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Every semester, I have the same realization.
I look across my classroom and see a room full of college students — young faces, some confident, many uncertain, all still figuring out who they are and what kind of lives they want to build. The class includes both young men and young women, bright and thoughtful students beginning to imagine their futures.
But my attention often settles on the young men. When I look at them, I cannot help thinking about the men who built the American republic and how young they were.
We often imagine the founders as older figures, seasoned statesmen and philosophers who arrived at their achievements after long and careful preparation. But many of them were strikingly young.
Alexander Hamilton was barely 30 when he helped write the Federalist Papers. James Madison was only 36 when the Constitution was signed. Gouverneur Morris, the underappreciated delegate who drafted much of the Constitution’s final language, shaping its cadence and precision word by word, was just 35.
Even the relative elders of the founding generation were not particularly old by modern standards. They were young men trying to work out profound questions about government, liberty, and human nature in real time. They argued fiercely, made mistakes, revised their thinking, and struggled through uncertainty.
Nothing about what they attempted was easy. Yet they attempted it anyway.
That contrast is difficult to ignore today, particularly as the United States approaches its 250th anniversary. The men who created the institutions we still live under were not mythical figures carved from marble. They were young men wrestling with ideas and responsibilities far larger than themselves.
Looking at my students, I often wonder what kind of culture produces young men capable of that ambition, and whether we are doing enough to prepare them.
For many boys and young men today, the path to adulthood looks less certain.
Across the country, troubling patterns have emerged. Young men report rising levels of loneliness and social isolation. Many struggle with compulsive digital habits, from pornography consumption to online gambling. Others retreat into gaming worlds or endlessly scroll through social media feeds that promise connection but often deliver only distraction.
At the same time, boys are falling behind in key measures of educational achievement. In colleges and universities across the country, women now outnumber men by significant margins. Increasing numbers of young men report feeling disengaged from school, unsure of their purpose, and uncertain about what society expects of them.
The problem is not simply economic or educational. It is cultural.
The digital world offers young men two distorted images of adulthood. One is a world of endless entertainment, where life becomes a cycle of consumption and simulated achievement. The other is a hyperperformative caricature of masculinity built around wealth, dominance, and status. Both are compelling in their way, and both are ultimately fraudulent.
The mechanisms of this fraud are worth naming clearly. Video games offer competition without consequences. Social media offers recognition without achievement. Online communities provide the feeling of belonging without the demands of real relationships. These technologies do more than distract boys; they simulate the feeling of challenge and mastery while exempting them from the real costs — effort, failure, accountability — that build character over time. They train boys to expect the reward without enduring the struggle that makes the reward meaningful.
Sociologists increasingly describe a prolonged adolescence stretching well into the twenties. But the deeper danger is not the delay. It is that many young men are losing the ability to picture what adulthood is even supposed to look like.
For most of human history, boys grew up surrounded by visible examples of what maturity required. Fathers, teachers, clergy, coaches, and civic leaders provided everyday models of responsibility. Boys could watch adults struggle with real problems, see how challenges were confronted, and slowly imagine themselves stepping into similar roles.
Today, many of those models have faded from view. Civic institutions that once connected generations — local clubs, fraternal organizations, neighborhood associations, religious communities — have weakened significantly. Families are more geographically dispersed. Workplaces are more remote and less visible to children. The mentors who once transmitted adult expectations across generations are harder to find, not because men of wisdom and character have disappeared but because the institutions that once created regular contact with them have hollowed out.
This is the overlooked reason history matters so much and why it can do something that sports programs, mentorship initiatives, and vocational training, valuable as they are, cannot fully replicate.
A mentor is irreplaceable. The coach who stays late, the teacher who takes a struggling student seriously, the father who shows up. These relationships shape boys in ways nothing else can. But most boys will have, at best, a handful of such figures in their lives.
History offers something different: imaginative access to an almost unlimited gallery of adult male lives across centuries, cultures, and circumstances. It expands what a boy can imagine becoming far beyond the few adults he happens to know personally.
And critically, those lives are not sanitized. History shows boys the lives of men who failed, doubted, overcame, and persevered. That is precisely what a boy searching for a sense of possibility needs to see.
