The Silence of the Majority: Why Young People Hold Back, and What It Costs

She wanted to speak. She decided not to. We were at a school town hall. Panel at the front, microphone passed around, students in the audience. It was the kind of format designed to look like participation. But she chose silence instead, because saying it out loud in that room did not feel worth the risk. In a Theory of Knowledge class not long after, we were asked whether citizens have a civic responsibility to engage politically. The answers were measured and balanced. I am not sure they were sharing what they truly believed either.

For a while I put it down to caution. But the problem runs deeper than that. In Singapore especially, it is both structural and cultural. IPS Singapore Perspectives 2024 found that young Singaporeans often struggle to see how their input connects to actual policy outcomes, and when the connection is absent, it actively deters future participation.

The pattern is not unique to my school or my cohort. The Singapore data makes it concrete: an IPS survey found that around eight in ten Singaporeans do not take part in any civic activity regardless of knowledge level, and a 2025 ISEAS survey ranked Singapore youth among the lowest in civic concern across six Southeast Asian countries. The barrier, in other words, is not primarily informational. It is in what people feel equipped to do with what they already know.

That structural barrier has a real cost. Decisions that will affect young people for decades are being made right now in processes where they are rarely present and seldom consulted. The assumption that civic engagement develops naturally with age overlooks how it is actually formed: through settings where participation feels possible and worth the risk. I am not sure Singapore's school structures are built for that. But nothing in them is designed to actively create those settings, and without deliberate effort, none of it changes.

That is part of what The Unspoken Policy is trying to do. Not to speak for young people, but to build something they can actually use. What young people think and what they are willing to say are not the same thing, and nothing in the systems they move through is designed to close that distance.