The Formation of a Free People: Forming the Next Generation
A Weekly Devotional from The Founders' Quill: Reclaiming America's Judeo-Christian Heritage through Spirit and Truth.
What Are We Teaching the Next Generation?
There is something deceptively ordinary about a family gathered around a table. Meals are eaten there. Bills are discussed. Stories are told. Children interrupt. Parents correct. Grandparents remember. Questions arise that nobody expected to answer that evening. In the course of ordinary life, however, something far more important than food is being passed from one generation to another. A child is learning what the adults around him believe matters.
In the last chapter, we considered the home as one of the first places where the character necessary for liberty is formed. But that raises another question we cannot avoid. If the home is where an inheritance is handed down, what exactly are we passing across the table?
A family can possess an old Bible without opening it. It can celebrate Independence Day without understanding independence. It can honor veterans without explaining sacrifice. It can admire the Founders without knowing what they believed. It can enjoy religious liberty without understanding liberty of conscience. It can inherit freedoms purchased at terrible cost while never learning that freedom carries obligations.
An inheritance that is not explained eventually becomes an artifact. Moses understood this danger long before there was an American republic. As Israel prepared to enter the Promised Land, God commanded His people to remember His words and deliberately pass them to their children: “These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts. Impress them on your children” (Deuteronomy 6:6–7 NIV).
Notice the order. First, on your hearts. Then, impress them on your children. Before truth can be faithfully transmitted, it must first be possessed. We must be forming the next generation.
We Must Be Forming the Next Generation
The setting of Deuteronomy 6 makes the command even more striking. Moses was speaking to a people preparing to inherit cities they had not built, houses filled with things they had not provided, wells they had not dug, and vineyards they had not planted. Prosperity was coming, but prosperity carried a danger. They could enjoy the inheritance while forgetting where it came from.
“Be careful,” Moses warned, “that you do not forget the LORD” (Deuteronomy 6:12 NIV).
America is not ancient Israel, nor does our nation possess Israel’s unique covenant with God. But the principle of generational memory is universal. Our children were born into an inheritance they did not create. They did not stand at Lexington and Concord. They did not endure Valley Forge. They did not debate independence in Philadelphia or construct the Constitution. They did not fight to preserve the Union, struggle to abolish slavery, march for civil rights, or bear the costs of wars fought before they were born. They simply arrived in a country where an enormous inheritance—imperfect, costly, remarkable, and unfinished—was already waiting for them.
Why should we expect them to value something merely because they inherited it? Gratitude requires memory, and memory requires teaching. The psalmist described the same responsibility when he commanded one generation to tell another “the praiseworthy deeds of the LORD, his power, and the wonders he has done” so that even children yet unborn would know them and “in turn would tell their children” (Psalm 78:4, 6 NIV).
There is the chain: receive, remember, live, transmit. Break that chain for a generation and the generation following it begins without memory. This is true of faith. It is true of families. And it is true of civilizations.
The republic is always one generation away from forgetting why it is free.
Forming Citizens, Not Merely Students
The generation that established the American republic understood that education involved more than transferring information. A government resting heavily upon the judgment of ordinary citizens required citizens capable of exercising judgment.
The Northwest Ordinance of 1787, adopted while the Constitutional Convention was meeting in Philadelphia, made the connection plainly: “Religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.”¹
Consider those words together: religion, morality, knowledge, good government, happiness, and education. The early republic did not treat these as entirely unrelated compartments of human life. The Northwest Ordinance itself also protected religious liberty, addressed civil rights in the territory, declared that good faith should be observed toward Native peoples, and prohibited slavery in the Northwest Territory. The same generation capable of serious contradictions and failures was nevertheless wrestling with the moral principles by which a free society should govern itself.²
Benjamin Rush, physician, signer of the Declaration of Independence, and one of the most prominent advocates of education in the early republic, was even more explicit. In his 1786 proposal concerning education in a republic, Rush argued that religion was foundational to the formation of republican character. “Without this there can be no virtue,” he wrote, “and without virtue there can be no liberty.”³
Rush was not arguing merely that young people needed enough knowledge to earn a living. He believed they needed formation sufficient to live responsibly in a republic. Noah Webster made a similar argument. Schools, he wrote, should teach not only the usual branches of learning but “the moral or social duties,” the history of the country, and “the principles of liberty and government.” Then Webster made an observation worth recovering in our own age: “the heart should be cultivated with more assiduity than the head.”⁴
The Founding generation certainly disagreed among themselves about religion, education, government, and the proper relationship among them. We should not flatten those disagreements into a history neater than the evidence permits. But a recurring conviction in the early republic is difficult to miss:
Self-government required the formation of people capable of governing themselves.
