The challenge of teaching American civics in high school is that the message collides with the medium. You’re preaching liberty and self-governance in a place where kids follow a regimented bell schedule into a series of cinderblock rooms, completing often-arbitrary assignments with minimal autonomy. Anyone with Boston Tea Party inclinations gets a ticket to detention.
That’s why the most exciting book I’ve read about civic education isn’t about civic education at all. It’s Rebecca Winthrop and Jenny Anderson’s The Disengaged Teen, a deeply researched call for making the high school years less of a grind and granting students more freedom over what and how they’re learning. “To thrive in the Age of Agency,” Winthrop and Anderson write, “our kids will need to not only identify where they want to go but also be able to drive their own learning to get there.”
The Disengaged Teen is not the first book to call for more self-starting in school; the book’s authors acknowledge the long lineage of reforms designed to reignite student interest in the classroom, from Montessori Schools to experimental learning networks. But in proclaiming an “Age of Agency” for today’s high schoolers, Winthrop and Anderson point to post-pandemic ennui and the promised disruptions of AI as reasons to make student motivation the central concern for parents and educators everywhere. “As AI becomes more widespread, humans will need to get better at picking goals they care about and harnessing the motivation to meet them,” they write. “The AI-dominated future will favor not apathy and compliance, but the agency that comes from self-knowledge and the motivation to act.”
At a book talk in January, Anderson cited the rise in anxiety and depression among young people as a key reason to focus on agency. “A shocking number of kids feel hopeless and helpless,” she said. According to one 2023 survey, more than half of young adults are dissatisfied with American democracy and distrustful of government institutions, while another from 2024 found that barely half of Gen Z Americans feel prepared for the future.
Anderson and Winthrop think the solution involves greater autonomy and real-world relevance in school—jolting young Americans out of passivity and into what they call “Explorer mode.” “When you give kids a little bit of choice in a classroom, they perform better, they feel better, and they’re more pro-social — they’re actually kinder to one another,” Anderson said in January. “We really need to give kids time to find their own interests and dive into them.”
This isn’t a utopian vision of kid-run school districts or an argument that TikTok dances should replace calculus homework. (Winthrop and Anderson are generally wary of time-wasting technology, cautioning parents to limit the “mind-bending amount of time spent on tech.”) The Disengaged Teen instead calls for practical changes to teaching practice to let students exercise more choice. Instead of assigning everyone the same homework, a teacher might offer three different assignments and let students choose. Instead of a standard essay prompt, ask students to do independent research on a topic they found especially intriguing. Instead of more fact memorization, a lot more “transcendent discussion” that pushes teenagers to get curious about the world around them. And more opportunity to earn school credit for internships, work with local businesses, and volunteer projects that apply academic skills in a real-world context.
Compliance is not (always) a virtue.
The Disengaged Teen makes the case—backed by a mountain of research and some vivid storytelling— that schools and parents ought to bend more to accommodate the huge population of students who are not natural rule-followers and worksheet enthusiasts. Winthrop and Anderson are big fans of Johnmarshall Reeve, a psychologist who spent his early career traveling to midwestern high schools and documenting how often student questions were ignored or brushed aside—about 80 to 85 percent of the time. Reeve devoted his research to “autonomy-supportive teaching” and designed experiments in classrooms around the world to show that subtle changes in the way teachers react to student input, along with opportunities to make decisions about assignments, can shift attitudes from passive to highly engaged. “Parents can use these strategies, too,” Winthrop and Anderson write. “We can give kids choices over their classes, their extracurriculars, even their chores.”
The best high school classrooms often look like a Socratic seminar, with the teacher asking questions and sparking conversations. Winthrop and Anderson focus most of their attention on small-scale, practical things educators and parents can do to nudge students toward this ideal, but also acknowledge that any large-scale change will have to come from major shifts in school design. Less high-stakes testing, less pressure to cram seven different subjects into the school day, more emphasis on group work and long-term projects instead of sprinting through textbook content.
“In ways big and small, kids in Explorer mode influence the flow of their learning,” Winthrop and Anderson write. “They sit at the opposite end of the spectrum from learned helplessness, exercising daily the muscle of actively questioning the world they are in.” That’s precisely what’s needed to become a decent citizen.
Take young Tevin, one of the students featured in the book, who was a hellion in the classroom but spent his out-of-school hours mastering architectural software and visiting open houses to hone his design sensibility. His school life was miserable until he was moved to an experimental program that offered real-world projects related to his interests: designing a meeting space for the school and helping his town rebuild a washed-out pedestrian bridge. “He loved seeing his work have a tangible impact,” Winthrop and Anderson write. “It turned out that more freedom over his learning was exactly what he needed.”
