Who Was Morton Prince and How Did He Influence Early American Psychotherapy?

Morton Prince—physically hale, philosophically heterodox, ethically uncompromising, and psychologically splintered—epitomizes a classic New England character at its sunset hour. Indeed, Prince’s fiery conviction that he could make all his contradictory elements hang together makes his own psychology as fascinating as that of the patients and politicians he scrutinizes. And even when he fumbles in making a grand diagnosis of the foibles of others, it sometimes seems that it is precisely Prince’s lack of a compelling master-theory that makes his work such a rich repository of individual observations. Until Freud and the rearrangement of values occasioned by the Great War soured his spirit, Prince sustained a note of plucky anarchy in his approach to almost all social problems. In a typical instance of this happily contrarian strain to Prince’s thoughts, he once responded to a suggestion by Upton Sinclair that intercollegiate football be abolished as a “killer of thought” by announcing that what should be abolished was rather the professional coach, whose last duty before surrendering his office should be “handing the game back to the boys.”

Less felicitous was Prince’s combative sense of near infallibility as a judge of what was wrong with everyone else—the quality his famous patient Miss Beauchamp once described as Prince’s tendency to be “so awfully wrathy and superior.” Prince fought back against the era’s double threat of moony spiritualists and zealous psychoanalysts on the grounds of his adversaries’ refusal to rationally engage with evidence that challenged their axiomatic beliefs. But confronted with the intractability of those who could not see the virtues of his own high-minded middle way, Prince tended to swerve over into untempered opposition that partook of the same absolutism he condemned in others. When Freud’s disciple Ernest Jones objected to his pugnaciousness, Prince dismissed Jones outright, not for his ideology, but for the wimpiness of his comeback punch. “Can you imagine John Brown, Luther, Calvin…whimpering ‘like a girl’ because their opponents hit them back or because they would not believe?” he railed to a colleague. Even at his more offensive moments, the vigor of his high dudgeon makes for lively reading.

Prince’s lifelong focus lay in charting the relationship between body and mind. He never forgot an experience he had had in church as a child when the preacher abruptly pointed above the congregation’s head to a chandelier swaying in the breeze and remarked that the human body was affected by the spirit exactly as those dangling crystals were by the wind. The puzzle of what, precisely, this correlation meant haunted Prince’s professional life. He strove to show that there was, at the last, no opposition between mental function and bodily mechanics because there was no integral distinction between the two. But the question of what this seamless contiguity implied for ultimate questions of human nature was a matter on which he waffled with uninspired ambivalence.

For the first part of his career, Prince sought to minimize the element of spirit altogether by advocating a purely materialist vision of mental dynamics. Thought and emotion did not act to influence the operations of the brain; they were the substance of those operations. Between the 1880s and 1890s, Prince contributed to the evolution of a sophisticated behaviorist theory of mental health that anticipated many aspects of cognitive therapy. He argued that neuroses developed through the often random associations between negative experiences and phenomena surrounding such experiences. These associations were then fixed through repetition and habit, but could be unraveled in treatment through aggressive “conditioning,” both physical and ideational, which eventually reconfigured corrosive behavioral patterns.

As was often the case with Prince, key theoretical positions were born of personal experience. Prince’s entire family suffered from a thunder phobia that led them to flee inside closets, dive beneath beds and rush into each other’s shivering arms to hide from storms. Prince finally conquered the syndrome by forcing himself to remain outside in the most violent thunder fusillades until his angst about the warring heavens was quashed.

Regardless of his motivations, by placing so strong an emphasis on the role of learned habits of association in the development of symptoms, Prince helped undermine the position of social conservatives who condemned whole families, neighborhoods, and populations on the basis of hereditary degeneration. Concurrently, he bolstered the case for the work of New England’s large network of progressive civic reformers, in which he himself played a passionate role. Indeed, Prince’s understanding of the complex web of motives that converged in the behavior of individuals and states led to his championing numerous issues of social justice in national and international arenas. Prince attacked the Sacco-Vanzetti verdict as a gross, cynical manipulation of the jury’s ignorance about the workings of perception and memory. He fought for the League of Nations as an essential counterbalance to monolithic, megalomaniacal state enterprises of any stamp.

By the turn of the century, Prince stood at the forefront of a cadre of Boston psychotherapists whose open minds, erudition, and dogged clinical labors had upended previous American understandings of how the mind worked. Building on scaffolding erected by such pivotal French psychologists as Jean Martin Charcot and Pierre Janet, Prince linked neuroses to extreme “dissociations” between mental states that resulted in a kind of psychological deadlock. This deadlock manifested in rigid behaviors that failed to respond to external reality’s flux and flow. To reintegrate himself, Prince collaborated with his fellow New Englanders in developing a surprisingly sophisticated proto-Freudian version of talk therapy. Like others in his circle, he was also a talented hypnotist who translated a subtle understanding of the power of suggestion into effective clinical practice. Together with colleagues like James Jackson Putnam, Prince began to outline a new, holistic approach to the challenge of psychological treatment that drew on elements of older, so-called “somatic” treatments like hydrotherapy and electric therapy and melded them with language-based probing of patients’ psychological conditions.

There were still some wild-and-woolly edges to his methodology, to be sure. In The Dissociation of Personality, Prince’s best-selling, hugely influential account of America’s first famous multiple-personality case, he describes a (literally) climactic moment of treatment that qualifies as not just surprising, but jaw-dropping. In order to fully exorcize the sassy alternative personality nicknamed “Sally” who had been tormenting his patient, Prince began applying an established technique whereby he put pressure on a “hypnogenetic point” over the patient’s spine. “With a strength that I did not think she possessed,” Prince records, “she fought, wrestled, struggled to throw off my grasp, and to resist the subtle power. The rush of physical sensations through her body and the mental feeling that her consciousness was being engulfed in oblivion were more than she could bear. In mental anguish, she shouted aloud. Thus, for two hours we struggled.”

Two hours? Try to picture this insane, erotic wrestling match in a prim Boston medical office between a righteous, jaunty medical luminary, then in his mid-fifties, and a withdrawn college-age young woman of humble origins. Rather than the brush of Prince’s actual portraitist, John Singer Sargent, one longs for the hand of Francis Bacon to do the duel justice.

There’s something symptomatic of Prince’s deeper conundrum in this ethically chaotic moment of full-throttle body-mind therapy. For all his intermittent clinical acumen, the unbending value systems that Prince and his fellow Boston doctors inherited from their forebears ultimately hindered them from effectively orienting their practice toward modernity. Prince had seen through the past, but when he looked into the future, he felt so revolted by what he saw that he tended to swerve his gaze violently back again. Thus, in works like The Psychology of the Kaiser and The Creed of Deutschtum, Prince revealed himself to be enormously prescient about the dangers of German militarism and the militaristic state of mind as such. In the former study, he described militarism under the Kaiser as “something much more than a system of defense against encroachments from within and without—it is a mode of, and organization for, attack in the enforcement of progressive policies, of national growth, and of the will of the State, whatever direction these may take.” Yet in trying to fashion an argument for American interventionism against these kinds of threats in the international arenas, Prince fell back on a jingoistic sense of his home country’s historic moral clarity. And in attempting to explain why America had so far failed to respond to the German invasion of Belgium in 1915, he could only surmise that as “a polyglot nation speaking many tongues” his country had lost “the homogeneity of a single race” that had hitherto enabled the maintenance of a national conscience.

In 1908, Sigmund Freud received an invitation from the president of Clark University to come to the United States and lecture on psychoanalysis at the school’s 20th-anniversary celebration, scheduled for July. With his theories failing to gain traction among professional circles at home, and the psychoanalytic movement itself already fissured by nasty spats, one might have expected Freud to seize this opportunity to export analysis to the New World. However, Freud politely declined the offer, citing in his refusal letter the economic hardship of preempting the seasonal loss of income that would descend with Vienna’s summer hiatus. In private, however, he gave another explanation. To his disciple, Karl Abraham, who had recently had a paper concerned with the psychology of sexuality rejected by the Journal of Abnormal Psychology (the periodical Prince had founded and continued to edit), Freud remarked, “Morton Prince, who has always been a kaleidoscopic character, is this time really lamentable. Where do the Americans expect to get with this fear of public prudery?” Writing to Jung a few days later, he elaborated on his apprehensions, noting his belief: “Once they discover the sexual core of our psychological theories, they will drop us. Their prudery and their material dependence on the public are too great. That is why I’ve no desire to risk the trip there in July.”

Freud almost did not come to the United States at all because of his virulent distaste for a host of American bugbears that seemed to dovetail in the person of Morton Prince, whom Freud would soon be calling “the most arrogant ass imaginable.” Indeed, Prince—a champion yachtsman, a talented horseman, a member of many jolly social clubs and an all-around emblem of sporty Yankee self-reliance—fit the model of the privileged WASP that made Freud most self-conscious about his own ancestral stereotypes.

But for all of Freud’s understandable apprehensions about Prince having a constitutional aversion to psychoanalytic theory (“the gentle zephyrs of prudery blowing across from America” were ones for which Prince had “a quite special organ,” Freud told Jung), he failed to take the measure of the man himself. Not only was Prince not a prude, but he confessed in later years that with some patients he had even pushed too hard to find a sexual etiology to their symptoms where none actually existed. Indeed, after exposure to Freud’s work, Prince’s practice continued to reflect many aspects of Freudian theory. Most of all, Freud misjudged, assessing Prince as a threat to him rather than the other way around. As Prince wrote, looking back on the era of Freud’s arrival in America, “Freudian psychology…flooded the field like a full-rising tide, and the rest of us were left submerged like clams buried in the sands at low water.”

Rather than the importance of sexuality to humans’ psychological makeup, what Prince challenged was the dogmatism with which Freud’s axioms were propounded—the insistence that all neurotic symptoms were rooted in sex (to name but one exception important to Prince, he contended that the convolutions of pride and shame could also distort mental health). Prince summed up his objection to Freud in a response to an attack by Jones, as recorded in the 1911 Journal of Abnormal Psychology: “It sometimes seem[s] as if the followers of Freud care more for the acceptance of their method—for being baptized in the faith, than for the determination of truth.” For himself, he says, in the spirit of his one-time mentor, William James, “I don’t care a button what method is employed in the investigation of any given problem, provided it does not lead to fallacies in the results.”

It was this mobility of ideological allegiance that got the goat of the Freudians and stoked their hostility to him. Yet given its latter-day history, Prince’s balanced agnosticism about analysis appears only too justified. Now that the Freudian tide has receded, it is Prince’s early support for cognitive therapy that appears remarkably forward-looking, while Freud’s opus (rightly or wrongly) has been largely side-channeled into cultural studies programs of the academy.

We have much to learn from re-examining figures like Prince who occupy a pivotal position in early 20th-century psychological debates, before the dogmatism of Freud’s disciples crowded out elements that might have fostered a more fruitfully heterogeneous approach to psychotherapy. Reading their copious writings, we catch glimpses of multiple intriguing alternative histories—and, perhaps, come to question the orthodoxies of our own time.

How Stories Change the Human Brain, Empathy, Memory, and Behavior

Story, a spoken or written account of connected events, is one of the main ways we communicate with other people. Whether it’s reading a picture book with a child, watching a movie, listening to a podcast, gossiping over a cup of coffee, or daydreaming about a vacation, we participate in storytelling in some way every day.

Although stories have frequently been dismissed as “leisure” or “escapism,” they serve a basic human need. After all, every society has its stories that are passed down from one generation to the next. But what exactly is happening to us when we dive into a story?

Research in psychology and neuroscience suggests that stories are far more than entertainment. They are one of the primary ways human beings learn, connect, and make sense of themselves and one another. Stories allow us to simulate experiences, understand other minds, regulate emotions, and strengthen the social bonds on which societies depend. A recurring finding is that stories exercise our social brain. They strengthen parts of the brain we use to relate to and connect with others, especially the cognitive systems responsible for empathy, theory of mind, and emotional regulation. As neuroscience PhD and science writer Aditi Subramaniam observes, fiction in particular “is a kind of cognitive simulation that allows us to practice social and emotional skills in a low-risk environment.” Essayist Susan Cushman argues that this might also be true of literary or narrative nonfiction, which is often told as a vivid story.

By contrast, expository nonfiction, whose goal is to inform without forming a narrative or eliciting an emotional response, offers a chance to exercise a wide range of skills that help build social connection more indirectly by enhancing general knowledge, improving analytical thinking, and building self-esteem.

How Stories Organize and Share Meaning

The human brain has evolved to sift, sort, and integrate a massive amount of information to prioritize survival. It registers sensory input, evaluates the relative importance of that input, and integrates it into an existing archive of memory and consciousness. Of key importance in this process is Superior Pattern Processing, which allows us to detect small changes in the environment and to ascribe meaning to those changes. Neuroscientist Mark Mattson argues that this is the basis of most of what makes the human brain unique (“intelligence, language, imagination, invention, and the belief in imaginary entities such as ghosts and gods”).

The brain is also overwhelmingly motivated by a need for social connection; our species is sometimes termed “ultrasocial” for the way large groups of unrelated individuals cooperate—a tendency also seen in some insects but in very few mammals. One of the ways we connect is through language and, by extension, story, which not only organizes our thoughts but also sends them to other brains. Story is like a delivery service that packs and transports a world of facts, emotions, ideas, sensations, and beliefs from one brain to another.

The Default Mode Network and the Social Brain

To understand why stories are such effective vehicles for transmitting ideas and experiences, it helps to look at one of the brain’s core networks for constructing meaning and imagining other perspectives: the Default Mode Network.

Since neurologist Marcus E. Raichle coined the term “default mode” in 2001, research on how our brains respond to story has incorporated a growing understanding of the default mode network (DMN). This is a system of connected brain regions that is inactive when we are focused on external stimuli but gets very busy when we are inwardly focused, for example, when daydreaming, thinking about the past, planning, or getting lost in a work of fiction.

In the words of Vinod Menon, director of the Stanford Cognitive and Systems Neuroscience Laboratory, the DMN “integrates and broadcasts memory, language, and semantic representations to create a coherent ‘internal narrative’ reflecting our individual experiences.” This internal narrative, he says, is central to our sense of self; it shapes how we perceive ourselves and how we interact with others.

In fact, one of the regions most active in the DMN is the dorsal medial prefrontal cortex, which is involved in making predictions and in thinking about the thoughts and feelings of others.

Social neuroscientist Taylor Guthrie, of the “Sense of Mind” podcast, describes the utility of making predictions and imagining scenarios about social interaction:

In these social environments, there’s a lot of cost from damaging relationships. If a relationship is really providing us sustenance, is providing us a means of eating, of feeling safe and all of these things, then we need to make sure we’re not just reactive in the moment, that maybe we’re angry and we just say a bunch of things that we shouldn’t have said. Instead, it’s a lot more beneficial for us to be able to play out these scenarios. ‘If I said this, what would they maybe say?’ And ‘How could they maybe be thinking about this?’ and ‘What is their perspective? I know they have a mind of their own, they have emotions of their own.’

Narrative Transportation

The DMN is active in many forms of internally focused thought, but one of its most remarkable roles is helping us enter and make sense of imagined worlds. This ability is especially evident when we become deeply immersed in a compelling story—a phenomenon psychologists call narrative transportation.

An example of how the DMN helps us absorb new information is the quasi-magical experience of narrative transportation. A story can be so gripping that it pushes you into an experiential state of immersion in which all your mental processes are concentrated on the narrative events and scenes. In this trance-like state, your brain receives and processes the fictional narrative as if it were lived experience.

While you are in this state, the DMN is connecting story events to personal memories, simulating environments, and constructing meaning. For the duration of this process, the brain merges the narrative self with the material self.

Although there is no reliable rule for determining whether any particular story will spark narrative transportation in any one person, vivid writing doesn’t hurt. Strong visual and mental images stimulate motor-sensory regions of the brain that support a convincing sense of reality. When you read or hear the word “kick,” for example, your brain activates in the same way it would if you were kicking. The same goes for specific sensory details. Consider this sentence from Raymond Chandler’s story “Red Wind”:

“It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch.” 

Even if you have never experienced a Santa Ana wind, your body registers the sensations “hot,” “dry,” “curl,” “jump,” and “itch” and, to one degree or another, feels the discomfort. This kind of vivid writing makes it easier for you to get carried away because you have clear reference points in your memory.

Interestingly, especially for advertisers and politicians, messages couched in story-form are more likely to persuade people than direct appeals or the presentation of facts. When readers or viewers experience a story as if they themselves are living it, they become less likely to examine embedded messages in a critical light and more open to changing their behavior as a result of the message.

Mentalizing: Understanding the Internal States of Ourselves and Others

Narrative transportation does more than immerse us in fictional worlds. It also helps explain why stories are so effective in strengthening our ability to understand other people’s thoughts and feelings.

One way in which fiction, and literary fiction in particular, enhances social cognition is through exercising the default subnetwork. This network is involved in theory of mind, which is our ability to recognize that other people have thoughts, feelings, and perspectives that may differ from our own. This skill is also known as mentalizing.

The mentalizing subnetwork allows us to infer the mental states of others. It performs discrete tasks, one of which is perspective-taking, the act of practicing cognitive empathy by accepting another person’s point of view without necessarily agreeing with it. It also refers to experience and to general knowledge, and it anticipates the future.

