Something is shifting in the world young people are inheriting, and they feel it with an immediacy that adults can sometimes miss. In Compass Circles, hallway conversations, and our recent Student Joy work at Valor, students describe a shared experience: deepening disconnection – fragmentation, overwhelm, and the sense that life is moving faster than their hearts can process.

Adults feel this too, but young people often name it first. They see disconnection – within themselves, between people, and across systems – with a clarity adults have learned to filter out. Their reflections suggest that much of what feels frayed traces back to disconnection, and that beneath it all lives a deep longing to feel connected again.

To help make sense of this moment, we recently introduced the Three Stories framework to our entire community, including students. Developed by Joanna Macy, a scholar of systems thinking and deep ecology, the framework describes our era as shaped by three stories: The Great Unraveling, Business as Usual, and The Great Turning. It resonated across generations and gave us a shared language for naming the forces shaping our lives.

The Great Unraveling: Young People Feel the Fracture Most Clearly

When we share Macy’s first story, The Great Unraveling, students respond with immediate recognition. The story names ecological destabilization, social fragmentation, political polarization, and rising mental health challenges – not as isolated events, but as symptoms of a deeper breakdown. Young people don’t react with surprise. They react with relief: “This is what it feels like.”

They describe the emotional texture of the era with nuance: climate grief, digital fatigue, isolation, fear about the future, and the constant pressure to hold more than their nervous systems can manage. Their clarity isn’t cynicism. It’s truth-telling.

Business as Usual: Students See Its Contradictions Before Adults Do

Macy’s second story, Business as Usual, describes an operating system built on growth, speed, and optimization. When students hear it, they immediately identify its parallels in school – pressures to perform rather than learn, efficiency prioritized over humanity, and metrics overshadowing meaning.

In our Student Joy Initiative, students named something deeper than individual interactions. They described feeling bound inside systems designed by adults long ago – systems that rarely pause to ask young people what actually works for them. What surfaced wasn’t just interpersonal adultism, but a structural pattern in which youth wisdom is left out of the very systems that shape their lives.

This was one expression of a broader issue: educational systems organized around disconnection – from student experience, from relationship, and from the purpose of learning itself. As we began addressing disconnection directly, classrooms softened. Students and teachers re-engaged. Connection changed the environment.

The Great Turning: Youth Know What They’re Longing For

The third story, The Great Turning, names a global shift toward reconnection – toward more life-giving ways of learning, relating, and living. The Turning is rooted in practices that restore connection: to self, to others, and to the larger world.

When students encounter this story, something in them opens. “That’s what school should be,” one senior said. “A place where we’re connected. A place that cares about who we’re becoming.” For over 12 years, Valor’s Compass model has attempted to do exactly that – help students practice presence, empathy, accountability, and community in ways that strengthen connection. Compass Circles and commitments were never “soft skills”; they were an antidote to fragmentation. The Great Turning is not new for us. It is the through-line of our work – but it might be time to go even deeper.

Connection as Multi-Layered Practice

If disconnection lies close to the roots of what’s unraveling, and connection keeps emerging as what students long for, then education becomes, at its heart, a relational practice. That practice has many layers: connection to self through grounding and emotional clarity; connection to others through trust, attunement, and mutual responsibility; and connection to the wider world through purpose, ethics, and systemic awareness.

Young people feel these layers viscerally. They sense the inner fragmentation. They navigate the relational ruptures. They live inside digital systems that shape attention, identity, and meaning. Adults bring something essential as well – wisdom, context, developmental understanding, and what philosopher-educator Zack Stein calls teacherly authority, the responsibility to guide and protect young people’s growth. Neither perspective is sufficient alone. Together, they form the relational ecosystem this moment requires.

One of the most powerful expressions of that ecosystem that we’ve been integrating more at Valor has been intergenerational partnership – students and adults (and parents!) working side by side to understand problems, redesign systems, and build community. When approached with mutual respect and shared purpose, this becomes more than a school strategy; it becomes a small-scale model of the intergenerational cooperation society itself will need to rebuild coherence, belonging, and trust. This is not youth takeover, and it is not adult control. It is the Great Turning in practice.

AI: A Crucible for Connection and Disconnection

Artificial intelligence intensifies the stakes of the Three Stories. If absorbed through Business as Usual, AI risks accelerating disconnection – speed, optimization, surveillance, and the outsourcing of human capacities.

But if held through the lens of the Great Turning, AI becomes a mirror and catalyst. Students already ask the deeper questions:

• “How will AI change what it means to know something?”
• “What kind of world is AI learning from?”
• “How do we stay human in a digital world?”

Their digital fluency gives them insight adults often lack. Their perspective must inform how schools integrate AI – not as the only voice, but as an essential one.

A Call to Connection

So what do we do? We begin by telling the truth about the moment we’re in. We acknowledge the pressures of the Great Unraveling and how easily schools can slide into Business as Usual. And then we choose differently.

We commit to building learning communities that actively participate in the Great Turning—places where connection is strengthened, where relationships are centered, and where young people and adults practice the human capacities that lead toward coherence, belonging, and responsibility. We create environments where students and adults practice connection intentionally – within themselves, with each other, and with the wider world, including the increasingly AI-infused digital landscapes they inhabit. We design systems that invite multiple generations to share insight and responsibility. And we remind one another when we slip back into Business as Usual.

In the Age of AI, this kind of connection is not a luxury. It is essential to ensure we do not begin mistaking AI companionship for human relationship—and to build a true foundation for wisdom, agency, and flourishing. The future of learning – and the future of society – will be shaped not by speed or optimization, but by how well we reweave the relational fabric that holds us. This is the work of the Great Turning. And we will need to do it together.