Kids, The World Is Not Bad and Broken

What teachers need to know about “primal world beliefs"—and what it might mean for the way we work with children

Over the past few weeks, I’ve published two major pieces about a body of psychological research that I believe deserves much wider attention in K–12 education. One appears in the October issue of National Review, titled “There’s Too Much Doom and Gloom in the Classroom.” The other is a chapter in the book Mind the Children: How to Think About the Youth Mental Health Crisis, edited by my AEI colleagues Naomi Schaefer Riley and Sally Satel. Because these pieces are either behind a paywall or between the covers of a book, I want to bring the discussion here.

The research at the center of both is Jeremy Clifton’s work on primal world beliefs, or “primals.” I consider it among the most important and eye-opening ideas I’ve encountered in over two decades in education thought and practice—important for two reasons: First, it’s almost completely unknown in K–12. In fact, the only mention I could find in a publication for educators was a 2022 Education Week interview in which Clifton offered a quiet warning: “Don’t assume teaching young people that the world is bad will help them. Do know that how you see the world matters.”

Second, it challenges two of the most widely accepted assumptions in schools today: that more social and emotional learning (SEL) and trauma-informed pedagogy are the right responses to the student mental health crisis.

In my National Review piece, I imagined a day in the life of an eighth grader named Maya. She reads a novel about a suicidal teen in English, studies systemic racism in social studies, watches a climate disaster documentary in science, and works on a gun-violence “action civics” project. Meanwhile, her teachers head off to professional development on trauma-informed pedagogy.

“Almost no one will consider the possibility that we are the ones traumatizing students,” I concluded.

What Are Primals?

Clifton’s research identifies deep, often unconscious assumptions we all carry about the world: is it safe or dangerous? Enticing or dull? Alive or mechanistic?

As I wrote in Mind the Children, “These beliefs subconsciously shape people’s perceptions, thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. A closer look at primals research offers a key to understanding how a seemingly healthy distrust of the world and humanity might paradoxically fail to make children safer or happier.”

Most counterintuitively, primals don’t arise mainly from experience, rather they shape how we interpret experience. People who work in high-risk professions like law enforcement and routinely encounter danger are more likely to believe the world is safe than the general population. Their belief in a fundamentally safe world shapes how they interpret risk, navigate uncertainty, and process adversity.

In short: events don’t determine beliefs; your primal beliefs determine how we process events.

Why This Matters for Kids

Clifton and his colleague Peter Meindl found that negative primals—seeing the world as dangerous, barren, unjust—“were almost never associated with better life outcomes. Instead, they predicted less success, less life satisfaction, worse health, more depression, and increased suicide attempts.”

And yet our schools often do just that. As I wrote in National Review, we marinate children in bleak narratives—from the classroom to the school library to civics curricula that frame America as irredeemably unjust and democracy as hanging by a thread. We assume that this will somehow inoculate them, even inspire them to work for positive change. But as Clifton has found, these beliefs aren’t protective—they’re harmful.

To be clear, Clifton has no professional connection to K-12 education. He’s a research scientist at the University of Pennsylvania. But when I described trauma-informed pedagogy to him he replied with a disarming metaphor that revealed the heart of an elementary school teacher—and advice I hope every teacher will consider and reflect upon. “The enemy of learning is not danger but expectation that there is little worthwhile to be learned,” he said. “What stops great quests to discover buried treasure is not the snakes and the pirates—it is the expectation that there’s probably little or nothing of value buried out there in the sand.”

This “treasure map” orientation—what Clifton calls the “explore desire”—is what we risk extinguishing when we surround children with narratives of doom.

In both my chapter and my essay, I warned of schools adopting what I called “institutional primals”: a professional consensus that the world is unjust, broken, and dangerous, and that children are fragile rather than resilient. This is at least the tacit logic of SEL and trauma-informed pedagogy, but it may be the opposite of what children actually need.

Let me clear and emphatic: this is not a call for rose-colored glasses. Children must learn that the world includes hardship and injustice. But they also deserve to learn that it contains beauty, opportunity, and progress—and that orientation, Clifton’s research shows, supports flourishing.

As Clifton himself told me: “Personally, I plan to teach my daughter specific bad things to watch out for but, on balance, the world is good. There’s beauty everywhere—we have only to open our eyes to see it.”

How to Learn More

If this is new to you—and for most teachers it will be—Clifton has a number of excellent resources:

Take the Primals Inventory to see your own primal world belief scores.

Listen to this Hidden Brain episode on primals.

Watch this five-minute explainer video.

For those who want to go deeper, read Clifton’s academic article, “Psychologists Return to the First Question of Western Philosophy”.

Clifton also recommends this Scientific American article on primals and politics.

And for educators specifically, I recommend watching the AEI webinar I hosted with Clifton. It’s a terrific introduction to his work and a rich opportunity to reflect on what it might mean for teaching and learning.