Coming of Age in Polarized Times
Teaching Civil Discourse in a Digital Era
Teens and emerging adults are coming of age in information environments defined by speed, personalization, and polarization. For many, social media is not a separate “media diet” so much as the water they swim in—where friendship, identity development, memes, and breaking news are in the same scroll. In these feeds, contentious issues surface early, often uninvited, and almost always out of context. Young people encounter war, political violence, and moral outrage in short-form clips that reward certainty and reaction over reflection, leaving them to make sense of the world before they have the tools—or the time—to do so.
Origin Story
Or Initiative was founded in this context, and this first-year report begins with an intentionally simple stance: before prescribing solutions, we listened. We approached the post–October 7 period and the ensuing war in Gaza as a high-stakes case study—not because it is the only tough issue young people face, but to see how it reveals a broader generational condition. The conflict has become a deep fault line in American public life, amplified online into a relentless binary that presses adolescents to “pick a side,” even when they are still trying to understand what is happening. Through that lens, the report asks three interlocking questions: How are teens learning to interpret contentious issues in algorithmically driven digital spaces? What role are schools playing—or not playing—in helping them process those issues? And what would it look like to design curriculum and educator supports that actually fit this moment?
What We Did in 2025
In 2025, Or Initiative pursued three strands of inquiry: interviews with 8th and 11th grade students in Southern California and New York City across independent, public, and Jewish day schools; interviews with educators and school leaders working with those age groups; and a review of 84 curricula spanning digital/media literacy, civil discourse and dialogue skills, and teaching about the Middle East conflict. These findings are illustrative, not representative, and future work will expand into more regions and communities.
Meet Our Authors
- Vikki Katz
- Michael H. Levine
- Rachel Sato
- Dan Sigward
Teens’ Digital Lives Are Layered, Not Simple
What emerged from young people’s accounts is a portrait of digital life that is layered rather than monolithic. Teens describe social media as fun, connective, and often calming—yet also emotionally volatile and full of whiplash, as humor and harm sit side by side. Crucially, many teens believe adults misunderstand this complexity. Teens’ expectations of adult judgment carries a cost: when teens encounter disturbing content, they often avoid turning to parents or teachers for help because they fear being criticized or having their devices restricted.
News Arrives Fast, Context Arrives Late
At the same time, social media is where teens often encounter news first—sometimes within minutes of major events—and in formats that offer little context and even less warning. Graphic content arrives in their pockets between class periods, not in the shared frame of a nightly news broadcast. This shift not only fragments what young people know, but what they can assume others know. Teens understand that their feeds differ from their peers’; an erosion of shared reference points makes it harder to build shared reality—and easier for misinformation to stick.
An Untapped Asset: Teens’ Digital Agency
One of the report’s most essential counter-narratives is that teens are not digitally naïve. Many demonstrate substantial algorithmic awareness and actively “hack” their feeds—blocking, saving, and strategically engaging content to shape what they see. This digital agency is a largely untapped asset. Algorithmic awareness has complex consequences. In fact, knowing that feeds are curated by platforms and by their own behavior often intensifies teens’ skepticism. Many teens arrive at the bleak conclusion that nothing online is true. The traditional media literacy skills many have been taught assume stable sources and verifiable texts that feel mismatched to information environments where content disappears into the scroll, sources are unclear, and expertise is contested and claimed by all. In the absence of reliable verification strategies, some teens adopt a “majority rules” strategy—trusting repetition of a message as a proxy for truth—which, ironically, makes them more vulnerable in algorithmic spaces designed to serve them more of what they linger on.
The Post–October 7 Period as a Stress Test
These dynamics converge in the post–October 7 period. Teens report being overwhelmed by emotionally charged narratives and graphic imagery, while simultaneously feeling mis- or underinformed. Awareness and impact vary dramatically; we interviewed students who barely recognized the date and others who remembered arriving at school in tears on the Monday after. For Jewish teens in particular, the conflict is not only geopolitical; it is intimate, bound up with identity, safety, and belonging, and intensified by the sense that platforms “know” who they are and deliver content accordingly. Yet even amid fear and anger, the report captures moments of nuance: teens holding grief for both Israeli and Gazan civilian suffering, resisting the simplifications their feeds insist upon. It also surfaces how allyship can function as caring for each other rather than ideological alignment—small, human signals of solidarity when conditions feel threatening or heavy.
Why Classrooms Still Matter Most
Across these students’ accounts, a pattern becomes unmistakable: young people do not experience online spaces as reliable places to learn complex issues or to deliberate across differences. They point instead to one of—or the only—place they feel such experiences are still possible: their classroom.
Students describe classrooms as the settings where they can ask questions, change their minds, and watch peers do the same; where face-to-face accountability makes it harder to “shut your brain off and walk away,” as one student phrased it.
They value structured discussions that slows the speed of reaction, insists on a shared evidence base, and makes room for uncertainty and growth. And they notice—acutely—when teachers avoid, shut down, or abruptly cut off conversations, leaving them more anxious than before. They want more chances for supported, civil discourse rather than silence on issues they care about, and they recognize the courage it takes for teachers to “go there.”
