After the Birthday Cake: Baking a 15-Year Arc of Civic Renewal

For months, the United States has been prepping for a blowout birthday bash. Fireworks, flyovers, official ceremonies: a version of the “Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations” that John Adams envisioned in the summer of 1776. Then as now, July 4 is merely the starting line: the beginning of a long and strenuous race. 

Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence marks its 250th anniversary, and begins its next quarter millennium, on that day. But the Declaration–the nation’s vision statement–is just the first of three founding documents that will cross the 250-year mark in the next 15 years. Each one will arrive with its own opportunities and provocations, to meet a new generation of Americans who will decide what to do with this opportunity.

A five-year-old who enters kindergarten in 2026, the anniversary year of the Declaration, will be seventeen when the U.S. Constitution turns 250, in 2038, and three years past high school graduation when the Bill of Rights does the same in 2041. 

That young person will grow up inside this anniversary window, remembering its celebrations, absorbing its arguments, and learning to answer its unresolved questions. In 2041, whether she’s continuing her schooling, serving in the military, parenting, working outside the home, or–like so many Americans–both, she’ll be old enough to vote, having spent her entire conscious life watching America take stock of itself. A few decades after that, she and her friends may be the ones planning America's 300th.

More than merely marking these moments, we must use these years to drive a generational leap forward in citizen knowledge, skills, hope and power. The legacy of America’s semiquincentennial chapter can be a better America, one that takes the founding forward, balancing our shared national inheritance with the rights and obligations essential to the future. 

Making good on that legacy requires us to equip our imaginary kindergartner with all the tools and opportunities needed to succeed in the highest office in the United States, that of citizen.

To become the citizen of 2041, the kindergartener of 2026 needs knowledge about who we the people are, where we came from, and how we fought to achieve the promises of the Declaration. That means learning our history, in schools and with community partners, in all its complexity and richness. It means content and yes, fact. “About facts, you and I cannot differ; because truth is our mutual guide,” Jefferson wrote to John Adams in 1813. So we must commit to high-quality history and civic education in every American classroom and out-of-school learning space. 

In addition to historical knowledge, our future citizen also needs to hone civic skills, including the ability to deliberate and build coalitions with those of unlike mind. “I shall be happy to receive your corrections of these ideas,” Jefferson told his political sparring partner Adams some years after the Declaration, “as I have found in the course of our joint services that I think right when I think with you.” Thinking right did not necessarily mean agreement. It meant focusing on common goals, even when the roads toward those goals diverged. High-quality civics instruction must celebrate as well as critiquing compromise, and cultivating both civic honesty and reflecting patriotism, as the Educating for American Democracy Roadmap challenges all learners to do. 

Above all, she will need civic character, especially those virtues we adults have lately struggled to model: curiosity about those unlike ourselves, resilience when institutions disappoint us, pride in our shared achievements, and insistence that tomorrow must be better than today. These are not limp virtues. Curiosity helps us update our assumptions. Resilience and pride keep us involved when opting out is easier. The willingness to work hard, to build and create with others, is how republics self-renew. And renewal is how they survive.

Civic character is not innate, but cultivated as a building block of our self-governance. Jefferson believed our morals could be “strengthened by exercise,” like a muscle. Today’s young people might liken the moves of civic virtue to a TikTok dance – spread by (relentless) example. Whether your metaphor comes from the eighteenth century or the twenty-first, learn those moves we must. Virtue can’t be mandated, but it must be lived, modeled, and above all practiced, in our families, schools, places of worship, and neighborhoods as well as in the halls of government. 

Of course, our kindergartner, as she grows, will teach adults new civic moves, too. Young Americans today care deeply about their communities. They value fairness, opportunity, and varied perspectives. Civic participation requires chances to contribute before problems become intractable and opportunities to lead before leadership feels out of reach. From our own work, in Made By Us and with Young Advisors at Monticello, as well as from broad survey data, we know that they are not disengaged, but rather looking to be invited in.

Let us issue that invitation, starting today. This summer, during the Civic Season that spans Juneteenth to July 4th, hundreds of museums and libraries will open their doors to young people to help them grow as citizens: to teach and also to learn from them. The generational transfer of knowledge and values will take place not just in schools but also at block parties and around dinner tables. Our rising citizens will realize their civic potential through recurring rituals, not a one-and-done celebration followed by silence. 

The founders did not hand us a finished America, but the opportunity for each subsequent generation to build, innovate and evolve. The chapter ahead offers a generational opportunity for renewal of all that our democracy can become. Let’s use it, lest we lose it. 

Historian Jane Kamensky is the President & CEO of Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello. Civic educator Caroline Klibanoff is the Executive Director of Made By Us.