for civic learning. In 2037, when the nation marks the 250th anniversary of the Constitution, Sophie will be in high school, and Charlotte will be in middle school. In 2041, when we commemorate the 250th anniversary of the Bill of Rights, Sophie will be a young adult, and her little sister will be turning 18.

Those dates can feel distant on a calendar. As a mother, they suddenly do not feel distant at all.

In a very real sense, the Civic Decade will span my daughters’ childhoods. It will carry them from some of their earliest encounters with the American story through the years when they begin to ask harder questions, form their own views, and discover more fully what it means to participate in and help shape our constitutional democracy.

That makes me think differently about what these next 15 years can be.

At the National Constitution Center, we have been talking about the Civic Decade as the generational opportunity stretching from America’s 250th through the 250th anniversaries of the Constitution and Bill of Rights. These anniversaries give us moments of national attention. But anniversaries alone do not produce civic knowledge, strengthen civic institutions, or create habits of citizenship.

We have to decide what to do with them. And one way to think about that work is through the children beginning their education in this anniversary year.

What if we treated this fall not simply as the beginning of another school year, but as the first day of a 15-year civic learning journey?

Imagine what we could build if we began with the expectation that a child entering school in 2026 should have repeated opportunities, across childhood and adolescence, to encounter the ideas, history, institutions, and debates that shape our constitutional democracy.

Not a single civics course in eighth grade. Not a unit on the Constitution in high school. Not a worksheet on Constitution Day once a year. A lifelong learning journey.

At five, that might begin with stories: Who were the people who came before us? Why did they decide to declare independence? What did they mean when they wrote that all people are created equal? What promises did America make, and where have we fallen short?

As children grow, the questions can grow with them. Why did Americans decide they needed a Constitution? Why divide power among different branches and levels of government? Why protect speech, religion, assembly, and petition? How has the meaning of equality changed over time? What happens when constitutional principles collide? How have generations of Americans debated those questions, and how do we continue those discussions today?

By adolescence, students should not simply know that these debates exist. They should have the knowledge and confidence to enter them: to read primary sources, weigh evidence, understand competing constitutional arguments, listen seriously to people who see a question differently, and develop views of their own.

And learning need not happen only in school.

Children learn from parents and grandparents, museums and libraries, historic sites and community institutions. They learn through books and podcasts and digital experiences. They learn by visiting places where history happened, asking questions around a dinner table, hearing family stories, and discovering that the debates of the past are connected to questions unfolding around them today.

That is why the Civic Decade should be an invitation to think about civic learning across a lifetime, beginning early, deepening over time, and happening everywhere learning happens.

So what should we do with these 15 years?

We should build connected pathways for civic learning, so that what a child encounters at five can be revisited with greater depth at 10, 15, and 18. We should invest deeply in teachers, pairing rigorous, nonpartisan resources with sustained professional learning that strengthens their own knowledge and practice. We should create more opportunities for families to learn across generations, and connect schools more intentionally with museums, libraries, historic sites, and other civic institutions. And we should use technology responsibly to make the best civic learning accessible to anyone, anywhere, while creating clearer pathways for lifelong learning. But that must be matched by a human strategy that gives young people more opportunities to learn with others, build relationships across differences, and participate meaningfully in the civic life around them.

Just as importantly, we should spend these 15 years building a much stronger evidence base for civic learning. We should measure not simply how many people participate, but what they know and retain, whether they become more curious and confident learners, whether they can engage seriously with different perspectives, and whether their curiosity leads them to seek out new opportunities to deepen their understanding. Fifteen years gives us the chance to track that growth over time, understand what produces durable impact, and use what we discover to make each opportunity more meaningful.

If we deliver that promise, Sophie and Charlotte should grow up with civic learning that builds as they do: encountering the American story first through family experiences and stories, then through increasingly sophisticated classroom learning, visits to civic institutions, conversations across generations, interactions with primary sources, constitutional debates and discussions, and opportunities to develop and test ideas of their own. By the time they reach adulthood, my hope is that they will see civics not as a subject they once took in school, but as a lifelong practice.

And if we do this well, the benefits should extend far beyond their generation. The children who begin kindergarten in 2041 should inherit better-prepared teachers, stronger civic institutions, richer and more accessible resources, connected learning pathways, and far more evidence about how civic knowledge and habits actually take root and endure.

That is what makes this 15-year horizon so powerful. We have time to accompany one generation from childhood to adulthood while building something stronger for the generations that follow.

In a few days, I will send Sophie off to kindergarten. I will be thinking, as parents do, about everything I hope she learns and the person I hope she becomes. But I will also be thinking about the responsibility those of us who work in civic learning share for her generation.

