What if the rise of authoritarianism, online misogyny and anti-humanist movements is not only a political problem, but also a signal that we are failing to meet some of our most fundamental human needs? And what if part of the answer begins in childhood?

Across the world, authoritarian leaders, nationalist movements, online misogyny and increasingly influential anti-humanist ideologies are finding new audiences. Young people are growing up in a world where contempt can be packaged as confidence, domination as strength, and hostility towards others as a source of identity and belonging.

We rightly debate how to respond. How do we counter disinformation? How do we protect democracy? How do we challenge misogyny, racism and extremism? How do we prevent young people from being drawn into communities that encourage hatred?

These questions matter. But there is another question we need to ask:

What makes these messages attractive in the first place?

If we want to build a society that is more democratic, compassionate and resilient, we cannot focus only on confronting harmful ideas once they have taken root. We must also pay attention to the human needs, vulnerabilities and social conditions that make people susceptible to them.

And that work needs to begin early.

The human needs beneath the ideology

Human beings need more than food, shelter and physical safety. We need connection. We need to feel that we matter, that we belong somewhere, and that we have some agency in our lives. We need to develop an understanding of who we are and how we relate to others. We need to feel capable of navigating a world that is often confusing, uncertain and difficult to control.

These needs are not weaknesses. They are part of being human.

But when they remain unmet, or when people lack healthy ways of meeting them, they can become vulnerable to exploitation.

A child who repeatedly experiences failure, exclusion or powerlessness may grow into an adolescent searching desperately for recognition. Someone who feels invisible may be drawn to a community that promises significance. Someone who feels confused or insecure may welcome an ideology that divides the world into clear categories of winners and losers, strong and weak, insiders and outsiders.

A movement that offers a ready-made identity, a sense of belonging, simple explanations for complex problems and someone to blame can be deeply appealing.

It can offer certainty where there is confusion, status where there is shame, and community where there is loneliness.

This does not mean that everyone who experiences exclusion or insecurity will embrace authoritarianism or hateful ideologies. Nor does it excuse the harm that such ideologies cause. People remain responsible for their actions, and political and economic forces play important roles.

But understanding these psychological and social dynamics helps us see why simply arguing against harmful beliefs may not be enough.

When an ideology offers people a sense of belonging, purpose and personal worth, challenging its ideas may also mean challenging the very things that make them feel whole.

We need to offer something better.

When belonging comes at the expense of others

Consider the online spaces where boys and young men encounter influencers who promise success, confidence, wealth, masculinity and control. Some begin with seemingly harmless advice about fitness, dating or self-improvement. But these messages can also lead into narratives that portray women as adversaries, empathy as weakness, and social equality as a threat to men’s status.

Research published by Common Sense Media in 2025 found that many boys aged 11–17 regularly encounter masculinity-related content online, often without actively searching for it. The study also found associations between greater exposure to such content, loneliness and reluctance to express emotions.

Research commissioned by the UK’s communications regulator, Ofcom, has similarly explored how social isolation can make people more vulnerable to harmful views promoted within insular online communities.

These findings do not tell us that loneliness inevitably leads to misogyny. They point to something more important: the environments in which young people form their identities matter.

If boys have few opportunities to discuss insecurity, relationships, rejection and vulnerability without fear of ridicule, online personalities offering certainty and simplistic answers may fill that gap.

If young people struggle to find a meaningful place in their communities, groups built around resentment can offer an alternative.

And if children learn that status comes from dominance rather than contribution, or that strength means suppressing vulnerability rather than developing resilience, they may be more receptive to worldviews built on hierarchy and exclusion.

The same broad questions apply beyond gender. Nationalist and authoritarian movements can also exploit fear, uncertainty, threatened identity and the desire to belong to something larger than oneself. They can turn legitimate frustrations into narratives of collective victimhood, directing anger towards groups presented as outsiders or enemies.

Different movements have different histories, motivations and political purposes. They should not be treated as interchangeable. Yet some draw power from similar human needs.

The problem is not that people need belonging, meaning or security. The problem is when those needs are met through domination, scapegoating and the dehumanisation of others.

Childhood is not just preparation for life. It is where we learn how to live together.

We often treat education primarily as a way of preparing children for adult life: acquiring knowledge, developing skills and eventually becoming productive members of society.

All of these things matter. But education is also where children experience, every day, what it means to be human among other human beings.

Do they learn that mistakes are part of learning, or that failure diminishes their worth?

Do they experience themselves as capable of influencing their lives, or mainly as people who must comply with decisions made by others?

Do they learn to understand and regulate their emotions, or to suppress them until they emerge in less constructive ways?

Do they develop the ability to disagree, listen, reflect and reconsider their views? Can they encounter difference without immediately interpreting it as a threat?

Do they experience belonging as something they can build through cooperation and mutual care, or as something that depends on being accepted by the right group and distinguishing themselves from everyone else?

These are not secondary questions. They shape how children come to understand themselves, other people and the world they inhabit.

