At a recent teacher-training session that we led in Pennsylvania, a high school teacher softly shared something that landed heavily in the room: “I miss the days when I could feel proud of Old Glory—and when my students did, too.”
This was not shared as a political statement. It was an expression of grief over something lost and over a fading sense of connection. Everyone in the room understood.
Across classrooms and Zoom rooms with people of all ages, we’re hearing similar versions of grief in the past several years that the symbols once meant to unify have become contested and fractured. Some mourn how the Make America Great Again movement has used patriotism to exclude valued members of our community; others worry that historians’ recent efforts to examine our country’s flaws have erased all pride in the core values of democracy. But beneath both perspectives is a shared yearning to belong to a community and to feel rooted in home with a past, a promise, and a future.
This longing is real—and it deserves a serious response. But how our education systems respond matters.
President Donald Trump’s recent executive order on restoring Truth and Sanity in American History by narrowing what students can learn about history misses the point. Today’s young people are not disengaged from democracy because they lack interest or knowledge. They’re disengaged because schools too often fail to deliver experiences and relationships that unlock what our young people are truly capable of.
Even though our schools still largely are designed for “sit and get,” research has proved that adolescents are not geared to be passive recipients of information. Their brains are wired for inquiry, exploration, and for challenging systems of injustice. They seek purpose, test assumptions, and scan constantly for authenticity. When they detect disingenuity or manipulation, they withdraw—not because they don’t care but because they care enough to demand truth and mutual respect.
A heroic and simplified version of history can never make teens more patriotic. On the contrary: It makes them more mistrustful. If students cannot find themselves—and their communities—in the national narrative, they won’t want to participate in shaping its next chapter. That retreat, not critique, is the real threat to democracy.
And the threat is real, given young Americans lack of trust in major institutions. A 2023 Gallup poll found that more than a third of Gen Z say they have very little trust in large technology companies (40 percent), the news (40 percent), and the criminal-justice system (38 percent). Their mistrust isn’t much better for the police (29 percent), the military (25 percent), or the medical system (19 percent).
As patterns of life have moved people’s interactions online and out of physical spaces, levels of loneliness and social disconnection are reaching record highs. Rebuilding trust in our institutions will have to start with rebuilding connection to our shared spaces, needs, and stories.
We work with school systems across the country to design teen-centered civic learning rooted in the local community and see firsthand what’s possible when adults treat teens not as empty vessels to be filled but as active participants in the democratic project. At the Truman Presidential Library in Missouri, students co-designed a public tour on Cold War themes they identified for peers and the local community. In Dallas, teens partnered with adults to create a game that helps adults understand how their actions can create lasting harm on the confidence and courage of young people. These students weren’t rejecting patriotism—they were practicing it, through inquiry, empathy, and care.
This aligns with decades of research in developmental science, social-emotional learning, and neuroscience:
- Teens are primed for meaning-making. They want to understand how the world works and how they fit into it.
- Belonging and trust are prerequisites for engagement. Students can’t learn from institutions that ignore, erase, or misrepresent their experiences.
- Agency fuels learning. When students witness that their voices are heard and that they matter, they engage. When they’re silenced or ignored, they opt out.
- Relationships are the heart of rigor. Cognitive challenge is necessary—but it lands only when accompanied by emotional safety and connection.
- We adults need to become guides, not gatekeepers. Teens have deep empathetic and creative powers to make the world a better place. Those powers will have their greatest impact when adults walk alongside teens instead of standing in front of them.
When educators translate learning science into practice, they support young people in developing their full power as contributors to their community.
This generation, in particular, cannot be duped with boring content and oversimplifications. They carry engagement and complexity in their pockets. With a few swipes, they can access any information or viewpoint imaginable. They’ve grown up watching adults build addictive technologies, spread disinformation, fail to act on climate change, and offer learning void of relevance. They grew up with COVID-19 and its aftermath of disconnected learning, broken relationships, and mistrust. They are skeptical and they’re hungry for something real.
They don’t need lectures about how great America is. They need an honest invitation into the story—one that includes the beauty and the brutality, the ideals and the gaps, the work that has been done and the work that remains. If our classrooms ignore that reality and our governments don’t support the learning of it, we not only will further undermine pride in America. We will create further rifts between generations that will prevent us from creating the solutions and new ideas we urgently need.
To understand history is to know that we can’t go back in time, but we can go forward with clarity and imagination. In an era of rapid change, artificial intelligence, and democratic uncertainty, our job is not to protect students from discomfort but to equip them with the tools to sit in it, examine it, and learn from it—with nuance, humanity and hope.
It is up to all of us adults to support young people in stepping into their magnificence and to collaborate with them in co-creating our future.
This generation doesn’t need protection from complex history. They need to be welcomed into it—and trusted to carry it forward.
