Symposium: What is Patriotic Education?

The Editors
May 6, 2026

One of President Trump’s first executive orders instructed agencies to “prioritize Federal resources, consistent with applicable law, to promote patriotic education.” This executive order, and the announcements that followed it, sparked a debate about the term “patriotic education” in higher education. Can professors educate patriotically? Or are the two terms mutually exclusive? Must professors choose between truly educating their students and leading them to love their country?

On the one hand, patriotic education appears to conflict with liberal education, if the aim of the latter is to become radically free. Does becoming liberally educated not entail becoming aware of one’s own freedom to refuse to be patriotic? Reading our country’s own Declaration of Independence might even seem to imply as much, for it claims that human beings are free to cast off their governments, if not without good reason. The “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” would seem to support an “inalienable right” to decline to love one’s country.
 
On the other hand, do we not also owe a natural debt to those who gathered together, at great personal risk, first to announce those rights and then to create a constitution to safeguard them? Should anyone who has benefited from the nation, states, communities and institutions enabled by the government those founding documents helped to create not be appreciative of them? Do we not owe gratitude to the many people who, in different ways, have contributed to the culture those documents made possible?
 
To explore these questions, we asked three faculty members in the schools of civic thought that have recently been founded at state flagship institutions to make the best case for a patriotic education. Should we think differently about our country because it is our own? The essays below provide excellent starting points for that discussion.