A free society could not concern itself merely with whether its children could make a living. It also had to ask whether they were learning how to live.
Who Is Teaching Our Children?
Here the temptation is to turn our attention outward.
We could complain about schools. We could blame universities. We could point toward Hollywood, social media, political activists, popular entertainment, or the glowing screens that occupy hours of a young person's day. There are legitimate questions to ask about all of them. But that would allow us to leave the mirror too quickly.
The more uncomfortable question is this:
Where were we while they were being formed?
Every child is being formed by something. Parents form them. Teachers form them. Churches form them. Coaches and friends form them. Music, entertainment, advertising, social media, and the endless stream of digital content placed before them form them. Some influences are beneficial; others are destructive. Most are not waiting for parental permission before beginning their work.
Formation abhors a vacuum. If we do not teach our children what marriage means, other voices will offer definitions. If we do not teach them why human beings possess dignity, someone else will tell them where their worth comes from. If we do not teach them Scripture, they will still acquire a worldview. If we do not teach them American history, they will still receive an interpretation of it. If we do not explain why freedom of speech must protect speech we dislike, they may eventually mistake silencing disagreement for virtue. If we do not explain why religious liberty protects the conscience of our neighbor as well as our own, they may come to see religious liberty merely as a privilege Christians demand for themselves.
And if we never teach them that freedom requires responsibility and self-restraint, they may eventually confuse liberty with permission to follow every appetite wherever it leads.
It is easy to become angry at the culture for teaching our children things we reject. There are times when that anger is understandable. But anger is no substitute for formation.
We cannot outsource the formation of our children and then act surprised when they are formed by someone else.
That sentence is uncomfortable because responsibility comes home.
The biblical command was never merely to complain about what Babylon, Canaan, Rome, or the surrounding culture was teaching. God's people were commanded to know the truth themselves, live it before their children, and speak of it in the ordinary rhythms of life—when sitting at home, walking along the road, lying down, and getting up. The first responsibility was theirs. So is ours.
Information Is Not Formation
There is another danger here. Recovering our heritage cannot simply mean filling children's heads with more historical facts. A child can memorize the Declaration of Independence and still grow into an irresponsible citizen. He can recite the Ten Commandments while watching adults disregard them. He can know the dates of battles, presidents, revivals, and constitutional amendments while never understanding why any of them matter. Information is necessary. But information alone is not formation.
A child learns honesty partly because Scripture commands truthfulness, but also because he watches his father tell the truth when lying would be easier. A daughter learns human dignity because the Bible teaches that humanity bears God's image, but also because she watches her mother treat inconvenient people as though they actually possess that dignity.
Children learn citizenship not merely from civics lessons but by watching adults disagree without hatred, serve neighbors who cannot repay them, keep promises, work faithfully, worship sincerely, admit wrongdoing, forgive injuries, respect legitimate authority without worshiping it, and question authority without despising everyone who exercises it.
The most convincing curriculum a child ever encounters may be the life of the adult teaching it.
And suddenly the questions of the last several weeks return.
How can we teach self-government if our children watch us governed by our appetites?
How can we teach the strength of the family while neglecting our own?
How can we teach reverence for truth while casually repeating claims we have never bothered to verify?
How can we teach civil disagreement while allowing contempt to characterize the way we speak about people with whom we disagree?
How can we teach our children that God is the center of life if everything they observe tells them He receives whatever time remains after everything else has been done?
This is why Moses first said that God's commands must be upon our hearts. Our children do not merely hear what we teach. They watch what we love.
Give Them Memory, Not Mythology
Recovering our heritage also requires enough courage to tell the next generation the truth about it. We do our children no favors by giving them a mythology in which America has always lived perfectly according to its professed principles. It has not. The existence of slavery alongside the Declaration's assertion that human beings are created equal remains one of the most glaring contradictions in American history. The mistreatment of Native peoples, racial injustice, failures of religious tolerance, and other chapters of our history should not be hidden from those who inherit the nation.
