America will celebrate its 250th birthday later this week. As teachers and schools have prepared lessons to mark the occasion this past school year and next, President Donald Trump’s administration has offered its own priority: Teach students to love their country.
In September of last year, the U.S. Department of Education announced “patriotic education” as a new priority for competitive grants. The agency convened an America 250 Civics Education Coalition, composed largely of conservative-leaning organizations, aimed at “restoring patriotism by ensuring every American knows our history and treasures our freedoms,” said Katie Gorka, the coalition’s executive director, in a statement.
A 2025 executive order promised to end “radical indoctrination” in K-12 schools, arguing that classrooms were pushing “anti-American ideologies.”
Though debates about how to present the American story have been especially heated over the past five years, they’ve waxed and waned for decades, spanning different presidential administrations and political climates.
Exactly what role patriotism should play in the classroom, and how much freedom students should have to criticize their country, have long been contested questions.
See how arguments about patriotism have resurfaced and changed shape through the years below.
1988
Students reciting the Pledge of Allegiance became a flash point in that year’s presidential election between Gov. Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts and then-Vice President George H. W. Bush, a Republican.
In 1977, Dukakis, a Democrat, vetoed a bill that would have required teachers in the state to lead their students in the pledge every morning. The legislation passed anyway, with lawmakers overriding the veto.
Bush made the veto a talking point in his campaign, and his platform promised to “protect the Pledge of Allegiance in all schools”—stirring up debate over which candidate was the more patriotic American.
“I think it’s pretty infantile,” the headmaster of a Minnesota Catholic school told Education Week at the time. “There are so many other things that they should be discussing.”
1989
In his farewell speech to the nation, President Ronald Reagan called for teaching children an “informed patriotism” that shows them “what America is and what she represents in the long history of the world.”
“Younger parents aren’t sure that an unambivalent appreciation of America is the right thing to teach modern children. And as for those who create the popular culture, well-grounded patriotism is no longer the style,” he said.
“Our spirit is back, but we haven’t reinstitutionalized it. We’ve got to do a better job of getting across that America is freedom—freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of enterprise—and freedom is special and rare. It’s fragile; it needs protection.”
1992
A federally funded effort to develop national history standards cratered amid fierce debate over how children should be taught to understand the American story.
In 1992, the U.S. Department of Education and the National Endowment for the Humanities brought together more than 200 educators and academics across the political spectrum to develop national guidelines for what students should learn in history classes. The process spanned two years and more than 6,000 drafts.
But on the eve of their release, Lynne Cheney, the head of the NEH when the project was funded, came out in strong opposition to the standards her agency had sponsored.
They were too concerned with “political correctness” and left out “traditional history,” she wrote in a 1994 editorial in The Wall Street Journal. The U.S. Senate voted to condemn the standards, 99-1, in 1995.
For the following year, officials on both sides of the aisle hammered the now-abandoned standards as anti-American.
Their purpose, said Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole, a Republican, “seems not to be to teach our children certain facts about our history, but to denigrate America’s story while sanitizing and glorifying other cultures.”
“They portray American history in a bad light, and that is a mistake,” said then-U.S. Secretary of Education Richard W. Riley, a Democrat, in a 1996 speech.
2001
Following the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, schools were “awash in patriotism, mirroring the sentiment that gripped much of the nation,” Education Week wrote in September 2001.
Some schools draped their auditoriums in American flags, posted “God Bless America” banners in the hallways, or held patriotism rallies. Some principals invited clergy members to lead assemblies.
When parents or civil liberties experts questioned school-sanctioned displays of religious slogans and prayer, some were met with swift and intense backlash.
In the 2002 legislative session, state lawmakers across the country introduced bills that would have required schools to begin the day with the Pledge of Allegiance, post the national motto “In God We Trust,” or offer classes that teach patriotism.
2004
The Supreme Court heard a case challenging the inclusion of the phrase “under God” in teacher-led recitations of the Pledge of Allegiance but did not issue a ruling. The court held that the California father who brought the case didn’t have the legal right to represent his daughter in court.
But three justices—William Rehnquist, Sandra Day O’Connor, and Clarence Thomas—wrote in opinions that they would have ruled the district’s pledge policy constitutional.
The court’s decision left the door open to similar legal challenges in the future, Education Week wrote in 2004. Several followed.
In 2010, a federal appeals court ruled that teachers could lead the Pledge of Allegiance, rejecting a challenge from parents who said that the inclusion of the words “under God” violated the Constitution’s prohibition on government establishment of religion.
Similarly, in 2014, the highest court of Massachusetts upheld a state law requiring schools to lead the pledge daily, ruling that the phrase “under God” in the recitation was constitutional.
2016
At the beginning of the 2016 football season, San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick kneeled during the pre-game playing of the National Anthem, a protest against police violence toward Black Americans. Some student-athletes started to follow his lead.
The decision sparked pushback from some athletic directors and school leaders, who issued reminders that players were to stand during the playing of the anthem or told students that athletes who didn’t stand would be removed from games.
First Amendment advocates issued their own reminders: Supreme Court precedent holds that schools can’t require students to observe patriotic rituals in the classroom, they said.
2020
In May of 2020, Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, sparking a nationwide protest movement with far-reaching implications. One outgrowth of this racial reckoning was a widespread conversation about systemic racism in schools—including how social studies classrooms portray the American story.
Long-standing debates in history education were reignited in the wake of Floyd’s death: Should students learn to view America as a singular example of freedom, democracy, and opportunity? Should they learn about the ways the country has failed to live up to the ideals espoused in the founding and systematically denied equal rights for all citizens? Or something in between?
As some schools moved to bolster instruction about Black Americans and other marginalized groups, fierce backlash followed.
Republican politicians and pundits said that schools were trying to teach kids to “hate America.” In a flurry of state legislation aimed at restricting how teachers discussed race in the classroom, some states banned teaching that racism was systemically embedded in American society.
Trump issued an executive order promoting “patriotic education” and convened a commission to influence what students learned in social studies classes. The commission’s report, published in 2021, accused schools of fostering resentment between races and promoting anti-American ideals.
In this environment, the states that were beginning their periodic reviews of social studies standards found themselves in the middle of tense debates.
In Louisiana, commenters said that standards should focus on the good things about America; in South Dakota, the state department of education scrubbed references to local Native American history. Florida civics standards, revised in 2021, emphasized patriotism and American exceptionalism.
2025
In Trump’s second term, his administration has deepened its focus on “patriotic education,” with the Education Department announcing it as a priority for competitive grantmaking in September 2025.
State social studies standards have continued to prove a battleground for arguments over the role of patriotism in U.S. classrooms.
In Florida, a series of standards on communism added to history guidelines in 2025 aimed to give students “a deeper appreciation for the blessings of liberty that define our nation,” said the state’s education commissioner.
And in Texas, new social studies standards adopted in 2026 present the founding of the United States and Texas as “the noblest experiment.”