Reading is an effective way to flex our mentalizing abilities and improve emotional literacy. In a 2005 study, mothers read picture books to their children and asked questions about characters’ emotional states. The children of mothers who frequently practiced storybook reading at home and trained them to identify mental-state terms tended to perform well in tasks testing their theory of mind. Other studies with adult participants have drawn similar conclusions: reading fiction supports readers’ understanding of emotional concepts by exposing them to these emotions in context.

Exposure to literary fiction in particular (as opposed to popular or genre fiction) is associated positively with emotion recognition in others. It improves a reader’s ability to mentalize, both for short periods and over a lifetime.

Inter-Brain Synchronicity

Stories influence not only our internal understanding of other minds but also the way our brains respond to one another during communication.

When a group of people listens to someone telling a story, something remarkable happens:  specialized brain cells called mirror neurons fire in the same areas and with the same patterns in the listeners’ brains as in the speaker’s brain, only with a slight delay. This synchronicity, called neural coupling, occurs when successful communication is happening, such as when a teacher is giving a lesson, or a couple is conversing, or a baby’s caregiver is responding to the infant’s babbling. When there is a failure to communicate, for example, when a story is told in a language the listener doesn’t know, there is no significant neural coupling.

Synchronicity also occurs when individuals share the same narrative experience, for example, when they watch the same movie, hear the same story, or co-create it. A 2010 study found “that the greater the anticipatory speaker–listener coupling, the greater the understanding.” In other words, when neural coupling occurs, it fosters imitation, empathy, and learning. Similarly, the closer people are to one another in terms of friendship, the more similar their DMN patterns are.

A University of Chicago study measured the reactions of people watching the same movie while having MRI brain scans. It found that synchronicity was most pronounced during highly engaging moments, suggesting that different people experience a similar degree and pattern of engagement and attentional fluctuations while processing the same narratives.

The mirror neuron system is separate from the DMN, but the two systems do interact: the former provides “embodied simulation” of other people’s actions and emotions; the latter handles internal, self-relevant thought and social cognition. So, as in the case of narrative transportation, the DMN works to bridge extrinsic information with our intrinsic world, negotiating differences between others and ourselves.

Emotional Engagement

Shared neural activity is only part of the story. Strong narratives also engage the brain’s emotional systems, helping explain why certain stories remain memorable—and persuasive—long after they end.

At the beginning of the collection of folktales A Thousand and One Nights, Sultan Shahryar is so enraged by the infidelity of his former wife that he resolves to take a new wife every day and have her executed the next morning. When he has depleted the region’s supply of nubile virgins, the Vizier’s clever daughter Scheherazade offers herself to him in marriage. On their wedding night, she tells him a story that ends on a cliffhanger, with a promise to tell him the rest the following night. The sultan is so captivated by the tale that he readily agrees. The next night, the same thing happens, and the next. After 1001 nights of engrossing stories, the Sultan’s unreasonable rage has calmed. He no longer feels the urge to murder all the women in his kingdom, and his ideas of responsible leadership have (presumably) been influenced by the stories that modeled good kingship or warned against bad.

As A Thousand and One Nights shows, reading or hearing highly engaging fiction increases a reader’s empathy (the ability to feel, share, and mirror another person’s emotions). Fiction does this by accessing the emotional sharing network, which overlaps with the mentalizing network but also includes the mirror neuron system, which leads us to internalize observed actions and emotions; the amygdala, which processes emotional arousal; and hubs of affective empathy (the anterior insula and anterior cingulate cortex), which activate when we see others’ pain or disgust.

Narrative transport, or high engagement, can be a prerequisite for the release of hormones like dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, and endorphins. Will Storr, author of The Science of Storytelling, argues that well-crafted stories create tension through conflict and mystery, which keep readers and listeners engaged and trigger a dopamine-driven “reward” response in the brain.

Like a gambler in the throes of addiction, Sultan Shahryar was experiencing the “do-it-more” effect of dopamine, driven by the tension and mystery Scheherazade created by presenting him with intriguing plots and withholding the endings of her stories.

He was also, very likely, experiencing increased empathy thanks to a surge of oxytocin, a chemical that increases a feeling of closeness to and empathy for others. In a series of experiments, neuroeconomist Paul Zak and his team asked volunteers to watch one of two versions of a video about a dying boy. The first version was presented as a story, with a classic dramatic arc, while the second had a “flat” narrative arc. The team also took blood samples from the volunteers before and after viewing the videos. They found that people who watched the film in story form experienced increased oxytocin levels.

This emotional power of story was dramatically demonstrated by a 2020 study in which a single storytelling session with hospitalized children led to an increase in oxytocin, a reduction in cortisol and pain, and positive emotional shifts.

Calming the Nervous System

Stories influence us not only emotionally but physiologically, affecting the body’s stress response and overall sense of well-being.

Reading or listening to a story, or indeed to nonfiction texts, can have significant calming effects on your nervous system. Training your attention on a book can signal your brain to activate the parasympathetic nervous system (“rest and digest” mode), lowering your heart rate and easing muscular tension in much the same way as meditation. Making a habit of reading books can even lengthen your life.

Mentalizing also plays a role in emotional regulation. Those who regularly practice taking another person’s perspective (as fiction readers naturally do) develop strong connections between their prefrontal cortex and anterior cingulate, a pairing linked to better emotional regulation and stress recovery.

Emotional regulation is not only healthy for us as individuals, but it is also an essential aspect of social communication. Recognizing emotions, calming down, and adapting behaviors to social contexts are all skills that decrease conflict and increase independence and resilience.

Stories are far more than entertainment or a pleasant escape from everyday life. They are one of the primary ways human beings make sense of themselves, understand one another, and build shared communities. Research in psychology and neuroscience suggests that stories organize information, exercise the social brain, strengthen empathy, regulate emotion, and help us imagine lives beyond our own experience. Whether we encounter them in novels, films, conversations, podcasts, or family traditions, stories do more than reflect what it means to be human—they help make us who we are.

What Is Humanitarian Education and Does It Help Build Peace?

Humanitarian education refers to educational initiatives developed or supported by humanitarian organizations to reduce suffering, protect vulnerable populations, and help communities recover from conflict and disaster. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees defines humanitarian education as an initiative that “is implemented in a humanitarian context and is inclusive of refugee and other marginalized learners.”

With wars and conflicts becoming increasingly common in the 21st century, education has taken on greater significance. According to a 2025 United Nations article, of the 234 million school-age children affected by conflict worldwide, 85 million are completely out of school. Helena Murseli, global lead of the UNICEF Education in Emergencies team, called the situation “unprecedented.” “These are not isolated incidents. They are part of a global pattern of escalating conflict that affects children’s right to learn,” she said.

There is an urgent need to help develop spaces to provide a caring environment, especially for children experiencing conflict and displacement. “Refugee children deserve an education of quality that will last them a lifetime. Education must be an integral part of our response to emergencies, not an afterthought that falls gradually into neglect,” states the UN Refugee Agency.

Humanitarian education encompasses a wide range of educational goals, teaching methods, and pedagogical approaches. To understand its effectiveness, this article examines its purpose and ultimate goal, its link to the humanitarian mandate to reduce conflict and human suffering, and, most importantly, whether it has achieved its objectives.

Why Humanitarian Education Is Important

Using education to develop a peaceful society has been foundational to the concept of schooling throughout human history. Two of history’s most prominent teachers, Confucius and Plato, both spoke of the purpose of education as creating “harmonious societies.” Over time, education was institutionalized, first by religious bodies and then by political ones. Colonialism rooted these educational structures worldwide. A 2023 Brookings article by Ghulam Omar Qargha and Emily Markovich Morris, from the Center for Universal Education, states, “In most countries under colonial influence, the colonizing forces used modern schooling to develop a workforce in the colony, spread culture and values, control the local populations from opposing colonial rule, and create a sense of national unity among colonized peoples.” Those purposes still rigidly define mainstream education today.

In the 20th century, following two catastrophic wars that engulfed large parts of the world, alternative models developed to recenter the role of education in nurturing peaceful, nonviolent societies. The United Nations created UNESCO to ensure a “peaceful coexistence between nations,” with the motto that “[s]ince wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defenses of peace must be constructed.” This helped pave the way for international organizations to highlight the importance of education, not only to sustain peace in conflict areas but also as a means to build a safe and nurturing environment for children in these countries and regions.

On a global scale, humanitarian educational endeavors focus on highlighting the value of education and ensuring universal access to it. Humanitarian education comes under the umbrella of Education for All (EFA). “Education for all is a principle advocating that all children, young people and adults should have access to quality education, regardless of background or circumstance,” the UNESCO website explains. The EFA declaration affirms that “education can help ensure a safer, healthier, more prosperous and environmentally sound world, while simultaneously contributing to social, economic and cultural progress, tolerance and international cooperation.” This shows that the international community’s push for wider participation in education stems from the idea that a more educated world is a more peaceful one.

There are, however, several limitations to this idea and its implementation. As UNESCO notes in its blog about the links between education, violence, and well-being, despite evidence that higher levels of basic education are associated with reduced national violent conflict, this claim remains ambiguous.

Although the number of people who receive at least a basic education has reversed since 1800, from one in five receiving a basic education to one in five who have not received any formal education, according to 2020 figures analyzed by Our World in Data, there is no way to prove this is a direct result of humanitarian education initiatives. The sharp uptick in education post-World War II suggests that the global shift in perceptions toward education, of which the UN was an integral part, has contributed to increased access to education. Other important developments include the recognition of education as a human right, which helped pave the way for another key humanitarian educational concept: education in emergencies (EiE). In her article in the Comparative Education Review, Julia C. Lurch emphasizes that “rights-based conceptions of education provided a powerful cultural frame that helped legitimate greater attention to EiE.” Education in emergencies has since become another pillar in humanitarian organizational responses to conflict.

Girls are often disproportionately affected in humanitarian emergencies. According to the UN Girls’ Education Initiative (UNGEI), girls are among those most excluded from education during crises and are especially vulnerable to dropping out of school. To cope with this situation, the UN argues that “Education in emergencies should become an integral part of a long-term strategy to develop inclusive education systems in countries affected by armed conflict.”

The Inter-Agency Network for Education in Emergencies (INEE), established following the 2000 EFA conference in Dakar, promotes and helps to guide frameworks and approaches to EiE. The INEE states that providing education to children impacted by conflict helps reduce their suffering: “Education in emergencies provides physical, psychosocial, and cognitive protection that can sustain and save lives.” It further states that when parents and children living in conflict situations were asked what they most needed, they said they wanted to continue their education. “According to 8,749 children caught up in 17 different emergencies—ranging from conflict to protracted crises and disasters—who took part in 16 studies by eight organizations covering 17 different emergencies, 99 percent of children in crises see education as a priority,” states the INEE.

Unfortunately, education programs are facing dramatic cuts. “Today, only 3 percent of humanitarian aid goes to education. Yet the children most in need of a good education are also at greatest risk of having their learning disrupted, whether by conflict, violence, pandemics, climate, or other crises,” according to the World Bank.

Putting the long-term effects of this lack of funding into perspective, Murseli said, “We’re talking about 234 million children’s future and ultimately, global stability and development. The cost of inaction far exceeds the investment needed to get every crisis-affected child learning.”

An article in the Human Rights Education Review shows that humanitarian education not only teaches children basic subject concepts but is also essential for teaching school-age children how to exercise their human rights while respecting the rights of others.

Restoring Access to Education

Humanitarian organizations’ efforts to promote education go beyond merely advancing the idea of education; they also involve physically restoring access to education in disaster zones. For example, UNICEF, the World Food Program, and Save the Children, funded by the World Bank, helped rebuild Yemen’s education system between 2021 and 2024, following decades of instability, conflict, and famine. While there is not sufficient evidence of this project’s success, it aimed to rehabilitate 1,000 schools across Yemen, pay teachers incentives to ensure attendance, build rural teaching capacity, provide learners with equipment and healthy snacks, and train teachers to improve their ability to teach literacy and numeracy.

“Yemen’s education system continues to face immense challenges. More than 2.5 million children are currently out of school, while 2,375 schools have been damaged or destroyed, severely limiting access to safe learning environments across the country. To support the recovery of the sector, the National Education Sector Plan 2024–2030 was launched in 2025, defining national priorities and guiding international support for rebuilding Yemen’s education system,” states an April 2026 UNESCO report.

According to research by the Global Education Cluster, a forum for coordination and collaboration on education in humanitarian crises, the affordability of educational supplies and the lack of schools in the community are key barriers to accessing education. There, meanwhile, seems to be a division of opinion on the effectiveness of such educational initiatives.

As Maha Shuayb, director of the Center for Lebanese Studies, explains in her article for The New Humanitarian, educational initiatives do not always succeed. Her review of EiE for Syrian refugees displaced in Lebanon found that the Lebanese state education system could only accommodate 50 percent of school-age Syrian refugees, which resulted in learners being split into morning and afternoon shifts, with the afternoon cohort experiencing fewer positive outcomes than the morning shift. This resulted from the incompatibility between the educational needs of displaced people and the Lebanese school system.

Due to national regulations, lessons could only be taught by Lebanese citizens; students had to learn some subjects in French or English, even though most spoke Arabic as a first language. International donors funded this initiative and did not sustainably improve the system to build long-term capacity. “Ten years later, the results speak for themselves. Syrian refugee enrollment in Lebanese state schools is below 30 percent, with less than 4 percent progressing to secondary education.” She argues that this approach to providing education in emergencies is inherently flawed, as “85 percent of the refugee population is hosted in low- and middle-income countries, where educational systems may already be strained: Enrolling children in a struggling system is extremely challenging.”

On the other hand, the EiE practitioners insist that this education saves lives. In a working paper, Christopher Talbot, who was a co-founder of the Inter-Agency Network for Education in Emergencies, argues that “it also sustains life by giving children a sense of the restoration of normality, familiar routine and hope for the future, all of which are vital for mitigating the psychosocial impact of violence and displacement for individuals and whole communities.” Accessing education and reestablishing safe routines can therefore vastly reduce human suffering at a time when children are especially vulnerable to situations resulting in child marriage, child labor, and recruitment into groups supporting violence. Yona Nestel, a senior education adviser at Plan International Canada, writes that “Education in emergencies is often a humanitarian afterthought, even though it has been demonstrated as the most effective way to normalize children’s lives and help them recover from trauma.”

Talbot also states that being enrolled in education can help children avoid danger: “Children and adolescents who are not in school are at greater risk of violent attack and rape, and of recruitment into fighting forces, prostitution and life-threatening, often criminal activities.” He also claims that education initiatives can help restore peace in conflict situations and disaster-affected societies by preparing for reconstruction and developing economically and socially valuable skills.

In his 2011 article on EiE Best Practice, Phillip Price points to examples of learning about landmine awareness and sexual health, and how these lessons reduce death and injury later on in life. This highlights the other, arguably more important, side of humanitarian education initiatives: the content of education. Despite EFA and EiE’s focus on expanding access to education, humanitarian organizations often do more than just build capacity to educate; they deliver their own bespoke education curricula aimed at reducing human suffering and building more peaceful societies.

Restoring access to education is only one part of humanitarian education. Once children and communities return to classrooms or other learning spaces, humanitarian organizations face another question: What should be taught? Beyond literacy and numeracy, many organizations have concluded that education in crisis settings should also help learners cope with trauma, rebuild trust, resolve conflict, and strengthen social cohesion. This has led humanitarian organizations to develop specialized educational programs that draw on peace education and other learner-centered pedagogies.

Shaping Peace Education

Humanitarian organizations generally pursue these broader educational goals through three complementary approaches: training new humanitarian practitioners, teaching humanitarian principles and international humanitarian law, and adapting peace education through established learner-centered pedagogies.

Humanitarian organizations and educational institutions teach how to do humanitarian work. This includes learning a variety of practical skills, such as international law, frameworks, project management, and logistics, while instilling humanitarian values like accountability, trust, and fairness. A substantial amount of this learning takes place online, so it is accessible to a wide range of practitioners worldwide. Evaluations of some of these courses, including a humanitarian leadership diploma for practitioners in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region and a course run by Médecins Sans Frontières in Italy, found them effective at building humanitarian knowledge and capacity among participants.

The extent to which such capacity building leads to peace in the region has not been clearly assessed. But it is considered better for the sustainability of humanitarian work among local populations. Scholar Séverine Autesserre has written several books highlighting the importance of localization in humanitarian work and its relationship to genuine, long-lasting peace.

A key part of the curriculum for these courses focuses on developing an understanding of humanitarian principles. They teach external practitioners and staff members to internalize values such as egalitarianism, respect, and empathy through practical skills like active listening and problem-solving. These skills are also taught to younger people through educational programs, such as the Youth as Agents of Behavioral Change (YABC) offered by the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC). This program aims to teach young people “critical thinking, dropping bias, collaborative negotiation, mediation, and enhancing personal resilience,” along with other practical skills similar to those taught to humanitarian practitioners. This has led to the establishment of the final pillar of humanitarian education: teaching peace to the general population. Organizations use “peace education” pedagogy, combined with their experience teaching humanitarian skills and values, to develop learners’ willingness and instill the ability to be peaceful.

