Reimagining the Classic American Dream Unit

In Jennifer Kirk’s 11th-grade English class, students spend a year examining the American experience and reading books like The Great Gatsby and Their Eyes Were Watching God. 

But it’s when discussion of the American Dream gets closer to home that her West Virginia students light up. 

“One thing unifying my kids is that they are from Appalachia, which has been ravaged by greed and corporations,” said Kirk, a 2024 Teacher of the Year finalist. “I ask them how we can ensure that our culture can continue.” 

While Kirk’s students enjoy Gatsby, they “see themselves” in the writing of Wendell Berry and Breece D’J Pancake—writers who capture rural life. 

In Wisconsin, where the Hmong people are the state’s largest Asian ethnic group due to a mid-1970s influx of refugees, Kabby Hong, an English teacher at Verona High School, draws a powerful connection between the American Dream and the immigrant experience. “I think of the United States as a nation built on immigrant nostalgia and mythology. Talking about their stories benefits students,” said Hong, who was Wisconsin’s first Asian American Teacher of the Year in 2022. Before moving to Wisconsin, he didn’t know much about the Hmong people; now he’d like to have students read Hmong author Kao Kalia Yang’s memoir The Latehomecomer. 

A literature unit on the American Dream has long been a high school rite of passage. Students might read Gatsby in Louisiana, where Fitzgerald’s century-old milieu of Long Island trust fund brats may feel as distant as foreign shores, or Of Mice and Men in East Los Angeles, five hours south of where the novella’s protagonists fantasized about a ranch of their own. While teachers often look to tradition, department protocols, or state standards for guidance on how to teach the unit, others, like Hong and Kirk, are galvanized by current events, geography, and the interests and needs of students, who inevitably consider their home, their values, and their potential for success and belonging in the world outside the classroom. 

To learn how educators around the country are currently framing—and even reinventing—this classic unit, I spoke with over a dozen teachers from Florida to California. 

“America is big, with a diverse range of visions,” said Elise Boutin, Louisiana’s 2025 Teacher of the Year. “Since [the American Dream’s] original conception, we’ve grown. Is there something we can all agree on? Do we have anything left to agree on as a country?”

The answer might be yes. 

Is the American Dream on ‘Life Support’?

The concept of the American Dream dates back to 1931, when James Truslow Adams mythologized “that dream… in which life should be better and richer and fuller for every man, with opportunity for each according to his ability or achievement.” Now it’s invoked by rappers and mortgage lenders alike and appears to be an idea that many of us agree on. In a 2023 study from the Sine Institute at American University, researchers found that across political parties, Republicans and Democrats each considered happiness and fulfillment, freedom to make life decisions, financial success, and close meaningful relationships the most important elements of the American Dream.

The dream isn’t fixed, though. The dreamer—any student, ultimately—has autonomy over its construction and expression; otherwise, it would not be American. 

Yet in classrooms across America, “most students feel the American Dream is unattainable,” said Andreas Kolaczko, who teaches at Lorain High School in Ohio. In South Florida, English teacher Fred S. told me that for many of his students, the American Dream is “on life support.” Health care difficulties, the Covid-19 pandemic, and school shootings have “hardened” them, said the teacher, who didn’t feel comfortable using his full name.

For some students, the idea of belonging isn’t a given. “[In America] we’re having a challenging debate about citizenship,” said Kabby Hong, and there’s a long history of wrestling with the question of who belongs here and why. “Nothing brings that to light more than Wong Kim Ark saying, ‘I’m part of this country,’ and fighting it to the Supreme Court [in 1897].” 

The data corroborates much of this youthful gloominess. A July 2024 Pew Research Center study found that while nearly 70 percent of respondents over age 65 believed the dream was still attainable, only 39 percent of young adult respondents felt it remains in reach. Black respondents were more than twice as likely to state that the American Dream had never been possible. Likewise, a January 2025 University of California, Los Angeles study surveying 1,500 young people found that 74 percent of respondents believed their generation was less likely to achieve happiness than predecessors.

And yet, teachers report that many teens appear undaunted. 

No matter how she frames the American Dream to her students, “at the end of the day, they have hope,” says Monique Ulivi, who teaches at Garfield High School, an East Los Angeles school where 99 percent of students are Latino. Ulivi recalled one of her “awesome” students writing that dreaming is “a ray of hope” in Of Mice and Men. The fact that middle class life doesn’t exactly work for Lennie and George doesn’t diminish its importance. 

Hope, Ulivi said, is also what fueled Jay Gatsby, whether or not his goal was attainable. 

Is ‘Gatsby’ Still Relevant?

Jay Gatsby gets wealthy skirting laws, but for students raised on rap music narratives of rags-to-riches triumph, an unfamiliar last name or shady income stream isn’t a barrier to the dream. Professional athletes hang with Silicon Valley CEOs; streamers are as popular with teenagers as singers and actors. 

Students don’t know the Rockefellers—they know Elon Musk and social media influencers in the vein of Mr. Beast. I know that my own students still valorize ambition, hard work, and resilience, yet TikTok and Instagram peddle a hustle culture that deemphasizes intellectualism and college in favor of entrepreneurial pursuits. The face of wealth is different now. 

“The new versus old money is hard—it’s generational wealth now,” said Ulivi. “It’s very apparent in Los Angeles. Students can walk to the Grove and understand the concept of privilege.” Fred S. notes that his students covet fast money born of fleeting online fame. “They mention people getting rich for stupid stuff, like the ‘hawk tuah’ girl,” the teacher said. “Someone goes viral, and then they have a podcast, a TikTok channel, and sponsors.” 

For many kids, “the American Dream is being a YouTuber,” said Kabby Hong. “We should ask: Why would that fulfill them?”

