A Republic, If You Can Keep It

A Republic, If You Can Keep It

I spent the Fourth of July this year off the grid. No internet, no notifications, no feed updating me regularly. Just my family, in Alaska, and a lot of quiet. And in that quiet, in the middle of America’s 250th year, I found myself thinking less about fireworks and more about a question I keep coming back to as a father and as a founder.

What kind of people does a free country actually require?

We tend to celebrate America as a finished thing. A flag, a date, a set of monuments. But the more I sit with the story of how this nation began, the more I see it not as a monument at all. I see it as a hero’s journey. And I see, woven right through it, almost everything we are trying to build with your children every single day at Acton.

The founders were heroes on a journey

It is easy to flatten the founders into marble. It is harder, and truer, to remember they were people who chose courage when the outcome was anything but certain.

George Washington took command of an army that barely existed, and he did it without pay. He asked only that his expenses be covered. When the war was won and he stood at the height of his power, with an army loyal to him and a young country unsure of itself, he did the thing almost no victorious general in history had done. He gave the power back. He resigned his commission, walked away, and went home to his farm. When King George III heard that Washington intended to surrender his command rather than seize it, he reportedly said, “If he does that, he will be the greatest man in the world.”

Washington could have been king. He chose to be a citizen instead. And years later he walked away again, stepping down after two terms when many would have handed him a crown. He understood something worth teaching every child: real strength is knowing when to let go of power for the good of something larger than yourself.

The founding is full of heroes we rarely name. Elizabeth Powel, the Philadelphia woman whose home was the gathering place for the men shaping the Constitution, is the one who asked Benjamin Franklin the famous question as he left the convention. There were couriers who rode through the night, soldiers whose names we lost, and the enslaved men and women who built so much of this country while being denied its promise. A nation is never made by a handful of famous people. It is made by ordinary people practicing extraordinary responsibility.

“If you can keep it”

That question Elizabeth Powel asked Franklin has stayed with me all year.

As the story goes, she stopped him and asked what kind of government the convention had given the country. A republic or a monarchy? Franklin’s answer was seven words long: “A republic, if you can keep it.”

Sit with that phrase. He did not say, “A republic, here you go, enjoy it.” He said if you can keep it. He handed the country a responsibility, not a trophy. He was telling them, and telling us, that freedom is not something you inherit finished. It is something you practice, protect, and renew, or it slips away.

This is the part most of us miss on the Fourth of July. Self-government is not a document under glass. It is a habit. It is a set of daily choices about how we treat each other, how we disagree, whether we tell the truth, and whether we can be trusted with freedom. A republic does not run on paperwork. It runs on the character of its people.

Which is exactly why what happens in a studio matters more than it might first appear.

Sowing the seeds of civilization

Jeff Sandefer, who founded Acton Academy with his wife Laura, often says that what we are really doing is sowing the seeds of civilization. When I first heard that, it sounded grand. Now I think it is simply accurate.

Because a studio is a small civil society. And the habits your Heroes practice there are the very habits a free country depends on.

Every studio writes and agrees to a Contract of Promises. The Heroes are not handed a rulebook by an adult (albeit they are given a framework and guardrails and then guided through the process). They build their own governing document, debate it, sign it, and hold one another to it. If that sounds familiar, it should. It is the same act the founders performed at a much larger scale, deciding together how free people will live alongside one another.

In Town Hall, Heroes govern themselves. They surface problems, propose solutions, and learn that freedom and responsibility are partners, not opposites. In our Socratic Launches, they practice something our country is starving for right now: how to disagree well. How to make an argument, listen to a real objection, change your mind when the evidence demands it, and stay kind to the person across the table. Through Running Partners and Hero Bucks, they build a working economy of trust, where your word means something and effort is honored.

No one lectures them about citizenship. They practice it. And what a child practices, a child becomes.

Character is the curriculum

Thomas Jefferson wrote a line in 1816 that could be painted over the door of every school in America. “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.”

He was right, and he was pointing at something deeper than test scores. A free people has to be an educated people, yes. But education, real education, is not just the transfer of information. It is formation. It is the slow shaping of the kind of human being who can be trusted with liberty. Franklin’s warning and Jefferson’s warning are the same warning. A republic is only ever as strong as the character of the people keeping it.

That is why we say character is the curriculum. Clear thinking leads to good decisions. Good decisions, repeated, become habits. Habits become character. And character, in the end, becomes destiny, for a child and for a country.

No place is perfect, and that is the invitation

I would be telling the story dishonestly if I pretended the founding was clean. It was not. Slavery sat at the center of a country that declared all men created equal, and that contradiction was real, and it cost generations dearly. There is unfinished work in America’s story, and there always has been.

But here is what I have come to believe. The imperfection is not a reason for cynicism. It is the reason the responsibility passes to us. “If you can keep it” only makes sense in a country that is still being kept, still being repaired, still reaching for its own ideals. Every generation inherits the work unfinished. That is not a flaw in the design. That is the design.

And this is where America’s story reads most like a hero’s journey. In its hardest moments, again and again, this country refused to give up. It struggled, it divided, it suffered, and then it found a way to grow stronger through the adversity. That is the pattern we hope to write into every Hero who walks through our doors: difficulty is normal, perseverance works, and you are more capable than you know.

How will you keep it?

So here is what I am sitting with, and what I would gently hand to you.

Being American is not only a privilege. It is a responsibility. And that responsibility is not kept in Washington or in a history book. It is kept at your dinner table, in the way you let your child struggle instead of rescuing them, in whether you trust them with real freedom and real consequences, in the character you model when you think no one is watching. Your children are practicing something every single day. The only question is what.

Abraham Lincoln put words to the stakes better than I ever could, when he hoped that “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” That government does not survive on its own. It survives because ordinary families raise children who can keep it.

That is the real work. It is the work of a republic, and it is the work of a studio. They are more alike than we tend to admit.

If you want to see what it looks like when children practice self-government, honest disagreement, and genuine responsibility, come see it for yourself. Schedule a tour, and watch a small civil society at work.