The Most Important Civics Lesson Schools Can Teach

A generation raised to believe the world is against them won’t step forward to serve it.

Last week, I was invited to speak to board members, educators and supporters of A+UP charter schools in Houston after several of them read a recent essay of mine in National Review about the bleak worldview too many schools are unwittingly imparting to children. My remarks built on that argument, exploring the civic consequences of raising young people to believe that the world is dangerous, unjust, and stacked against them. What follows is an adapted version of those remarks—about optimism as a civic virtue, the quiet ways schools shape students’ assumptions about the world, and why no society can expect its children to engage with a world they think has already given up on them. —RP


When I taught a high school civics seminar at a Harlem charter school, my favorite lesson was one I did near the end of the school year that I hoped my students would never forget. I handed each soon-to-be graduating senior an invoice for the entire cost of their public education.

The invoices were official-looking. Clean design and letterhead, personalized—a bill for the approximate total, over a quarter of a million dollars, that the city and state of New York had spent on each student’s “free” K–12 education. When I passed them out, there was usually a moment of stunned silence. Then someone would inevitably ask, “Wait…is this real?”

“Of course it’s real,” I’d reply. “This is my job. I get paid. So do your other teachers. We’re not volunteers. The heat and electricity are on. Your books aren’t free. Who do you think pays for all this?”

I didn’t want to panic them, so I let them in on the joke fairly quickly. No, the bill isn’t real, I’d explain, launching the lesson. But the cost is absolutely real. The citizens of New York State and New York City had spent nearly three hundred thousand dollars to educate each and every one of them. Why?

They’d rarely if ever reflected on the cost of their “free” public education, much less that strangers— millions of people they’d never meet and who’d never met them—had been quietly investing in them for over a decade. It sparked some of the richest classroom discussion I’ve ever led. What does society owe its young people? What do young people owe society in return?

No one had ever invited them to see school as a gift, as their civic inheritance, as a sign that the world might be for them, not against them.

And that experience convinced me of something at the heart of this talk: Our job isn’t just to teach kids things. It’s to shape what they think the world is like, and whether it’s a world worth engaging in or a world to retreat from. A world that’s on their side, or a world that is aligned against them.

But we need to acknowledge something plainly: In too many schools, we present children with a relentlessly bleak view of the world. And we do it with absolute confidence that we’re doing the right thing—that we’re being honest and authentic and “keeping it real.”

A few years ago, I wrote a cover story for Commentary titled “The Unbearable Bleakness of American Schooling.” I wrote that if you simply listen to the stories we tell students—what we emphasize, what we assign—it’s hard to escape the sense that we are promoting to students a view of the world in which everything is broken, corrupt, dangerous, or doomed.

In English language arts, “authenticity” has led us toward canonizing young adult literature obsessed with trauma, abuse, dystopia, self-harm, and catastrophe. Novels are chosen not for style, language, or cultural significance, but for the depths of the wounds they reveal. The hidden message—never stated, but always present—seems to be that suffering is the most defining and universal human experience.

In social studies, we tell ourselves we are teaching “honest history,” but too often, “honest” is a euphemism for exclusively grim: a country understood only through its sins, rarely its virtues; its failures, rarely its triumphs; its shortcomings, rarely its aspirations. I am all for truth-telling, but kids are not getting the full truth. They are getting the bleakest possible version.

In science, the climate conversation has shifted from environmental stewardship to apocalypse. Instead of asking how we innovate, adapt, and solve problems, we bombard kids with projections of planetary disaster. It is no wonder so many young people report “climate anxiety.” Adults are modeling it for them, even imposing it upon them.

And then there is “action civics,” which theoretically teaches students to engage with real-world public problems. But in practice, it tacitly assumes that everything around them is broken and unequal, that democratic institutions are hanging by a thread, and that the most important civic posture they can adopt is outrage. It’s as if the adult world hands them a list of societal failures and says, “Here, kids, fix this.”

It’s an enormous emotional burden for adolescents. It’s also—let’s be honest—pedagogically absurd.

The danger is creating a student experience in which bleakness is treated as a kind of virtue signal or a pose of moral seriousness. The more tragic the story, the more broken the institution, the more angry the critique, the more serious, authentic, or rigorous we believe we are being.

We tell ourselves that by exposing children to more injustice, more trauma, more inequity, more doom and gloom, we’re empowering them. We think we’re motivating them to become “change agents.”

But that has never been how human motivation works. No child has ever been inspired by despair. Not once, in nearly two centuries of public education, has a student thought, “Everything is collapsing! Institutions are corrupt! The planet is burning! I should probably do my homework.”

This bleak narrative doesn’t produce activism. It produces lassitude, even despair. It’s not preparing young people to enter civic life; it’s nudging them toward exhaustion, withdrawal, and retreat.

My AEI colleague Yuval Levin penned a landmark essay in The Dispatch a few years ago titled “The Changing Face of Social Breakdown,” in which he observed that social disorder today doesn’t look like unruliness—a reckless desire for things like pleasure, status, wealth, and power.

Today, disorder looks like passivity—lethargy, disengagement, lives adrift.

It’s easy to miss it because some metrics look better: fewer divorces, fewer teen pregnancies, fewer teenagers dying in car accidents. But often that’s because there are fewer marriages, less teen dating, fewer teenagers even getting their driver’s licenses. There’s less social disorder, Levin observed, because there is less social life. Imagine a generation already prone to withdrawal, disappearing into screens, and then imagine saturating them in school with a worldview of danger, fragility, and decline. You’re not going to get a generation of engaged citizens and motivated reformers. You’ll get a generation of young people who stay on the sidelines. Who say, in effect, “Why bother?”

