E Pluribus Unum at 250
By Mitch Siegler, Founder

As America prepares to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, it is worth reflecting on one of our country's most remarkable achievements.

The United States has never been united by a single ethnicity, religion, or ancestry. From its earliest days, Americans have come from different backgrounds, spoken different languages, practiced different faiths, and brought different traditions with them. What has held the country together has not been a common bloodline, but a common belief.

That belief is captured in one of our oldest national mottos: E pluribus unum: "Out of many, one."

That phrase expresses a profound idea, a revolutionary one. America asks people from every background to become part of a shared civic community. It does not require them to abandon their heritage, but it does ask them to embrace a common identity grounded in liberty, equality under the law, constitutional government, and the responsibilities of citizenship.

History shows that this ideal has never been perfectly realized. The United States has endured slavery, segregation, discrimination, and periods in which many Americans were denied the full promise of the nation's founding principles. It took a brutal civil war to abolish slavery and generations of determined citizens to dismantle legalized racial discrimination and secure voting rights for women.

Yet those struggles also demonstrate something important. Americans have repeatedly appealed to the nation's founding ideals not to reject them, but to extend them more fully. The Declaration's promise that all people are created equal – a remarkable innovation – became the standard against which injustice was measured and ultimately challenged.

This understanding of America has practical implications for education.

If our shared identity is rooted in common principles, then schools need to help students understand both those principles and the many stories that make up the American experience. Students must learn about the triumphs and struggles of the many communities that have shaped our nation while also developing the skills to engage respectfully with fellow citizens who hold different perspectives and come from different backgrounds. Without civil dialogue, sustaining a diverse constitutional republic is not possible.

Encouragingly, Americans overwhelmingly agree. THINC's recent national survey of more than 2,200 parents found that 91% believe schools should teach students the concept of mutual respect, regardless of differences of opinion. 82% agree that society should judge people without regard to race, emphasizing our common humanity over our differences. And 90% support requiring civics education in K-12 schools so students understand how our system of government works and the responsibilities of citizenship.

These principles are at the heart of THINC's forthcoming constructive ethnic studies curriculum, The American Story: Out of Many, One. Rather than reducing Americans to competing identity groups or presenting history as a story of perpetual conflict, the curriculum explores the experiences and contributions of the many communities that have helped shape the United States while emphasizing civil dialogue, critical thinking, and the shared ideals that unite us as Americans.

Patriotism should be a natural outgrowth of learning American history, not its objective. Students should neither be taught that America has always lived up to its ideals nor, cynically, that those ideals can be discarded because they were written by men who came up short of them. Rather, they should understand both the nation's extraordinary achievements and its shortcomings, and how generations of Americans have worked to bring the country closer to its founding promises.

Two hundred and fifty years after the Declaration of Independence, E pluribus unum remains both a description of who we are and an aspiration for who we want to be. In a country as diverse as ours, there may be no more important lesson we can teach the next generation than this: we are many, but we are one people.

Happy 250th birthday, America.