Secretary of Education Linda McMahon said on Tuesday that she was inspired by a program by PragerU to teach American children and families the history of the Fourth of July like the “Seder in the Jewish religion” where “once a year families share the stories of their heritage.”

McMahon made the comment at the Milken Institute Global Conference in Los Angeles, prompted by a question from moderator Nina Rees about promoting civics education.

“Civics has just been removed from so many schools’ curriculums,” McMahon said, noting that she had visited PragerU earlier in the day and learned about the conservative organization’s “4th of July Declaration Ceremony,” the brainchild of PragerU founder Dennis Prager, who first advocated for the idea in 2007.

“To have a similar kind of a program that kind of brings it back to ‘let’s start it at home,’” McMahon told Rees. “And then let’s spread to all of the different schools that we have.”

The concept of a “July Fourth Seder” includes the use of “ritual” items, including sweet iced tea “to remember the Boston Tea Party, when patriots dumped British tea into the ocean rather than pay unfair taxes to King George,” salty pretzels “to remember the salty tears and suffering of the soldiers during the harsh winter at Valley Forge” and ringing a small bell or cell phone “to remember when the great Liberty Bell, now in Philadelphia, rang to proclaim the surrender of the King’s armies.” 

“When Jews gather at the Passover Seder — and this is the most widely observed Jewish holiday — they recount the exodus from Egypt, an event that occurred 3,200 years ago,” Prager wrote in a Daily Signal op-ed that was republished last year. “We Americans have difficulty keeping alive the memory of events that happened 231 years ago.”