I've been thinking a lot this week about something my kids asked me when they were pretty little.
We were in the car—I don't even remember where we were going—and one of them asked why the Fourth of July is such a big deal. They weren’t being bratty or anything, they genuinely just didn’t know.
I caught myself giving this sort of half-answer about fireworks and the Declaration of Independence, and then I stopped, because I realized I could do a lot better than that. I also realized that if I hadn't happened to have spent my whole adult life learning this stuff, I probably couldn't have given them much of an answer.
The truth is, most parents can't give answers beyond fireworks and the Declaration. Not because they don't care, but because nobody ever actually taught them.
And if you think your education was lacking, you aren’t going to believe how very bad things are now.
Yeesh.
Recently, we asked a thousand parents what they think about how their kids are learning American history. Here’s some of what they said:
Three out of four of them said their kids aren't being consistently taught to think for themselves about American history.
Only about a quarter said their kid's school actually has them look at different sides of something and come to their own conclusion. Everybody else said it's either a "here's the right answer, agree with it," situation, or that it just depends on which teacher their kid happened to get that year.
Now I know that stuff like this can make teachers feel like they’re being painted as the bad guys. That's not what I'm saying, and it's also not what the data says. Some of the best people I know are teachers. But something is definitely off in the system if whether your kid learns to actually think about their own country's history comes down to the luck of the teacher draw.
(When I talk about the public education system being dysfunctional at its core, this is at least part of what I mean.)
One of the most interesting things about this data is that the way parents felt had almost nothing to do with politics. It barely moved across party lines.
71% of Democrats, 75% of Independents, and 78% of Republicans all agreed that their kids aren’t being taught to think for themselves about American history.
Now, I've been doing this a long time and I can tell you it is really, really rare to get parents who disagree about almost everything to agree about something like this. So when they do, I definitely pay attention.
Of those surveyed, almost all of them—93%!—said the ideas behind America's founding are important to them. Ideas like natural rights, where those rights come from, and why the people who built this country were so obsessed with limiting the power of the very government they were creating. Nearly every parent said "Yes, that matters. I want my kid to have that."
When we asked whether any of it actually comes up when their kid talks about history, only 26% said yes.
So the thing almost every parent says they care about is, for three out of four families, just... not making it home. That’s a really big gap between what we say we value and what our kids actually think about.
Interestingly, a large part of the reason for this knowledge gap showed up in the data too. See, only about 28% of parents said they felt “very confident” that they could explain founding ideas themselves. So—yeah, that tracks. I mean, you can't teach your kids something you were never taught.
When we asked parents to guess how many American eighth graders are actually proficient in U.S. history, almost all of them guessed way too high. The most common guess was somewhere around half of all kids. The real number (straight from the federal government's own assessment) is actually 13%.
Yikes.
About 92% of parents overestimated proficiency, and most of them by a whole lot. Nearly every parent in the country assumes their kids are getting this stuff at school, and nearly every parent is wrong.
Maybe that explains why, when we gave parents a list and asked them to pick just one thing that they thought was the single most important thing for their child to understand before they graduate high school, “founding ideas” came in dead last.
“Well come on guys, if you care so much about kids learning this stuff, why aren’t you even prioritizing it as something you want them to learn,” was my first thought. But then the more I thought about it, the more it made sense. See, “founding ideas” didn't come in last because parents don't care—93% of them just said that they do!—it came in last, I think, because it feels abstract.
Financial literacy feels real. It feels like something your kid is going to actually use someday. "Consent of the governed" sounds like a phrase on a plaque at a place you visited once on a school field trip.
And here's the thing… parents are right to want the practical stuff for their kids—I want it for mine too! The problem is that hardly anyone was ever shown how the founding ideas are the practical stuff. A kid who really understands where their rights come from is a kid who's a whole lot harder for the powers-that-be to manipulate as they grow up. That's not abstract at all. In fact, that's about as practical as it gets. But too few people make that connection, because this “founding principles” learning deficit is now generations deep.
It’s also the reason I started writing books to begin with. My own kids were asking me questions I wanted better answers to, but when I went looking for something to help them, I couldn't find anything.
The timing of this seems pretty perfect to me. Volume 3 of our America's History series just started shipping this week.
The entire point of the series is to take exactly these ideas—the ones almost every parent says they want their kids to have, and almost none of them feel ready to teach—and put them in a story that kids actually want to read. Not in a textbook or a lecture format, but as an interesting, engaging story where the ideas emerge the way they really did in history—as things that real people argued about and fought over and sometimes risked everything for.
We've got our America 250 sale going right now to celebrate the country turning 250.
It gives you 25% off all our books with the code USA250.
If you've been working through the history series, you’ve likely been waiting on Volume 3. And if you've never started it, I can’t think of a better week to jump in.
But honestly, even if you never buy a single thing from us, I hope you'll take the one real lesson buried in all these data points to heart: you likely want your kids to understand this stuff. They're going to be better off for having learned it. Most of the "gap" isn't because kids don’t care—it’s because too many adults don’t feel equipped to teach these vital ideas.
Still, I’m willing to bet that you're more equipped than you think.
You don't have to have all the answers. You just have to be willing to go searching so that when road-trip questions come up, you have the foundational knowledge to answer them in a meaningful way.
Really, that’s the most important part of parenting. Just being there to have these conversations when your kids are ready to have them.
We just make tools that help make your job a little easier.
— Connor
P.S. If you want to dig through all the numbers yourself, we put the whole survey up here.
