Looking around our country and the world, it’s easy to be overwhelmed by the scale of the challenges we face—inequity, polarization, armed conflicts and climate change.
Taking on these challenges is both a huge burden and a huge opportunity for the next generation of young people—and what keeps me up at night is the question of whether we are adequately preparing them to succeed where those of us who came before them have failed, and what we need to do to ensure we are equipping them with the values, mindsets and skills they will need to take on these challenges.
As the founder of Teach For America and the CEO of Teach For All, a global network of similar organizations united by a commitment to developing collective leadership to ensure all children can fulfill their potential, over time I’ve come to realize we need to reshape our education systems with that goal in mind. With the purpose of equipping young people to shape a better future, we need to recognize that students are whole people who can lead today, and understand that our role as educators is to facilitate their leadership and learn alongside them.
Thanks to the work of teachers and leaders around the world, I’ve seen the power of what young people can achieve and what they can learn when they exercise their leadership in shaping the world around them for the better.
Take the example of Lindsey Huahuamullo, a student from Enseña Perú who, at the age of 14, set up her own organization Wake Up Now to run workshops and trainings for other students to help them develop their emotional intelligence, conflict resolution, teamwork and critical thinking. Over the past three years, Huahuamullo and her team have trained more than 13,000 students in Peru and beyond.
Across the world in India, I’ve watched Teach For India’s Kids’ Education Revolution inspire thousands of students to partner with adults to strengthen their schools.
Closer to home, The Young Vote is a powerful documentary by Teach For America alumna Diane Robinson—now streaming on PBS Passport and on PBS affiliates across the country.
The film highlights the stories of young changemakers like Ariana Tulay.
Voting is important, but voting alone doesn’t make you a beautiful citizen!
Ariana Tulay in ‘The Young Vote’
Tulay became an active citizen as a high school student, frustrated that African and Native American history were not being taught at her school. She was encouraged by her teacher, Matt Kauffman, to write a letter to her state representative to change the curriculum to address this.
This led Tulay and other students to work together to help draft a bill that could change the history curriculum in all middle and high schools in Louisiana. Although the bill did not pass, this experience of involving our young people in the issues that impact their lives led Tulay to become politically involved.
As the film highlights, one of the opportunities young people have to shape their future in the U.S. is the chance to participate in the democratic process and vote. We face a big choice on Nov. 5 about what kind of nation we want to be and whether we will set ourselves on a path to solving the challenges we face. I hope we’ll see an unprecedented turnout of young people taking action through their votes to shape a better future.
Growing up, I took for granted our right to vote here in the United States, but through the work I now do all around the world, I’ve realized what a rare and precious privilege that is. While more than half the world’s population lives in countries holding elections this year alone, the majority of those elections aren’t free and fair; 71 percent of the world’s population now live in autocracies—up from 48 percent 10 years ago.
Even where there are free and fair elections, voters need to increasingly navigate their way through fake news, AI-generated deep fakes, and a splintered and polarized media landscape where it’s more difficult than ever to know what to believe and who to trust.
While more than half the world’s population lives in countries holding elections this year alone, the majority of those elections aren’t free and fair.
So, while fostering the agency of the rising generation involves getting them out to vote, it doesn’t start and end with elections. As Tulay says in The Young Vote, “Voting is important, but voting alone doesn’t make you a beautiful citizen!”
We need young people to be growing in their awareness, their connectedness to people and planet, their wellbeing, their problem solving and critical thinking skills—which they will bring both to how they vote and everything else they do to shape a better future.
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