If schools are to succeed in the mission of helping students to become wise citizens, we need a clear idea of what that wisdom looks like.
Here are the citizenship skills I reckon every student should have a chance to learn:
1. The ability to figure out your values. Schools typically encourage students to embrace a variety of hard-to-dispute values (such as honesty, kindness, fairness). All well and good, but the hard work of citizenship involves grappling with trade-offs between these values, and to do that properly we need to think deeply about what our personal values are.
2. The ability to argue your case. Wise citizens need to be able to persuade others to their cause. Doing this means framing their argument in terms of the values that their listener holds rather than merely their own values. This is a feat of empathy requiring focused effort and a conscious awareness of our own subjectivity.
3. The ability to listen to others – and change your mind. Our political culture brands any change in position as a humiliating backdown, but wise citizens need to adapt their view as they learn more. We all need to know how to do this with grace and dignity, lest our future selves be held hostage to the myopia of our past selves.
4. The ability to defy the mob. The path of least resistance is to go along with the popular consensus among those we identify with. Wise citizenship requires us to take the time to form our own view – based on our own values – and be willing to stand true to that, even when it makes us uncomfortable.
5. The ability to see how power is distributed. As citizens we need to understand who holds power and who doesn’t, the source of that power, and what levers are available to change its distribution. Only by gaining this understanding can we seek to influence the world so it better aligns with our values.
6. The ability to separate truth from truthy. We are all at sea if we do not have the tools to know what information we can trust. But beyond those tools, we need skills of metacognition to understand the biases that may corrupt our search for truth –motivated reasoning and confirmation bias, for starters.
7. The ability to critique institutions. Much political discourse is a dialogue of the deaf between those who reflexively uphold every existing institution and those who reflexively seek to tear them down. Wise citizens need to do the harder work of critiquing why these institutions exist and identifying if they are fit for purpose, if they can adapt, or if something better ought to be built in their place.
What have a missed? Keen to hear your ideas.
First posted on LinkedIn in August 2026.
Ari Sharp 