Over my four years at Penn, I have participated in countless discussions in my humanities classes surrounding important historical issues, including imperialism, inequality, and oppression. In these classes, America is often defined as a catalog of its failures and injustices. Most students understand the unspoken rule that the expected criticism of America requires little qualification, but that any praise must be carefully accompanied by a disclaimer. Over time, this pattern reveals something important about how universities teach students to think about their country and its history.
At Penn and across higher education, students are rightly taught to scrutinize America’s failures; a liberal democracy depends on citizens who are willing to examine their country honestly and confront its shortcomings. The problem is not that universities encourage criticism, but that too often criticism is taught without any acknowledgement of the civilizational achievements, political ideas, and institutions that have, ironically, made this very criticism possible. When students learn only America’s failures and not the ideals and institutions that allowed these failures to be challenged and corrected, self criticism stops being productive, and instead hardens into self loathing.
This classroom culture is not unique to Penn, and its effects extend well beyond our campus. Surveys of young Americans show declining levels of patriotism, institutional trust, and confidence in the country’s future. A 2025 Gallup poll found that national pride among younger Americans is at a historic low, with only 41% of Generation Z saying they are extremely or very proud to be American, compared with 83% of Americans born before 1946. Other surveys of young Americans show similar trends. For instance, polling from the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics has found deep pessimism among young Americans about the direction of the country and an eroding trust in its democratic institutions.
Additionally, a 2024 survey by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni found that many college students could not identify basic constitutional principles or key moments in American history, and some even identified concepts like imperialism and white supremacy as core principles of American civic life. Together, these trends suggest that many students are leaving college with a comprehensive awareness of America’s failures but a much weaker, if not nonexistent, understanding of the ideas, institutions, and events that have allowed these failures to be modified and corrected over time.
One of the great paradoxes of the current teaching of American history in higher education is that the examples used to illustrate America’s failures are also some of the best examples of America’s ability to reform itself. For example, although the Civil War and Reconstruction are often cited as evidence of America’s moral failure, they also represent a moment of profound self correction. President Abraham Lincoln framed the Civil War as a test of whether a nation founded on the principle that all men are created equal could endure. The Reconstruction amendments were not a rejection of the Constitution, but a fulfillment of its promises.
The Civil Rights Movement followed a similar pattern. The leaders of this movement did not argue that the founding ideals were meaningless or that they made the country fundamentally or morally bankrupt. In fact, in his most famous speech, Martin Luther King Jr. described the Declaration of Independence as a promissory note to which every American was an heir. The Civil Rights Movement succeeded not by rejecting America’s founding ideals, but by demanding that the country live up to these very principles.
Transformations such as these are central to the exceptionalism of American history. When students are taught only the failures of their country and not this long tradition of reform and self correction, they are left with a distorted understanding of American history, with many even believing that America and western civilization are uniquely unjust. Our universities teach us that America has done many things wrong, but disregard how the very origin of the American experiment allowed for a system that could be corrected through reform.
A thriving democracy requires that citizens be willing to criticize their country, but it also requires these citizens to believe their country is worth improving. Universities should not teach students that America is perfect, but they also should not teach students that America is irredeemable. Criticism is essential, but it must be directed at particular actions and injustices, not expanded into a wholesale rejection of the American project itself. If universities forget this, they risk producing cynics who want to tear down the system rather than improve it.
SEE MORE FROM BO GOERGEN:
Penn is not on stolen land
The costs of abandoning the world we built
The true irony is that the very Constitution that is so often criticized in our classrooms is what makes these debates possible in the first place. America exists as it does today because of its institutions and ideals, and, for all its flaws, it remains a place where millions around the world are willing to risk everything to join. It should be taught as such.
BO GOERGEN is a College senior studying political history and international relations. His email is rgoergen@sas.upenn.edu.
