The following essay is adapted from Jeremy S. Adams’s new book Lessons in Liberty: Thirty Rules for Living from Ten Extraordinary Americans.

If you are a normal American citizen who hasn’t been a vigilant observer of intellectual trends on college campuses the past few decades, the nihilistic nonsense on vaudevillian display at some of America’s most exclusive universities the past few weeks probably provoked some disturbing questions: What in the world is wrong with these kids? Where are they getting these ideas from? What do they know beyond hollow sloganeering or trite tropes? 

But these college students were high school students not that long ago. And what I have witnessed in the past decade as a high school teacher is a plaintive pivot away from empowering optimism and toward a contemptuous cynicism about American civilization and its history. This scorn has exploded on a scale and with a celerity that is difficult to fathom. The iconoclasm of our age has led to broad discouragement and civic embarrassment among American youth. A jaw-dropping forty percent of Gen Zers now characterize America’s founders as “villains.” Many of my current and former students now ask questions that betray a deep suspicion of national pride.

Should they stand or kneel during the national anthem?

Should they recite the Pledge of Allegiance or sit on their hands during the flag salute?

1619 or 1776?

Even though this fashionable self-flagellation may advertise itself as courageous honesty, its real effect is to tell young people that America was never great to begin with, and even if it was, they shouldn’t see themselves as a part of it. Can you imagine a more deflating message to students striving to identify their place in a grander story of national purpose?

It’s no coincidence that this fever of contempt for Americans from the past has emerged in an era of powerful personal and political misery. A slew of recent reporting tells the dispiriting tale of young Americans finding it difficult to have fun, maintain mental health or be happy, pursue a career or higher education, form friendships, pursue passions, or seek romance. In the past decade alone, the number of American teenagers who agree with statements such as “I do not enjoy life” and “My life is not useful” has roughly doubled. A quarter of eighteen to twenty-four-year-olds have seriously considered suicide. It is no surprise that cynicism has surged in the classroom. My students often describe themselves as helplessly overwhelmed, feeling as though they have no agency or ability to shape their own destinies. They’re crippled by anxiety, guilt, perfectionism, and apathy.

Pundits blame a host of national ills for our youth’s anxiety epidemic, many of them economic or sociological in nature. But what ails the American soul today is not material poverty but existential ignorance. Our moral shibboleths are weak, our focus is shallow, and the greatest goal presented to kids is living for yourself. This may seem like freedom, but it’s not. Imagine a wasteland powered by energy drinks and processed foods, medicated to quell constant anxiety, hyper-focused on navel-gazing safetyism. That’s not freedom.

This is why the primary project of our time is educational in nature. Americans want answers but keep looking in all the wrong places. We have a lot of entertainment. We have a lot of politics. We have a lot of pontification, online strutting, and braggadocio.

What we need is a healthy form of national pride. We need more moral authority and inspiration. We need to confront what Dostoyevsky called “the eternal questions.”

As a teacher, a father, and a deeply worried citizen, I have been searching for a path out of this ruin, probing the national landscape for geysers of inspiration or wells of purpose. How can modern citizens recover hope in America and in themselves? How do they absorb the life lessons of the best American men and women who have ever lived? How do we apply these lessons in such a way that we can live better and more joyful lives?

While the United States is a physical place that can be objectively measured in a variety of ways—by its population, economic statistics, or abundant resources—truly understanding and loving America has to start not with cold, impersonal data but with American stories liltingly revealed and intimately studied. People connect with stories because they connect with people. And not just any people, but our people, our American brethren.

The Greek historian Plutarch is famous for The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, a book that stirred so many Westerners to greatness—especially America’s founding generation. A compelling and defensible case could be made that Plutarch wrote the most successful self-help book of all time. As Thomas E. Ricks notes, “There is no equivalent book today with which familiarity would be assumed by all members of a political elite. Even Washington, not much of a reader except in a handful of topics that intrigued him—notably agricultural innovation, and late in his life, the abolition of slavery—owned a copy of Plutarch’s Lives.”

At the outset of his narrative about Alexander the Great, Plutarch explicitly, albeit briefly, reveals the ultimate intention of his grand project. He writes, “Therefore, as portrait painters are more exact in the lines and features of the face, in which the character is seen, than in the other parts of the body, so I must be allowed to give my more particular attention to the marks and indications of the souls of men, and while I endeavor by these to portray their lives, may be free to leave more weighty matters and great battles to be treated by others.”

Plutarch is not concerned so much with the grandiose headlines of life, not battlefields, not masterpieces, not wealth or the traditional springs of social accolade and political acclaim. Instead, he chooses to focus his attention on “the souls of men,” for it is ultimately the character we sow or the virtue we cultivate that paves the road we sojourn in this life.

The American story—our story—is one of the richest and most fascinating tales in the history of human civilization. It still holds tremendous, even salvific, power. Despite young Americans disliking their own country at unprecedented levels, I have found that when the phones get turned off and my students take a deep breath and listen to the stories of the men and women who made this country, something extraordinary occurs. They show a steady and pronounced interest in the lives of the people who made America, the citizens brave enough to renew America, and those who continue today to add new colors and fresh contours to the national tapestry of our country. It is this interest that holds the key for helping our students and fellow citizens live better, deeper, more significant lives.

In short, an Americanized version of Plutarch is needed now more than ever—it might not be a magical elixir, but it would be powerful medicine nonetheless.

What it has taken me two and a half decades to learn is that this engagement with these historic actors and actresses sells itself organically. It doesn’t have to be coerced, lulled, or strong-armed. Students are authentically fascinated by the human element of the political institutions they are learning about. But this only works if we’re willing to praise the good and heroic when we see it. As novelist and Laureate for Irish Fiction Sebastian Barry gorgeously frames the process, we must engage “the good gold of memories retrieved in a certain way.”

Nowadays, sadly, we ignore “the good gold” and instead rush to condemn and denounce instead. As Roosevelt Montás observes in Rescuing Socrates, “As with all thinkers from the past, our moral censure has to be applied with discrimination and historical awareness. ‘In what way are they right?’ is almost always a more productive and a more difficult question than ‘In what way are they wrong?’ ”

My argument is simple but powerful: Let us study the best American men and women in our rich history and focus on the best they have to offer. Leaving these figures’ flaws to able-minded scholars and academics, let the everyday American, the teacher and the truck driver, the pediatrician and the policeman, instead honor what is honorable, praise what is praiseworthy, and most of all, emulate what is highest and best so we can take advantage of the miracle of human freedom.