I’ve been thinking about a conversation I had with a colleague last year. They were reflecting on a group of 18-year-olds and felt disconnected. Why weren’t these young people more forthcoming with their views, even in subjects they’d chosen? Why weren’t they critically engaged with the material?
I’ve had that reflection too. I said it to young people when I was teaching. But working with Class 13 has pushed me to look deeper at the why.
If we want young people to feel affirmed enough to challenge ideas, share their own thinking, and critically engage with the world beyond school, we have to look at what happens in classrooms long before they turn 18.
In Teaching to Transgress, bell hooks reminds us that “the classroom remains the most radical space of possibility.” It’s a place where we can “open our minds and hearts so that we can know beyond the boundaries of what is acceptable.” But to reach that space, we have to move away from what Paulo Freire called the “banking model” of education, where students are treated as passive accounts to be filled with information the teacher holds.
Critical engagement isn’t a switch students can flip at eighteen. It’s a muscle that either withers or flourishes depending on the culture we build from day one.
Think about what happens in most classrooms. A teacher asks a question. One student answers. The teacher evaluates that answer: correct or incorrect, good or nearly there. Then we move on. That’s the banking model in action. The teacher deposits information, the student receives it, and learning stays transactional.
But what if we changed that pattern? Take cold calling. When you call on a student and they answer, what happens next? Do you affirm their response and move on, or do you put it back to the room so other students can build on it, question it, complicate it? That choice matters. One keeps you as the authority validating knowledge. The other opens a radical space for genuine inquiry.
That shift requires something specific. It requires affirmation: unconditionally valuing a young person’s full humanity beyond their latest assessment score. Requires nurturing their innate ability to question rather than training them to comply. It requires building what bell hooks called a “beloved community” of mutual care and radical honesty. And it requires fundamentally rethinking power dynamics, co-constructing learning with students rather than doing it to them.
These aren’t abstract ideals. They’re daily practices.
The most impactful lessons I’ve taught (the ones young people asked me to do again) were the ones where they took the lead. The shift happened when I stopped being the primary source of information and became a facilitator of critical thinking. In those moments, engagement wasn’t about compliance or natural interest. It was the result of intentionally shifting power dynamics to create space where young people felt empowered to challenge and collaborate with one another.
That 18-year-old who won’t speak? They’ve had years of learning that their role is to receive, not to question. Years of being told (sometimes explicitly, more often implicitly) that the teacher’s knowledge matters more than their thinking. Years of classrooms where silence means you’re a good student and questions mark you as difficult.
We can’t undo that in one lesson. Relationships take time to build. The young person who’s learned that silence keeps them safe won’t suddenly start speaking because we’ve shifted our approach once or twice. They need to see it’s consistent. They need to test whether this new space is real. That happens through small shifts in practice with each young person we encounter, repeated until trust builds.
This isn’t about transforming your entire practice overnight. It’s about starting somewhere, sustaining it, and giving those relationships space to grow.
We can start by asking ourselves:
Is my current approach inviting a deposit of information, or is it co-constructing a space for inquiry?
Am I creating opportunities for low-stakes critical conversation between young people?
Does everyone in my class know that I want to hear them, that this is a space for all of them to engage and share thoughts?
As bell hooks said, “To educate as the practice of freedom is a way of teaching that anyone can learn.” It starts with us, creating a radical space where every student feels safe enough to stand and speak.
That’s liberatory. For them and for us.
