It’s the 4th of July, and America is bursting into ritual. The flags come out. The skies light up. Neighborhoods thrum with parades, barbecues, and patriotic playlists. We drape ourselves in red, white, and blue – and for a moment, we celebrate the idea of freedom, rather than confront its reality. We celebrate “freedom” like it’s a constant, as though the mere passing of time since 1776 has made liberty inevitable.
But here’s the question we rarely ask as the fireworks crackle overhead: Are we actually free?
Not free in the abstract, but in the everyday. Free to imagine your future. Free to speak your truth. Free to question systems, challenge norms, and shape – not just survive – society.
Or have we grown so comfortable with the performance of freedom that we’ve stopped noticing its quiet erosion?
Because for all our celebrations, many in this country are watching their rights – once considered unshakable – erode under the weight of fear, power, and indifference. Voting access is being restricted. Reproductive autonomy has been gutted. Surveillance has become normalized. Books are banned from classrooms. Histories are erased. And our youth, the ones we’re pinning our futures upon, are growing up in a world where the future feels more like a burden than a promise.
We tell ourselves these are isolated issues – political disputes, local skirmishes. But zoom out, and the pattern is hard to ignore: we are not just losing rights. We’re losing the conditions necessary to understand them in the first place.
Because freedom – real freedom – isn’t self-sustaining. It doesn’t come from slogans or symbols. It depends on people who know how to question, connect, and create. People who can discern fact from fiction, ideology from insight. And that kind of capability doesn’t just appear out of thin air.
It’s built.
And the place we build it – or fail to – is in our classrooms.
If we want a freer, fairer society, we have to start by cultivating the minds that will shape it. Not just with facts and formulas, but with the courage to interrogate inherited truths and the clarity to imagine better ones.
That’s not just education. That’s emancipation.
Education is the architecture of freedom.
Not the kind that drills facts or disciplines curiosity. But the kind that equips us to discern truth, build empathy, and see beyond borders – literal and mental. The kind that doesn’t just prepare students for the job market, but for democracy itself.
And yet, in America, our education system is in no position to sustain democracy – let alone reinvent it. It is, in many ways, both under attack and out of date.
On one side, it’s being hollowed out by censorship, political interference, and fear. On the other, it’s clinging to outdated models designed for a different century. We still rank students by standardized scores, reduce creativity to electives, and treat failure as disqualification. We prize test-taking over truth-seeking and obedience over originality.
And we do it while telling students they’re free.
Free to choose a major – but not free from debt.
Free to speak their minds – unless they challenge the wrong narrative.
Free to pursue dreams – so long as those dreams align with market demand.
This isn’t education. It’s quiet conditioning.
If we want to reclaim the future, we need more than incremental reform. We need reinvention.
We need to build systems where education doesn’t just inform, but liberates. Where students are taught to think across disciplines, across borders, across narratives. Where questioning isn’t subversion – it’s survival.
So how do we begin?
We start by rebuilding trust in educators – not as content dispensers, but as architects of critical thought. We invest in media literacy as a core subject, not an afterthought. We teach students how to engage with complexity, not retreat into certainty. We create classrooms where diverse histories aren’t erased but embraced – and where young people don’t just prepare for tests, but for tectonic shifts.
We pair that with social infrastructure: affordable higher education, universal broadband access, community centers that bridge the digital and civic divide. And we make global learning the norm, not the niche – because the future students will inherit won’t stop at national borders, nor should their education.
And we don’t need to imagine it from scratch – some countries are already showing us what’s possible.
In Finland, teachers are trusted to teach, not micromanaged into submission. In Germany, higher education is treated as a public good, not a private investment. In New Zealand, indigenous knowledge is being integrated into mainstream curricula. These aren’t perfect systems, but they are courageous ones – willing to reimagine education as the beating heart of a free and equitable society.
Meanwhile, we’re asking our students to memorize facts about the Founding Fathers while stripping them of the very future those men promised.
So go ahead – wave the flags, light the fireworks, and order the freedom fries. But remember, your greatest act of patriotism right now isn’t to defend the past – but to imagine something braver for the future. A future where we stop mistaking access for equity. Where we stop confusing noise for knowledge. Where we stop performing freedom and start practicing it.
Because the uncomfortable truth is that the final frontier of freedom isn’t the ballot box or the courtroom – it’s the mind.
When we allow ideology to replace inquiry, when we punish discomfort instead of exploring it, when we raise a generation more fluent in test prep than in truth – we don’t just lose control of our institutions. We lose the capacity to reclaim them.
That’s the danger.
But it’s also the opportunity.
This July 4th, instead of just lighting fireworks, let’s light a fire in our own thinking. Let’s ask harder questions. Let’s push for deeper truths.
Because independence is declared once.
But freedom?
Freedom must be taught, protected, and practiced – again and again, in every classroom, every institution, and every mind.
Ex Cogitatione, Progressus.
Girish
