A country that cannot argue with itself is a country that has stopped governing itself. As America approaches its 250th birthday, the question that should hang over the celebrations is not whether we can throw a good party. It is whether we still know how to live together when the party is over.
The honest answer is that we are no longer sure. A generation now arrives at college unable to disagree without escalation and unable to draw on a shared body of knowledge that might make such exchanges worthwhile. They can speak, but they cannot really reason. They can express, but they cannot persuade. The Yale Committee on Trust in Higher Education, in its sober April report, conceded that universities have helped erode public trust in the very institutions supposed to form citizens. But what arrives at the college door is the result of formation that did or did not happen long before. By 18, the habits are set. The college classroom is the place where the bill comes due, not the place where the work gets done.
That work is formation. A free society depends not merely on information but on formation: the slow apprenticeship by which a child becomes a citizen capable of inhabiting the republic she has inherited. This is the predictable result of decades of decisions that hollowed out that apprenticeship while pretending that something else — sentiment and self-expression — could carry the load. The diagnosis is finally widely shared. The harder news is that the cure requires two forms of formation at once, and we have been attempting one without the other for 30 years.
The civic skills the next generation is lacking
The first thing we owe the next generation is the explicit cultivation of civic skills. Disagreement, deliberation, listening, weighing evidence, changing one’s mind — these are not personality traits. They are skills, in exactly the same sense that addition and reading are skills. They have to be taught, practiced, modeled and reinforced, year over year, from the earliest grades. They corrode when replaced by therapeutic substitutes that treat every conflict as a wound to be soothed rather than a question to be reasoned through.
I have written about one K–12 school, the Birch Wathen Lenox School in Manhattan, that has stopped treating constructive dialogue as an assembly theme and started building it into a developmental arc: a year-by-year curriculum that walks children, beginning in the lower grades, through the actual mechanics of disagreement with trust, compassion and evidence.
The fast-growing network of classical charter schools across Idaho, Wyoming, Colorado and the Mountain West is doing related work from a different starting point: pairing rigorous instruction in the founding documents with a structured culture of recitation, argument and Socratic exchange. The two models look almost nothing alike. They are converging on the same insight: a citizen is formed, not born. The work belongs to childhood, not commencement.
I see the absence of this formation every term in my own classroom. Last semester, I asked a seminar of bright, motivated juniors to argue the strongest version of a position they personally rejected. It is one of the oldest exercises in the Western pedagogical canon, and it is now genuinely difficult for students to perform.
Not because they were unwilling — they were not — but because they had never been asked to inhabit a view they did not already hold. They had been trained to express, to affirm, to share. They had not been trained to argue. They had reached 21 without the apprenticeship that should have begun at 7. And the shared physical architecture that once made such an apprenticeship routine has thinned: I have written about the library as one of the last places on a college campus where a student cannot mute the person who disagrees with him, and the erosion of such shared spaces has consequences our dialogue programs cannot reach.
The importance of constructive arguments
The Jewish tradition I was raised in has a name for what these students had been deprived of: machloket l’shem shamayim, argument for the sake of Heaven — the Talmudic ideal in which Rabbi Hillel and Rabbi Shammai disagree across generations because they share a sacred text and a discipline of reasoning.
Christian readers will recognize the same instinct in the medieval disputatio and in the line that runs from Augustine through Aquinas to the great pulpits of the American Founding. Lay traditions of communal teaching and self-governance — the ward council, the volunteer lesson refined among neighbors — carry that wisdom in a different idiom.
Communities of faith have long understood, even when secular institutions forget, that learning to argue well is itself a form of neighborliness and a discipline of humility before truth. They have understood that formation is not optional. It is what a community owes its young.
Tocqueville understood this in 1830s America. He admired Americans not because they agreed with one another — they did not — but because their associations, town meetings and churches had developed habits of mutual address that let argument function as the connective tissue of self-government. Those habits were formed in childhood, in congregations and one-room schoolhouses and family debate around the table, and they were carried into adult life as second nature. That tissue has thinned. It can be rebuilt, but only deliberately, and only in the years when human beings are actually being formed.
The importance of shared knowledge
Yet civic skills alone are not enough, and this is where most of the current dialogue work falls short. You can run all the trainings, workshops and summits you want. If the participants do not share a baseline body of knowledge about the country they are arguing over — its founding documents, its religious and philosophical inheritances, its great books and great failures — the dialogue risks becoming more therapeutic than civic. It becomes an exchange of feelings about a country no one in the room actually knows. The conversation may be civil. It will not be civic.
This is the second form of formation we owe the next generation, and I have argued elsewhere that it is the precondition for everything else: a genuine inheritance, transmitted in K–12 and again in higher education. Not a checklist of requirements in which medieval political philosophy and contemporary television satisfy the same box. A real common foundation — basic historical literacy, the development of the American constitutional tradition, the religious and philosophical sources of Western civic life, the texts that shaped how the founders thought and how their critics still think. The point is not indoctrination. The point is exposure. The point is to admit the next generation into a conversation that began before them and will continue after them, so that they enter adult citizenship with something to argue from rather than only feelings to argue with.
When 10% of the room has read the Federalist and the rest have not, the room is not really having a debate about federalism. It is staging an asymmetry: Some students are arguing from a tradition, while others are left to argue from fragments. When students do not know what the Hebrew Bible, the Gospels, the classical tradition and the Enlightenment each contributed to the American settlement, they cannot tell the difference between a critique of the country and a caricature of it. A shared inheritance is what makes serious disagreement possible. Without it, you are not having a conversation. You are having a collision.
These two forms of formation — civic skills and shared core inheritance — depend on each other in ways the policy world keeps trying to separate. Skills without knowledge produce articulate ignorance. Knowledge without skills produces educated stalemate. Formed together, in childhood, they produce something the founders would have recognized: a young adult who can read a serious book, change her mind in public and remain on speaking terms with her neighbor. A grown citizen who can lead a school board meeting through a hard question without anyone walking out. A town that can argue about its school curriculum and its zoning and emerge with both a decision and the relationships intact.
Young people started this country and it is up to young people to carry it forward
It helps to remember who the founders were. Jefferson was 33 when he wrote the Declaration. Madison was 36 when he carried the Virginia Plan into Philadelphia and spent the summer arguing the Constitution into being. Hamilton was 32 when he wrote most of the Federalist Papers.
They were young men, and they argued ferociously with one another: in pamphlets, in taverns, in the Continental Congress, on the floor of the convention. They could argue that way because they had been formed in the texts they were arguing about: the Hebrew Bible and the Gospels, Cicero and Locke and Montesquieu, the histories of the ancient republics and the dissenting Jewish and Protestant traditions. They knew what they were arguing for, what they were arguing against and how to argue. They built something new and unique in the world because they had been given the foundation that made building possible. They had been formed.
Our young people can step up and live that legacy. They have not been refused the inheritance. They have simply not yet been given it. The 250th anniversary is our chance to give it to them, the skills and the substance, the disagreement and the friendship that comes after. Formation is how a republic hands its inheritance to the next generation. We will not be ready for 275 unless we begin the work where it must begin, in the lives of children, and begin it now.