Civic education platform

The Citizens Compass

An interactive teaching platform for the preamble plus 25 founding principles. Family, Citizen, and Educator modes in one PWA.

thecitizenscompass.comFree for families and citizens; educator licensing in development.

What it is

The Citizens Compass is the interactive companion to the source book Zen and the Art of Citizenship. Where the book reads the principles, the Compass teaches them: a progressive web app with three modes that meet a learner where they are.

Family mode walks parents and children through the preamble plus twenty-five principles together, paired with companion stories from Liberty’s Principles Pals. Citizen mode grounds the principles in active civic life: the Constitution, live federal bills via the Congress.gov API, and the connections between principle and policy. Educator mode is the classroom layer: lesson plans, standards alignment, gradebook, and student management. Gamification (XP, badges, streaks) carries through all three.

Who it’s for

Homeschooling families who want a structured civic curriculum without partisanship. Adult citizens looking to anchor their political reading in first principles. Civics teachers in middle school, high school, and community college who need lawyer-curated material that ties principle to practice. Veterans and naturalized citizens revisiting the founding documents.

The problem it addresses

Civic education at the K-12 level has shrunk to a few hours a year in most curricula. Adult civic literacy has followed. The Citizens Compass offers a single platform that teaches the preamble plus twenty-five principles in the arc-of-life ordering, designed by a lawyer and veteran, structured so a family, a self-directed adult, or a classroom can each enter at the right level and find depth beneath each step.

Companion legal-research demo

A separate companion app at app.thecitizenscompass.com demonstrates the principle library in active legal-research use, focused on Florida family law. It pairs Claude Sonnet with Voyage AI embeddings against a structured statute corpus to show educators and researchers how the principles map to actual legal authority.

Stack

React 18 plus Vite plus Capacitor for Android and iOS. PWA first; native shells follow. Firebase Hosting and Cloud Functions on the back end. Claude Sonnet for retrieval- augmented generation in the legal-research demo; Voyage AI (voyage-3-lite, 1024-dim) for embeddings.

Press & partnership

Educator licensing inquiries, classroom pilots, and homeschool group access requests should be routed through the contact page.

Press kit Partner inquiry