It’s been widely reported in the news that depression, anxiety, and suicidality among youth are on the rise. As a humane educator who teaches about the interconnected issues of human rights, environmental sustainability, and animal protection, I’ve personally seen anxiety deepen among youth during the almost 40 years that I’ve been teaching.

When I began my work as a humane educator, and during the ensuing 20-plus years, by and large young people were upset about the problems they learned about, but they almost all believed these problems could be solved. In 2012, before the COVID pandemic, before wildfires were regularly destroying forests and communities across the globe, before hard-won rights were being rolled back, and before polarization had become so extreme it seemed we could barely come together to solve much of anything, I was invited to speak at a middle school in Connecticut. I asked the fifth- and sixth-graders to tell me what they thought were the biggest problems in the world, and I wrote down what they said on a whiteboard until the board was completely full. Then, I asked the students to raise their hands if they thought we could solve the problems they listed. Of the 45 children, only five raised their hands.

This was the most sobering moment in my then almost 35-year career as an educator, and things have only gotten worse since then.

I knew I had to do something to restore their hope, so I asked the students to close their eyes and imagine themselves sitting on a park bench on a beautiful day at the end of a long and well-lived life. I painted a picture of the scene: The air and waterways around them were clean. The birds were singing. Species were recovering from the brink of extinction. There hadn’t been a war in more years than they could remember. No one went to bed hungry. We had learned to treat each other and other animals with compassion.

For the sake of our children and the world, we need to educate them to be solutionaries.

Then, I asked them to imagine a child coming up to them and joining them on the park bench. I told them that the child had been studying history in school and had been learning about darker times, times they themselves had lived through. The child had all sorts of questions about how things had gotten so much better. Then I asked them to imagine the child asking this final question:

“What role did you play in helping to bring about this better world?”

I let them respond to the child in their mind before asking them—with their eyes still closed—to raise their hands if now they could imagine us solving the problems they listed on the whiteboard. This time, 40 hands went up in the air. Envisioning a peaceful, healthy world and knowing that they and the other children in the room would have a role in creating such a future was enough to restore their hope.

A few years later, I was in Guadalajara, Mexico, to speak at a........

© Common Dreams