Harvard University campus on May 24, 2025, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Photo: Zhu Ziyu/VCG via Reuters Connect

Ronald Reagan warned that freedom is fragile — that it must be taught, protected, and deliberately passed from one generation to the next. For years, that warning could be heard as rhetoric. As the United States approaches its 250th anniversary, it reads as diagnosis.

Ruth Wisse makes a similar point in her recent Jefferson Lecture, and she does so with characteristic clarity. Democracy, she reminds us, does not reproduce itself. “Democracy is not transmitted biologically.” It must be taught, reinforced, and defended.

That line should be engraved above the entrance to every school in America.

But even Wisse stops one step short of the deeper problem.

By the time we try to teach democracy in college, it is often already too late.

Her lecture is about endurance — how a people survives, how a civilization persists, how freedom is carried forward across generations. Drawing on Jewish history, she shows that continuity is never accidental. It is built through teaching, repetition, and expectation. The Shema is not just a prayer; it is a civilizational blueprint: teach your children, speak these truths constantly, bind them into daily life.

This is how a people endures.

But in the United States today, we have largely abandoned this model — and nowhere is that abandonment more visible than in education.

For years, colleges and universities have imagined themselves as the primary sites of civic formation. When students arrive with weak civic knowledge or thin historical grounding, institutions respond with programming — substituting initiatives for formation and statements for substance — designed to shape values in real time.

But anyone who teaches knows the truth: students do not arrive as blank slates.

They arrive formed.

And what is formed early tends to endure.

They have already learned whether disagreement is something to engage or something to silence. They have already absorbed whether institutions deserve trust or suspicion. They have already internalized whether their country is something to inherit or something to dismantle.

These habits are not formed in college. They are formed much earlier — especially in high school. Political scientists Richard Niemi and Jane Junn showed decades ago that high school is the decisive window for civic formation — that the knowledge, attitudes, and habits students carry into adulthood are largely shaped before they reach college.

I see this every day in the classroom. Present students with a controversial text and ask them to engage it — really engage it — and a familiar pattern emerges. Some move immediately to moral judgment before they can articulate the argument. Others retreat, wary of saying anything contestable. Very few instinctively attempt persuasion – laying out a case, anticipating objections, and revising their views in response.

This is not a failure of intelligence. It is a failure of formation.

And higher education, rather than correcting this, often deepens it.

Wisse watched this transformation up close during her two decades at Harvard, where she saw what Lionel Trilling called the adversarial culture — the ascent of grievance over gratitude — displace the serious transmission of civic inheritance. She wanted to remind her colleagues that democracy requires active reinforcement, not passive assumption. What she witnessed instead was the substitution of critique for formation, of grievance for gratitude.

In place of formation, we have substituted expression. Students are encouraged to “share their truth” but are rarely required to defend it. In place of shared civic frameworks, we offer individualized narratives. In place of intellectual discipline, we reward performance — moral, emotional, and increasingly ideological.

The result is a generation that is often articulate but not persuasive, engaged but not grounded, confident but not resilient.

These are not small distinctions. They are the difference between citizens and spectators — between a democracy that endures and one that frays.

Wisse is right to warn that civilizations must be defended — not only militarily, but culturally. Here, the Jewish experience offers a lesson that has become newly urgent after October 7.

For many, especially in the Diaspora, there was a quiet assumption that security could be taken for granted — that integration was sufficient, that strength could remain in the background.

October 7 shattered that illusion.

It was a brutal reminder that survival requires not only memory and meaning, but power and preparedness. The same is true, in a different register, for democratic societies. Freedom depends not only on ideals, but on the willingness to defend them — culturally, intellectually, and, when necessary, physically.

But defense begins with formation.

And here is where Wisse’s warning should land most forcefully: we are no longer reliably forming the citizens we need to sustain the system we have.

In K-12 education, the shift has been profound. History is too often taught as indictment rather than inheritance. Authority is treated with suspicion rather than seriousness. Students are encouraged to critique before they are asked to understand. The result is not critical thinking — it is premature certainty.

By the time these students arrive on campus, the patterns are already established.

Colleges are not building civic habits. They are attempting — often unsuccessfully — to remediate their absence.

This helps explain why so many institutional responses feel hollow. Statements are issued. Committees are formed. New programs are announced. But none of this addresses the deeper issue: the habits required for democratic life were never built in the first place.

And habits, once unformed, are extraordinarily difficult to create under pressure.

If we are serious about sustaining a free society, we must shift our attention earlier — restoring serious civic and historical formation in K-12 education, where these habits are actually built. That means requiring students to read founding documents and debate their meaning — not merely critique their authors. It means teaching argument before self-expression, and inheritance before indictment.

Wisse closes with a call for renewed patriotism — a reminder that Americans benefit from an extraordinary inheritance but “do not sing of it enough.” That is true. But patriotism is not a slogan. It is a disposition, formed over time through exposure, expectation, and practice.

It cannot be summoned at the moment of crisis. It must be cultivated long before.

Reagan understood that. Wisse reminds us of it.

But here is the harder truth:

Democracy is formed early — or it is not formed at all. And when we wait until college to build it, we are no longer forming citizens — we are trying, too late, to repair the habits we failed to build.

Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.