Educators’ Urgency—and the Constraints They Face
Educators, for their part, mirror this sense of moral urgency—and the constraints that make action fragile. Many see civil discourse and civic learning as core to their responsibilities, but they fear perceptions of bias or professional recklessness. They point to uncertainty of school leaders’ support, heightened parental scrutiny, and limited time and professional training to facilitate high-quality conversations. In their telling, classrooms are both refuge and pressure cooker: precious spaces for shared inquiry, but also environments squeezed by academic standards, differences across families, and the ever-present fear of becoming the next viral controversy. As a result, even well-intentioned teachers’ efforts often become episodic “small sanctuaries” rather than durable practice.
The Gap Between Feeds and Curriculum
Educators also name the gaps between students’ digital realities and the learning resources they have available. Media and digital literacy curricula often assume that information comes from websites and search engines, not from short-form video or AI-generated content. Middle East curricula may be historically rich, yet also disconnected from the images and narratives students encounter daily in their feeds. Teachers ask, in essence, for bridges: resources that help them connect what teens are seeing online to rigorous evidence, context, and classroom dialogue.
What the Curricular Landscape Shows
Our review of the current curricular landscape reinforces both the promise and the fragmentation of the field. The report finds strong work in each of the three domains—civil discourse protocols, digital/media literacy approaches, and resources on the Middle East conflict—but very little integration across them. Few materials braid together the skills needed to navigate algorithmic environments, build a robust evidence base on a complex issue, and practice civil discourse grounded in that shared evidence. And digital literacy or digital citizenship curricula often emphasize risk and restriction rather than youth agency, missing the opportunity to treat teens’ real digital competencies and interests as a springboard into deeper knowledge development.
Or Challenge: Civil Discourse in a Digital Age
From these findings, the report articulates the Or Challenge: to build a new, integrated paradigm for civil discourse in a digital age. The core conviction is that we cannot treat adolescent development, digital life, and civic learning as separate problems. Young people need to develop capabilities to navigate digital environments effectively, consolidate a shared evidence base on tough topics, and engage each other face-to-face in civil discourse. Or Initiative frames its approach through commitments that are both philosophical and practical: a youth-first, asset-based lens; a developmentally staged pathway across key transition points (8th grade, 11th grade, and early undergraduate years); a reassertion that shared evidence is the foundation for shared reality; and a clear-eyed interest in digital tools—including generative AI—only insofar as they strengthen, rather than replace, the human work of inquiry, struggles for authentic understanding, and relationship-building.
Three Solvable Challenges Ahead
The report then names three solvable challenges that together define the work ahead.
Rebuilding Classrooms as Counterweights
First, classrooms must become counterweights again—places that slow down the speed of assumption and make meaning together after civic shocks, rather than treating contentious events as rare interruptions. Silence is never neutral; it teaches students that the most challenging questions belong outside school.
Evolving Digital Literacy into Digital Knowledge Development
Second, digital literacy must evolve into digital knowledge development: platform-sensitive, asset-based, and inseparable from consequential content. Teens already understand algorithms; what they lack is reliable, lived practice in verification and AI-era discernment that meets them where they are—in real feeds, real cases, and fundamental uncertainties.
Building Shared Infrastructure for Civic Courage
Third, the field must stop outsourcing civic courage to individual teachers and instead build shared infrastructure: vetted curricula that protect teachers from improvising under pressure, professional learning communities that make courage collective, and tools designed with and for teens that scaffold discourse without short-circuiting the productive friction such learning requires.
Or Initiative’s Planned Contributions
Or Initiative’s planned contributions reflect that systems-level stance: integrated curricular resources that braid evidence-building, digital knowledge development, and civil discourse; professional learning that aligns with real teacher constraints; and field-building convenings and efforts. The latter include the Civil Discourse Accelerator, to develop ethical, youth-driven digital tools that work with and for young people, strengthening classrooms as civic spaces and young people’s capacities as civil and civic actors.
Conclusion: The Work Ahead
The conclusion returns to the report’s central paradox: young people are witnessing broken communication everywhere, but they still want to connect across differences. They are already processing the most consequential issues of their lives in digital spaces that appear open but are often toxic. They are hungry for places that insist on evidence, slow down reaction, and make room for complexity. The work ahead is demanding, especially for schools and educators already stretched thin. But the alternative—leaving adolescents alone with algorithmically amplified extremes and a growing conviction that “nothing is true”—is unacceptable.
A Simple, Urgent Invitation
We offer this report as both a map of the current terrain and an invitation to co-create what comes next: for students, educators, and school leaders to help build and test new ways to build young people’s civil and civic muscles; for curriculum developers to connect and strengthen efforts across domains; for philanthropies and research partners to fund infrastructure rather than isolated pilots; and for technologists to design for young people’s flourishing inside systems they already inhabit.
The invitation is simple and urgent: join us in building classrooms where students learn to pursue strong evidence, hold more than one truth at a time, speak across differences without damaging relationships, and navigate digital life with discernment and confidence.