America has given us a remarkable series of anniversaries around which to organize this work. Our task is to make the years between them count, so that the generation coming of age across the Civic Decade is ready to carry the work of self-government forward and strengthen it for the generations that follow.

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When we talk about civic education, we usually talk about young people.

What should students know about the Constitution? How should schools teach American history? How can we prepare the next generation for citizenship?

These are essential questions. But they start from an assumption worth reconsidering: that civic learning is primarily something older generations provide to younger ones.

What if, instead, we thought of civic learning as something generations do together, rooted in relationships, animated by curiosity and joy, and designed to continue across a lifetime?

Long before children encounter civics in a classroom, they are developing ideas about fairness, responsibility, community, freedom, and belonging alongside the adults in their lives. They hear family stories. They watch how adults respond to disagreement. They ask questions about the world around them. They visit museums, libraries, historic sites, parks, and places of worship.

These experiences may not look like traditional civic education. But they are part of how we learn what it means to live in a community and participate in a self-governing society.

And they point toward an opportunity we have only begun to meaningfully explore as a field.

What Generations Can Learn From One Another

We know that families matter to civic learning. Research has found connections between conversations at home and young people’s civic knowledge and engagement. Parents and other adults model habits of participation and help shape how young people understand public life.

But learning inside families doesn’t travel in only one direction. Children bring home questions and ideas of their own. Research has documented this exchange, including evidence that young people can influence their parents’ civic behavior. One study found that parents became more likely to vote when a child living at home became newly eligible to vote.

That shouldn’t be surprising. Learning across generations is powerful precisely because each generation brings something the others cannot. A grandparent brings memory and lived experience. A parent brings context. A child brings curiosity and questions that adults may have stopped asking. Put those perspectives in conversation and something different happens: history becomes personal, familiar stories can be seen anew, and a question asked by one generation can spark discovery in another. The learning happens in the exchange.

That is what makes intergenerational civic learning so promising. The adult does not always have to be the teacher, or the child the student. Each can deepen the other’s understanding.

Joy Belongs in Civic Learning

There is another part of this that I think we often underestimate: joy.

Civics is serious. Constitutional democracy asks us to wrestle with difficult questions about power, rights, liberty, equality, responsibility, and citizenship. Good civic education should never shy away from that complexity. But serious learning does not have to feel solemn.

Think about how families naturally learn together. They tell stories. Play games. Explore new places. Ask questions. Solve problems. Debate answers. Laugh. Compete. Discover. These aren’t distractions from learning. They are invitations into it.

Research on learning through play points to the value of experiences that are active, engaging, meaningful, socially interactive, iterative, and joyful. Research in museums and other informal learning environments similarly shows how shared experiences can prompt questions, explanations, and exploration between children and adults.

Joy doesn’t mean making civics easy or merely entertaining. It means creating the conditions for curiosity. A joyful encounter with history can prompt another question. That question can lead to a book, a museum visit, a conversation with a grandparent, or deeper exploration in school.

The goal isn’t simply to make someone enjoy a civic activity. It is to create the civic spark that makes them want to know and explore more.

Testing the Idea

At the National Constitution Center, we’ve become increasingly interested in understanding what joyful, intergenerational civic learning can look like and how it can deepen learning for children and adults.

That’s why this past year we launched Civic Quest, a play-based family learning experience for children ages 7–12 and the adults in their lives. Through hands-on missions of discovery, families decode clues, encounter historical characters with different points of view, and explore the people and ideas that shaped the nation. Along the way, they practice civic skills such as listening to different perspectives, asking questions, and working together to solve problems.

Thanks to philanthropic support, we committed to making the first 20,000 Civic Quest sets free to families nationwide. The first 10,000 are already in families’ hands, and demand has been so strong that another 10,000 are now being produced for families on our waitlists. The incredible response has also encouraged us to begin developing the next Civic Quest box, extending the experience into another chapter of America’s constitutional story.

We also launched Trivial Pursuit: Exploring America’s Story, a special edition of the classic game designed intentionally for generations to play together. Its 600 questions are divided evenly between kids and adults and span six categories, from the American Revolution and branches of government to voices from history and the places where history happened. It’s a simple design choice with an important effect: everyone at the table has something to contribute, and everyone has something to learn.

The games are different, but the hypothesis behind them is the same: civic learning can be rigorous and substantive while also being playful, social, and shared.

Early enthusiasm is encouraging. But participation and enjoyment aren’t the same as learning. That’s why we’re working with Dr. Ashley Berner and the Johns Hopkins University Institute for Education Policy on a nine-month study of Civic Quest examining its effects on children and parents and caregivers. We want to know what happens when families learn this way: What do they learn and remember? Does play generate meaningful conversation? Do children and adults learn from one another? Does the experience spark curiosity that continues after the game ends?

