Classical academies should lead this coming year from their exceptional strength: we should lead from within.
In this coming year, as we mark the 250th anniversary of the United States of America, we should all be encouraged that the classical education movement is well positioned to lead a celebration of America’s remarkable achievement. I don’t mean that our schools should hold parades and set off fireworks. There will be plenty of that from other corners, and we should embrace it. Classical academies, however, should lead this coming year from their exceptional strength: we should lead from within. Given what others have done before us over the course of our history, we should resolve to stoke the fire of interior freedom, for freedom is the very purpose of genuine education and the surest foundation of the life of freedom we share in America.
A sense of history
We begin as classical leaders should, with a turn to anthropology: Who are we? Regarding history, Shakespeare’s Warwick says, “There is a history in all men’s lives.(Henry V). The historian John Lukacs reminds us, we are by nature historical beings and uniquely so among all beings. History, he teaches, has a hold in this world through human memory. As the remembered past, history is what we remember.
Zooming in on America, we find in our history that history itself has played a seminal role in the order of American freedom. Works by Thucydides, Polybius, Tacitus, and Livy were part of the Revolutionary generation’s regular literary diet, and Plutarch’s Lives prevailed among all forms of history. More recent histories were highly popular too. Between 1770 and 1776, William Molyneaux’s The Cause of Ireland (1698), the story of another people subject to Britain, was so widely read by American readers that three new editions were printed in order to keep up with demand. While Locke and others played crucial roles in shaping the Revolutionary mind, our Founders, in fact, read more history than political theory.
The Revolutionary generation measured their lives by heroes from antiquity, Cato and Cicero among the most notable. Washington came to be known as America’s Cincinnatus, since like the great Roman, twice he answered the call to lead, and twice he willingly stepped down and returned to his farming.
The chief model for America’s new republic was the Roman Republic. The Founders knew all too well, however, that Rome collapsed from within. The loss, they knew, was a matter of forgetfulness, that Romans had neglected their customs, then let them slip away from the heart of their life together. That sober story, among others, convinced the Founders to recognize the necessity of character. They knew that American freedom required republican virtue. They knew that freedom meant more than being out from under tyranny; it was ordered freedom, ordered to what permanently fulfills our nature as humans.
Moving on from the Founding, and particularly at times of crisis, Americans have benefitted from their sense of history. Amidst our greatest crisis, Lincoln led the way out of the Civil War in part by drawing from the Founding. He interpreted the need to defeat the Confederacy and to free the slaves as ways to prove the “propositions” of universal freedom and equality established in our Founding documents. As the war neared its end, Lincoln drew on ancient biblical truths and called Americans to rise in character: “With malice toward none with charity for all.”
One century later, Martin Luther King, Jr., invoked Lincoln and the Founding as part of his attempt to lead the effort toward finally overcoming segregation. He interpreted the Founding’s promise of universal freedom and equality as a “promissory note” to be paid off. In hope that payment was to come at long last, he envisioned a time when Americans would be judged not by the color of their skin but by their character. That was 1963.
On April 4, 1968, the night of MLK’s assassination, and when riots broke out in most American cities, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., drew from an ancient Greek source as he solaced a mostly black audience in Indianapolis. Before he recited the lines, however, he posed a question for everyone to consider: “In this difficult day, in this difficult time for the United States, it is perhaps well to ask what kind of a nation we are and what direction we want to move in.”
In solidarity with the audience and out of shared sympathy for their terrible loss, he recalled the assassination of his brother less than five years earlier. Then, to his fellow countrymen, RFK reached back to antiquity and offered a line from Aeschylus: “‘And even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.’”(Agamemnon)
Kennedy went on to encourage his audience: “What we need in the United States is not division. What we need in the United States is not hatred. What we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but love and wisdom and compassion toward one another, a feeling of justice to those who still suffer in our country, whether they be white or . . . black.”
A sense of responsibility
The story from 1968, like the others touched on earlier, are the very kind that classical academies are exceptionally well suited to encourage among American students. In each of the examples, the key figure lived in memory of those who came before him and made sense of his times in light of what his predecessors did and said. In every case, the representative American had a sense of history born from a common culture. Each time, he thought classically. And at each juncture in time, and out of remembrance, the exemplary figure took responsibility for the order of American freedom.
To see by the light of a Roman republicanism, Greek drama, or the Bible, the histories of antiquity, or the speeches of modern statesmen, is to see what history frees us to see: that we have a life together in society and that we hold that life together under a body of shared knowledge and common sympathies inherited from the past.
That sense of history is a particular strength of classical academies. It is also an exercise of our responsibility for America. We serve the public good, the common good, by maintaining a culture of remembrance. We can say that our mission to America is the bequeathal of the culture inherited from their forebears. By living under history ourselves, we foster men and women who are free now to do the same.
Each generation, in fact, is called to pass on the remembered past. The creation and preservation of history is necessary to our existence as a society. Later generations cannot experience directly what the first generation experienced. This was true for Jews who took Israel but lived under the memory of the Exodus by celebrating the Passover Meal and for Christians who lived well past the time when Christ walked among his followers but who continued to remember him in the Paschal Meal.
This was true for Athenians who had not had a hand in defeating the Persian empire as their forebears did but who heralded Athenian greatness as the measure of their own. It was true again for Cato who inherited the republic founded centuries before his time and gave his all to preserve Roman customs and republican integrity.
It is no less true for Americans. Neither Lincoln nor King was at the Founding, yet the Founding pulled on their memory with great force and stirred a vision for their respective futures. A shared history is necessary for preserving those bonds across decades and centuries. Only under a common story of who we are can a cross-generational diverse people know the freedom of living as one.
“What we need in the United States is not division.” What we need is greater unity under our shared history. Classical academies know well the role of unity. Like Truth, Goodness, and Beauty, Unity is among the transcendentals. We rely on concepts of unity, being and nature, to glimpse the whole of things from within.
History too is such a concept, by which we grasp the unity of time as past, present, and future, and the unity of social existence in time as the dead, the living, and the yet to be born. Where diversity is a given in life, unity is the end. Intellectual freedom ultimately lies in seeing the many in relation to the whole. In moral freedom we envision unity as our purpose. And if we see Verum, Bonum, Pulchrum heralded in classical mottos, we must also see Athenae, Jerusalem, Roma, since the freedom embodied in cultural and civic unity is made possible through inherited culture forged in our shared history.
We are positioned well to serve the purpose of unity by stoking a rebirth of remembrance, a vision of ordered freedom reborn from within. Classical academies, Happy 250th!
This article was originally published on the On Classical Education Substack on January 14, 2026, at https://classicaled.substack.com/p/stoke-the-fire-for-americas-250th. It is republished here with the permission of the author.