Justice Gorsuch writes children’s book on America’s founding principles

Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch is sounding the alarm about the sharp decline in civic literacy in classrooms across the United States — a trend that Gorsuch says eventually led him to write a new children’s book aimed at educating the next generation about America’s founding principles.

Speaking to Fox News Digital in a recent interview, Gorsuch said his new book, “Heroes of 1776: The Story of the Declaration,” was created to address the sharp decline in civics education and history among both school-aged children and adults in the United States.

“Only 13% of eighth graders today are proficient in American history – [and just] Gorsuch told Fox News Digital there’s a 22% civics rating. “Six in 10 adults will fail our citizenship test.

He said these figures reflected a “deeply” worrying reality and were ultimately what inspired the creation of the book.

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“That’s it [my co-author] it hooked me,” Gorsuch said, referring to his former clerk and co-author, Janie Nitze.

“‘You’ve been complaining for a long time about the state of civic education in this country,'” Gorsuch says. he said. “He’s right. … So I thought it was time to do something about it.”

Gorsuch has long sought to improve the state of civic education programs for youth in the United States; a goal that preceded his nomination as a Supreme Court justice.

Fox News recently said on Sunday that the new book was “very inspired” by former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who founded a nonprofit civics education organization after leaving the bench.

“As she left the court, she thought civics education was a problem in this country,” Gorsuch said of O’Connor’s work. “And for many reasons it’s not taught anymore.”

“So I think we have a big problem, because again, we are a nation of faith, not based on race or religion, but based on an idea, three great ideas, I guess,” he said. “And if you don’t know what they are and the history and the people who made them possible, how can you keep them going?”

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Supreme Court members attend President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address ahead of the 2024 joint session of Congress. (Shawn Thew-Pool/Getty Images)

Gorsuch noted that in 2019, only a third of Americans could name all three branches of government; This is an alarming decline, he said, given that the three bodies interact with each other and critically “check” each other against overreach.

Gorsuch said at the time that these promises of freedom without separation of powers were “just words on the page.”

“What Madison knew was that people were not angels,” he told Fox & Friends. “And we need to separate the forces that keep us free.”

Now he hopes to bring that message to a younger audience.

Gorsuch said their goal in writing the book, which features striking, hand-painted illustrations along with stories of well-known revolutionaries and youth during the Revolutionary War, was to inspire children by highlighting the role they played in shaping the nation 250 years ago.

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U.S. Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch speaks at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley, California, on May 5, 2026. (Getty Images)

Listing the young people mentioned in the book who participated in the war directly or as spies, Gorsuch said, “Young people have made significant contributions to our country throughout history.”

“We wanted to inspire young people. That was a big part of it,” Gorsuch said.

He emphasized that civics education is not a partisan issue on the high court, adding that the issue is in fact one that unites all nine Supreme Court justices, regardless of their ideology.

“If you poll the nine of us in our conference room, there is one thing we can all agree on is the importance of learning American history,” Gorsuch said of the justices.

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“Because how else are you going to move this forward? Someone has to run the zoo,” he said.