Every January, as the long weekend dedicated to Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. approaches, classrooms across the country pivot to show his famous “I Have A Dream” speech and limit his work and life to those four words and the bus boycott. Many students don’t have a full understanding of who the man was and what his dream meant. They don’t have a sense of how far things have come, how dangerous a backswing can be, and how it can harm everyone regardless of their stake in Dr. King’s dream. As a social studies teacher, I know that Dr. King holds a special place in an American history as one of the most influential non-Presidents. As an American, I know he represents the hope of a struggle that is far from over.

Dr. King occupies a rare place in the American Imagination, especially for elementary school students. He is usually one of the few historical figures that they can name without hesitation. The substance of his four famous words are often ephemeral for them though. I’ve had students tell me everything from he was born a slave, to he ended slavery, to he was the first black president. Some of them understand the words to mean that “everyone is equal” and depending on their background, privilege, and the amount of news that is discussed at home, they think that equality is largely settled business. In recent years, I’ve even noticed a trend of students who claim that the weight of inequality has swung in the opposite direction (a stark note of the political views they hear at home). “Isn’t racism over?” ask many students who will never face it but will often benefit from its effects that are imperceptible to them.

Regardless of the slant, equality and equity are far from settled matters in the United States. In fact, the distance between King’s dream and the reality of our world today feels in many ways more visible in 2026 than when I was a kid on the other side of the desk. The struggle for an egalitarian America has become controversial in new ways. Much as slavery became Jim Crow and redlining maintained segregation long after Brown v. Board of Education, there are lines in the sand that cannot be crossed in this country even today. Race, class, place of origin, accident of birth are all under the microscope in today’s America. Who you are and who you want to be is either something you take control of or is controlled for you. Oftentimes, it is both.

Access, institutions, opportunity, and power are more complex and the tools used to keep people separate like race, class, creed, and perspective are wielded ever more deftly and shrewdly than in the past. In some states, it has become illegal to discuss the reasons that Rosa Park would not move from her seat. Books in Florida say that she was tired because institutional racism cannot be discussed with students. Teachers are banned from adding the context that she was tired of the racism that made her a second class citizen. Removing the concept may not remove the feeling that some students have that something isn’t fair, but it will remove their agency to act.

On the other hand, many students don’t feel safe in their schools anyway. This isn’t just because they are distrustful of a teacher judging them for who they are, how they look, or what they said, but also because the schools themselves are no longer sanctuaries. For example, for years the idea that school security is a division of the NYPD in New York City made students feel unsafe because they felt targeted by Police on the streets of their neighborhood and in the school building. Now, across the country ICE Agents can enter a school building and arrest children who came to school looking to learn. Whether it is the institution, the administration, the teachers, or the outside agents who enter the building, many students don’t have a sense of belonging, equality, or safety in their schools. Students who feel that the world has dealt them a bad hand aren’t likely to think that they can succeed in a society where schools are traps. How hollow the “I Have A Dream” speech must ring in their ears in those schools.

In a world where college is presented as the only route to success and the only route to equity, how can we expect otherized and underprivileged students to achieve when the setting of their primary learning isn’t a safe space? How can they invest in themselves when student loan debts have been constructed as trap rather than an a resource? When housing is increasingly unattainable and providing for your family while you are young is financially unachievable? How can we expect a country to thrive when all these barriers for the next generation are in place and some can’t even discuss the bill left on the table from slavery that Dr. King called out the work of his lifetime?

Education is the great leveler. Through our ability to create a thoughtful, well-informed, and critical thinking electorate in the schools our principles are tested, or values are run through the praxis of reality, and opportunities are identified and seized. They don’t have to be just in higher education, or in trades, or even in economic terms. The dream of living the equality that is inherently your own isn’t a matter of economic determination, it is a matter of dignity. We don’t manufacture sameness in the classroom, we cultivate agency in a civics sandbox.

Dr. King’s words are often twisted at this time of year by those who would ensure that his dream never materializes. Social media posts that cherry pick simple words out of a complicated, intellectually constructed philosophical framework that stabs at the heart of the status quo for something better, more humane, and deeply beautiful are ones we should look at careful. Beware those that twist these words. The cognitive gymnastics required to flip his words into denying that divisions and inequities remain are dizzying, yet they come year after year without fail. We cannot allow this message to be twisted like Orwellian doublespeak. The message has to be clear.

If Dr. King’s dream is to be realized at all, it will be realized through education—not through standardization, not through debt, not through control, but through intentional, human-centered learning. Through systems that honor difference, cultivate skill, and prepare young people not just to pass tests, but to live meaningful lives with the agency to demand that the society bends to their needs and not the other way around. If we are ever to live that dream where the content of your character is the defining characteristic of how you are judged, schools have to be safe places where students can invest in their own development of self. We have to let his words ring true and real.