A child who develops emotional awareness, self-esteem that does not depend entirely on external approval, and the ability to think critically is better equipped to navigate social pressure and manipulative messages. A child who experiences meaningful participation can begin to understand agency and responsibility. A child who learns to cooperate with people who think differently can discover that disagreement does not have to mean hostility.

None of these capacities makes anyone immune to propaganda, prejudice or radicalisation. They are not a guarantee of democratic values.

But they are valuable human capacities in their own right, and they can help create the conditions in which democratic societies thrive.

This is why social and emotional development should not be treated as an optional addition to academic learning. It belongs at the heart of how we think about education.

We cannot lecture our way out of a relational problem

There is an understandable tendency to respond to social problems by adding more information, rules, programmes and interventions.

We teach children about democracy. We warn them about misinformation. We introduce lessons on mental health, respectful relationships and digital literacy.

These efforts can be valuable. But knowledge alone does not necessarily translate into behaviour.

A child can know what empathy means without experiencing empathy from the adults around them. A teenager can learn about democracy in a classroom where they have no meaningful influence over anything that affects them. A school can teach collaboration while rewarding individual competition above all else.

There is a difference between teaching a value and creating an environment in which that value is experienced, practised and made real.

If we want children to develop agency, we need to give them opportunities to exercise it, appropriate to their age and abilities.

If we want them to take responsibility, we need to offer meaningful responsibility rather than expecting compliance.

If we want them to respect others, they need to experience relationships built on mutual respect.

If we want them to become curious, independent thinkers, we need learning environments where asking questions is encouraged and changing one’s mind is a strength.

And if we want them to develop resilience, we need to help them navigate difficulties with support, rather than simply expecting them to endure them.

This is not an argument for removing boundaries or abandoning adult responsibility. Children need structure, guidance, consistency and protection. Autonomy without support can be just as unhelpful as control without trust.

The challenge is to create environments that combine clear boundaries with meaningful agency, and high expectations with psychological safety.

That requires more than a new lesson plan. It requires us to rethink the structures, relationships and assumptions that shape everyday life in schools.

Prevention begins long before a crisis

By the time a young person becomes deeply invested in a hateful online community, a conspiracy theory or an authoritarian worldview, many different influences may already be at work. Their family circumstances, friendships, social environment, experiences of exclusion and encounters with digital media may all play a role.

We cannot assume that schools can solve these problems alone. Families, communities, public institutions, technology companies and political leaders all have responsibilities.

Nor should we place the burden of preventing society’s problems on individual children or teachers.

But schools are one of the few places where society has an opportunity to reach almost every child, over many years, during a formative period of life.

That makes them an essential part of a broader preventive response.

What if we took the development of emotional awareness, healthy relationships, critical thinking, self-direction and collaborative problem-solving as seriously as we take other core educational outcomes?

What if we designed learning environments around the understanding that children are not empty containers to be filled with knowledge, but human beings actively developing their identities, capabilities and relationships with the world?

What if we evaluated educational success not only by what students can reproduce in an examination, but also by whether they are developing the capacity to think independently, act responsibly, work with others and navigate complexity?

These questions do not require us to choose between knowledge and wellbeing, or between academic rigour and human development. They challenge us to stop treating them as competing priorities.

A society needs people who can read, calculate, analyse and understand the world. It also needs people who can cooperate, handle frustration, question simplistic answers, recognise manipulation and take responsibility for how their actions affect others.

We need both.

And we need to begin before harmful patterns become entrenched, rather than waiting until they manifest as problems that demand expensive and difficult interventions.

A different starting point

At Teal School, we began with a conviction that education could be organised differently: that children deserve learning environments that take their autonomy, relationships and social and emotional development seriously, alongside their academic growth.

That conviction feels increasingly relevant in a world where young people are navigating unprecedented volumes of information, competing demands on their attention, social pressures and uncertainty about the future.

We do not have a single solution to the challenges facing our societies. No school model can guarantee that its students will become compassionate, thoughtful or democratic adults.

But we can ask better questions about what education is for, and design our learning environments accordingly.

We can create spaces where children are seen, where their voices matter, where they learn to understand themselves and others, and where they experience the practical value of cooperation.

We can help them build identities that do not depend on feeling superior to someone else. We can give them opportunities to experience competence without domination, belonging without exclusion, and strength without the suppression of vulnerability.

We can help them discover that having influence does not require controlling others, that disagreement can be constructive, and that complexity does not always need to be reduced to a simple story with heroes and villains.

These may sound like modest ambitions compared with the scale of the political and social challenges we face. But the everyday experiences through which children learn to relate to themselves and others are part of the foundations on which society is built.

If we want a more humane society, we need to create the conditions in which people can develop the capacities to build one.

That work cannot begin only when things go wrong.

It begins in childhood. It begins in our relationships. It begins in the environments we create together.

And it begins with the question of what kind of human beings, and what kind of society, our education system is helping us become.