Citizenship – Ari Sharp

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.

Another day, another story about AI upending the workforce.

As confronting as it is for everyone already working, for school students the impact is greater still.

Who can have any certainty about what jobs will exist beyond 2030? What skills and habits of mind will be necessary to function?

No one knows with any certainty – and anyone who claims they do is probably trying to sell you something.

As I have been studying to be a teacher, I have been thinking about what it means for schools. The perennial question of recent years – Why should I bother learning how to do something myself when AI can do it better and faster? – is becoming more frequent and the answer more dispiriting.

We need to level with students. On the vocational front, the best we can do is teach students foundational skills and good habits, and wish them the courage and good humour to figure it out when they get there.

But here’s the thing. Even if many jobs of the future will be done by AI, the most fundamental task in life cannot be done by machine: citizenship.

Whatever happens with AI, it will ultimately be humans – as citizens – who decide how it is used. Citizens will set the guardrails of the technology, shape the ways we deploy it, and determine the supports to those whose lives are impacted.

Axiomatically, no matter how capable the technology becomes, it will be citizens who decide its place – short of extending citizenship to HAL’s descendants.

(The argument that big tech wields greater influence than citizens in the actions of governments is largely true. This only strengthens the case for centring citizenship. Such a situation is a function of an undervaluing of citizenship, and will only be rectified by more active citizenship.)

So I think there is a compelling case that educators should focus our attentions on instilling in students the attitudes and skills of good citizenship. We know with certainty that these attitudes and skills will be central to building a better world.

When I talk about the attitudes and skills of citizenship, I mean the characteristics that enable societies to make collective decisions. To answer questions like: How do we navigate through differences to achieve a consensus? How do we truthfully inform ourselves about things that matter? How do we fairly share efforts and resources? How do we reckon with the legacies of history? How do we hold people in power to account? How do we protect individual and collective rights?

Enacting the answers to these questions cannot come from the machine. Humans need to do the work. So as schools and teachers, we need to equip our students to do it. If we get this wrong, the worst techno-dystopia becomes possible. But get it right, and we can use the technology to enable human flourishing.

Schools have few more important jobs than nurturing good citizens. Let’s do it.

First posted on LinkedIn in May 2026.

Tag: Citizenship

What skills does a person need to be a wise citizen?

There’s one thing AI can’t do: be a citizen