Peace education developed alongside alternative educational theories in the 20th century. While Montessori and other educational approaches promote education that centers on the needs of the learner, peace education focuses on the needs of peacebuilding. As Yi Yu and Michael Wyness explain in their journal Social Sciences, “Across socio-political contexts, peace education may target micro-level interpersonal skills, such as conflict resolution, or macro-level societal change, including altering collective narratives, breaking down stereotypes, and promoting human rights.”

Rather than representing a single distinct pedagogy, humanitarian education combines multiple leading learning theories to refine peace education into approaches that help rebuild societies after conflict and disaster. It combines aspects of psychosocial competencies and social-emotional learning (SEL) pedagogy to develop learners’ self-esteem and psychological resilience. Humanitarian education inculcates these pedagogies, believing that establishing a strong sense of self, combined with a deep understanding of emotions, is vital to building empathy and healthy coping mechanisms in the face of extreme stress.

It also seeks to teach people how to manage the trauma they’ve experienced, which is often a source of perpetuating conflict. It draws on other pedagogies, such as intercultural learning, to build the capacity to understand opposing views, aiming to bridge political or ideological differences between groups.

Does Humanitarian Education Work?

The YABC program has been implemented in several countries since its release in 2008. Still, aside from qualitative accounts of how the learning personally impacted some participants, there has been little evaluation of its impact on the development of peaceful societies. Beyond this program, the IFRC has developed educational programs aimed at teaching international humanitarian law since the early 2000s, with other organizations such as the British Red Cross and the Canadian Red Cross. According to testimonies in a 2025 blog post, IHL education helped develop empathy and understanding among students, especially toward people from refugee backgrounds. However, to really understand if humanitarian education is effective in building peace, these initiatives need to be thoroughly assessed.

Save the Children ran a program in Syria in 2022 called “The Summer Club,” which was structured as a “12-session child resilience program for… 200 children. The child resilience program included activities in problem-solving, improving knowledge of the self, healthy expression of feelings, effective communication, and identifying and dealing with abuse and bullying.” This program was likely modeled after Save the Children’s longstanding Youth Resilience Program. In investigating the efficacy of this project, Save the Children found high engagement in the program, with “99 percent attending more than 70 percent of all activities. Facilitators’ observations also noted that the children were deeply engaged during the sessions.” They also analyzed how far learning goals were achieved, stating that “100 percent out of the 65 percent of targeted children had better awareness of child protection threats and skills to deal with them, when comparing pre-test to post-test at the end of Summer Club.”

They also conducted third-party monitoring to determine that “Summer Club had increased their ability to understand school subjects and that their performance at school had improved from participating in Summer Club.” This program was initiated by Save the Children Denmark in collaboration with a local partner. According to them, while the local partner was heavily involved and provided continuous feedback, there is little information available on long-term outcomes or the program’s sustainability. A wider evaluation of how the education of these 200 children impacted broader peace in the region was not conducted.

We can compare this small program to a larger group of IRC initiatives in the same region. The “Ahlan Simsim” project has reached “over 1.3 million children and caregivers with direct services for families across Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria.” It involves a structured 12-week intervention in which children watch an Arabic-language version of Sesame Street to learn social-emotional skills and improve literacy and numeracy. The show was called Ahlan Simsim or “Welcome Sesame” in Arabic. According to the IRC, their study “found that watching the Ahlan Simsim show had a significant impact on children’s foundational social-emotional skills, such as identifying emotions and applying coping strategies.”

They also broadcast the television show across the MENA region, reaching another 23 million children. IRC claims that “Watching Ahlan Simsim helps children identify emotions of fear and frustration and teaches them coping strategies, like pausing to breathe in emotionally stressful situations. … [N]ew characters join familiar faces like Elmo and Cookie Monster to teach children important lessons and promote healthy early childhood development. These new characters are designed to be relatable to children living in vulnerable situations.”

NYU Global TIES for Children studied some of the Ahlan Simsim programs. One of the programs called “Reach Up and Learn” targeted caregivers of children under the age of three. “In this program, trained health outreach staff called caregivers to share their regular curriculum of health tips, and integrated into this 7–10 minutes of Ahlan Simsim parenting guidance per week. While researchers found no significant impact on parenting behaviors, pointing to the limitations of a short, once-weekly, audio-only interaction, they did find the program reduced caregiver depressive symptoms.” This candid sharing of results helps to understand how these programs work to improve learning outcomes. In the case of another program evaluated, which involved remote teaching via WhatsApp, “[r]esearchers found that this program produced statistically and developmentally significant impacts on children, particularly for literacy, numeracy, and social-emotional skills. The impact was comparable to global studies of year-long, in-person preschool programs.”

These studies provide “new evidence that innovations in educational media and in leveraging caregivers’ support of learning can improve children’s holistic development,” said Hirokazu Yoshikawa, former co-director of Global TIES for Children.

The effectiveness of using media to teach peace or well-being is corroborated by studies of peace education projects conducted in Sierra Leone during and after the civil war. In their analysis, Yi and Wyness found that one of the most successful peace education initiatives was a series of TV and radio shows produced by Search for Common Ground. Structured programs led by the state or the UN, and those taking place in educational institutions, often had limited success due to a lack of scale, insufficient teacher motivation, and a lack of relevance of the content to the specific context. Non-formal education initiatives, however, seemed more successful at fostering reconciliation.

The Limitations of Humanitarian Education

There are several underlying issues with humanitarian approaches to peace. One of the most apparent assumptions is that most conflicts stem not from imbalances of power or resources but from a lack of mutual understanding. As the authors of a 2025 article published in the International Journal of Lifelong Education explain, a focus solely on promoting dialogue between conflicting parties is flawed. “This approach has the underlying assumptions that conflict primarily emerges from misunderstanding or lack of recognition, and reconciliation is both possible and desirable if dialogue is fostered.” The article points out that “peace education can no longer rest on the post-1945 model of (only) cultivating diplomacy, pacifism, compromise, and reconciliation under the presumption that peace is humanity’s default state. Rather, a reconceptualization of peace education is required that: resists both naïve appeasement and creeping militarization; and instead anchors itself in justice, international law, and democratic resilience.”

Current thinking points out that humanitarian education and peace education focus on promoting negative rather than positive peace. As a 2026 study published in the Educational Research Review explains, scholar Johan Galtung’s theory of positive peace “emphasizes the importance of addressing not only direct violence, but also structural and cultural violence, to achieve sustainable peace.” Arguably, by focusing solely on teaching empathy, resilience, and dialogue, humanitarian education initiatives fail to achieve positive peace.

Often, this reluctance to draw attention to the political, social, or economic inequalities that people caught up in or actively participating in conflict face stems from a desire (or imperative) to remain neutral and impartial. The Red Cross approach to humanitarian education mainly focuses on teaching about IHL to maintain neutrality. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) even states that “[The exploring humanitarian law program] is not explicitly concerned with peace, tolerance, mutual understanding, prevention of violence or conflict resolution. It emphasizes the positive changes in attitude stemming from ideas related to respect for life and human dignity, civic responsibility, and solidarity.”

The Red Cross approach helps ensure that its materials, and therefore its values, are taught in places where peace education may be censored, and focuses on creating materials that local teachers and practitioners can share in schools or communities.

According to international humanitarian law practitioner Sobhi Tawil, teaching IHL is less controversial than teaching human rights, as some divided societies consider lessons on human rights to be aligned with one side of the conflict. National Red Cross organizations function as humanitarian auxiliaries to their respective governments and are often accountable to prevailing public opinion. As an example, there has been previous backlash toward British Red Cross educational materials, which positively supported anti-racism education.

Humanitarian education initiatives that avoid discussing the causes or symptoms of conflict only alienate learners who are suffering real injustices. The Red Cross has lost significant legitimacy over the past few years, particularly with Ukrainians who accuse the wider Red Cross of complicity due to the actions of the Russian and Belarusian Red Cross organizations. In many ways, attempts to remain neutral and impartial in education are doomed to failure. According to Critical Pedagogy, a theory pioneered by Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, “schools typically serve the interests of those who have power in a society by, usually unintentionally, perpetuating unquestioned norms for relationships, expectations, and behaviors.” As an International Institution with close ties to Western powers, a humanitarian organization risks reinforcing the problems that cause conflict.

Another issue is that foreign educators are often sent to poor countries to carry out humanitarian work and are disconnected from the local population, having a limited understanding of the complex social context. Sometimes they don’t speak local languages at all, or at a very basic level, according to Junru Bia’s article for the Network for Strategic Analysis. The temporary nature of their contract also means they are not around long enough to do the painstaking work required. As Michael N. Barnett explains in “The Humanitarian Club” in the book Global Governance in a World of Change, the humanitarian sector operates as an elite club furthering the interests of a specific group. They are elite not just because they come from the West and are funded by Western interests, but also because, as individuals, they come from middle- and upper-class backgrounds. Organizations like the UN and the IFRC favor individuals who are fluent in at least two European languages, not necessarily to speak to local people, but because these languages are the established languages of international politics. These humanitarian jobs are often completely out of reach for working-class people in any nation, Junru Bian points out.

Despite some efforts to universalize humanitarian education by building inter-agency networks and clusters, for the most part, each international humanitarian organization has its own individual education initiative, which is often rolled out differently in each location. Sometimes these initiatives include cooperation with local organizations, while in other instances they involve the state education departments. The sheer volume of different initiatives may be due to localization processes, and to ensure that learning meets the needs and contexts of learners. But it can also result from competition among organizations, the desire to align with their internal mission or values, and funders who demand something new, different, or specific to their goals.

Failing to meet funders’ demands can lead to a Catch-22 financial situation for humanitarian organizations. Education initiatives are already chronically underfunded. “New analysis from UNICEF shows that international aid to education is projected to fall by $3.2 billion by 2026—a 24 percent drop,” states the UNICEF website. International Rescue Committee’s senior director of education, Emma Gremley, laments that “Despite the vast and growing education needs of children and youth in crisis contexts, education remains a severely underfunded aspect of humanitarian responses globally, receiving less than three percent of humanitarian aid annually.” On the other hand, when it is funded, funders can often bring their own biases to the program through funding requirements. The World Bank self-reports that it is a key funder of humanitarian education programs. “Our education portfolio in Fragility, Conflict, and Violence settings has grown rapidly in recent years, reflecting the increasing importance of the FCV agenda in education. In fiscal year 2024 (FY24), our investment in FCV settings stands at $7 billion, accounting for about 27 percent of the World Bank’s education portfolio and representing 42 projects in 28 countries.” Critics argue that organizations such as the World Bank are not politically neutral and that funding priorities can shape the design and implementation of humanitarian education programs.

Another problem is the lack of consistency in approach and in the sharing of data to determine which actions or initiatives are effective and which are not. Even when organizations review their programs, they are not always forthcoming with the results, perhaps for fear that any negative findings would be used to revoke funding. Finally, a common issue across these initiatives is their focus solely on teaching children. Adults are key actors in conflict, but are often completely excluded from these peace education initiatives. In general, very little attention is paid to educating adults beyond career-related skills. According to a 2023 survey by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, one in four adults faces barriers to learning. Around half of adults don’t participate in learning or show interest in it. Common barriers are a lack of time and opportunities, and the restrictive cost of training. Humanitarian peace education, which doesn’t reach the people who need it the most, cannot possibly achieve peace.

The Future of Humanitarian Education

Humanitarian education has expanded far beyond simply restoring access to schooling. It now encompasses peace education, psychosocial support, social-emotional learning, and humanitarian principles, all aimed at reducing suffering and helping communities recover from crisis. While many programs show promising results, especially at the individual and community level, evidence of their long-term impact on building peaceful societies remains limited.

The field also faces significant challenges, including chronic underfunding, fragmented approaches across organizations, political constraints, and a lack of rigorous long-term evaluation. As a result, researchers still know far less than they should about which educational approaches produce lasting change and how successful models can be adapted to different cultural and political contexts.

Even so, humanitarian education remains one of the few humanitarian tools that addresses both immediate crises and their long-term consequences. Beyond restoring access to classrooms, it seeks to equip people with the knowledge, skills, and resilience needed to navigate conflict, rebuild communities, and reduce future harm. As conflicts become more frequent and complex, education is increasingly recognized not simply as a humanitarian service but as an essential part of humanitarian infrastructure—and one of the most important long-term investments societies can make in peace, resilience, and human well-being.

Why Do Societies Normalize Harm to Children in War, Poverty, and Public Policy?

Few ideas command more universal agreement than the belief that children must be protected. Across cultures, religions, and political traditions, they are regarded as uniquely deserving of care, safety, and opportunity. Yet a glaring contradiction emerges when we look closely at the conditions under which millions of children actually live.

Around the world, childhood is routinely fractured by war, hunger, pollution, displacement, and poverty. Even within the United States, children face food insecurity, inadequate healthcare, environmental hazards, failing infrastructure, and unequal educational opportunities. We usually discuss these realities as separate crises—economic, political, or environmental. Rarely do we recognize them as interconnected symptoms of a larger pattern.

To a child, however, these bureaucratic distinctions matter little. The consequences accumulate in bodies, minds, and futures. This reality forces an uncomfortable question: if societies profess such deep concern for children, why does so much preventable harm persist? Why are conditions we would find intolerable in an individual case so easily accepted when they occur at scale?

The answer is not necessarily a lack of empathy. It is something more troubling: many forms of harm to children have become normalized. They persist not because societies openly endorse them, but because they have been quietly absorbed into the ordinary operation of institutions, policies, and social systems.

Consider how many of the gravest threats to children are discussed. War is typically analyzed in terms of territory, security, military strategy, or geopolitical interests. National debt is debated in the context of budgets, interest rates, and fiscal policy. Environmental disasters are measured through property loss, infrastructure damage, and economic costs. Immigration enforcement is discussed in terms of law, borders, and political conflict.

Yet children often experience these events differently. They encounter them not as policy questions but as disruptions to safety, stability, health, education, and belonging. The consequences can persist long after the original crisis has faded from public attention. Different in form, these crises share a common feature: the well-being of children is rarely the measure by which they are judged, even when children bear a disproportionate share of the harm.

Around the world, the pattern is remarkably consistent. Whether the source is armed conflict, environmental disaster, economic instability, forced migration, or political repression, children frequently bear consequences they neither created nor can control. The details vary from one society to another, but the underlying dynamic remains the same: the costs of collective failures are often carried by those with the least power to influence them.

Public expressions of concern for children are nearly universal. News reports on wars, famines, environmental disasters, and epidemics routinely highlight the number of children harmed. Yet these acknowledgments often remain symbolic rather than transformative. Concern is expressed, tragedy is recognized, and attention moves on, while the underlying conditions that produced the harm remain largely unchanged.

The suffering of children is often invoked as evidence of a crisis, yet it rarely becomes the standard by which the success or failure of public responses is judged.

The same pattern appears in the United States. While hunger is often debated through the lens of federal budgets and public spending, millions of children quietly rely on school meal programs as their primary source of daily nutrition. Similarly, environmental contamination is routinely assessed using regulatory thresholds and economic costs, even as emerging research documents developmental harms from pollution across childhood and adolescence. Immigration enforcement, too, is often discussed through the abstract language of borders and legality, while children endure the immediate fear, instability, and trauma of family separation. In each instance, the language of policy can obscure the lived realities of childhood.

The Evidence Is Already There

We do not lack evidence. We lack organized will. Year after year, global organizations such as UNICEF, Save the Children, and Oxfam document the scale of systemic harm inflicted on children. The data is neither hidden nor ambiguous. Yet a profound disconnect persists between public concern and institutional action. Societies routinely pass sweeping laws, sign international declarations, and voice collective outrage, but consistently fail to build the systems needed to turn concern into protection.

A stark, contemporary manifestation of this gap is found in the 2026 Global Out of the Shadows Index. Developed by Economist Impact alongside Together for Girls, the index benchmarked how 60 countries address child sexual abuse and exploitation. Its findings point to a familiar pattern. Many countries have developed legal protections for children, but far fewer have built the institutions, systems, and public commitments needed to make those protections meaningful in everyday life. Across the global index, governance and prevention emerged as the absolute weakest areas.

This points to a difficult truth. The failure to protect children is rarely a failure of knowledge. We know far more about the causes of harm than we did a generation ago. We know how poverty affects development. We know how violence shapes mental health. We know how environmental toxins accumulate in growing bodies. The question is no longer whether the evidence exists. The question is why societies continue to tolerate conditions that produce predictable harm.

The pattern extends across national boundaries and political systems. Wealthy countries and lower-income countries alike often struggle to translate concern into prevention. Some fail because of limited resources. Others fail despite having substantial resources at their disposal. The recurring challenge is not simply capacity, but the willingness to organize institutions around children’s long-term well-being.

Part of the answer lies in the unequal conditions into which children are born. Long before children make choices of their own, geography, family circumstances, health, environment, and social status begin shaping the opportunities available to them.

The Biology of Inequality

To understand how policy impacts a child, we must expand our definition of “biology” beyond mere genetics. A child’s biology is inextricably bound to a social reality: where they are born, to whom they are born, and the specific burdens they inherit and are expected to bear. Poverty, race, disability, environmental pollution, generational trauma, and social exclusion are not abstract social concepts, nor are they inescapable destinies. Instead, they are environmental realities that become physically embodied over time.

