The Silence of the Majority: Why Young People Hold Back, and What It Costs
In a Theory of Knowledge class this year, 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. I spent a while telling myself that was just caution. But the more I thought about it, the problem runs deeper than caution. 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 school environment in Singapore is a major reason. Openly challenging an institution rarely feels like a safe or valued thing to do. The annual town hall our school held was a good example. Panel at the front, microphone passed around, students in the audience. Only safe questions were asked. A friend said afterwards she had wanted to raise something, but decided it would look bad. When the structure of participation consistently signals that dissent is unwelcome, silence becomes the easier and more rational response. I started this blog partly because I could not find a reason why that should be normal.
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. In Singapore, where school structures tend to reward conformity over critical expression, those settings are the exception rather than the default. Without deliberate effort to build them, nothing in the current system is designed to do so.
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.
