Kindling a Fire: The Decline of Public Trust – And What To Do About It

Trust is the lifeblood of any democratic society. Schools, as miniature societies themselves, similarly depend on a sense of collective trust. Trust is the quiet current that flows between classmates, the bond that links students to teachers, and the confidence that parents place in administrators. It is essential.

Which is why, like many educators, I am alarmed by the broader collapse of public trust in America. The consequences reach far beyond school walls, but because schools remain one of the last arenas of genuinely shared life – and, inevitably, of shared conflict – the erosion of trust in society poses an especially grave challenge to education.

The numbers starkly demonstrate that America has been living through a trust recession. In the early 1970s, nearly 70% of Americans said they trusted the federal government most of the time. Today, that figure is closer to 20%. The General Social Survey once found that almost half of Americans believed “most people can be trusted.” By 2018, only a third agreed. And Gallup reports that confidence in major institutions, from schools to banks to newspapers, hit a record low in 2023, averaging just 26%.

The slide began decades ago, with Vietnam and Watergate shattering confidence in political leaders. In more recent times, the financial crisis of 2008 deepened mistrust of financial elites. But if the decline began more than 50 years ago, 2020 was the breaking point. That year concentrated every anxiety at once: a pandemic, a lockdown, mass protests, spikes in violent crime, and a bitterly contested election. The civic consequences were immediate, and they were broadcast to a captive audience isolated in their homes and glued to their handheld social media echo chambers.

In the wake of the tidal wave of 2020, schools suffered. Student learning collapsed at many schools (though thankfully not at Country Day). Chronic absenteeism nearly doubled, especially in public schools. Equally as troubling, social life shrank. Americans, most notably young adults, spent less time with friends than at any point in modern record-keeping. More of life shifted online.

Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that a Gallup poll in August 2023 found that only 36% of Americans say they are satisfied with American K-12 education quality – a record low. And teachers have noticed. In a 2024 Pew survey of U.S. public school teachers, nearly half felt that most Americans don’t trust them “much or at all.”

And yet, buried in this rubble lies a clue to the solution. The same Gallup survey that reported record-low satisfaction with schools in general found that 76% of parents are satisfied with their own child’s education. This paradox is illuminating. We mistrust the abstraction – “the system” – but often retain confidence in the actual teachers and administrators we know. Parents may loathe faceless bureaucrats in Washington or the state capital, but they generally trust Ms. Gardner in the third-grade classroom.

That gap suggests a path forward. The antidote to mistrust is, unfashionably enough, the humble relationship. Because a relationship presumes good faith; it obliges us to stay at the table and forces us to navigate the friction of real human exchange. It complicates our instinct to reach a quick (and too often negative) judgment.

The online world, by contrast, is the antithesis of a relationship: It prizes performance over patience and grants us the coward’s luxury of lobbing venom without consequence. Worse yet, it offers us an unlimited supply of the worst fringes of society, and it tempts us to develop our understanding of the world from this narrow and misleading funhouse mirror of society.

If trust is to be rebuilt in society, then, it will not happen online, but rather in real life. It will happen in classrooms, neighborhoods, congregations, and village meetings. Instead of falling victim to the endless algorithmic scroll that monetizes mistrust, we must all do the little things that create and build real relationships: volunteer for the parents’ association; coach the youth baseball team; start a book club; help a neighbor; buy a stranger a cup of coffee. Small as these are, these are the building blocks of trust – and a healthy society.

The last five years may have hastened our national slide into mistrust. But this trend need not be our destiny. And the cure for it is older than the republic itself: quietly show up, selflessly do your part, and build authentic relationships until suspicion yields to trust, and trust ripens into shared purpose.

It will take time and effort. But that’s the point. Trust matters not because it is easy, but because without it, no free society can long endure.

"Kindling a Fire" is a column submitted regularly to Indian Hill Living by Head of School Rob Zimmerman '98. This ran in the November 2025 edition of the publication.