Society quite literally writes itself into children’s bodies. What once sounded like a metaphor is now supported by decades of developmental research. We see it in Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) research and toxic stress models, which demonstrate how prolonged hardship alters a child’s neurological development and immune system. We even see it in the physical record preserved in children’s shed primary teeth. Studies of so-called “milk teeth” suggest that the microscopic layers of those teeth can serve as a biological record of prenatal and early childhood environmental exposures, offering a window into the conditions that shape development.

Evidence of this process appears across multiple dimensions of childhood development. Research on respiratory health suggests that lung damage sustained during childhood can persist throughout life. At the same time, studies of environmental exposure continue to reveal how pollution, conflict, and deprivation leave lasting marks on developing bodies. Whether the source is war, poverty, or environmental contamination, the effects of childhood conditions often extend far beyond childhood itself.

When systemic inequality is allowed to persist, it begins to shape a child’s biological trajectory. Chronic stress associated with instability, deprivation, and neglect can alter how children process the world, affecting cognitive development, emotional regulation, and physical health. Over time, these effects influence everything from learning and attention to self-image, trust, and future opportunity. What begins as a social condition can become a biological one, transforming unequal circumstances into unequal outcomes.

The consequences do not end with the individual child. Childhood trauma can shape relationships, communities, and even future conflicts as unresolved harm is carried into adulthood.

The significance of these findings extends beyond health and development. If social conditions can become biologically embedded, then the question is no longer whether harm occurs. The question becomes why societies continue to accept conditions that predictably produce it.

How Harm Becomes Normal

The normalization of harm does not require overt cruelty; it requires only routine. Societies manage to tolerate the suffering of children by systematically dismantling it into manageable, administrative pieces. When a crisis is broken down into separate departments, budgets, jurisdictions, headlines, and eligibility categories, the human reality vanishes. Children are quietly transformed into statistics, cases, costs, risks, or collateral damage. Because bureaucratic fragmentation ensures that no single actor or agency appears fully responsible, the system continues to operate without any single institution fully accountable for its cumulative effects.

This normalization is sustained by psychological distance and economic abstraction. When child poverty is reduced to a budgetary line item or environmental contamination to a cost-benefit calculation, it becomes easier to focus on managing a problem than on the lived experience of the children affected by it. This abstract mindset is further sustained by policy drift and weakened enforcement. Existing protections are rarely abolished overnight; instead, they are steadily weakened through executive or legal actions that erode regulatory oversight and reduce institutions’ capacity to protect vulnerable populations.

When accountability is diffused across a labyrinth of agencies, inaction becomes the default setting. The institutions that shape children’s lives—schools, healthcare systems, child welfare agencies, environmental regulators, and immigration authorities—often operate according to different mandates, funding streams, and measures of success. Each addresses a piece of a child’s experience, while no institution is responsible for the whole child. The greatest danger to children is not a sudden wave of malice, but the quiet efficiency of the everyday. The result is not merely administrative failure. It is a culture in which preventable harm can persist for years, even decades, without provoking the sustained public response it would demand if children remained fully visible.

Children and the Moral Foundation of Civil Rights

The expansion of modern civil rights in the United States has never been a purely abstract legal exercise, and some of the most consequential moments of American democratic progress occurred when the nation was forced to confront the harm being done to children. It was the televised horror of children being attacked by police dogs and fire hoses during desegregation struggles. It was also the recognition in Brown v. Board of Education—supported in part by research on children’s self-image—that segregation harmed not only educational opportunity, but a child’s sense of self and place in society.

Historically, protecting children has not merely shielded the vulnerable—it has expanded democracy itself. When the law recognizes the rights of a child, it compels the state to acknowledge a deeper obligation. The struggle for civil rights has always been about defining who counts as a full human being in the eyes of the law. By centering the child, these movements successfully argued that a society’s legitimacy is measured by how it treats those who cannot vote, lobby, or protect themselves.

The restoration and strengthening of civil rights protections should not be viewed as a secondary political concern. If children become invisible within public institutions, they are more easily reduced to statistics, categories, or symbols in larger political debates. A society that recognizes children as full human beings affirms that dignity, healthy development, and opportunity are not privileges to be distributed selectively, but conditions necessary for democratic life itself.

What Can Be Changed

To confront the systemic neglect of children, we must move from diagnosis to responsibility. The structures that normalize harm were built by human choices, which means those same choices can dismantle them. Transforming how society treats its youth requires shifting from reactive intervention after trauma has occurred to a proactive, sustained architecture of prevention.

In the immediate term, the most important task is restoring the protections that help prevent predictable harm. School nutrition programs, early childhood services, public health initiatives, civil rights enforcement, and international assistance are often treated as discretionary expenditures. Yet, they form part of the social infrastructure that allows children to develop safely. Prevention rarely attracts the attention that accompanies a crisis, but its effects are often more profound. The strongest systems of care are those that reduce the likelihood of harm before intervention becomes necessary. Protecting children also requires the enforcement and strengthening of civil rights protections, helping to shield young people from systemic discrimination and institutional displacement. Finally, breaking down bureaucratic silos to build coordinated systems of care that integrate healthcare, education, and social services into unified networks can prevent harm before it manifests.

In the medium term, overcoming the psychological distance that insulates us from distant suffering becomes a central task. Sister-city programs, cities of refuge, and other forms of civic partnership demonstrate that communities can assume responsibility for one another across geographic and political boundaries. When people develop sustained relationships with places beyond their own, distant suffering becomes harder to ignore and easier to address collectively. This framework transforms abstract global crises into concrete local obligations, fostering cross-border solidarity and direct mutual aid.

Cultural change also depends on public rituals that remind societies of their obligations to future generations. The relative invisibility of Children’s Day is itself revealing. Societies routinely profess concern for children, yet devote comparatively little public attention to reflecting on their well-being. International Children’s Day receives only a fraction of the attention devoted to observances such as Earth Day, Mother’s Day, or Father’s Day. Yet it could serve as a focal point for schools, communities, and civic institutions to reflect on children’s well-being and compare approaches across regions and nations. Just as Earth Day helped elevate environmental awareness, a more visible Children’s Day could reinforce the idea that protecting children is a shared social responsibility rather than a private concern.

Ultimately, the most enduring change is not institutional but cultural. Modern societies measure success through economic growth, productivity, and financial performance. Yet these indicators reveal little about whether children are safe, healthy, or able to flourish. A society committed to children would ask a different question: Are young people developing the capacities they need to live meaningful lives? When children’s well-being becomes a central measure of success, policy priorities begin to change as well.

America Making America Whole

This effort requires a posture of candid self-examination rather than celebratory rhetoric. The United States cannot credibly present itself as a global beacon for human rights or children’s well-being while failing to confront its own domestic record. Within its own borders, millions of children contend with systemic poverty, food insecurity, deep-seated educational inequality, and toxic environmental exposure. This vulnerability is compounded by weakened labor protections that expose young people to exploitation, the ongoing trauma of family separation and detention at the border, and a glaring legal omission: the United States remains the only United Nations member state that has not ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

Yet ratification alone is not a guarantee of success. Many nations that have formally embraced the Convention continue to struggle with poverty, conflict, exploitation, and inadequate protection for children. The challenge is not simply adopting principles, but translating them into culture, institutions, and daily practice.

At the same time, some countries have demonstrated that meaningful progress is possible. The Economist Impact 2026 Global Out of the Shadows Index found examples of lower- and middle-income nations strengthening prevention efforts, improving accountability, and expanding protections for children despite limited resources. Such examples suggest that political commitment and institutional design can matter as much as national wealth.

The argument here is not that America should lecture the rest of the world on moral responsibility. It is that America needs to repair itself. True leadership on the global stage cannot be projected outward while systemic neglect is tolerated at home.

If the United States were to organize its laws, budgets, institutions, and communities around the well-being of children, it could offer the world something more persuasive than rhetoric: evidence that democratic societies are capable of confronting their own failures and repairing them. Such an achievement would not solve every problem, but it would demonstrate that accountability, prevention, and long-term investment in human development remain possible in a complex modern society. By addressing the structural conditions that undermine children’s well-being, the nation would reinforce the principle that democratic institutions are ultimately judged by their capacity to support human flourishing.

The Standard We Choose

Ultimately, we must return to the central question that anchors this series: Does your community care about children?

When we ask this, we must deepen our understanding of what “care” actually means. The true measure of a society’s commitment to its youth is not sentiment. It is not found in political speeches, corporate slogans, or cycles of selective outrage after a tragedy. The genuine measure is structural: whether a society organizes its resources, institutions, and legal protections around a child’s right to live, learn, grow, and belong.

The condition of our children is never incidental; it is diagnostic. It does not exist in a vacuum, separate from our economic successes or political debates. Instead, the well-being of the youngest among us provides one of the clearest indicators of a society’s overall health. It reveals exactly what a society values, what kinds of suffering it is willing to tolerate, and what kind of future it is actually prepared to build.

We can no longer treat the harm inflicted on children as an unfortunate byproduct of a complex world. It is a direct consequence of the standards we choose—and it remains within our power to choose a higher standard. Doing so will require countries, working both together and independently, to revisit their budgets, strengthen protections for children, and establish effective systems of accountability and enforcement. International agreements and declarations matter, but their promise is fulfilled only when they are translated into daily practice.

Yet the responsibility does not rest solely with national governments or international institutions. The well-being of children must also be advanced community by community, school by school, neighborhood by neighborhood. Public policy can establish protections, but communities give those protections life. Every level of society has a role to play, and every adult has a responsibility to help create the conditions in which children can thrive. The question that anchors this series is whether a community cares about children. The answer must be demonstrated not only through words, but through action. Every child counts.

Investing in Care: A Public-Private Model for Youth Opportunity

If we are to understand the conditions facing vulnerable children, we have to begin with a difficult truth: poverty remains the central force shaping their lives. It is not the only factor, but it is the most consistent one—structuring access to health, education, safety, and opportunity from the earliest years onward.

Children, by definition, are dependent. Their well-being is tied to the systems that surround them—family, school, community, and public institutions. When those systems are strained by poverty, the effects are not marginal. They are often paralyzing. Barriers to opportunity—whether in the form of underfunded schools, unstable housing, environmental hazards, food insecurity, or lack of healthcare—are not experienced as abstract policy failures. They are lived constraints that narrow what a child can imagine for their future.

Research has repeatedly shown that childhood poverty affects educational attainment, physical health, mental health, and long-term earnings potential. Children raised in economically unstable households are more likely to experience chronic stress, lower academic performance, and reduced social mobility. These patterns are not isolated outcomes. They reinforce one another across time.

It is tempting to respond to this reality with calls for sweeping transformation—to eliminate poverty altogether or radically redesign the systems that produce inequality. But in the absence of such transformation, the question remains: what can be done now?

The answer may lie in a more grounded approach. If we cannot yet abolish poverty, we can still confront it—carefully, persistently, and in the details. We can examine where harm occurs, where opportunities are blocked, and where support is insufficient. And we can begin to build systems that respond not in fragments, but with coherence and intention.

From Fragmentation to Comprehensive Services

One of the defining features of current approaches to child welfare is fragmentation. Education, healthcare, workforce development, and social services are often treated as separate domains, each with its own funding streams, eligibility criteria, and institutional boundaries. Programs exist, but they rarely form a continuous pathway.

The result is a patchwork system in which children and families must navigate multiple entry points, often without guidance and often at moments of crisis. Support is reactive rather than preventive. Transitions—from early childhood to adolescence, from school to work—are especially vulnerable points where many fall through the gaps.

A different approach begins by shifting from isolated interventions to comprehensive services. This does not mean a single program that attempts to do everything. It means designing systems so that the supports children need—education, health, mentorship, and opportunity—are aligned, accessible, and sustained over time.

Healthcare is especially important in this framework because childhood well-being is inseparable from physical and mental health. Untreated medical conditions, chronic stress, trauma, nutritional instability, and lack of preventive care all shape educational outcomes and long-term stability. Yet healthcare systems for low-income children are frequently overstretched, fragmented, or difficult to access consistently.

To make such an approach workable, it helps to organize the problem—and the response—into three practical frames: what can be stopped, how resilience can be built, and what communities themselves can do.

What We Can Stop

Some of the harms children experience are not inevitable. They are the result of policy choices and institutional practices that can be changed.

These include the criminalization of childhood behaviors, the persistence of hunger and food insecurity, homelessness, lack of access to healthcare, and schooling systems that fail to meet basic educational needs. They also include exploitative labor conditions and the absence of meaningful job pathways for adolescents who are ready and able to work. The concern is not with young people engaging in meaningful, educationally compatible work experiences, but with exploitative labor that undermines development, safety, or educational opportunity. Work, under the right conditions, can itself become a form of learning and civic participation.

Each of these conditions has been documented extensively. Food insecurity affects millions of children in the United States each year. Youth homelessness remains a persistent national crisis. Public schools in low-income communities continue to face chronic funding disparities, overcrowding, and staffing shortages. Children in economically disadvantaged neighborhoods are also more likely to encounter punitive disciplinary systems and policing practices at younger ages.

To begin here is not to solve everything. It is to establish a baseline: there are forms of harm we already understand well enough to address. Reducing them is not a matter of innovation, but of political will, coordination, and sustained attention.

Stopping harm does not in itself create opportunity. But it removes obstacles that should not be there in the first place. It clears the ground for the next question: how do we build the conditions in which children can move forward?

Building Resilience and Confidence

If we look at children who navigate challenges and move toward stable adulthood, a pattern emerges. Their success is not simply the result of individual effort or family background. It reflects the presence of consistent, reinforcing supports across multiple areas of life.

These supports are often taken for granted in middle-class environments. They include structured schools, accessible extracurricular activities, responsive healthcare, tutoring, summer programs, mentorship, and adults who are available to provide attention and guidance when needed. Together, these experiences and supports create a sense of stability and expectation: that effort will be met with opportunity, that challenges can be managed, and that a future is attainable.

Many communities already recognize the importance of developmental supports outside formal schooling. Educational foundations, scholarship programs, summer camps, arts initiatives, tutoring networks, and enrichment opportunities often provide forms of stimulation and engagement that are essential to school success yet occur beyond the classroom itself. Programs that support access to camps, educational travel, extracurricular learning, and community-based enrichment reflect an understanding that education is shaped not only by what happens in school, but also by the environments and opportunities surrounding it.

Middle-class children frequently receive these experiences as part of ordinary life, while lower-income children encounter them inconsistently or not at all. The key difference is not that some children have better parents. It is that some children are surrounded by systems that can afford to pay attention to them.

In under-resourced communities, the opposite is often true. Classrooms are overcrowded. After-school programs are limited. Healthcare systems are strained. Counselors and social workers are spread thin. Mentorship, when available, is often sporadic. The result is not a lack of care so much as a scarcity of sustained attention.

Addressing this gap requires a shift in focus—from correcting individual deficits to expanding system capacity. Children need reliable access to adult support across the environments they move through. This means lower adult-to-child ratios in schools, enrichment programs, mentorship settings, healthcare environments, and youth employment programs. It means creating conditions in which attention is not a scarce resource available only to the affluent.

Alongside this structural support, other elements contribute to resilience. Children benefit from a sense of belonging—of being valued within their families and communities. They benefit from opportunities to contribute, to be recognized, and to see their efforts matter. They also benefit from predictable pathways forward that reduce uncertainty and reinforce long-term planning.

One of the most important of these pathways is access to post-secondary opportunity. Whether through academic education, technical training, apprenticeships, or skilled trades, the expectation that further learning and advancement are possible should not depend on income. Middle-class children often grow up with an implicit guarantee that if they work hard and succeed academically, opportunities will follow. For many poor children, that relationship between effort and reward is far less certain. A system that guarantees educational opportunity in response to commitment and achievement helps restore faith that effort has meaning and that the future is not closed off in advance.

This expectation can be reinforced through direct investment in children. A savings or allowance structure—something like a GI Bill for children—can signal that society has a stake in their future. Instead of waiting until young people are already burdened by debt or instability, the investment would begin early and accumulate gradually through childhood and adolescence.

This framework also begins earlier than adolescence. Increasingly, researchers and policymakers have emphasized the importance of birth equity, maternal health, and early-childhood stability in shaping long-term outcomes. Proposals such as baby bonds—publicly funded savings accounts established for children at birth—reflect the growing recognition that inequality compounds over time. Connecting these early investments to later educational and workforce opportunities creates continuity across childhood rather than treating each stage of development as a separate policy problem.

Taken together, these elements form the basis of resilience—not as an abstract personality trait, but as a product of sustained, structured support.

The Model in Practice: Resilience Ranges

One way to think about how these ideas might work together in practice is through a community-based framework of service and development that might be called Resilience Ranges. The point is not to propose a single national program to be adopted uniformly across the country, but to illustrate how education, mentorship, healthcare, meaningful work, and long-term investment might be coordinated under a shared developmental umbrella.

In this sense, Resilience Ranges functions less as a fixed institutional blueprint than as a thought experiment—a way of imagining how communities could organize interlocking supports so that children encounter continuity rather than fragmentation as they move from childhood into adulthood.

At its core, the model adapts elements of national service programs to a local context and extends them to younger participants. It is designed to begin in middle school and continue through high school, creating a continuous experience rather than a one-time intervention.

In middle school, participation would be voluntary and exploratory. Students could choose to engage in weekend service activities, much as they might choose to join a sports team or an arts program. The goal at this stage is exposure—introducing the idea that contributing to one’s community is both valuable and expected.

