July 4, 2026, marks the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and the colonists’ claim to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” The year 1776 also recalls a quieter but significant anniversary. Adam Smith published An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, giving the modern world a language for thinking about markets, productivity, and prosperity.

　　Before Smith wrote about markets, though, he wrote his The Theory of Moral Sentiments. There he explored sympathy—our capacity to enter into the feelings of others—and the moral discipline of what he called the “impartial spectator.” That discipline was not mere politeness. It involved learning to govern one’s passions, judge one’s conduct as others might judge it, and become fit for life among free and equal persons. Smith’s insight was that liberty depends not only on institutions and incentives, but also on habits of self-command and regard for others that no market can create on its own. He understood that commercial society rested on moral and social foundations it did not itself create.

　　A free society must ask not only how wealth is produced, Smith teaches us, but how it is shared, accessed, and made usable in ordinary life. Today, those questions are relevant to one of the biggest problems we face: what some have called “the loneliness crisis.” Revisiting Smith’s writings can help demonstrate that this crisis of disconnection is not merely a public-health concern or a matter of loneliness, but a civic and cultural problem with implications for self-government.

　　That requires attention not only to economic and human capital, but also to social wealth: the relationships, habits, associations, friendships, local loyalties, and institutions that help people find belonging, weather hardship, and turn learning into opportunity. Social scientists often call this social capital, but the two ideas point to much the same reality. If economic wealth describes a nation’s productive assets, social wealth describes the civic and moral reserves that make freedom workable and prosperity widely accessible.

　　It includes character, citizenship, congregations, neighborhoods, and other institutions that teach people how to live with and for others. Among the institutions that cultivate this social wealth, high schools deserve particular attention. They still reach nearly every young person and stand at the hinge between civic formation and adult opportunity.

　　Liberty depends on more than rights, markets, and formal procedures. It also depends on habits of trust, local knowledge, voluntary association, and institutions that teach us how to live with others without constant direction from the state. Alexis de Tocqueville understood this when he described American democracy as sustained by local associations, congregations, townships, and habits of cooperation.

　　In a different idiom, Smith saw that commercial society required moral sentiments and social norms it did not itself create. Sympathy, self-command, and the ability to see ourselves through the eyes of others were part of the moral architecture that made liberty possible. A republic of free people cannot be built out of isolated individuals alone. It requires mediating institutions strong enough to form character, convey responsibility, and connect private lives to a common world.

　　A free society cannot live by markets and laws alone. It also depends on the habits, relationships, and institutions that teach people how to use freedom well.

　　Given that Smithian insight, new evidence suggesting that America’s stock of social wealth is thinner than it should be ought to be a matter of grave concern. The 2025 Social Connection in America report, for example, found that 41 percent of adults say they feel lonely at least some of the time. Nearly three-quarters gather only twice a month or less with close friends or family members.Many have very small circles of companionship and support. Across club attendance, volunteering, neighborhood action, and other forms of participation, the report concludes that “disengagement is the norm, not the exception.” That phrase suggests a weakening architecture of belonging.

　　Another recent report, The Six Points of Connection, makes the diagnosis more concrete, identifying six forms of association that sustain social life: neighborhood contact, community of identity, one-on-one relationships, third places outside home and work, community of play, and community service. The topline numbers are stark. Only 42 percent of Americans say they have a neighbor they can count on in an emergency. Only 28 percent regularly spend meaningful time with a friend or family member at least twice a week. Only 26 percent regularly frequent a third place outside home and work where people gather and feel they belong. And only 26 percent regularly volunteer.

　　These are not merely statistics about sociability. They are indicators of institutional and cultural thinness. A society rich in freedom but poor in association will eventually find its freedom harder to sustain.

　　The Survey Center on American Life’s Social Capital Survey should inspire further alarm, because it shows that disconnection is not evenly distributed. Americans with less education are less civically active, have fewer close friends, and possess weaker support systems than college graduates. Twenty-four percent of Americans with a high school education or less report having no close friends, compared with about one in 10 college graduates.

　　The same divide appears in access to practical help and relationships with others. Seventy-one percent of Americans say they feel basically “on their own” when it comes to their financial well-being. That sentiment captures not simply economic anxiety, but a sense that many citizens no longer inhabit circles of mutual obligation robust enough to steady them. Social wealth is not merely declining. It is becoming more unequal in its availability.Some Americans still live amid thick local attachments and dependable institutions. Others move through life with far fewer friendships, expectations, and shared obligations that make freedom feel livable.

　　Whatever one’s politics, those numbers describe a people not only polarized but spiritually thinned out. Citizens who feel alone, distrustful, and detached from institutions will find it harder to exercise freedom responsibly. Self-government presupposes some measure of self-command—but it also presupposes a common life in which people learn how to trust, cooperate, deliberate, and serve. When that common life weakens, the legal framework of liberty remains, but the civic substance underneath it begins to erode.

　　High schools are one of the last institutions that touch nearly every young American. They bridge civic formation and adult opportunity and serve as focal points for larger communities. Of course, high schools cannot rebuild the whole of civil society. But given that they remain one of the only universal experiences in American life, we can certainly find ways to turn them into resources for renewal.

　　In their landmark study, Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz argue that the rise of high schools between 1910 and 1940 was not driven by economics alone. These institutions took root in small towns and communities with sufficient wealth, stability, and cohesion to support secondary education as a public good. High wealth, greater community stability, and more ethnic and religious homogeneity fostered school expansion and conclude that the social capital assembled locally in the early twentieth century contributed to later human-capital formation—what I referred to above as “social wealth.”