Civic Quest is one case study. During the Civic Decade, the Center is committed to helping build a stronger evidence base for intergenerational civic learning and putting what we learn into practice. We want to develop and test experiences that are rigorous, joyful, and designed to endure, creating opportunities for children and adults to learn with and from one another in homes and communities across the country.

The Civic Decade gives us an opportunity to make this kind of learning a lasting part of our civic culture. If we want civic learning to endure from one generation to the next, we need to create more opportunities for generations to learn alongside and from one another.

Cited Research

Family conversation and civic development: Hugh McIntosh, Daniel Hart, and James Youniss, “The Influence of Family Political Discussion on Youth Civic Development: Which Parent Qualities Matter?” PS: Political Science & Politics 40, no. 3 (2007).

Young people influencing parents: Jens Olav Dahlgaard, “Trickle-Up Political Socialization: The Causal Effect on Turnout of Parenting a Newly Enfranchised Voter” American Political Science Review 112, no. 3 (2018).

Joy and playful learning: Kathy Hirsh-Pasek and colleagues, “Making Schools Work: An Equation for Active Playful Learning” Theory Into Practice (2023).

Families learning together: Maureen Callanan and colleagues, “Exploration, Explanation, and Parent–Child Interaction in Museums” Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development 85, no. 1 (2020)

America’s civic institutions are all around us.

They are the museums that preserve our history and inspire our curiosity. The libraries where neighbors gather to learn and exchange ideas. The historic sites and national parks that connect us to the people and places that shaped our nation. The bookstores that bring authors and ideas into communities. The historical societies, archives, universities, community organizations, and cultural institutions that help us better understand our shared past and imagine our shared future.

We visit these places every day. We bring our children to them. We volunteer at them. We attend lectures, exhibitions, performances, and community conversations within their walls.

Yet we rarely think about them collectively.

Together, they form America’s shared civic infrastructure: a remarkable national network of trusted institutions that preserves our history, strengthens our communities, and creates lifelong opportunities to explore the Constitution, our civic traditions, and the responsibilities of self-government.

America already possesses one of the world’s greatest civic resources. The challenge is not building it. The challenge is recognizing its value, strengthening it, connecting it, and inviting more people to experience it.

The scale is extraordinary.

The Institute of Museum and Library Services has estimated that more than 35,000 museums operate across the United States, a broad universe that includes history and art museums, science centers, children’s museums, historic organizations, botanical gardens, zoos, aquariums, and more. A more recent national census identified more than 21,000 history organizations alone, many of them small organizations deeply rooted in their communities. And more than 120,000 libraries of all kinds serve communities across the country, including more than 17,000 public library locations.

Our civic infrastructure extends far beyond them. More than 100,000 properties are listed on the National Register of Historic Places, encompassing roughly 2 million historic resources. The National Park Service stewards 433 sites, while states collectively care for nearly 10,000 state park units. National Heritage Areas, presidential libraries, universities, archives, independent bookstores, cultural institutions, and community organizations extend this network even further.

The result is an extraordinary civic architecture spread across the country: places in communities large and small where Americans can encounter history, ideas, culture, and one another. These are the places where civic life happens.

Every day, families discover history together. Children encounter our nation’s founding documents for the first time. Visitors wrestle with difficult chapters of our past. Neighbors gather for conversations about their communities. Scholars bring new perspectives to enduring constitutional questions. Millions of Americans experience moments of curiosity, discovery, reflection, and connection that deepen their understanding of our country.

These experiences matter because civic learning is not confined to a single stage of life. It unfolds over a lifetime. A visit to a museum sparks a question. A conversation at a library deepens understanding. A book discovered at a neighborhood bookstore opens a new perspective. A walk through a historic site makes the past feel tangible. A public program brings people together around an idea. Each experience builds on the last, helping people develop the knowledge, judgment, and civic habits that sustain constitutional democracy.

Our civic institutions make those lifelong learning journeys possible. Yet despite their importance, we too often treat them as optional amenities rather than essential civic infrastructure.

Many operate with limited staff and resources. A small historical society may have deep knowledge of its community but little capacity to develop new educational programs. An independent bookstore may have the space and trusted relationships to convene an important civic conversation but lack the resources to identify speakers or build a program around it. A local museum may want to reach teachers and families but have limited capacity to develop curriculum or train staff.

The Civic Decade offers an opportunity to change that.

Larger civic institutions, universities, national organizations, and philanthropy can look beyond the boundaries of their own programs and ask how their resources can strengthen this broader civic infrastructure. Major museums can share programming and professional development with smaller institutions. They can connect scholars with libraries, bookstores, and historical societies. National organizations can make high-quality educational resources available to local partners. Funders can invest not only in individual programs, but in the relationships and shared capacity that allow institutions to learn from one another.