While I was reporting that Commentary piece, I came across the work of a psychology professor at the University of Pennsylvania named Jeremy Clifton, whose research stopped me in my tracks. It felt like the antidote to everything I’ve just described.

It flatly contradicted so much of the conventional wisdom in K–12 education—our assumptions about the effects of trauma, resilience, social and emotional learning (SEL), and curriculum design. And yet when I looked around, no one in K–12 seemed even to know this research existed.

Clifton’s work doesn’t just challenge the doom-and-gloom narrative; it explains why that narrative is potentially so damaging. And in doing so, it offered something incredibly rare in education: not just a critique of what we’re doing wrong, but a scientifically-grounded framework for what we might do right.

Clifton studies what he calls primal world beliefs, or just “primals,” for short. They’re our deepest assumptions about the world:

• Is the world safe or dangerous?

• Is it enticing or dull?

• Are people basically good, or a threat?

Here’s the part that stopped me in my tracks, because it runs up against a lot of assumptions we make about children’s lives, particularly the lives of our most disadvantaged children: It appears that our experiences do not shape our primal world beliefs. Our primals shape how we interpret our experiences. Primals are the lens, not the photograph. The frame, not the picture.

So it shouldn’t surprise us that Clifton’s primals research indicates that seeing the world as dangerous, barren, or unjust is almost never associated with better life outcomes. It predicts less success, less life satisfaction, worse health, more depression, and increased suicide attempts. If we have convinced ourselves that we are protecting or preparing children by teaching them to view the world as bad, we might be doing exactly the opposite. We might be doing harm.

By contrast, people who hold sunnier primals—who believe the world is, broadly speaking, safe, enticing, and meaningful—have less depression and anxiety, greater resilience, and more life satisfaction.

Let me be clear that I am not proposing we present to student a rose-tinted view of the world. Children must learn that their world includes hardship and injustice. But they also deserve to learn that it contains beauty, progress, and opportunity.

Let me also be clear that Clifton is a psychology professor and researcher. He has done no explicit work on K–12 education. But it seems to me that his work has a lot to say to those of us who work with children.

“The enemy of learning is not danger but the expectation that there’s little worthwhile to be learned,” he told me when I interviewed him earlier this year. “What stops great quests to discover buried treasure is not the snakes and the pirates—it is the expectation that there is little to nothing of value that is probably buried out there in the sand.”

Research on primal world beliefs is still new, and we have more to learn about its implications. We don’t have empirical evidence for what produces better outcomes in students: an optimistic or pessimistic school culture. But I think it might be illuminating to perform a cost-benefit analysis—a kind of Pascal’s Wager, if Pascal was talking about school climate and curriculum instead of faith in God. (To be clear, this is my conjecture, not Clifton’s.)

• Option 1: We wager on a school that is orderly, adult-led, warm and intriguing—one that privileges hope and gratitude. At best, we shape students’ primals in ways that make children more resilient and more hopeful. At worst, we leave students naive and vulnerable.

• Option 2: We wager on a school that is chaotic, grievance-driven, crisis-soaked, and intensely adult-emotional. At best, we shape students into shrewd adults undaunted by suffering. At worst, we leave students too lethargic and passive to participate in democracy.

As in Pascal’s Wager, the potential benefits of an optimistic school environment outweigh the costs—and the same is not true of a pessimistic school environment. A warm, orderly, hopeful school is the most rational bet.

Primals also give us something we desperately need in this moment:

A way to acknowledge resilience without denying reality.
A way to sound hopeful without sounding naïve.
A way to talk about country and community without resorting to indoctrination.
And a way to understand why our doom-and-gloom culture is not just misguided—it actively undermines kids’ chances to flourish.

Let me say a few more things about teaching and its role.

Teaching is not performance. It’s not therapy. It’s not activism. It is the quiet, steady, faithful work of forming human beings. Yuval Levin, whose work I invoked a moment ago, has also written about how the institutions that are supposed to be molds of our character have become platforms for performance.

Too many classrooms have drifted toward the platform model: my identity, my politics, my anxieties. But children don’t need our performance, and they certainly don’t need our anxieties. They need institutions that are molds—stable, trustworthy, and oriented toward the common good.

Charter schools and schools of choice more broadly have a unique opportunity here. Families choose you. That act of volition implies hope and trust. You can build school cultures that cultivate:

• Optimism—grounded in competence, striving, and progress.

• Attachment—to family, to their community, to the country.

• Patriotism—not jingoism, but gratitude and shared purpose.

We cannot expect children to invest in a world we’ve spent years signaling or telling them is unworthy of their affection or investment.

I want to end where I began—with those invoices that I handed my high school seniors. The lesson didn’t work because it taught them economics. It worked because it revealed something they had never considered: that adults and public institutions had invested in them. What could they now do to pay it forward?

A school is not just where children learn civic engagement. It is where they experience the civic engagement of others. If their first encounter with a public institution is chaotic, ideological, or infused with despair, why would we expect them to trust any public institution that follows or to become active, engaged citizens?

But if that first encounter is with stability, competence, gratitude, and optimism, then maybe we can form adults willing to engage, contribute, and believe their communities and country are worth their investment and effort.

Children will rise to meet the world they believe they’re inheriting. Let’s invite them into a world where they can walk with confidence and hope. Let’s build schools that help them see that the world is not something to withdraw from, but something to join, and a place in which they can flourish.