This is where the skeptic’s objection deserves a direct answer.
Why should a struggling 18-year-old — disengaged, lonely, three hours deep into a gaming session — care about Madison or Morris? What does any of that have to do with his life?
The honest answer is that it only works if it is taught well. History taught as a catalogue of dates and grievances produces exactly the disengagement we already see. But history taught as human drama, as the story of real people confronting impossible circumstances with incomplete information and no guarantee of success, reaches something in young men that little else does.
Boys are not indifferent to stories of courage, ingenuity, and consequence. They are drowning in artificial versions of those stories. The question is whether we will give them the real ones.
The Constitutional Convention illustrates this powerfully. It was not a serene gathering of wise men calmly drafting a perfect document. It was a contentious, often chaotic meeting in which delegates argued intensely about representation, power, and the survival of a fragile union that most of the world expected to collapse. Madison arrived with a plan. Others quickly dismantled it. Morris spent weeks wrestling language into precision, knowing that the words would have to survive for generations. There was no guarantee any of it would hold.
A young man who understands that story, really understands it, sees something important: The institutions he inherited were not inevitable. They were built under pressure by people figuring it out as they went.
Role models encountered across centuries through books and classrooms do something mentors cannot always do: They expand the imagination.
A young reader encountering Frederick Douglass does not simply see a historical figure. He sees a young man who secretly taught himself to read, escaped slavery at 20, and went on to challenge a nation to live up to its own ideals. A student learning about Theodore Roosevelt encounters a boy once dismissed as physically frail who forced himself into the strenuous life and eventually led cavalry up San Juan Hill. These are not distant legends. They are lives that began in uncertainty and became something larger through effort and conviction.
These figures are not perfect. Their flaws are part of what makes them useful. They show boys that great lives are not lived by people who have every advantage. They are lived by people who chose engagement over retreat.
That distinction, engagement, and connection over retreat and isolation, is exactly what this moment demands.
The transition to adulthood has never been easy. Previous generations of boys faced poverty, war, displacement, and social upheaval. What history shows is not that the past was easier, but that young people in far harder circumstances chose to act rather than withdraw. That choice, made repeatedly across centuries, is what built the institutions we live in.
Education in a republic was never meant to be purely vocational. The founders believed schools should cultivate citizens capable of sustaining self-government, not merely workers trained for a profession. Thomas Jefferson argued that an educated citizenry was essential to preserving liberty. History mattered because it connected young people to a larger story, reminding them that the institutions around them were built by earlier generations who struggled, argued, failed, and tried again.
Today, history instruction often struggles to balance critical analysis with civic understanding. Students rightly learn about injustice, conflict, and the nation’s failures. But they also need to see examples of perseverance, institutional creativity, and moral courage: Not as propaganda, but as evidence that human effort can shape the course of events.
Without those examples, history risks becoming a catalogue of problems rather than a guide to human possibility.
For boys especially, that distinction matters. Young men are often searching — sometimes quietly, sometimes desperately — for a sense of purpose. They want to know that their lives can matter, that their efforts can contribute to something larger than themselves.
History answers that question not by offering false comfort but by showing that the individuals who shaped the world were not fundamentally different from them.
As the U.S. approaches its 250th anniversary, the natural impulse is celebration: parades, monuments, speeches about national greatness. All of that has its place.
But a semiquincentennial should also be a moment to ask a harder question. A 250th anniversary is not only a time to commemorate what was built. It is a moment to ask whether we are still capable of building, whether the habits of mind and character that made the founding possible still live in the rising generation.
The answer to that question will not be found in policy or programs alone. It will be found in the imaginations we cultivate in the next generation.
Two and a half centuries ago, a group of young men attempted something audacious: the creation of a republic built on liberty and self-government. They did not know whether their experiment would succeed. They debated, argued, compromised, and kept going. They believed that free citizens were capable of rising to the responsibilities placed before them.
If we want today’s boys to grow into men capable of sustaining that republic, we should begin by showing them the lives of those who built it and by making clear that the work of shaping the future now belongs to them.
That belief, transmitted across generations, is itself a form of institution-building. It is one we cannot afford to abandon.