The goal is not to make these institutions the same or impose national programming from above. It is to help them do more of what they already do best: understand their communities, build trusted relationships, and create experiences that bring people together. Our civic infrastructure becomes stronger when knowledge, resources, and expertise are shared.

For those of us who lead, work in, fund, or partner with civic institutions, the charge is to strengthen this shared infrastructure and expand what it can offer.

But the future of these institutions does not rest on civic leaders alone. All of us have a role to play, and it begins with something wonderfully simple: Visit. And then return.

Walk through the doors of your local museum. Attend a program at your public library. Browse an independent bookstore. Explore a nearby historic site. Spend a day in a national or state park. Join a community conversation. Become a member. Bring a friend. Bring your children. Then come back for the next exhibition, conversation, book, or discovery.

Civic learning unfolds over a lifetime, and these institutions give us places to keep learning. The more often we enter them, participate in their programs, support their work, and make them part of our family and community lives, the richer our own civic lives become and the stronger these institutions become in return.

That is the opportunity of the Civic Decade: not to invent a new civic architecture, but to recognize the extraordinary one already all around us and invest in it from both directions. Institutions with greater capacity can help strengthen it. Individuals can experience, participate in, and support it.

If we do both, the legacy of these anniversary years will not simply be the celebrations we held. It will be a stronger civic infrastructure, more deeply woven into American life, for the generations that follow.

Find Civic Institutions Near You

Want to explore the civic institutions in your own community or where you’re traveling? The American Alliance of Museums offers a Find a Museum directory to help you discover museums across the country. You can also use the libraries.org directory to find public, academic, school, and other libraries near you.

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America’s 250th anniversary invited us to look backward. It should also compel us to establish a baseline for the future.

A new national survey from the Cato Institute offers one of the fullest portraits yet of what Americans know, believe, fear, and hope at the beginning of the Civic Decade. Its findings are encouraging and unsettling. Americans retain a deep attachment to the country, its founding principles, and the Constitution. But that attachment often rests on a thin foundation of knowledge, it is distributed unevenly across generations and communities, and it does not always translate into a consistent commitment to constitutional restraint when those limits stand in the way of a desired political outcome.

The survey has understandably generated headlines about civic knowledge. But I believe its greatest value lies elsewhere. The Cato data should become the Civic Decade’s baseline for measuring progress.

To justify its promise, the initiative must become more than a series of commemorations. It should leave the country civically stronger. If the Civic Decade is truly a once-in-a-generation opportunity to strengthen the civic knowledge, constitutional culture, and institutions that sustain self-government, then we should be able to measure whether we are succeeding. Fifteen years from now, we should know far more than how many programs we offered, how many people attended, or how many resources were downloaded. We should know whether the country itself has changed.

The survey’s headline-grabbing finding gives us a sobering data point: only 53% of Americans correctly identified the adoption of the Declaration of Independence as the event commemorated by America’s 250th anniversary. Among Gen Z, that number fell to 39%.

But the more revealing gaps concern the purposes of our constitutional system. According to the Cato survey, only 41% identified the Constitution’s principal purpose as establishing and limiting government power. Just 54% knew that the Constitution creates three branches of government. Far more Americans recognized George Washington as the first president.

That distinction matters. Americans may know the symbols and personalities of the founding without understanding its constitutional logic. They may know the Constitution exists without grasping how divided powers, institutional restraints, and protected rights preserve freedom. Understanding how these ideas connect, not simply recalling historical facts, is the essence of civic knowledge.

At the same time, the Cato survey offers powerful evidence against the idea that Americans have abandoned the country or its founding ideals. 86% say they are grateful to be American. 79% are proud to be American. Large majorities view the founding and the Constitution favorably and believe the Constitution remains essential to protecting liberty.

This combination matters: limited knowledge coexists with substantial attachment. That should change how we describe the challenge. The public is not a blank slate. There is a reservoir of gratitude, belonging, and belief on which to build. But that attachment may be intuitive rather than informed, general rather than durable, and vulnerable to partisan pressure.

We do not have to persuade most Americans that freedom and the Constitution matter. We have to help them understand more deeply what those principles require, how the constitutional system works, how its promises have expanded over time, and what responsibilities fall to each generation that inherits them.

The Cato survey also points to another challenge that deserves far more attention: civic belonging.

According to the data, 71% of Americans believe the ideals and institutions of the founding are part of their inheritance. But that sense of ownership varies dramatically across generations and racial groups. It is significantly stronger among older Americans than among Gen Z, and stronger among white Americans than among Black and Hispanic Americans.