In high school, participants would take on a more formal role as “Rangers.” They would engage in structured service on weekends and during the summer, working with community-based organizations across a range of fields. This work would be compensated, with stipends directed in part toward future education and training.

The activities themselves would vary depending on local needs. Some communities might emphasize environmental restoration, public-health outreach, elder care, tutoring, food systems, or neighborhood improvement projects. Others might partner with unions, technical schools, hospitals, libraries, or local businesses to expose students to skilled trades and professional pathways.

Existing apprenticeship systems already demonstrate that structured, hands-on learning tied to real work can provide both economic mobility and a stronger sense of direction for young people. Programs such as Year Up have also shown that combining mentorship, technical training, and workplace experience can significantly improve employment outcomes for young adults.

Earlier community-based experiments also demonstrated the value of linking education, service, and guaranteed opportunity. One initiative developed through the New World Foundation (where Colin Greer serves as president), known as COIN, supported high school students selected not primarily for academic performance but for leadership potential. Participants worked in community organizations during high school and were guaranteed college support if accepted into post-secondary programs. During college, they returned to community work during the summers with paid stipends, allowing them to continue developing skills and civic engagement without abandoning their educational goals for unrelated work. The model reinforced the relationship between contribution, education, and opportunity.

What matters most is that the work is real, connected to community priorities, and carried out alongside experienced adults who can provide guidance, accountability, and encouragement.

Through this structure, several objectives are met simultaneously. Students gain work experience and practical skills. They form relationships with adults and peers in a structured setting. They contribute to their communities in visible ways. And they begin to see a connection between their efforts and their future opportunities.

Just as important, the model reinforces consistent access to adult support. Mentorship is not an optional add-on, but an embedded feature of the work itself. Attention is built into the structure, not left to chance.

Over time, this experience can shape how young people see themselves—not as passive recipients of services, but as participants in a shared civic project.

What Communities Can Do

While national and state policies are essential, much of the work of supporting children happens at the community level. This is where institutions intersect, where policies are implemented, and where daily life unfolds.

One practical step communities can take is to adopt a simple yet powerful standard: evaluate all policies and decisions by their impact on children. This “child-impact audit” can be applied across domains—from budgeting and land use to transportation, education, environmental planning, and public health.

The purpose is not to create an additional layer of bureaucracy, but to introduce a consistent question into decision-making: how will this affect the children in our community? If the impact is negative, what barriers prevent change?

Such an approach can be supported by partnerships with local universities or research institutions that help analyze data, identify patterns, and evaluate outcomes. It can also create a shared language for discussing priorities and trade-offs.

A second step is to build and sustain a local ecosystem of service opportunities. Programs like Resilience Ranges depend on the presence of community-based organizations, schools, healthcare institutions, libraries, and local employers that are willing to collaborate. By aligning these actors around a common goal—supporting youth development—communities can create a more coherent system.

This work is inherently local. It reflects the specific needs, resources, and capacities of each place. But the underlying principle remains consistent: communities are not just sites of need, but also sites of action.

For such a system to succeed, responsibility would have to be shared across public and private institutions. Local governments could provide coordination and baseline funding, while schools, nonprofits, employers, labor unions, healthcare providers, and higher education institutions would contribute opportunities, mentorship, training, and facilities.

Community organizations already possess deep knowledge of local conditions, but they are often underfunded and disconnected from broader educational and economic support systems. A coordinated model would treat these organizations not as peripheral charities, but as essential civic infrastructure.

In this context, “public-private” refers to collaboration among public institutions, community organizations, nonprofits, labor groups, educational institutions, and responsible private-sector partners. The goal is not to transfer responsibility away from the public sphere, but to align existing institutions around the shared task of supporting children and adolescents.

Some critics may argue that such a system would be too expensive, too bureaucratic, or too difficult to scale nationally. Others may worry that formalizing youth service risks institutionalizing childhood too heavily or placing excessive responsibility on schools and local governments. These concerns are legitimate and deserve consideration.

Yet the costs of fragmentation are already immense. Societies pay for youth instability in other ways: emergency healthcare, incarceration, unemployment, untreated mental-health conditions, and lost economic potential. The question is not whether resources will be spent, but whether they will be spent proactively or reactively.

The aim is not to build a massive national bureaucracy with identical programs in every community. What must scale is the vision: the recognition that children deserve sustained support, meaningful opportunity, and consistent care. The practical responses themselves must remain local, shaped by the needs, institutions, and capacities of individual communities. A national framework can provide encouragement, sustained support and commitment, funding, and shared purpose while still allowing care to remain rooted in local relationships and realities.

Guaranteeing the Future

For such a system to function effectively, it must include a clear commitment to the future of the children it serves. This means more than providing services in the present. It means ensuring that pathways forward are real and accessible.

Financial investment is one part of this commitment. Savings accounts, stipends, and education funds can provide a tangible foundation for future plans. They signal that effort will be met with support.

Access to post-secondary education is another essential part of the commitment. Whether through community colleges, trade schools, apprenticeship programs, or universities, opportunities for further learning should not depend on a family’s ability to pay.

In communities participating in a model like Resilience Ranges, institutions of higher education could guarantee tuition-free access for students with family incomes below a certain threshold, removing loans and other financial barriers altogether. The goal is not only affordability, but predictability—the assurance that effort and participation will be met with a real pathway forward.

When these elements are aligned—early investment, adolescent engagement, healthcare access, mentorship, and post-secondary opportunity—they form a continuous pathway. The transition from childhood to adulthood becomes less uncertain, less fragmented, and more stable.

Investing in Care as Civic Responsibility

At its core, the question this model raises is not only practical, but moral. What does it mean for a community to care for its children?

Care, in this sense, is not an emergency response. It is not limited to moments of crisis. It is an ongoing commitment, expressed through the systems a society chooses to build and sustain.

Those systems reflect collective values. They determine whether children encounter barriers or opportunities, whether attention is scarce or abundant, and whether the future is uncertain or within reach.

The framework outlined here does not require a complete transformation of society. It operates within existing constraints. But it does require a shift in priorities—a willingness to understand care for children not as charity or emergency response, but as an ongoing civic responsibility.

That responsibility is ultimately encountered locally. Children experience support, neglect, opportunity, and a sense of belonging through the schools, institutions, neighborhoods, and relationships that surround them every day. National vision matters, but care itself is lived at the community level.

Which returns us to the central question: Does your community care about children?

How Propaganda and False Information Are Undermining Humanitarian Work

In today’s post-truth era, where “objective truth” has lost influence in the public sphere, it is becoming increasingly difficult for humanitarians, who seek to preserve human life, to carry out their work.

“The post-truth era has dramatic reper­cussions on humanitarian work, not only because it affects NGOs’ reputation, but also because it presents a distorted vision of the reality of people in need,” says Lubiana Gosp-Server, a humanitarian and development professional.

Humanitarians tackle hidden or poorly understood social issues and help people in difficult or extreme situations. All of this is threatened if people are no longer able to discern what is true or real.

Despite its contemporary prevalence in public discourse, fake news is not new. Propaganda and rumors have always existed and are something that humanitarians increasingly need to manage during the course of their duties, especially in the current “infoglut” environment of being bombarded with information from all sides, which exacerbates the problem.

High levels of propaganda and false information damage public trust and have led people to question whether humanitarians really have humanity’s best interests at heart.

Humanitarian Work and Its Challenges

The modern concept of humanitarianism was born from the founding of the Red Cross after the 1859 Battle of Solferino and the establishment of the First Geneva Convention, which sought to limit harm to human beings, particularly in times of war. Humanitarians uphold a set of moral principles, and though they vary by organization, they usually include high standards of truth, honesty, and integrity.

“At its core, a humanitarian is a person dedicated to reducing suffering and protecting human dignity. Whether in war zones, after natural disasters, or during health emergencies, humanitarians put people first,” explains the nonprofit Action Against Hunger.

Humanitarian organizations are not without their faults. They suffer from several issues, including a lack of accountability to those accessing their services and a history of furthering Western imperialism. Humanitarian organizations, in many instances, are responsible for supporting the political or military agendas of hegemonic powers, which often fund their work.

“NGOs have in many cases become extensions of Western foreign policy. This has most obviously been seen in contexts such as Afghanistan where many NGOs supported and formed an integral part of U.S.-led stabilization activities following the U.S. invasion in 2001,” states Jonathan Whittall, head of humanitarian analysis at Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders (MSF).

Humanitarian aid has also been used as a tool to intervene in and impact a country’s sovereignty, raising concerns about the intent behind the work. For instance, the UN Peacekeeping missions have often aligned with the political interests of the US and other members of the Security Council.

Whittall says that it is essential for humanitarian organizations to stick to their core mission of representing the interests of the marginalized rather than furthering the “interests of the core state,” and that they need to form alliances with social movements, grassroots organizations, etc., to be truly effective. This is necessary for these organizations to “regain their legitimacy and face with integrity the push-back from those in power who see the delivery of assistance as impinging on their political and military strategies.”

Humanitarians also need to be aware of how false information (sometimes called misinformation) and propaganda (sometimes called disinformation) undermine their ability to do their job, worsen already complex crises, harm the people they are trying to help, and can even result in their death.

“The emergence of hybrid conflicts, mixing the spread of harmful information and cyber operations with kinetic operations, creates more suffering for affected populations. Harmful information… hinders the work of humanitarian organizations by calling into question their mandates and intentions, undermining their integrity, and making them and their staff a target of online and offline harassment and violence,” according to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).

Humanitarians are uniquely positioned to help combat this problem by working with communities to address concerns both caused by and arising from the spread of false information.

How Is False Information Spreading and Why?

Some researchers, like Zoë Adams and Magda Osman et al., have argued that concerns about false information causing harmful behavior are “illusory.” “The assumption is that there is a direct causal link between the prevalence and consumption of misinformation and subsequent harmful behaviors. To date, however, this link has not been sufficiently demonstrated,” states their 2023 study, published in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science. They point out that we have shifted from viewing the world via “objective facts” to viewing it via “intersubjectivity,” which they define as “a coordination effort by two or more people to interpret entities in the world through social interaction.” The study adds that there is nothing inherently harmful about this shift and that there may be some benefits to democratizing concepts of truth.

However, there are many circumstances in which an increased amount of false information shared very rapidly has caused human suffering. “Spreading harmful information… could exacerbate the suffering of the most vulnerable people, and humanitarian operations. Harmful information is reported to induce psychological and social harm in both communities affected by conflict and among people serving those communities. Incorrect information prevents communities experiencing humanitarian emergencies from accessing important and lifesaving services, and undermines the ability of humanitarian organizations to deliver and implement effective interventions,” according to the Lancet.

Understanding how false information and propaganda spread and how they influence people helps us determine what can be done about it. As Mark Thomas Kennedy, from the Imperial College of London, argues, “Unless you understand how people consume information and learn, you’re not going to be able to have anything more than a conversation in which you’re shouted down or dismissed.”

According to a 2021 MIT study, most people are unaware that they are sharing false information online. However, other studies have indicated that a small population seeks to deceive—motivations for sharing disinformation range from financial to ideological. Based on a 2022 survey conducted in the U.S., researchers found that 14 percent of people were aware that the information they shared on social media was false. They also concluded that participants who “[share] false political information online” tend to be a specific type of person: they report having anti-social behavioral traits, such as a psychological need for chaos, a tendency toward psychopathy, sadism and paranoia; are more likely to have positive feelings for extremist groups like QAnon, the Proud Boys and white supremacists; and harbor desires to run for office and support political violence. Evidence also suggests that foreign governments are responsible for spreading false information in attempts to influence global affairs and shape political outcomes.

Another factor to consider in the spread of propaganda and false information online is technology itself. Social media is the new epicenter of harmful information. Investigations by Amnesty International found that X’s “For You” page is designed to promote content that provokes outrage, heated exchanges, and reactions—otherwise known as “engagement.” Decisions to allow influencers with a track record of sharing fake content with their followers on social media platforms to spread that information can be directly linked to an increase in fake online news.

The rapid development of large language models (or LLMs), also known as AI, has led to a surge in computer-generated images. Now, stock image platforms like Adobe are allowing computer-generated content to be purchased from their libraries without any warning about whether the image is real. Worryingly, AI is increasingly spreading false information in its responses to the public’s queries. As people shift from asking “experts” for information, they have less control over the false information they are consuming. Not only do these models contain in-programmed biases, but they are also “hallucinating” inaccurate information. All of this has consequences for humanitarians and how they can perform their job effectively.

How False Information and Lack of Trust Are Impacting Humanitarian Work

According to the Lancet, “Complex humanitarian settings have become fertile environments for spreading misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation.” The situation is especially stressful for those witnessing humanitarian emergencies, as it is very challenging to distinguish between false and beneficial messages, given the sheer volume of information available on social media platforms.

The challenge of countering propaganda and false information becomes more difficult if people do not trust humanitarian organizations as reliable sources. “Unfortunately, too many human-rights NGOs—both large and small—suffer from a crisis of credibility. Persistent questions about their sources of funding, political bias, and lack of due diligence undermine the reliability of the information they espouse,” points out an article in the National Interest.

To understand how propaganda and trust affect humanitarian work, we examine its effects across three key areas of humanitarian work: global health, war and conflict, and support for refugees and asylum seekers:

Global Health

As writer and journalist Erica X Eisen states in her 2021 essay, hesitancy and propaganda campaigns around vaccines are as old as the first vaccine. Earlier, false information casting doubt on vaccines was limited to one or two pamphlets; it can now be found in hundreds of posts, articles, and videos being consumed daily. The World Health Organization (WHO) has labeled the rapid spread of misinformation as “infodemics” and sees it as a direct threat to public health. “Fake news spreads faster and more easily than this virus and is just as dangerous,” WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic. In a review, the WHO found that 51 percent of posts talking about vaccinations contained false information.

During a disease outbreak, combating vaccine hesitancy has become a key part of the humanitarian response, taking up time and resources. The British Red Cross launched a campaign to dispel false information to support the COVID-19 vaccine rollout in the UK, and UNICEF released a “Vaccine Misinformation Management Field Guide” for its workers.

To a certain extent, this hesitancy is understandable for new vaccines, as well as in communities where vaccines are less common or where they’ve led to avoidable negative experiences, for instance, due to unethical practices by international organizations. “In 2010, the Gates Foundation funded experimental malaria and meningitis vaccine trials across Africa and HPV vaccine programs in India. All of these programs resulted in numerous deaths and injuries, with accounts of forced vaccinations and uninformed consent,” according to an article by Sharmeen Ahmed in the Annual Survey of International and Comparative Law.

The lack of priority to human life over profits by pharma companies during the COVID-19 pandemic also contributed to vaccine hesitancy. As Gloria Giraldo of Latino Health Access pointed out in 2021, the inequities in the distribution of vaccines globally could result in “skepticism about the motives of vaccine makers and public health officials… especially among immigrants.”

Humanitarian organizations’ mistrust of local populations exacerbates the situation further. During the Ebola outbreak in 2014 in West Africa, aid organizations stereotyped the locals as “irrational, fearful, violent and primitive: as too ignorant to change.” This resulted in the treatment intervention focusing on “central, resource-intensive facilities, ignoring for months ‘responses and strategies that engage with and rely on communities,’” stated an ICRC blog.

Humanitarians need to be better equipped to navigate the issues of distrust and false information around public health and have been taking necessary measures to do so. When vaccine hesitancy becomes too widespread, it becomes very difficult to address and interferes with the ability of humanitarians to preserve human life.

“Measles, whooping cough, and other vaccine-preventable diseases are on the rise around the world, and cuts to foreign aid, coupled with growing vaccine hesitancy, and persistent gaps in vaccine access are fueling outbreaks in poor and wealthy nations alike,” states the Council on Foreign Relations.

Results from a randomized 2021 trial indicated that false information about COVID-19 vaccines “lowered the intent of recipients to vaccinate,” according to the BMJ. Missing vaccinations directly causes outbreaks of disease and preventable deaths. Previously controlled diseases like measles and meningitis are spreading in direct relation to an increase in the number of children missing their routine vaccines. These could lead to future epidemics. Resources used to tackle easily preventable diseases detract from the work needed to tackle other diseases or disasters.

In 2025, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. asked the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention “to cast aside its long-held position that vaccines do not cause autism,” stated the Politico. These unfounded claims amplify the spread of propaganda and are used to justify cuts to funding for international organizations supporting vital vaccine drives. Communities in conflict particularly rely on humanitarian organizations to deliver vaccines, and children are most vulnerable without proper vaccinations. These circumstances could lead to more children dying if humanitarian organizations have fewer resources and are overstretched trying to tackle vaccine hesitancy in countries where vaccines are available.

War and Conflict

The development of fake images and videos is increasingly becoming a problem in conflict situations. Since the 1850s, photography has changed people’s perceptions of war and conflict by depicting the harsh realities faced by average soldiers and civilians. Since then, we’ve regarded photographs and videos as factual, trustworthy evidence, especially for documenting human conflict and humanitarian work.

To a certain extent, the idea that photography and videos depict truth has always been an illusion. As soon as photography was invented, so was doctoring or staging photographs. However, the ability to create fake images was reserved for people with specific skills and knowledge. Now, anyone with internet access can create a fake image and spread it online within minutes. Already, misleading AI depictions of war zones are being created.