But neither does honesty require teaching that America's failures render its principles meaningless. The more mature lesson is harder—and better. Teach them the Declaration and slavery. Teach them the Constitution and the long struggle over who would fully receive its protections. Teach them religious liberty and the disputes through which Americans learned more fully what liberty of conscience required. Teach them the nation's failures, and teach them about the Americans who challenged those failures by appealing to Scripture, natural rights, constitutional principles, and America's own professed ideals. Teach them that inheritance carries both gratitude and responsibility.
Don't give them mythology.
Give them memory.
Memory allows us to say that something was wrong without concluding that everything was worthless. It permits gratitude without blindness and repentance without self-hatred. It gives the next generation something far more durable than either nostalgia or cynicism: truth.
And truth is strong enough to survive an honest telling.
One Generation Away
Every generation begins life knowing almost nothing about the generations before it.
A newborn child knows nothing of Washington or Lincoln. She knows nothing of the Declaration, Constitution, abolition, Gettysburg, the Great Awakenings, world wars, civil rights, or the countless unnamed men and women whose ordinary faithfulness helped build the world into which she has been born.
She does not know the stories of her own family.
She does not know what her grandparents endured.
She does not know why an old Bible is marked beside certain verses or why a folded flag sits in a wooden case.
Someone must tell her.
The documents cannot do it alone. Monuments cannot do it. Museums cannot do it. Churches cannot do it by themselves. Schools cannot carry the whole burden. A Constitution preserved beneath glass cannot explain why constitutional government matters.
Someone must tell the story. That someone is us.
This responsibility is not limited to parents of young children. Some readers have grandchildren. Some teach Sunday school. Some coach teams or lead youth groups. Some employ young adults. Some have nieces, nephews, neighbors, students, or younger friends who listen when they speak. Some have grown children with whom conversations once thought impossible may still occur. You do not need a classroom.
Deuteronomy gives us a much simpler picture. Talk about truth when you sit at home and when you travel, when the day begins and when it ends. For us that might mean the dinner table. The drive to school. A conversation after church. A question raised during the evening news. A family vacation to a historic place. A difficult conversation when a child encounters something contrary to what you have taught. It might even happen when we fail, and our children watch us confess it, apologize, and make it right.
Those moments may appear small. They are not.
One day someone else will sit in our chair at the table. The Bible may still be there. The flag may still fly outside. The Constitution will probably still rest beneath protective glass in Washington. Old photographs may remain tucked away in boxes, and family names may still be written inside the covers of aging books. But none of those things can explain themselves.
We must.
An inheritance can be received without being understood. What is not understood will rarely be defended. What is not loved will seldom be preserved. And what is not taught will eventually be forgotten.
The republic is always one generation away from forgetting why it is free.
So perhaps the question we should ask is not first, What are they teaching our children?
The question is closer to home.
What are we?
Spirit & Truth
Thom H. Paine
Notes
United States Congress, An Ordinance for the Government of the Territory of the United States, North-West of the River Ohio, July 13, 1787, art. 3.
Ibid., arts. 1, 3, and 6. The ordinance protected religious exercise, addressed relations with Native peoples, and prohibited slavery within the Northwest Territory, while permitting the return of persons escaping into the territory from whom labor or service was lawfully claimed.
Benjamin Rush, A Plan for the Establishment of Public Schools and the Diffusion of Knowledge in Pennsylvania; to Which Are Added, Thoughts upon the Mode of Education, Proper in a Republic (Philadelphia: Thomas Dobson, 1786). Rush wrote that “the only foundation for a useful education in a republic is to be laid in Religion,” adding, “Without this there can be no virtue, and without virtue there can be no liberty.”
Noah Webster, “On the Education of Youth in America,” in A Collection of Essays and Fugitiv Writings (Boston: Thomas and Andrews, 1790), 22–23.
Bibliography
Rush, Benjamin. A Plan for the Establishment of Public Schools and the Diffusion of Knowledge in Pennsylvania; to Which Are Added, Thoughts upon the Mode of Education, Proper in a Republic. Philadelphia: Thomas Dobson, 1786.
United States Congress. An Ordinance for the Government of the Territory of the United States, North-West of the River Ohio. July 13, 1787.
Webster, Noah. “On the Education of Youth in America.” In A Collection of Essays and Fugitiv Writings. Boston: Thomas and Andrews, 1790.
The Founders’ Quill seeks to recover the spiritual and moral foundations that shaped the American experiment in ordered liberty. By returning to Scripture, history, and the wisdom of those who came before us, we are invited not merely to admire our inheritance but to become people capable of preserving it.
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