A constitutional democracy cannot flourish if its history and institutions feel like they belong to only some Americans. One of the Civic Decade’s most important goals should be to not only expand civic knowledge, but also deepen civic belonging. Do more Americans see themselves in our constitutional story? Do they understand both its achievements and its shortcomings? Do they recognize themselves as heirs to its promises and stewards of its future?

One of the most revealing findings in the Cato survey concerns constitutional culture rather than constitutional knowledge.

Most Americans support divided government, limits on political power, and acceptance of Supreme Court rulings. Yet a substantial share also believe it may be acceptable for a president they support to stretch the Constitution to achieve a preferred political outcome. It is relatively easy to support constitutional principles in the abstract. Constitutional culture is tested when those principles necessarily constrain our own political preferences. Favorability toward the Constitution is not the same as fidelity to it.

The survey also reinforces yet another insight that deserves greater attention. 77% of Americans agree that for a country to remain free, most people must try to be good, honest, and responsible.

That finding echoes one of the central premises of the Civic Decade. Constitutional democracy depends not only on constitutions, laws, and institutions, but also on the character and conduct of the people who bring them to life. The Constitution can divide power. It cannot compel restraint. The First Amendment can preserve space for disagreement. It cannot teach us how to continue sharing a country across profound differences.

The Cato survey is a valuable snapshot, but it also exposes the limits of how we currently measure civic learning. Measuring reach is not the same as measuring impact. The Civic Decade should challenge us to move beyond counting participation to instead understanding meaningful impact.

Between the Declaration’s 250th anniversary in 2026, the Constitution’s in 2037, and the Bill of Rights’ in 2041, we have an extraordinary opportunity to establish baselines, test approaches, compare interventions, follow participants over time, and adapt based on evidence.

No single institution can do this alone. Researchers, educators, museums, libraries, historic sites, schools, universities, philanthropies, and community organizations should build a shared Civic Decade research agenda, combining repeated national surveys with longitudinal and qualitative studies.

Most importantly, we should not wait until 2041 to revisit the questions the Cato survey asks today. We should ask them every year throughout the Civic Decade and measure whether sustained investments in civic learning are changing the answers.

Are more Americans developing a deeper understanding of how and why the Constitution limits power? Do more young people see the founding as part of their inheritance? Are gaps in civic belonging narrowing? Are more Americans willing to uphold constitutional principles even when those principles constrain their own side? Do more people believe the country’s best days can still be ahead?

Just as importantly, we should measure which civic learning experiences are producing these outcomes. Which approaches create lasting impact? For whom? Under what conditions?

By the time we reach the Constitution’s 250th anniversary in 2037 and the Bill of Rights’ 250th anniversary in 2041, we should be able to demonstrate not only whether America’s civic health has improved, but also which investments and experiences made that progress possible.

Every generation inherits the responsibilities of self-government. Every generation must also acquire the knowledge to sustain it.

The nation’s founders understood this well. James Madison wrote, “… a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.” Thomas Jefferson believed that education was essential to the preservation of liberty. John Adams argued that republican government ultimately rested on the knowledge and character of the people themselves.

A free people must be an informed people. That is not simply an aspiration. It is one of the essential conditions of constitutional self-government.

But recognizing the importance of civic knowledge has never been the same as ensuring that people have the means to acquire it.

Every generation must ask not only what citizens should know, but how a free society creates opportunities for people to deepen their understanding of the Constitution, their communities, and the responsibilities of citizenship over the course of a lifetime.

Today, research on learning has deepened our understanding of how that journey unfolds. Learning is not confined to childhood or the classroom. It is a lifelong process of curiosity, discovery, reflection, and growth. We revisit important ideas with new experiences, new questions, and new perspectives. Knowledge accumulates. Judgment matures. Wisdom deepens.

Citizenship follows that same path.

It begins with a spark.

A child asks why rules matter. A family gathers with neighbors for a Fourth of July parade. A teacher introduces the Declaration of Independence. A visit to a museum or historic site brings history to life. A librarian recommends a book about a historical figure or event. A podcast sparks a conversation during a morning commute. A public program inspires someone to pick up a pocket Constitution they have not opened in years.

These moments may seem ordinary. Yet each has the power to awaken curiosity, invite exploration, and begin a lifelong constitutional learning journey.

But the spark is only the beginning.

A lifelong civic learning journey is not a straight path. It unfolds across a lifetime, shaped by age, experience, and the questions we encounter along the way. The questions we ask at age 6 are different from the questions we ask at 16, 36, or 76. As our lives unfold, so does our understanding of the Constitution, our responsibilities as citizens, and one another.

Imagine what it would mean if every American had the opportunity to follow that journey.

