It is a cliche of our time that trust is fraying: between individuals, between generations, between citizens and their institutions. We need to look closer at what’s happening. Citizens in a democracy should be mistrustful. They should compare leaders’ promises against their performance and hold them to account. Trust is earned by performance, not by fine words. Trust between generations is not the inherited entitlement of the elderly, but a reward to be earned by faithful performance of duties. 

In a healthy democracy, citizens are skeptics, actively holding representatives to account, questioning them about the gaps that inevitably emerge between promise and execution.  Civic education has to train citizens to maintain a balancing act: between skepticism with faith, doubt and belief, fear and confidence in the democratic experiment.