　　That historical lesson matters because many contemporary education debates treat schools as if they were self-contained delivery systems for academic content. They are not. Schools are institutions of formation, embedded in a larger social order. At their best, they induct the young into practices of responsibility, mutual regard, and common purpose. They teach students not only how to perform tasks, but how to show up, contribute, cooperate, and belong. In earlier eras, some of this work was supported more fully by families, neighborhoods, congregations, clubs, and other local associations.

　　They also helped answer deeper questions. A healthy school does not merely prepare students to earn a living or comply with procedures; it introduces them to an inheritance, asks what obligations they owe others, and invites them to consider what kind of life is worth living. If America’s crisis is part of a crisis of meaning, then schools cannot be indifferent to the task of helping young people with this task. A republic cannot renew itself if it teaches young people only how to perform but not what their performance is for.

　　Today, those institutions are often weaker or less accessible. As a result, schools increasingly inherit burdens once carried more broadly across civil society. Some students still arrive with dense networks of adult support and institutional familiarity. Others do not. That is one way to understand the social wealth gap: not simply unequal income or skill, but unequal access to the relationships and associations that make liberty and opportunity real.

　　For decades, school reform has focused on standards, accountability, school choice, and instructional improvement. Much of that work has been necessary. But students can meet formal requirements and still graduate socially under-capitalized. They may earn credits without finding an adult who knows them well, a community that expects something of them, or a setting in which service and responsibility become habits. They may pass classes without acquiring the weak ties, civic dispositions, and institutional fluency that help translate accomplishment into a stable adult life. In a more fluid labor market, where information, sponsorship, and tacit knowledge often travel through relationships, this matters enormously. Social wealth is not a distraction from mobility. It is one of mobility’s preconditions.

　　This is why the Six Points framework is so useful for education, even though it reaches beyond education. It names practical forms of association that schools can help cultivate without pretending schools can replace families, churches, neighborhoods, or civic groups. Do students have meaningful one-on-one relationships with adults and peers? Do they belong to communities of identity rooted in work, service, or shared purpose? Do they have access to third places linked to school life, such as libraries, arts spaces, and activity centers, where belonging can form naturally? Do they participate in communities of play through sports, music, debate, robotics, journalism, theater, or service clubs? Are they engaged in community service that places them in purposeful relation to others? Those questions are essential to education’s civic task.

　　If we want to renew American liberty, we will need more than policy fixes and better metrics.

　　To say this is not to turn schools into therapy centers or to ask teachers to repair every social fracture. It is to recover an older and more realistic account of what a free society requires. Freedom is not sustained by autonomy alone. It also depends on institutions that cultivate responsibility and connect persons in durable ways. The old language for this was character and citizenship. The newer language may be social capital or social wealth. Either way, the point is similar: liberty needs formation, not merely permission. The advantage of the term “social wealth” is not that it replaces the older moral language, but that it helps modern readers see that character, citizenship, belonging, and association are not ornamental goods. They are part of a nation’s real inheritance and one of the conditions of its flourishing.

　　What should high schools and their community partners do? Here are four suggestions. They are not a complete answer to America’s crisis of disconnection. Schools alone cannot create belonging by administrative decree. No set of programs can substitute for the deeper work of cultural and moral renewal. But schools can create conditions in which friendship, responsibility, service, and shared purpose are more likely to take root.

　　First, they should make sure every student is known well by at least one adult and connected over time to more than one adult. Advisory structures, mentoring arrangements, alumni networks, student-support systems, and school-community partnerships can all help. The point is not sentimentality but creating a pipeline of trust and institutional attachment.

　　Second, they should expand structured extracurricular and co-curricular participation. Sports, arts, clubs, student journalism, academic teams, service projects, and career-connected programs build communities of play and practice. These settings often cultivate trust more effectively than formal instruction alone because they require repetition, mutual reliance, and shared effort.

　　Third, schools and community partners should invest in service and civic participation, not as résumé polish but as part of moral and civic formation. Community service gives young people a reason to work alongside others, encounter different kinds of people, and see themselves as contributors rather than consumers of institutions. It is one way a community becomes visible to itself. Schools should also act as brokers to outside institutions. Partnerships with employers, community colleges, libraries, youth organizations, congregations, cultural groups, and neighborhood associations can enlarge students’ worlds and begin to build bridging ties across lines of age, class, and occupation. Strong schooling does not arise in isolation but grows from communities willing to invest in institutions that connect the young to a larger common life.

　　Fourth, policymakers should treat these relational goods as part of school quality. That does not mean reducing them to simplistic metrics. It means asking better questions about whether schools are building social wealth alongside knowledge and skills. In a country where many adults report feeling basically on their own, schools and their civic partners have a chance to model a different reality in which institutions can know people, connect them, and prepare them not just to compete but to belong.

　　Adam Smith understood that commercial society rested on moral and social foundations it did not itself create. So we need to ask not only what makes nations wealthy but press the companion question: what makes nations socially rich? In short, a free society cannot live by markets and laws alone. It also depends on the habits, relationships, and institutions that teach people how to use freedom well.

　　If we want to renew American liberty, we will need more than policy fixes and better metrics. We will need institutions capable of forming persons, sustaining meaning, and binding people to one another in lives of mutual obligation. High school cannot do all of that work. But they can help prepare young people not only to make a living, but to inherit, strengthen, and someday hand on a common life.