The journey would begin in families, where children first encounter fairness, responsibility, and belonging. It would deepen in schools, where students build the constitutional knowledge and historical understanding that prepare them for citizenship. It would expand in colleges and universities, where many learners first engage in sustained inquiry, wrestle with competing ideas, and develop habits of intellectual curiosity that can last a lifetime. It would continue through museums, libraries, historic sites, bookstores, community organizations, podcasts, public dialogue, and digital learning experiences that invite people to return to constitutional questions throughout their lives. Civic learning would no longer be something we associate primarily with childhood or formal education. It would become a lifelong habit of curiosity, exploration, and constitutional reflection.

This is one of the great opportunities of the Civic Decade.

For too long, we have relied on schools and classroom educators to shoulder the primary responsibility for civic formation. Yet we have not invested in civic education as fully as we should, nor have we built the broader network of institutions and experiences that support lifelong civic learning.

The answer is not to ask less of schools. It is to ask more of all of us.

We should strengthen civic education in schools so every young person develops a strong constitutional foundation. We should make civic parenting the norm rather than the exception, giving families the tools, confidence, and opportunities to explore our constitutional story together. We should encourage colleges and universities to embrace civic learning not as a single course or graduation requirement, but as a central part of preparing students for lives of informed citizenship and constitutional self-government. We should reinvest in the museums, libraries, historic sites, bookstores, and community organizations that make civic learning possible in communities large and small. And we should create many more opportunities for adults to continue learning through public programs, exhibitions, podcasts, digital experiences, civil dialogue, and university-quality courses throughout their lives.

No single institution can cultivate an informed citizenry. Nor should it.

A constitutional democracy depends on a constellation of institutions that accompany us throughout our lives, each inviting us back into our shared constitutional story with new questions, new experiences, and new opportunities to learn.

The anniversaries before us should inspire renewed investment in the institutions, partnerships, and places where civic learning happens over the course of a lifetime. They should encourage us to build the civic learning infrastructure that a constitutional democracy requires, ensuring that every American, regardless of age or background, has meaningful opportunities to explore the Constitution, wrestle with constitutional questions, engage in civil dialogue, and continue growing as a citizen.

At the National Constitution Center, we hope to help lead that broader effort. Our role is to invite learners of every age into America’s constitutional story, to spark curiosity, deepen understanding, and create opportunities for sustained lifelong constitutional learning. Not because one institution can build a culture of lifelong civic learning on its own, but because every institution has an important role to play.

The founders remind us that a free people must be an informed people.

The Civic Decade invites us to ensure that every generation has the opportunity to become one.

Constitutions create governments. People sustain them.

That simple distinction may be one of the defining lessons of the Civic Decade.

A constitution establishes the framework of self-government. It distributes power, protects rights, creates institutions, and provides peaceful means for resolving disagreement. But constitutions alone cannot create the civic habits, institutions, or culture that allow constitutional democracy to endure. Those must be built, practiced, and renewed by each generation.

Judge Learned Hand captured this truth when he warned that we often “rest our hopes too much upon constitutions, upon laws and upon courts.” Liberty, he reminded us, “lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court. . . can save it.”

Hand was not dismissing the Constitution. As one of America’s most respected judges at the time, he understood the indispensable role of constitutions, laws, and courts. His point was more demanding: governing institutions cannot preserve liberty if the people themselves cease to value it.

As we enter the Civic Decade, we have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to strengthen the constitutional culture that allows constitutional democracy to endure and flourish.

Constitutional culture is the civic life that surrounds, supports, and gives meaning to our constitutional system. It is the body of knowledge, habits, relationships, institutions, expectations, and moral commitments through which a society learns to live under a constitution.

It includes an understanding of constitutional principles and history. But knowledge alone is not enough.

Constitutional culture also includes habits of restraint: the willingness to exercise less power than one might possess, to respect legitimate opposition, to accept lawful outcomes, and to preserve rules that may one day protect one’s adversaries as well as oneself.

It includes habits of participation: voting, serving, organizing, deliberating, volunteering, petitioning, persuading, and taking responsibility for the life of one’s community.

It includes habits of relationship: learning to work with people whose experiences and convictions differ from our own, building trust through common effort, and recognizing that citizenship creates obligations among strangers.

And it includes a shared conviction that constitutional democracy is not someone else’s responsibility. It is a common inheritance entrusted to each of us.

The idea is far older than the United States Constitution.

Ancient thinkers understood political life not simply as a contest for power, but as a formative activity. Aristotle argued that political communities shape the character of their citizens. Although his conception of citizenship reflected the exclusions of the ancient world, he offered an enduring insight: political institutions do more than govern people. They help form them.