Images have a deep impact on how we perceive truth. Humanitarians have relied heavily on powerful images to communicate the necessity of their work and draw attention to human suffering. Conflict is inherently chaotic and secretive, and conveying the on-the-ground reality to those not experiencing it is difficult. Images, however, have proven useful in demonstrating the reality of conflict. There is a real risk that fake images can mislead people about the events taking place during conflicts and can reduce the power of visual media to change hearts and minds.

More tangibly, fake images or false reports about a conflict can make it more difficult for humanitarians to hold people accountable for breaking international humanitarian law (IHL). When an explosion killed hundreds of people at the Al Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza in October 2023, a storm of fake images, misleading videos, and unsubstantiated claims took over social media, making it very difficult for experts to understand who was accountable for attacking the hospital (a protected building under IHL). As a senior researcher at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, John Scott-Railton explained, such a large volume of false information is a “uniquely unhelpful” environment for truth and accountability. Indeed, propaganda has played a huge role in conflicts. An environment where nothing can be trusted allows both sides to denounce all reporting and evidence of human rights abuses as “fake.” This is most evident in the campaign to discredit journalists in Gaza, which is being used to justify killing them.

This compounds an alarming trend of weakening IHL and the values on which humanitarianism is founded. Erica Harper, head of research and policy studies at the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights, explains that “International humanitarian law stands at a crossroads… violations that were once considered shocking exceptions have become persistent, widespread, and too often tolerated.”

In March 2025, 15 paramedics and first responders, including eight Palestinian Red Crescent paramedics, were killed by the Israeli military. After the attack, the Israeli military said that the incident was a result of “professional failures,” with the troops opening fire “on what they believed to be a ‘tangible threat’ amid what the military called an ‘operational misunderstanding,’” according to CNN. Similar claims have been made about hospitals being used to hide combatants in both the Israel-Palestine conflict and the Russia-Ukraine conflict. This doesn’t just harm humanitarians; it harms civilians. This narrative suggests that any civilian building used as shelter is now fair game for attack.

Another aspect harming humanitarian work in these situations is the lack of trust in these organizations. To be truly effective, nonprofits and international agencies need to build and maintain trust in communities. A 2025 Washington Post article pointed to a situation where a mother of three in South Sudan refused to take airdropped food supplies that bore the flag of the country that had bombarded her village.

Refugees and Asylum Seekers

Misunderstandings about the rights and circumstances of people who seek asylum in other countries have long been an issue for humanitarian organizations. Although a 2024 Ipsos survey showed that global attitudes toward people seeking sanctuary remained broadly positive, sentiment was less positive in Western nations. In general, people confuse refugees (people fleeing persecution or danger) and migrants (people moving to a new country for familial or economic reasons). This environment of uncertainty is a breeding ground for propaganda. “Migration is an ideal topic for those pushing lies and half-truths to spread confusion, fear, anger, or prejudice. It is a complex phenomenon where the facts can be difficult to ascertain or explain,” wrote Alberto-Horst Neidhardt and Paul Butcher for the Migration Policy Institute.

This becomes particularly problematic when this topic is prominently featured in public discourse and contains factually incorrect information. In 2024, a year of elections internationally, migration was a key issue for voters. For a long time now, migration has been blamed for a decline in standards of living in the West, fueled by continuous propaganda. People seeking asylum (or migrants more generally) are often wrongly targeted for causing housing scarcity, overwhelming the health care system, and taking away jobs from citizens, despite evidence to the contrary.

People tend to overestimate the number of immigrants in their country. There are persistent claims in the UK, Canada, and other countries that asylum seekers or migrants receive substantial assistance from the government upon arrival, despite this not being true. During the 2024 U.S. election, stereotypical claims that Haitian migrants in Ohio were eating people’s pets became a key point of debate. Politicians increasingly focus on attacking migrants and use terminology like “illegal aliens” to dehumanize people and stoke further confusion about their right to be in the country.

“From Afghanistan to Ukraine and beyond, each development concerning global migrant flows or the management of cultural diversity can give rise to a new stream of disinformation, with significant consequences for policymaking, public discourse, and social relations. Conspiracy theories are also frequently used as a rhetorical tool by far-right movements and nativist politicians to advocate for hardline anti-immigration policies and mobilize their voters,” explain Horst Neidhardt and Butcher.

False claims about immigrants influence how people vote and encourage people to support politicians who offer “solutions.” For example, according to the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Refugees report, there is clear evidence that “offering safe and legal routes can help to reduce irregular migration and limit loss of life,” by reducing the number of people crossing the English Channel by boat. The British government has, however, chosen a hardline approach to this social issue. Channel crossings result in people’s deaths, but politicians are more interested in appeasing voters, whose opinions are largely influenced by harmful information, than in offering genuine solutions.

Humanitarian schemes to provide support for refugees and asylum seekers are failing thanks to false information. These campaigns focus our attention on attacking “the other” rather than on addressing chronic societal issues. They create hostility in diverse communities and threaten people’s rights to seek safety during dangerous situations.

“Humanitarian organizations have struggled with how best to protect refugees and other vulnerable people from the harms caused by hate speech and false information,” states the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). The organization found that the escalation of violence against the Rohingya in Myanmar resulted from social media platforms spreading disinformation and hate speech against them. Situations like this lead to questioning of “vital protection information” that humanitarians are required to share during such a crisis.

Failure by humanitarian organizations to meet migrants’ needs is also eroding the trust people place in them. “[T]he vast humanitarian needs of migrants in vulnerable situations are, for a variety of reasons, often not being fully met. These migrants also often have only a fragile trust in humanitarian organizations. … When organizations do not remain independent or are not perceived as such, this jeopardizes their ability to serve migrants in need. Protecting individuals’ data, avoiding involvement with governments’ implementation of immigration policies, and carefully considering whether to support activities such as returns has immediate implications for real or perceived independence and affects migrants’ trust,” stated a Migration Policy Institute 2023 article.

Potential Solutions to the Misinformation Problem

The UNICEF “Vaccine Misinformation Management Field Guide” starts by emphasizing that staff shouldn’t be distracted by the falsehoods. It tells humanitarians on the ground to be aware that people are understandably distressed in times of crisis and encourages them to listen to and address genuine concerns. As the American Psychological Association explains, people are more likely to believe misinformation when they are anxious since they appeal to emotions like fear and anger. They are looking for confirmation of what they already believe; they are putting their trust in the idea that comforts them, which tells them they were right all along. This gets to the crux of solving the problem of propaganda: trust.

If the post-truth era reflects a shift in people’s understanding of whom or what to trust, it should also reflect a shift in how we earn people’s trust. Former president of the International Federation of the Red Cross, Francesco Rocca, puts it succinctly when he said, “When people don’t trust us, then our ability to help them—to do what we are supposed to do—is eroded.”

If people trust a person or an organization, they are more likely to listen to what they have to say versus the random information they read online. Only through building strong levels of trust can we encourage people to question their own beliefs and accept alternative viewpoints. Humanitarian organizations need to understand that they cannot expect trust; they have to earn it. We have seen how people are easily won over by words and images, even false ones. However, trust can also be easily lost when not accompanied by action.

Humanitarians should demonstrate solutions to people’s problems and take action on their concerns. They should work harder to tackle poverty and inequality. Research has suggested that low GDP levels correlate with a lack of trust. Every community has its own issues. Communities struggling to access basic amenities and consistently let down by government institutions are less likely to trust others.

Humanitarian organizations also have to ask who should build this trust and deliver the information to communities. The international aid model or humanitarian system reflects a “colonial mindset,” says Kennedy Odede, head of Shining Hope for Communities that works in Kenyan slums, and ignores the “cultural knowledge” of grassroots organizations. “They believe they can just walk into a community and they’ll solve the problem if they have enough money, but that’s not how you create change.”

Evidence shows that people are more likely to trust members of their own in-groups. Efforts to build trust and tackle false information should therefore come from within the community. More responsibility and influence should be given to grassroots leaders and groups to build trust, challenge misconceptions, deliver services, and communicate accurate information within communities.

“Understanding where and how communities obtain their information will help… [humanitarians] identify who they trust and the main channels they use to communicate,” states Frontline Negotiations. This can help an individual or an organization develop a plan to counter propaganda before it becomes widespread.

Once trust is built, a clear strategy is required to ensure that effective communication addresses false information and challenges the bias and preconceived beliefs. Studies have suggested that using a storytelling approach to present facts makes the information easier to digest and understand.

These tactics respond to false information, but is there a way to reduce it? The United Nations suggests that states promote free and independent media rather than introducing curbs to reduce the spread of misinformation.

“Some States have carried out digital and media literacy programs to enable more resilient and meaningful participation online. Such initiatives serve to promote critical thinking skills that empower people to identify, dispel and debunk disinformation. States should also invest in tools and mechanisms that support independent fact-checking with the participation of journalists and civil society,” the organization adds.

We also have to do more to hold people accountable for the harm their decision-making inflicts, whether those are politicians and military generals who intentionally use false information to manipulate, or tech companies that allow false and harmful content to proliferate in society.

While there is no definitive way to ensure that all information in the world is honest and true, humanitarians can do their bit by building trust within communities and responding to people’s concerns to help counter propaganda and mitigate harm. This should be a top priority for humanitarian organizations, as it falls within their remit to preserve human life.

The ICRC has pointed to three ways in which humanitarian organizations can combat misinformation: During a conflict, protecting those most affected by the misinformation should be the top priority. Secondly, the “resilience and agency” of the people and community should be strengthened. Thirdly, humanitarian organizations should ensure “principled humanitarian action in the digital age” both offline and online.

Combating false information requires coordinated efforts at all levels. At the global level, as rising conflicts make humanitarian work more important, what is needed is a collaboration platform rooted within the humanitarian architecture to help frame a common agenda. This could include developing a joint advocacy position on online platforms, increasing collaboration, and pooling resources wherever necessary.

How Consciousness Shapes Culture, Communication, and Shared Meaning

This piece explores human consciousness as the foundational engine of culture, tracing its evolution from early social learning in infants to the sophisticated shared meanings of prehistoric human communities. It examines how social consciousness—joint attention and reciprocal mirroring—enabled humans to transmit knowledge, develop language, and coordinate culturally, creating a feedback loop between individual and collective consciousness. The article draws on biology, anthropology, and linguistics, including case studies like Nicaraguan Sign Language, to illustrate how shared meaning emerges. Its central argument: consciousness facilitates transmissive teaching and learning, which underpins human cultural evolution and the cumulative growth of knowledge across generations.

Consciousness as Cognitive Filter 

Research suggests that human consciousness evolved as a cognitive filter, privileging and amplifying human-communicative inputs as a foundation for language development, transmissive teaching and learning, and, ultimately, culture.

Fortunately, humans do not wait for a full understanding of things before they converse about them. Love is a good example, perhaps the best one. We have been talking about, singing about, painting, and dancing around “love” almost certainly from the beginning of our species’s communicative existence, and yet, what exactly love is, is a real question we could take up in earnest at any time without embarrassment. The same goes for concepts like maturity, character, respect, common sense, trust, leadership, normalcy, and, of course, consciousness. We can often do no better than to say merely that we know these things when we see them.

When humans do recognize consciousness, they tend to agree on a set of similar intuitive descriptions: it is like an inner self capable of observing our mental activity, an inner witness, or a piece of cerebral machinery that equips its owner with the sense that “I am” and “what it’s like to be me.”

We tend to speak of consciousness as something uniquely human, even after accounting for our scientific ignorance and allowing for the possibility of consciousness in “lower” animals, individual cells, or the entire universe.

Biological science furnishes us with its own constraining assumptions and intuitions about human consciousness: it likely evolved in some way across vast expanses of time; its roots likely stretch far back into prehistory; and it likely served, and perhaps continues to serve, an important purpose or set of purposes for the human species that possesses it, purposes that remain a mystery.

To this array of conversational and scientific intuitions, let us add those of archaeologists and anthropologists. The appearance of sophisticated tool refinement, the creation of art, the rise of elaborate burials, and the evolution of organized communities in the archaeological record are physical marks that are quintessentially human, indicators of consciousness, and as mysterious as they are.

It is likely that our various intuitions about consciousness are mostly true and that the mysteries connect. That is, human consciousness not only supplies us with a seemingly dualistic sense of “inner self” but also the one that represents the first click of the ratchet effect—the process responsible for cultural evolution and believed to be behind organized settlements, tool refinement, and art.

An infant sticks out its tongue, and their parent sticks out theirs. This phenomenon is known as human reciprocal mirroring. It is how social learning occurs. The infant imitates, then, crucially, pauses to monitor the parent’s reaction. Although non-human apes can occasionally manage this kind of behavioral imitation, they do not engage in reciprocal mirroring. In human infant-parent communication, each is aware that the other is aware that they are aware, a recursive process that represents an alignment of consciousness that goes back to the start of life. The infant is ready to be both observer and participant, actor and audience. It just needs the content of human social life (the scenes, experience, and knowledge) to start putting meat on the bones of this “inner self,” which is shaped by a rapidly changing social world. This same process of experience and learning from others is what gives social learning its footing. Nearly everything the infant will learn in its life will occur through this process.

What this exchange shows is that human consciousness, both social and individual, is what makes cumulative human culture possible. From the start, the mind is built to align with other minds, allowing knowledge to move between people and persist across time. Meaning is not merely passed along but stabilized and carried forward through this recursive awareness, so that what is learned does not vanish with the learner but becomes part of a shared, revisitable world.

How did our species arrive at this moment where all of its newest members are ready to learn, quickly and accurately, how to communicate?

Social Consciousness

Our story is generally thought to have started around 300,000 to 400,000 years ago with the consolidation of human social consciousness. This capacity can be described as “the spontaneous adoption of another person’s perspective,” as in the relationship between a parent and their infant. The increasing strength of this mutual attention in humans—especially, among groups of humans—gradually allowed for the generation of joint representations, or ‘objectified,’ agreed-upon percepts from the surrounding natural and social environments.

Human social consciousness—a term used here as an alternative to joint attention—forms both a literal and a figurative breeding ground for the consciousness we experience now. In simple terms, it can be understood as a communication channel. We witnessed this when the parent and infant were sticking out their tongues; joint attention automatically opens a channel, and the participants, parent and infant, communicatively imitate each other within it. Opening of communication channels also happens in larger groups, even with strangers. Each channel internally represents shared meanings, called joint representations, and participants can now point, imitate, use gestures and movements, vocal pitch, and other, even unintended, signals to coordinate within and across these social situations and explore them. The unconscious, automatic nature of this process is something we very much take for granted. For example, we will follow others across the street at a crosswalk, against the light, even though we are total strangers who have never spoken a word to each other, and never will again. We know without trying that everyone has the same joint representation.

The stage is now set for the gradual evolution of individual consciousness in humans, with tools of social consciousness becoming available to individuals at birth. This evolution allows communities to grow across vast spaces while remaining close-knit. Maybe it began in the Middle Paleolithic era (the Paleolithic era, characterized by the development of stone tools, extended between 3.3 million to 11,700 years ago) when little bands of humans begin to make some cultural progress, but only when they are together physically—a condition that fits well with Merlin Donald’s (1993) view that early human cognition remained heavily dependent on socially enacted forms of representation. This need for proximity makes cultural progress very slow because the necessity of staying together limits the sheer numbers, territorial reach, and outside cultural contacts of these human tribes. Even with a developing language and other signs of modern human sophistication, once a group’s culture became complex beyond a certain limit, generational change under social consciousness, without a robust individual consciousness, could only sustain it, not grow it further.

Shared Meaning: Gestures, Signs, and Grammars

It is reasonably likely that human tribes that were most successful at creating joint representations (i.e., shared meanings) across time and distance—quickly learning them, remembering them, and, importantly, coordinating themselves to them—were much better at adapting to the rapidly changing climates of the Pleistocene Epoch (from 3 million to 12,000 years ago).

Although they may not have had words at first, their emerging communication channels were by no means empty of content. A fairly sophisticated “folk physics” did not have to be effortfully shared and developed. For example, each member of the “superorganism” (groups of humans) automatically brings with them the intuition that “what goes up must come down,” which becomes part of objective joint representations. Similarly, humans experience shared emotions and shared inferences without words. Thus, humans started this process of developing shared meanings across time and space already equipped with several joint-representational hooks on which they could hang new vocabulary and new evidence of shared meaning. The shared landscape and environment also provided physical hooks: the stars are in relatively fixed positions, the mountains in the distance do not move, a nearby tree appears human-like, deviations from routine are noticeable, and certain animals predictably appear at specific locations at specific times. These stable representations become, for creatures with social and then individual consciousness, objects around which shared meaning becomes centered.

How did humans use these hooks to build language, constructing shared meanings outside immediate experience? As Israeli linguistic theorist Daniel Dor explains in his book The Instruction of Imagination, language was not a ready-made code inside individual minds but a public technology, one which groups of humans gradually invented to instruct one another’s imaginations. Speakers turned subjective experiences into compact, conventional instructions that helped listeners construct similar scenes in their minds. This process involves a mutually agreed-upon sign and its use in various situations. In this view, language (not just words, but a shared emotional, conceptual, and coordinative meaning) exists between people as a network of norms and conventions.

