Educating Guardians of Liberty

By Justin Dyer
May 6, 2026

This essay is part of a symposium answering the question: “What is patriotic education?”

Why should we be patriotic? What reason do we have to love our country? The first and primary reason to love one’s country is because it is one’s own. The love we have for our country is in this way akin to the love we have for our family. Our family is not perfect, but it is ours, and we should have a special regard for its good. What begins as love of family extends out to love of home and community and country—a love for a place, a land, a people, and a way of life.

As our family draws us out of our narrow selfishness, so our country draws us out of our narrow parochialism—and into a disposition of gratitude for our civilizational inheritance and friendship toward our fellow countrymen. “We are not enemies but friends,” Abraham Lincoln insisted in his First Inaugural Address.

“We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as the surely will be touched, by the better angels of our nature.”

From an early age, those mystic chords of memory bind citizens together through a story, through pomp and parade and celebrations, and through the public recounting of the deeds of the past.

These patriotic stories and celebrations are not false, but neither are they wholly true. They are the saga of a people and their heroic achievements, which is meant to shape the affections of the young and unite countrymen in a worthy endeavor. The problem, as C.S. Lewis noted, is that the “actual history of every country is full of shabby and even shameful doings.” The academic who wants to debunk the popular saga always has plenty of material to work with. History is a mixed bag, as human beings are a mixed bag.

The scholar, who moves beyond saga to academic research and teaching, need neither debunk the popular stories nor defend them. His job is something different. The way he loves his country is by providing the kind of education that will enable citizens to assume responsibility for it. The best of America’s statesmen have always thought deeply about the role of education is securing the blessings of liberty to our posterity. Although it was not until 1885 that Henry Randall Waite coined the term “civics” to describe the study of the rights and duties of citizenship, the connection between civics, self-government, and higher education has been part of the American experiment from the beginning.

Even before ratification of the Constitution, some of the founders advocated for the creation of a national university to educate the republic’s future leaders and to unite people from different parts of the country. George Washington took up the idea in his inaugural message to Congress, insisting that “education in the science of Government” would be a primary object of the national university. “In a republic,” he asked, “what species of knowledge can be equally important and what duty more pressing on its legislature than to patronize a plan for communicating it to those who are to be the future guardians of the liberties of the country?”

This project was largely taken up at the state level at places like the University of Virginia. In 1818, the first commissioners of the University of Virginia (a group that included James Madison and Thomas Jefferson) met at a tavern to decide what to do with an appropriation they had just received from the Virginia legislature. In the document they produced—The Rockfish Gap Report—they note that those citizens who go on to higher education will form the “statesmen, legislators & judges on whom public prosperity, & individual happiness are so much to depend,” and that the first object of higher education is therefore to “expound the principles & structure of government, the laws which regulate the intercourse of nations, those formed municipally for our own government, and a sound spirit of legislation, which banishing all arbitrary & unnecessary restraint on individual action shall leave us free to do whatever does not violate the equal rights of another.”

Public higher education, in this framing, was, like the Constitution, designed to “preserve the blessings of liberty to ourselves and to our posterity.”In laying out the curriculum, the commissioners identified “government, political economy, law of nature & nations, and history (being interwoven with Politics & Law)” as the course of study most suited to the training of those to whom the public happiness would be entrusted.” To these subjects we may properly add other aspects of a liberal education—that is, an education appropriate for a free person—as essential to the preservation of a self-governing republic.

Two decades after the Rockfish Gap Report, in the sovereign nation of Texas, President Mirabeau Lamar called on the Texas Congress to create a plan for public education, saying that “cultivated mind is the guardian genius of democracy.” The University of Texas at Austin later adopted a loose Latin rendering of Lamar’s quotation as the motto of the university: disciplina praesidium civitatis / “education is the guardian of the city.” There are many others like it at universities across the United States, including the motto of The Ohio State University: disciplina in civitatem / “education for citizenship.” These Latin mottos point to the deep connection between liberal and civic education in a republic.

The new civics institutes and schools are a continuation of this American tradition of loving one’s country by educating for freedom. Civic education begins with gratitude for what we have, for those who came before us, for the institutions we have inherited, and for the responsibility that is now ours. We want to improve what we have, which means it can be improved, which means it is not perfect. Civic education may be critical, but it is not cynical. We want to protect and improve what we have been given because we love it, and because it is ours—something for which we have a unique responsibility.