Centuries later, Montesquieu carefully examined constitutional design. He insisted that institutions alone could not sustain a republic. Every republic, he argued, depends upon political virtue. By this he meant not private perfection, but a love of the republic and its laws and a willingness to place the public good above private interest.

The American Founders inherited both traditions.

They did not believe that human beings could be trusted with unchecked power. That is why they created separated institutions, check and balances, federalism, representation, and regular elections.

But neither did they believe that constitutional machinery could compensate for every human failing.

In Federalist No. 55, James Madison acknowledged the darker elements of human nature that make safeguards necessary. But he also insisted that republican government presupposes enough esteem, confidence, and virtue among the people to make self-government possible. A political system built entirely on distrust could not remain republican at all.

John Adams put the matter even more directly: “Public Virtue cannot exist in a Nation without private Virtue, and public Virtue is the only Foundation of Republics.”

Constitutional design could restrain power. Civic life would have to cultivate a people capable of exercising it wisely.

Few thinkers understood the relationship between constitutional design and civic life more clearly than Alexis de Tocqueville. He came to America searching for the deeper sources of democratic self-government. He studied constitutions and laws, but he looked beyond them. He paid attention to townships, churches, newspapers, voluntary associations, juries, families, and the countless settings in which Americans learned to act together.

These institutions mattered because they taught the practice of freedom. In associations, individuals discovered that problems they could not solve alone might be addressed through common effort. They learned to organize, deliberate, compromise, persuade, lead, follow, and trust. Tocqueville believed that associations were especially necessary in democratic societies because they allowed ordinary people to combine their energies and resist both isolation and excessive dependence on centralized power.

This is what we mean by civic life. It is where constitutional culture takes root.

It is not simply politics. In fact, much of it takes place far from electoral campaigns and government institutions. It unfolds wherever people assume responsibility for something they share.

It is the parent who brings children to a library and introduces them to stories larger than their own.

It is the teacher who creates a classroom in which students learn to disagree without withdrawing from one another.

It is the neighbor who organizes a food drive, the volunteer who serves on a local board, the journalist who reports carefully, the congregation that cares for its community, and the museum that helps visitors encounter the beauty and complexity of the American story.

It is the debate society, the youth sports league, the historical association, the community foundation, the local newspaper, the book club, the service organization, and the town meeting.

These institutions do more than meet immediate needs. At their best, they form citizens.

Modern scholars have given new language to some of what Tocqueville observed. Robert Putnam called it social capital: the networks, relationships, and habits of trust that allow people to cooperate. His work warned that as participation in civic and community life declines, societies lose more than clubs and meetings. They lose the connective tissue that enables people to solve common problems and sustain a shared civic life.

Constitutional culture requires social trust, but it is more than social cohesion. A society may be tightly connected and still be unjust. People can possess strong bonds within their own communities while remaining suspicious of everyone outside them. Civic life can reinforce exclusion as easily as belonging.

A healthy constitutional culture therefore requires more than connection. It asks us to build relationships across lines of difference and to bind our civic life to constitutional principles: liberty, equality, human dignity, the rule of law, and freedom of conscience, to name a few.

It requires both conviction and humility. Both majority rule and minority rights. Both attachment to community and respect for the individual conscience.

Learned Hand offered perhaps the clearest description of the civic disposition constitutional democracy requires. The spirit of liberty, he said, is “not too sure that it is right.” It seeks to understand the minds of others and remembers that even the least powerful person deserves to be heard.

Hand was describing the discipline of democratic life. The humility to recognize that no individual or faction possesses the whole truth. The courage to defend the freedom of those whose views we reject. The generosity to weigh another person’s interests alongside our own. The restraint to refuse every power that law or circumstance might place within our reach. And the faith that our fellow citizens remain capable of reason, persuasion, growth, and common purpose.

None of these qualities can be manufactured by constitutional text alone. But neither do they arise spontaneously. They must be taught. Practiced. Modeled. Rewarded. Renewed. They must be cultivated in the institutions of civic life, long before they are tested in moments of constitutional tension or crisis.

That is why constitutional culture cannot be treated as a soft concern at the margins of public life. It is not ornamental to constitutional democracy. It is part of its essential infrastructure.

Schools can teach constitutional principles. Constitutional culture determines whether we practice them.

Courts can defend the freedom of speech. Constitutional culture determines whether we use that freedom to seek truth or merely to wound.

Elections can transfer political power. Constitutional culture determines whether winners exercise that power with restraint and losers remain committed to the system.

The Constitution can preserve space for disagreement. Constitutional culture determines whether we approach those disagreements with mutual respect and a shared commitment to self-government.

This does not mean that constitutional design is unimportant, or that civic virtue should be invoked to excuse institutional failure. Unjust laws must be changed. Broken institutions must be repaired. Constitutional rights must be enforced.