Functionally, the process, which follows the usage-based, joint-attention model of language development articulated by Michael Tomasello in Origins of Human Communication, can be summarized in a few steps:

  1. Anchor

A speaker points or otherwise recruits joint attention to a salient, shared experience and pairs it with a form, for example, a gesture or sound. Gesture is often the most effective starting point, with pantomime and pointing supplying the first instructions, and vocalizations or hand signs becoming more useful as conventions accumulate.

  1. Mutual identification

Others agree that this experience counts as the anchor for that form.

  1. Generalization 

Over repeated use, the group decides, often implicitly, what meanings the form can cover and where new distinctions deserve new signs.

  1. Linkage

Signs (shared meanings) acquire relations to one another (e.g., exclusions, where the part can stand for the whole, causal links), building the basis of a language.

  1. Procedural streamlining

Recurrent instruction patterns harden into grammar—negotiated constraints and sequencing routines that make the “instructions to imagine” faster and more reliable.

Dor emphasizes that this technology is negotiated and prone to error and repair; this is what real-time technology looks like.

Real-world cases echo these dynamics. In Nicaraguan Sign Language, for example, beginning in the late 1970s, children built a new language across cohorts. Earlier cohorts established basic conventional signs, and later cohorts introduced grammatical devices that segment and recombine events more systematically. Similar development of the structure of sign language, for instance, is also documented for Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language. And of course, sign language has rules just as spoken language does.

These cases show communal anchoring, cohort-by-cohort generalization, and the crystallization of grammatical procedures, just what Dor’s book (and title)—“Instruction of the Imagination”—would predict for a socially engineered signal system and communication technology.

Individual Consciousness

This work of language building, of building shared meaning with language as an important byproduct, was inevitable. A shared external code of some kind, a public semantic code linking private experiences to each other, was really the only solution to solitude.

It was in this selection environment that individual traits that make people “better” contributors to the communal technology of shared meaning were selected. Some of the implicit evaluation criteria include: effective anchors; sensitivity to others’ attention and intentions; memory for conventions; rapid learning and generalization of these conventions; and fluency in applying them.

The pressures on our prehistoric human ancestors to construct shared meanings converged in ecological (territorial reach, dietary variety, etc.), social (group maintenance, teaching and learning, etc.), and sexual selection (communicative display, listener selectivity, etc.). This merging produced generations of human individuals increasingly ready to participate in, extend, and stabilize the shared code, or, again, the set of shared meanings, of a community.

Infant brains show specialized responses to human voices; they can distinguish the structure of speech from other signals long before they have any vocabulary or comprehension. When it comes to sight, human faces, bodies, and body parts, human movements, and gait are all attentionally prioritized. Even scenes of people interacting are selectively highlighted in the brain. Touch (stroking, caressing, holding, etc.) also plays an important role in transmitting communication.

With both social consciousness and individual consciousness in place, humans inherit two selves: a “we + me” communicative social self and a private self. Subjective awareness is the result of the social self communicating about its private experiences internally, or, more often, simply being automatically ready to do so.

The Purpose of Consciousness

Research on shared human intentionality and gene-culture coevolution thus suggests that social and individual consciousness together enabled human cultural evolution to develop in tandem with the biological evolution of the species. Children could now rapidly learn their culture’s shared code, but, much more importantly, consciousness enabled them to more rapidly learn their culture’s shared meanings, which are only partially represented in the society’s language. These shared meanings become important knowledge that supports the tribe’s ability to survive and flourish. The human child comes ready to communicate and, thus, ready to contribute to those shared meanings.

Although many factors contribute to the success of Homo sapiens, the capacity for transmissive cultural teaching and learning, especially enabled and catalyzed by human consciousness, is a uniquely powerful factor in that success story. Paul L. Harris shows that humans learn almost everything they know from what epistemologists call “testimony”—learning from other humans, explicitly and communicatively. This includes learning about yourself and teaching others about who you think you are.

Children today learn voraciously, from language to the unwritten rules of playground games to the rhythms of popular music. As they grow older, they learn the shifting trends of dress and slang that define peer groups, how to behave on first dates, how to work at a first job, how to manage different identities (such as online versus offline personas), and how to cope with the loss of a loved one. This kind of knowledge simply cannot be had or shared without the presence and action of others, and it comprises a good deal of what we consider crucial to our lives.

The evidence, compiled across the literature and detailed in Knowledge and Power in Prehistoric Societies by Lynne Kelly, The Secret of Our Success by Joseph Henrich, and The Prehistory of the Mind by Steven Mithen, suggests that knowledge transmission and storage were also very important in the lives of prehistoric humans. Transmissions (teachings) were crafted to be memorable. So they were represented in stories and couched in memorably fantastic myths, which were danced, sung, written, or drawn in various ways to ensure preservation from one generation to the next. Kelly also argues quite powerfully that neurodiversities such as autism, dyslexia, and ADHD have likely been with our species from the beginning of its cultural evolutionary journey, and provide significant benefits to variability in working with, maintaining, and transmitting verbal and spatial information within human culture.

Conclusion 

Transmissive teaching and learning, which are the essence of cultural evolution, are our species’ superpower. And if that is the case, then human consciousness is the focus and form that this transmissive life inevitably takes. It is the capacity that allows meanings first exchanged between people to be carried forward, revisited, recombined, and answered for even in their absence.

There is very little mystery, in our view, as to why it emerges where meaning must be shared, preserved, and acted upon. When we understand these terms—teaching and learning—broadly, we see that they cover much more in our lives than “educating” narrowly defined. We transmit consolations and threats, and we offer congratulations and doubts; we explain, issue warnings, express commitments, and invite trust or resistance.

In doing so, we break out of our solitude. We come to know the world, ourselves, and others through meanings that did not originate with us, and we take action on that knowledge, for better or worse, within a web of shared expectations that long predates any single mind.

Understanding News Fatigue—and How to Stay Informed Without Overload

Beginning the day with digital news consumption often subjects individuals to a barrage of negative information—including environmental crises, political volatility, and health advisories—before the workday has even begun. For many people, this has become the quiet, unremarkable texture of daily life. And for many of those same people, it has become exhausting as well. That exhaustion has a name: news fatigue—the state of emotional and cognitive overwhelm that results from sustained exposure to news, leaving people feeling drained, anxious, or simply numb. It has become more prevalent over the last decade, driven by a structurally limitless media environment. Where previous generations received news in finite, bounded packages—an evening broadcast, or the morning newspaper—today’s always-on information landscape makes it harder than ever to know when enough is enough.

The psychological costs of this shift are real and well-documented. One recent survey performed by the American Psychological Association found that 73 percent of Americans reported being overwhelmed by the number of crises facing the world. Research consistently links heavy news consumption to elevated anxiety, disrupted sleep, and a diminished sense of personal agency. For many, the stress creates a desire to tune out the noise entirely. And yet, as psychologists are quick to point out, disengagement carries its own costs. When news fatigue evolves into news avoidance, people cut themselves off from information essential to their health, community, and political participation.

This is the central tension at the heart of news fatigue: the pull between two legitimate and competing needs—staying informed and staying sane. This article examines what news fatigue is, why the modern media environment makes it so difficult to escape, and what researchers and mental health professionals recommend for those who want to remain engaged with the world without sacrificing their well-being.

The Psychology Behind News Fatigue

To understand why so many people are disengaging, we have to look at the brain itself. News fatigue is not simply a matter of preference or attention span—it is a physiological response to an information environment our minds were never built to handle. When we encounter alarming headlines, the brain’s amygdala triggers a stress response, flooding the body with cortisol. Under normal circumstances, those levels subside once a threat passes. But when the next breaking alert arrives before the last one has been processed, cortisol remains chronically elevated, contributing to anxiety, disrupted sleep, and difficulty concentrating. Doomscrolling makes this worse. The brain keeps seeking the resolution and closure that the feed never delivers, locking us into a cycle of more consumption and more stress.

Beyond the neurochemistry lies something harder to quantify: the emotional exhaustion of living through what feels like an endless succession of emergencies. Psychologists call this crisis overload—the point at which the accumulation of serious events exceeds a person’s capacity to engage meaningfully with any of them. Most people who detach from the news are not becoming indifferent to suffering; they are protecting themselves from it. When every week brings a new humanitarian crisis or political rupture, the emotional resources required to respond with full attention simply run dry. That tension—knowing the news is stressful yet feeling unable to stop checking it—is itself a symptom of the overload cycle.

News fatigue does not affect everyone equally. Younger adults who consume news primarily through social media encounter it entangled with algorithmic amplification and social pressure, making psychological distance much harder to create. Studies consistently find higher rates of news-related anxiety among Gen Z than older generations. Older adults, more likely to engage through scheduled formats like a morning paper or evening broadcast, benefit from natural boundaries that continuous scrolling does not provide. Heavy, long-term news consumers may develop emotional apathy over time, though whether that represents healthy adaptation or troubling desensitization remains an open question.

For some communities, the toll runs even deeper. Members of marginalized groups who regularly encounter news coverage of violence or injustice directed at people who share their identity face what researchers call vicarious trauma—a compounded psychological burden that goes well beyond general stress. For these readers, engaging with the news is not an abstract civic exercise but something far more personal, making the question of news fatigue not just one of media habits, but of emotional survival.

Signs You Might Be Experiencing News Fatigue

You might be experiencing information overload if you notice shifts in your emotional state, such as heightened anxiety, irritability, or a persistent sense of dread when checking your phone. It can also manifest as apathy—a feeling of emotional numbness or indifference to reports of suffering—as the brain attempts to protect itself from overwhelm. This mental strain may reduce your ability to focus on daily tasks, contribute to a more negative outlook, or leave you feeling burned out by the constantt flow of bad news.

Behavioral changes are often the clearest indicators of news fatigue, characterized by a paradox: wanting to stay informed while feeling drained. You might find yourself avoiding news apps or news-related conversations, engaging in extensive “doomscrolling” where you cannot look away despite the distress, or experiencing an obsessive need to refresh feeds to stay up to date. This behavior is frequently accompanied by an irrational sense of guilt or duty—feeling like a bad citizen or uninformed person for taking a break. Other cues include disrupted sleep patterns, such as insomnia caused by worrying about global events, or physical symptoms like tension headaches and stomach issues.

Recognizing when to pause is essential for protecting your mental well-being before fatigue turns into permanent apathy or severe anxiety. It is time to step back if your news consumption disrupts your daily life, such as missing work deadlines, causing conflict with loved ones, or leaving you unable to feel joy. If your anxiety is no longer just a reaction to a single article but a constant, physical feeling of tension and panic, your brain is demanding a rest. A “news detox” is necessary when your ability to empathize is replaced by indifference, or when you find that the information is providing no value, only overwhelming distress.

Strategies for Staying Informed Without Overload

Managing news fatigue requires moving from passive consumption to an intentional, curated information diet. Start by setting intentional time boundaries, such as scheduling 15-minute check-ins in the morning and evening, and committing to news-free mornings to protect your peace before the day begins. Rather than falling into the trap of endless scrolling, switch to curated daily roundups or newsletters that summarize the key events without the alarmist, 24/7 noise. Additionally, take control of your media experience by choosing print over digital, or audio over video, which reduces the emotional toll of sensationalist visual imagery.

To avoid falling into a state of anxiety or apathy, actively curate your feeds and your emotions by unfollowing sources that rely on outrage and constant alerts. In today’s landscape, it is important to choose trusted, balanced outlets over click-driven media, and to remember that it is acceptable to step away entirely if you feel overwhelmed. Rather than passively absorbing every tragic story, balance your intake of “hard news” with solutions-oriented journalism, which highlights progress, innovations, and positive, proactive responses to global problems.

Technology can be part of the solution; utilize digital tools to enforce these boundaries, such as setting screen time limits on news apps and using content blockers for social media sites that trigger stress. By curating your feeds, you can actively reduce the amount of negative information you see, ensuring your digital environment doesn’t turn into a source of constant, draining panic. Reclaiming your attention from algorithms allows you to stay informed on your own terms.

Finally, manage the emotional weight of current events by turning anxiety into action—such as supporting a cause or engaging in local community issues—rather than feeling paralyzed by events you cannot control. This shift from passive consumption to purposeful action helps combat the feelings of helplessness that fuel news fatigue, allowing you to remain an engaged citizen while preserving your mental and emotional health.

Know When to Unplug

Recognizing that staying informed does not have to come at the expense of emotional stability is essential to prioritizing mental health. Studies show that even 14 minutes of news consumption can raise anxiety levels. Stepping away from information overload or taking a digital sabbatical—intentionally taking a break from smartphones and social media—provides a powerful antidote, helping our brains lower stress and regain a sense of calm. Research has shown that reducing news intake contributes to better mental well-being, while simultaneously giving people time to focus on personal growth and rebuild their coping capacities.

Guidance from the American Psychological Association suggests implementing proactive media restrictions to mitigate compassion fatigue and learned helplessness. This shift toward digital wellness is gaining momentum, notably with a 2025 “flip phone revival” driven by Gen Z to counter addictive algorithmic stimulation. Proponents of digital minimalism, such as author Cal Newport, advocate a “30-day digital declutter” to minimize non-essential technology and restore focus on intentional, analog activities. By establishing firm boundaries—such as disabling notifications or dedicating weekends to off-screen pursuits—individuals can break the cycle of compulsive “doomscrolling” and protect their long-term mental health.

With roughly two-thirds of American adults reporting feeling worn out by the amount of news fatigue, experts and public figures are increasingly advocating for intentional “unplugging” to safeguard mental health. Psychology experts, such as those advising the Jed Foundation and various academic researchers, suggest scheduling specific, limited times for news consumption rather than constantly checking for updates throughout the day. Taking this a step further, author and TED speaker Rolf Dobelli has long championed a total abstinence from news, arguing that cutting it out entirely improves mental clarity and reduces anxiety, a practice that can reduce fear-based cognitive overload. The growing trend of “news avoidance,” acknowledged by experts worldwide, highlights a shift toward selective consumption and represents a necessary, proactive measure to maintain mental well-being amid media fatigue.

A Fundamental Shift

Ultimately, overcoming news fatigue requires a fundamental shift in how we view “staying informed.” Being educated about current events does not necessitate being constantly connected, nor does it require engaging in the high-stress, 24/7 doomscrolling cycle. True, sustainable awareness is about quality over quantity—prioritizing reliable, vetted information over the anxiety-inducing, click-driven breaking news headlines that often dominate social media.

Finding a personal rhythm that respects mental bandwidth is beneficial, such as scheduling two designated 15-minute news sessions per day rather than engaging in constant, impulsive check-ins. Curating feeds to prioritize local or long-form reporting offers necessary context, reducing the burnout often caused by raw, sensationalist outrage. Reconnecting with the offline world—through a walk, a hobby, or a conversation—resets the mind, with the assurance that stories will still be available upon return.

Empower yourself to make these choices without guilt. Taking a break from the headlines is not ignorance; it is an act of self-preservation and emotional maturity. By setting healthy boundaries and curating your information diet, you are not stepping away from the world, but rather engaging with it on your own terms—protected, informed, and present.

Exploring Lyonesse: Where Myth, History, and Rising Seas Collide

For centuries, the waters off Cornwall’s Atlantic coast have kept a secret: the legendary drowned land of Lyonesse. Stories of a prosperous kingdom swallowed overnight by the sea have persisted in Arthurian tales, medieval manuscripts, and Cornish folklore, blurring the line between myth and memory. Some accounts speak of a lone survivor, others of divine punishment, while traces of sunken forests, buildings, walls, and bells beneath the water hint at a landscape lost to rising seas.

Lyonesse is more than a fairy tale: it offers a lens for understanding how humans remember environmental change. From medieval romances to Victorian revivals, the story has captivated imaginations, shaping cultural identity and inspiring speculation about the power of nature and the fragility of human settlements. Here’s what we know, and what may forever remain a mystery about Britain’s most enigmatic lost land.

Legend of Lyonesse

In medieval literature, Lyonesse is most closely associated with Tristan in the 13th-century Prose Tristan, which established him as King Meliodas of Lyonesse’s son. Tristan and Iseult’s tragic love story, fueled by a love potion, unfolds in the kingdom of Lyonesse before it sank, linking romance and legend to a drowned landscape.

Lyonesse is a recognizable location in Arthurian literature, appearing in medieval romances and later popularized in Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s 19th-century Idylls of the King. Sir Thomas Malory’s 15th-century Le Morte d’Arthur also reinforced its existence in the Arthurian canon. Accounts of the kingdom’s drowning vary. Some say a man named Trevelyan survived to tell the tale of how the land vanished, while others liken Lyonesse’s fate to the biblical punishment of Sodom and Gomorrah.

Its submergence is also reminiscent of Cantre’r Gwaelod in Wales and Ys in Brittany, where low-lying lands are said to have been flooded due to fatal human negligence or other moral failings. Lyonesse is generally believed to have lain between Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly. This raises the question: was the flooding purely myth, or could it encode a memory of real environmental change? Overall, this tale underscores the enduring power of myth, the preservation of Cornish cultural identity, and reflections on ecological change.