A 2024 op-doc in The New York Times supports Hong’s notion that influencer culture has birthed a “fantastical kind of American Dream.” The short documentary cites a study: nearly one-third of preteens aspire to become influencers.

In 2025, it’s not hard to imagine Gatsby as a cryptocurrency tycoon “buying” followers, Daisy Buchanan concealing sadness with giddy Instagram reels, and Tom Buchanan broadcasting his racism to internet audiences. With this update, assuming that students manage to process the challenging text, Gatsby feels like a contemporary creature—relevant, indeed. In my teaching experience, I’ve observed that students know that anyone can now be anything or anyone online; they start practicing as soon as they get a smartphone.

First Generations

Immigrant students often pursue the American Dream for the sake of their parents—as well as for themselves. They may also learn to hustle and advocate bravely well before adulthood. 

In a 2021 New Yorker essay, “Waking Up from the American Dream,” the Ecuadorian American writer Karla Cornejo Villavicencio recalls how, as a teen growing up in Queens, New York, she’d perform a character to protect her undocumented parents. 

“I’d stroll in with an oversized Forever 21 blazer, red lipstick, a slicked-back bun,” she writes. “Sometimes I leaned back in my chair, like a sexy gangster, and said, ‘So, you tell me how you want my mom to survive in this country without a bank account.’” 

Unlike her privileged classmates, who found him “pathetic,” Villavicencio “adored” Jay Gatsby. “He created his own persona, made a fortune in an informal economy, and lived a quiet, paranoid, reclusive life,” she writes. “Most of all, he longed.”

Villavicencio’s essay underscores a key piece of the dream for immigrant kids conditioned to “long” for scholarships and careers. Knowing that opportunities have come at the expense of hard-laboring parents’ health and comfort can impose intense pressure on teens, and for some, like Villavicencio, a potential sense of shame and even resentment for all that parents have sacrificed and should be repaid, in care and in financial support. 

As part of her American Dream unit, Venice High School English teacher Samantha Cline’s students read Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel The Jungle, which depicts brutal working conditions for Lithuanian immigrants in Chicago. According to Cline, the class can become mildly contentious, with some students perceiving the novel as anti-capitalist or irrelevant due to improved regulatory practices. Cline’s immigrant students, in contrast, quietly volunteer that they know how easily people can be exploited, even if regulatory practices have improved. 

Like Villavicencio, many have been sticking up for their parents since they could talk. 

Windows and Mirrors

Despite social media’s ability to make even distant parts of the world feel closer, most American kids don’t know much about the lives of others, so an American Dream unit is a chance to remedy that problem without dismissing the value of students’ experiences. According to Jeannine LeJeune-Gotte, a teacher at Rayne High School, “When [students] dig in and think about their background, their experiences or lack thereof are obviously powering their thoughts.” They assess the opportunities of others based on their own “bubbles.” 

The job of teachers, then, is to offer lessons and texts that build on what students already know—mirrors—and then nudge them toward the unfamiliar—windows. Thus, a kid in West Virginia might read Javier Zamora’s memoir of immigration, Solito, and a Californian could learn about Appalachia through Pancake’s short story “Trilobites.”

Discussion of the American Dream shouldn’t be confined to literature. With her class’s emphasis on West Virginia, Jennifer Kirk, for example, essentially seeks to enact it, applying her students’ capacity for what she calls “guts, grit, and empathy” to authentic classroom work on behalf of their own surroundings. 

“I went to high school here in [Fayette County], and I was told to get out if I wanted to make it. But I refuse to let students leave being ashamed,” said Kirk. “I was in Paris last weekend, but there’s no place like home.”

One year, her students wrote a bill proposing a public transit project that might improve local economic opportunities without harming the environment. Another project involved creating intervention plans to get teens to read more. Students conducted research, interviewed community members, and presented their findings to a panel of judges, which included one of the county’s associate superintendents.

With such work, even a student cynical about the country’s direction can taste empowerment, seeing how targeted local efforts might actually make that dream a likelier reality for many more Americans. 

Teaching the Dream Today 

Whether teachers reach for the canon, contemporary works, or projects to meet local needs, an American Dream unit invites controversy—texts and lessons that feel indispensable in one district might be incendiary in another. 

“One class stood up and clapped after [reading Amanda Gorman’s poem] “The Hill We Climb,” said Kimberly Brown. “‘We will build, reconcile, and recover’ was a powerful message for [Black and Latino] students who thought their system didn’t care about them.”

Yet, in 2023, a single parent complaint in Florida led an elementary school to restrict the same poem.

Reporting this story, I was struck by how many teachers didn’t want to participate for fear of attracting attention. 

The question is almost always there: What does a teacher include and leave out of classroom discussion? It would be disingenuous to teach Of Mice and Men without acknowledging the message behind the single Black character being forced to fight on the only night of the year he’s allowed in the bunkhouse with the White workers. 

Celebrating the American Dream does not mean proclaiming its universal, unwavering fitness. How can teachers empower students without pretending that economic inequality is improving? Teachers don’t simply prepare students for the real world—a mantra that pops up on many high schools’ mission statements. Students can and should believe that they shape the fate of the world they inherit.

“The dream is the hope,” mused Ulivi, recalling her student’s essay. “If you don’t have it, you won’t do anything.” 

I’ve made the same point to students. Even if a teacher emphasizes barriers to the dream, preaching resignation fails them. The work hinges on bravery and confidence. 

“These kids all have at least one story [of unlikely success] that they cling to,” said Ulivi. “It’s so cool and refreshing. You can argue about privilege and meritocracy, but students have to think that they’re the change-makers. And we teachers have to believe that too.”