Institutions shape behavior, distribute opportunity, and influence the kind of civic culture that develops around them. And throughout American history, citizens denied full membership in the constitutional community have drawn upon the nation’s own principles to demand that its institutions become more just.

The relationship runs in both directions. Institutions can encourage trust or corrode it. They can reward cooperation or deepen division. They can widen participation or close it off.

But even the best institutions depend on people willing to use them for constitutional ends. Reforming the machinery of democracy will never eliminate the need to form democratic citizens.

This is the opportunity of the Civic Decade.

The anniversaries of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights invite us to do more than celebrate remarkable documents. They invite us to strengthen the constitutional culture that allows those documents to endure.

These questions cannot be answered in Washington alone. They belong to families and schools, museums and libraries, community organizations and houses of worship, philanthropists and universities, local leaders and ordinary citizens.

They belong wherever constitutional culture is being formed, which is to say, everywhere.

Constitutions create governments. People sustain them.

The future of constitutional democracy depends upon the civic life we choose to build together.

On July 4, Americans gathered in city parks, libraries, museums, historic sites, schools, houses of worship, and around kitchen tables to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

They came together for concerts and parades. They attended naturalization ceremonies. They visited historic places, planted liberty trees, volunteered in their communities, read the Declaration aloud with their families, and reflected on the ideals that have shaped our nation for two and a half centuries.

In the months leading up to the anniversary, many wondered whether America could still find ways to celebrate together. Some worried that the nation had become too divided, too fragmented, or too distracted to mark such a significant milestone in a meaningful way.

What we witnessed instead was something both quieter and more encouraging.

America celebrated. Not through a single defining national moment, but through thousands of local acts of participation, reflection, learning, service, and civic connection.

And that is exactly why America’s 250th matters.

The anniversary was never meant to be an endpoint. It was an invitation.

The Declaration of Independence marked the beginning of the American experiment, not its completion. The work of turning revolutionary ideals into durable institutions would take decades. The generation that declared independence in 1776 still had to win a war, build a nation, establish a system of self-government, and confront profound disagreements about what the future should look like.

Things did not always go according to plan.

The Articles of Confederation proved insufficient to meet many of the challenges facing the young nation. Economic instability, political divisions, and questions about national authority threatened the durability of the republic. Americans disagreed fiercely about the path forward. Many wondered whether the experiment would survive.

And yet they persevered.

Through debate, compromise, civic participation, and constitutional imagination, Americans built something extraordinary: the United States Constitution, the oldest continuously operating written national constitution in the world.

That achievement should remind us of something important today.

The generation of 1776 did not inherit a finished democracy. They built one. So must we.

That is why we believe the most important work of the semiquincentennial begins now. Over the next decade, as the nation moves toward the Constitution’s 250th anniversary in 2037 and the Bill of Rights’ 250th anniversary in 2041, America has an opportunity to undertake a new era of civic renewal.

Not because our challenges are identical to those of the founding generation, but because self-government always requires renewal. Democracy has never been self-executing. Every generation must learn it, practice it, strengthen it, and pass it on.

The civic decade ahead should be marked by new investments in civic education, both inside and outside the classroom. It should be marked by renewed support for civic institutions like museums, libraries, historic sites, parks, archives, schools, and community organizations that help Americans encounter one another and engage with our shared constitutional inheritance. It should be marked by efforts to rebuild social trust and strengthen the relationships that sustain healthy communities.

At a time when loneliness and social isolation have become defining challenges of modern life, civic institutions have a particularly important role to play. They create opportunities for people of different backgrounds and perspectives to gather around shared questions, shared experiences, and shared responsibilities. They help transform strangers into neighbors and communities into places of belonging.

The work ahead will not be easy. Building civic knowledge, strengthening civic habits, restoring trust, and creating opportunities for meaningful participation will require sustained effort. It will require leaders, educators, parents, students, philanthropists, policymakers, community organizations, and citizens working together over many years.

But great civic achievements have never been easy. The generation that followed 1776 faced uncertainty, disagreement, and fragility. They understood that the future of self-government depended not simply on lofty ideals, but on the hard work of building institutions capable of sustaining those ideals. Their work became our inheritance. Our work will become the inheritance of future generations.

So if America’s 250th did not inspire you to stay engaged, consider joining us for the civic decade ahead.

The fireworks have ended. The celebrations have concluded. But the most important work is just beginning.

The story of America has never been defined solely by what happened in 1776.

It has always been defined by what each generation chooses to do next.

This article was co-authored by Vince Stango, interim President and CEO of the National Constitution Center.

This article originally appeared in The Fulcrum on July 13, 2026.