Something has gone wrong with the formation of American citizens. Too many young Americans have renounced the beliefs and conduct that maintain our civic order. In surveys, patriotic sentiment decreases with each successive generation from the Greatest to the Zs. Among the latter, 72% of college students agree that it’s acceptable to shut down a speaker who voices offensive opinions. The education system is producing graduates who don’t know much about American principles and their history, and what they do know they don’t like. Two recent books address this problem of civic education.

One is by James Traub, a writer for The New Yorker and The New York Times. In The Cradle of Citizenship: How Schools Can Help Save Our Democracy, he reports firsthand from America’s classrooms that civics teachers are not woke ideologues pushing anti-American bile in the classroom. To Traub, waning patriotism among the young has other causes. The other book is by Johns Hopkins scholars Benjamin Ginsberg and Dorothea Wolfson, The Unmaking of American Citizenship: How Americans Learned Not to Love Their Country and What Can Be Done About It, which proposes that leftist dogma has indeed turned civics education into a systematic assault on patriotism. All agree that American students have become cynical, pessimistic, and ignorant