America has suffered an assault on its civic memory from radical mobs who tore down statues across America in 2020. Their collaborators in public office have also denuded us of our public memory, often by not only removing but also destroying statues. Some of the statues have been of Confederates, but this distinction is a red herring. I put it this way a few years ago:

Our nation’s memory includes Confederates and slaveholders, and the woke activists must not be allowed to use that to divide traditionalists who wish to preserve our nation. The woke have screamed ‘Confederate!’ to set a precedent for erasing our entire public memory. If you love the memory of Abraham Lincoln, you still should defend statues of Jefferson Davis. Once they have erased the memory of the boys in gray, the radicals will undoubtedly raise a drumbeat to erase the memory of the boys in blue. The memorials to the Southern dead are also a memorial of the magnanimity of a generation of Northerners. The woke seek to erase evidence that America has been great not least because it has been gentle. 

But Catesby Leigh’s recent article on “Confederate Monuments’ Uncertain Future” makes clear that what is at issue is not just a question of maintaining America’s sovereignty against destruction by radical mobs, or the emotive issue of American memory of the Confederacy. What is at issue is our failure to educate our young to understand our civic architecture—not just why a republic and a nation seek to preserve their memory in statuary, buildings, and other public memorials, but also the actual meaning of our traditions of civic iconography. Too many of America’s children are ready to tear down our public memorials because they have never been taught why they matter or what they say.

Some part of the needed reforms includes the professional education of public historians, so that they will value and communicate the importance of national edifices. Instruction in art history must address the rationale of civic architecture. This component should be integrated into both K-12 art history instruction and into undergraduate general education requirements (GER).

Now, reform of state K-12 academic content standards and undergraduate GERs are my bread and butter, so I may default too quickly to those solutions. But where else but in the schools are our children likely to learn about civic architecture? Most Americans, when they can look up from their screens and the infinite allure of the digital universe, live in suburbs or the countryside, far from the city centers. Most of us city-dwellers take in the odd monument as part of the background without thinking about it. Certainly, the cities, their monuments, parades, and other civic functions, have receded from the center of our mental world. The success of the radical mobs in toppling statues in city centers surely had something to do with the general indifference of most Americans to anything that goes on in the cities.

The schools, then, should not have an enormous amount of time devoted to civic architecture. Classroom time is scarce, and there are more urgent priorities—reading, writing, knowing the very names of Washington and Lincoln. But let us say a dedicated instructional strand, beginning with learning the existence of sites such as state capitols and the Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials in Washington, as well as the architecture of courthouses, airports, post offices, and fire stations. Then, by high school graduation, the textbook condensation of Victoria Coates’s David’s Sling: A History of Democracy in Ten Works of Art, which summarizes the language of civic iconography and points out the variations we have chosen, is fit for a democratic republic. A projected image of Mount Rushmore, one of Augustus St. Gauden’s Memorial to Robert Gould Shaw and the Massachusetts Fifty-Fourth Regiment, and, as part of the American ensemble, monuments that honor those who took up arms against the United States, including South Dakota’s Crazy Horse Memorial and Georgia’s Stone Mountain Confederate Memorial.

An undergraduate GER in civic architecture seems a bit much. But state policymakers could specify that an undergraduate GER in American History and Government must include instruction in civic architecture.

School lessons are never enough. Parents need to take their children to our statues and our monuments and tell them why they matter. States, counties, and cities need to organize parades and other events focused on their civic architecture to make them part of daily life. The 2026 festivities might be a good spark for continued attention by every level of government to our civic architecture.

But if civic architecture matters, we must teach it in our schools and our universities. Not at the expense of everything else that must be taught, but as a thick enough strand in our public education that our children will not mindlessly destroy our nation’s public memory.

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