Sunken Lands: Isles of Scilly

Two key areas that have a firm connection to the Lyonesse legend are the Isles of Scilly and St. Michael’s Mount. The Isles of Scilly form an archipelago on Cornwall’s southwestern edge and are made up of more than 50 islands and rugged islets. It was theorized that the Isles of Scilly were once a large island called “Ennor” (Old Cornish for “great island”), which flooded around 400 AD as sea levels rose. Records show speakers referred to the Isles in the singular in 240 AD and 400 AD. Evidence of settlements dates back to the Stone Age, followed by centuries as an important ship park. The Isles acted as a royalist stronghold during the English Civil War, with the surrounding waters recording more than 1,000 shipwrecks.

In the 1920s, archaeologist O.G.S. Crawford interpreted the submerged walls as evidence of sunken land, a conclusion later supported by studies of postglacial sea-level rise. In 1927, he wrote:

“The line of stones was undoubtedly the remains of a wall of human construction, some of them still standing upright… its general appearance left no doubt whatever in our minds with regard to this… here before us was tangible proof that the land had sunk since prehistoric times; for no one makes walls like this below high water mark.”

This research suggests that a real drowned landscape could underlie the legend of Lyonesse, further presenting how a factual event may have inspired a myth.

Lyonesse in the Historical Record

The earliest major reference to Lyonesse as a real location appears in William Camden’s Britannia (1586), describing a land once stretching beyond Land’s End, now inundated. Camden records artifacts found at the mount, including bronze spearheads and axes, which link the site to ancient occupation. Richard Carew’s 1602 Survey of Cornwall likewise asserts that “the encroaching sea hath ravined” an entire country between Land’s End and the Isles of Scilly, retaining a constant depth of 40 to 60 fathoms. He further notes that “Karrek Loos yn Koos,” meaning “the gray rock in a wood,” was once surrounded by forest.

St. Michael’s Mount, a tidal island accessible by causeway at low tide, served as a monastery, fortress, and place of pilgrimage before being converted into a private home in 1659. Since the mount had been a monastery, the experiences of individuals who lived there were recorded. One account, from the Augustinian priest John Mirk in 1400 AD in De Festo Sancti Michaelis et Eius Solempnitate, recounts that the Archangel Michael, a patron saint of fishermen, instructed a church to be built on the mount.

Later interdisciplinary studies combining geological, paleoenvironmental, and archaeological evidence show that gradual postglacial sea‑level rise submerged low-lying coastal landscapes and forests off Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly, providing a plausible basis for the cultural memory preserved in the legend of Lyonesse.

Confusion complicates the historical geography as writers used “Liones,” “Leonois,” and “Rodneisa” interchangeably, sometimes referring to Scotland’s Lothians. Only in Elizabethan England was Lyonesse firmly tied to Cornish tradition and fixed on maps of the imagination if not of the sea floor.

Cultural Afterlife of Lyonesse

During the 19th century, medieval texts, particularly those associated with Arthurianism, gained popularity. Its sense of remoteness and savagery, of a place beyond rule, captivates readers and writers alike. Moreover, writers often associated remoteness with the unfamiliar and the supernatural, making this landscape a prime setting for the knightly, supernatural themes prevalent in Arthurian literature. This is exemplified by a 1922 pamphlet titled “The Lost Land of Lyonesse,” which promoted Cornwall, highlighting specific attractions such as Land’s End, Penzance, and the Isles of Scilly, using the mystery of this sunken land to engage Victorian readers with Cornwall’s coasts.

“To-day all that is left of the lost land are the beautiful Scilly Islands and the cluster of rocks between the Scillies and Land’s End, known as the Seven Stones. These rocks are probably the last genuine bit of old Lyonesse, for their Cornish name is Lethowsow, which was what the old Cornish called Lyonesse,” states the pamphlet.

The legacy of Lyonesse continues to live on in Arthurian literature and as a memory of environmental change. Nevertheless, the oral tradition and memory of Lyonesse’s loss signal the potential trauma and cultural response to shifting landscapes, as humans have long turned to myth to make sense of climate and loss. This tale continues to resonate with audiences today due to the continuous rise of sea levels and global warming.

Research published in Science Advances in 2020 sheds light on the impact of rising sea levels on coastlines and communities, confirming how “the stories of Lyonesse and rising sea levels in south-west Britain are inseparably intertwined.” Moreover, the researchers highlight that “response plans must be designed with both local environments and local cultures in mind.”

One location that is already undergoing protective measures against rising sea levels is Venice, which has been experiencing frequent and intense flooding. This example highlights how the legend of Lyonesse captures the interplay between cultural memory and environmental change, offering lessons for contemporary coastal planning while preserving the story of a lost land in collective memory. This relationship between scientific and humanitarian research can inspire the use of the latest technology to uncover more about historical cultural trauma and memory in the context of land shifts.

As seas rise again and coastlines retreat, stories like Lyonesse carry renewed resonance, showing how myth and memory can preserve the impact of real floods long after the land itself is lost.

How Accent Discrimination Reinforces America’s Deepest Divides

[Author’s note: IPA stands for International Phonetic Alphabet. It is an alphabet of symbols, not entirely unlike the Latin alphabet, which is used to guide pronunciation. For more information about IPA, please visit this link.]

For as long as humans have existed, we have defined ourselves in contrast to an “other”—a person or group who possesses a characteristic that is perceived as different. This impulse has shaped our communities since the moment we began to form them. Across the ancient world, warring tribes treated differences as a threat. The Roman Empire labeled states throughout Europe, Africa, and the Middle East as enemies to be conquered, enslaved, or absorbed. When colonizers arrived in the Americas, they cast Indigenous peoples as savage and primitive, and placed themselves in the opposing position as the embodiment of sophistication and civility.

When othering those of foreign backgrounds became too conventional, societies began turning that impulse inward. Regency-era English nobility labeled themselves “the Ton,” using wealth to distinguish themselves from the lower class. India’s strict caste system has divided people of different class statuses for thousands of years. To this day, some Northern Italians turn their noses up at Southern Italians, while those in southern China extend similar treatment to their northern counterparts.

The seed of “othering” is also deeply rooted in religion. Catholics and Protestants in 16th- and 17th-century Europe warred for hundreds of years, with lasting effects evident in England and Northern Ireland even today. In Middle Eastern countries, tension between Sunni and Shia Muslims has resulted in regional rifts.

Tribes, empires, countries, and cities alike have upheld humanity’s tradition of othering like a torch in the night. The concept of “us versus them” has persisted throughout history and across the globe. As psychosocial rehabilitation specialist Kendra Cherry explains,

“Othering is a phenomenon in which some individuals or groups are defined and labeled as not fitting in within the norms of a social group… [it] is a way of negating another person’s humanity. Consequently, people who are othered are seen as less worthy of dignity and respect.”

Othering stems from a variety of attributes, such as skin color, gender, nationality, occupation, religion, class status, political affiliation, language, and more—characteristics by which we classify ourselves as belonging to a specific group and, therefore, place others into a different one. This phenomenon bleeds into every aspect of culture and community, and language communities are certainly not exempt. The subtlety of linguistic discrimination has allowed it to persist where other, more brazen forms of bias have been denounced, expelled, and unlearned. As one form of language bias, accent discrimination flies dangerously under the radar in conversations about implicit bias and creeps into even the most well-meaning and inclusive minds.

Labov’s Landmark Study

In 1962, American linguist William Labov conducted a landmark study on social class, employment, and dialect. His simple yet effective method involved visiting New York City department stores and speaking with employees across different job levels, from managers to clerks to janitors. By prompting them to say a specific word containing the /ɹ/ sound (as in “floor”), he tested—and proved—his theory: the higher an employee’s social class, the more likely they were to pronounce the /ɹ/ and adopt speech patterns associated with Standard American English.

Manual laborers, such as janitors, were more likely to drop the rhotic /ɹ/ from their speech, a common trait of metropolitan New York English. A classic example of this dialect is the popular phrase, “Hey, I’m walking here!” Or, spelled out in phonetic symbolization, with regard to the New York dialect: /eɪ aɪm wɑkɪn ijə/. The point of this study is to show that different occupations, even within a single company, develop unique cultures and can create distinct divides among roles.

Due to these cultural self-selections, people may perceive particular dialects and ways of speaking as good or bad, wise or stupid, friendly or unapproachable, and so on. Assumptions are made, prejudices form, and eventually, distinct “high” and “low” dialects are established, giving rise to linguistic societal discrimination.

American Southern Accent

In the same stroke, this kind of widespread language prejudice can occur nationally and globally. A prime example is the American Southern accent. The rest of the United States and the world have long slighted the Southern accent. People often mimic it to portray someone or something as unintelligent.

Movies, television, books, and media have reinforced this negative stereotype of the Southern accent. For example, the beloved titular character from the 1994 film Forrest Gump perfectly encapsulates the essence of a stereotypical Southerner: unintellectual, oblivious, undereducated, happy-go-lucky, and overtly friendly. Despite several other characters in the movie having Southern accents, Gump’s is dramatized and highly drawn out to emphasize his Southern roots.

If you pay attention, the portrayal (and lack thereof) of Southern accents across various media forms tells the story of the American South through the eyes (and ears) of those unfamiliar with it.

The popular sitcom “Young Sheldon” features a family from East Texas, particularly an erudite young boy. You may notice that Sheldon is the only person in his family who speaks Standard American English. This dialect is considered articulate, with a superfluous vocabulary that occasionally creates a communication barrier with his family, all of whom speak a general Southern dialect. Perhaps it’s purely a coincidence that Sheldon starts college at the age of 11, while the rest of his family shows little to no interest in higher education and sometimes struggles to understand his scholarly jargon.

Even more insidious than the stigmatization of the Southern accent is its erasure entirely. The popular Netflix series “Outer Banks” is set on a chain of islands off the coast of North Carolina. In this area, geographical isolation has given rise to a unique dialect known as “High Tider,” spoken by the locals. The people of this area claim ancestry from Scottish, Irish, and English settlers who rarely interacted with those on the mainland, thereby creating a language community independent of the rest of the continent. The characters on the show itself, however, have no trace of the High Tider dialect in their speech; instead, they use Standard American English.

Erasing the region’s local speech patterns reinforces stereotypes and deepens subconscious linguistic othering. Characters who defy the typical Southern stereotype are almost always written and performed without the accent—traits like intelligence, attractiveness, and wit are rarely associated with a Southern drawl because it doesn’t align with the audience’s expectations.

Southern Vowel Shift

In 2021, researchers Jon Forrest, Steve McDonald, and Robin Dodsworth published a paper in the journal Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World that examined variation in dialects of the American South across employment sectors. The researchers used data from the Raleigh Corpus, which comprises interviews with residents of Raleigh, North Carolina, who were born and raised in the area. By talking to people of various ages, genders, races, ethnic backgrounds, socioeconomic statuses, and employment paths, several features emerged regarding the intersection of accent and occupation.

The most notable observation was that, as demand and popularity for technology jobs increased, the use of pronunciation features that were characteristic of the Southern vowel shift declined dramatically. This pattern is the relaxation of vowels in the Southern accent; vowels can stray from their standard tenseness and laxness, and can also be “fronted” or pronounced further forward in the mouth. For example, a person from the South might pronounce the word “rice” as “rass” (/ɹæs/) and say the word “pen” as “pin” (/pɪn/). The Southern vowel shift is a staple feature of the Southern accent and is (or was) especially prominent in Raleigh. Following Raleigh’s emergence as a technology hub in the 1960s, the advent of modern technology, and the growing job market for employees in those fields, the Southern vowel shift began to diminish within that particular workforce.

One possible explanation for this phenomenon is that the language associated with technology leaves less room for individuality and personality. Therefore, those working in that industry would begin adopting a more standardized accent. Another reason is that the realm of technology is vastly more globally connected in terms of the types of people who work within that sphere. This means those speaking with a Southern accent are exposed to many other national and global accents. This melting pot of dialects can affect the way someone speaks and, as a result, may reduce the Southern accent they were raised with.

According to Dodsworth, the influx of workers and their families led to a “dialect contact situation” in Raleigh and its neighboring cities.

“Through her analysis of K-12 networks in Raleigh, Dodsworth found correlations between the increasing social diversity of the city and the slow ‘leveling’ of its traditional accents. It also helped to explain why rural areas—or even the parts of Raleigh that saw the least inward migration—remain the most Southern-sounding,” according to a National Science Foundation report on the study.

Several other observations from Forrest et al.’s 2021 study further explored the ties between employment and accent in Raleigh. As previously discussed, those in the technical field were less likely to maintain a Southern accent. Law and government workers experienced a similar decrease, but to a lesser extent. Service workers, also known as “blue-collar” workers, were the most likely to retain Southern accent features. Additionally, across all industries, research showed that the older an employee was, the more likely they were to have a Southern accent.

This is partially because, in simple terms, old habits die hard. Older people, those who established careers before the advent of the digital age, are more likely to retain their Southern accents because of the culture and heritage associated with it. Although young people may be connected to Southern culture, they have not lived as long as their predecessors and are more susceptible to subconscious linguistic adaptation. Additionally, with the increase in immigration and ease of movement, many people in Raleigh likely come from places outside the South and have brought different accents, dialects, and languages with them.

Globalization has transformed homogeneous language communities into more diverse places, both linguistically and in other respects. The increased ease of travel, trade, and the spread of ideas and knowledge have brought people and their accents from all over the world into communities that were previously relatively isolated, such as North Carolina’s Outer Banks.

Tracing the Roots: How History, Class, and Media Shaped Biases Against the Southern Accent

There are several reasons why a person might hear a Southern accent and subject the speaker to the typical stereotypes associated with it. As with many linguistic theories, there is rarely a single, straightforward answer to this question. The nature of this kind of research requires a deep understanding of psychology, history, sociology, linguistics (of course), and many other complex subjects to fully comprehend the scope of the topic.

One popular theory dates back to the American Civil War. Before the Civil War, the South did not have nearly as much linguistic variation as it does today. Back then, the Southern accent was heavily influenced by the “prestigious” accents of the English colonizers. Today’s Southern accent shares few similarities with the “original” dialect.

Walt Wolfram, co-author of Talkin’ Tar Heel: How Our Voices Tell the Story of North Carolina and professor at North Carolina State University, makes several points on the evolution of the American Southern accent. According to Wolfram, the South’s loss at the end of the Civil War, along with the prospect of a new life in the North, drove many Southerners to abandon the South. Many who remained did so because they did not have the means to leave or because of the institution of “Southern pride.” Additionally, the racial divide in the South (especially after the Civil War) drove the white and Black populations apart culturally and linguistically, causing both groups to develop certain aspects of speech that would further distinguish one from the other.

As we have seen before in many cases, ways of speaking associated with lower social classes are often vilified and disparaged. And in the case of the post-slavery South, that meant primarily newly freed slaves, who had little to no money or land, and had no other choice but to stay. The specificities of the Black Southern dialect, combined with the white dialect and the various creoles and dialects from the African and South American slave trades, began to merge.

Several factors were in play simultaneously, like the impending stress and uncertainty during the South’s Reconstruction era, the lack of people migrating to the South, and the millions of recently freed former slaves, many of whom used speech that was influenced by other languages. These social elements now had a significant influence on the formation of new dialects, and the Southern dialect underwent a complete transformation. Due to cultural and geographical differences, numerous variations of the “standard” Southern dialect emerged, resulting in the modern Southern accents we know today. Though no clear explanation exists for how these accents are discriminated against, several possibilities arise from this Civil War-based theory.

One possibility is that the war’s effects on the relationship between the North and the South caused non-Southerners to disdain the Southern accent due to the political divide. Another possibility is that the accent became embroiled in Northern classism against the poor in the South. A final possibility, with similar roots, is that with the large population of African Americans in the South, along with their use of the Southern accent, non-Southerners correlated their racism with the Southern accent. These possible explanations have been perpetuated across generations and are still successfully maintained today, demonstrating just how implicit and invalid language biases can be.

Another, more modern explanation for this bias exists. A 2012 study by Katherine D. Kinzler and Jasmine M. DeJesus presents two perspectives on Southerners: Children from non-Southern states generally held a bias against Southern accents and associated the “standard” dialect with greater education, intelligence, and so on, while children from the South did not prefer one accent over the other. As Southern children grew older and became more exposed to media, they, too, began to develop prejudices against their own dialect. While local news reporters and other adults in a child’s life sound like them, few national voices carry the same Southern accent; news reporters, television show hosts, celebrities, and political figures mostly have non-Southern accents.

Over time, these children were conditioned to think that, since they don’t hear many Southern voices in these spaces, individuals with a Northern accent must be smarter, more authoritative, and generally better. Non-Southern children, seeing the same national media, are rarely exposed to Southern accents and are used to people who sound like them being the ones in charge. Children naturally learn from observing the adults in their lives, which continues the cycle of self-deprecation regarding dialect.

Despite the lack of statistical correlation between Southern accents and intelligence or capability, the stereotype persists across the U.S. and beyond. Its roots are complex, shaped by centuries of historical prejudice, regional divisions, and systemic classism, and continually reinforced by media portrayals that favor standardized speech. These biases ripple outward, affecting not only workplace dynamics but also education, social interactions, and even self-perception among Southerners themselves. Recognizing and challenging accent discrimination is more than a matter of politeness—it is a step toward dismantling deep-seated assumptions about worth, ability, and identity. By listening carefully and valuing linguistic diversity, we can begin to unlearn these prejudices and create a society where a voice’s sound reflects individuality rather than judgment.