Education Remains the Key to Good Citizenship

One of the primary motivations for instituting compulsory schooling in the United States was the need to assimilate immigrants.

Today, however, it’s not so much recent immigrants who need the schooling, it’s native-born Americans. The more removed they are from the experiences and motivations of parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents who immigrated, the less they seem to understand, much less appreciate, the ideas and values that inspire America — ideas such as freedom of expression and religion, the rule of law, and the chance to spectacularly succeed (or spectacularly fail and have an opportunity to try again).