Not every student is going to make the leap from disenchanted troublemaker to aspiring architect, but that’s not the goal of an agency-focused education. Winthrop and Anderson want to see the narrow funnel of academic achievement broadened to include all kinds of offbeat talents and interests—anything that gets kids energized about the future. Acing tests is a fine goal, but the motivation to get off the couch is the lifelong skill Anderson and Winthrop are most interested in cultivating. And they insist motivation is possible regardless of one’s academic aptitude.
One of their key recommendations is to teach students that stress is normal and should be harnessed, not treated like a disorder. “There are times in life when the stress is truly unmanageable, and that’s when children need help,” they write. “But most of the time stress is just uncomfortable. That’s okay. Life can be that way sometimes.”
Merit without meaning.
Fascinatingly, the students with the roughest stories in The Disengaged Teen aren’t the ones skipping class or getting sent to the principal’s office. They’re the kids acing tests, piling on the extracurriculars, and racking up the recommendation letters—with absolutely no sense of what it all means. “Teens stuck in Achiever mode… struggle to know what goals they care about outside of what is given to them,” Winthrop and Anderson write. “Achievers love guidelines. They don’t love freedom.”
In other words, the students we most expect to be running the country often have the least comfort with self-direction or deeper sources of flourishing. They can meet goals that authority figures set for them, but haven’t done enough reflection to set their own. Many high school high-fliers end up falling apart when they hit college, when the all-encompassing aim of earning admission has given way to the broader and more terrifying question of what to do with one’s wild and precious life. Winthrop and Anderson call these “unhappy Achievers,” citing research that found students with strong academic records but low emotional engagement were among the most depressed and fragile, dropping out of college at rates comparable to the most apathetic students.
“Frantically focused on mastering the present, teens in Achiever mode crowd out the time to consider who they are or what they want to be — critical questions teens need time and space to contemplate,” Winthrop and Anderson write. “Leaving those questions unanswered can cause problems down the road.”
That absence of a deep and self-reflective inner life among our academic strivers has a corrosive downstream effect on public life, producing an elite caste that values career success and little else. “The meritocracy is a gigantic system of extrinsic rewards,” David Brooks wrote in last December’s Atlantic cover story about what he sees as the civically deficient leadership class produced by American universities. “At the core of the game is the assumption that the essence of life fulfillment is career success. The system has become so instrumentalized—How can this help me succeed?—that deeper questions about meaning or purpose are off the table, questions like: How do I become a generous human being? How do I lead a life of meaning? How do I build good character?”
Jenna Silber Storey and Benjamin Storey, senior fellows at the American Enterprise Institute, have written a great deal about the hollowing out of the liberal arts tradition in favor of a manic striving that fails to instill the discernment needed for a thriving life. “The restless unease that unsettles our political and personal lives derives in part from a failure to understand ourselves, and to think well about the objects in which a human being might reasonably invest the hopes of a life,” they write in Liberal Education and the Restless Soul. “Liberal education—through which human beings train their minds to help them make good use of their freedom—thus has an indispensable role in any effort to find a measure of equilibrium.”
That’s the instinct underlying so many of the reforms recommended in The Disengaged Teen—the conviction that students deserve the chance to practice a little freedom of inquiry in the controlled environment of high school before they’re turned loose into a society where too many young Americans seem paralyzed by the choices of adulthood.
Parenting beyond the narrow path.
The toughest audience for this argument may not be teachers and school officials, but parents, especially the parents of America’s striver class. As Winthrop and Anderson are quick to note, the pressure-cooker conformity that high-achieving students feel comes as much from home as from school, with anxious parents concerned that anything less than academic perfection will cast their children into the outer darkness of an admissions waiting list or, God forbid, a state school. That narrow conception of what counts as success, where getting into a selective college and fighting your way into a competitive white-collar career is presented as the only path to a satisfying life, is one of the major obstacles to a healthy civic life.
When my kids were small enough to go crawling around the house, busying themselves with projects alien to adult purpose—meticulously removing all the food from the pantry or unraveling a roll of toilet paper—my wife and I would shrug and declare, “Autonomous being!” It was our in-joke to remind each other that young minds have their own logic of exploration, and any infant scheme that didn’t pose a direct threat to life and health should be allowed to run its course.
Winthrop and Anderson make a compelling case that letting a little more freedom ring—giving students the chance to daydream, make mistakes, and develop their own curiosity—is worth the additional risk. “As parents, we cannot control the world around them, but we are uniquely placed to help them unleash their agency to control what they can and go after what they want,” they write. “Our collective way back to civility and an enduring democracy will require much more than just unlocking engagement and building better learners. But it will be next to impossible without it.”
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