Want to save our democracy? Talk — and listen — to someone you don’t agree with.

After the 2016 election, I felt blindsided and ashamed. Living in Philadelphia and teaching at an Ivy League university, I didn’t know anyone who voted for Donald Trump. I was shocked when he won.

So I resolved to get out of my bubble and help others do the same. I convened meetings between students from Cairn University (formerly Philadelphia College of Bible) and my own institution, the University of Pennsylvania. To heal America’s bitter political divide, I believed, we needed to create conversations between people on either side of it.

Since then, dozens of student organizations — with names like Sustained Dialogue Institute and Bridge USA — have taken up the same cause. Beyond our campuses, an even larger network of groups has arisen to encourage Americans to speak across their differences: Coffee Party USA, Kitchen Table Democracy, Living Room Conversations, and more.

Alas, we’re preaching to the converted. Our campaigns for dialogue attract people who are already disposed to engage in it. But most Americans don’t want to do that, which is the heart of the problem. They don’t trust or respect each other, and they certainly don’t want to sit down and have a little chat with their opponents about abortion, Donald Trump, or any of the other matters that divide us.

So we need to force them to do it. And there’s just one place where that can happen: our schools.

Schools are the only institutions charged with making citizens, which is why we require everyone to attend them.

But our schools have failed to teach us how to conduct civil, reasoned dialogue. Turn on cable TV — or listen, if you must, to talk radio — and you’ll encounter people shouting past each other, not conversing with each other. They never learned to do anything else.

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To be sure, there are many teachers who are making good-faith efforts to change all of that. But America’s polarized geography — alongside its tradition of local school governance — is working against them. Put simply, we have segregated ourselves into ideological enclaves. So you’re much less likely than ever before to encounter someone of a different political persuasion in your apartment building, place of work, house of worship — or in your school.

“We have segregated ourselves into ideological enclaves.”

That’s why we need to bring students from different parts of the country together for regular online discussions. If your school is in a Democratic-dominated community on one of the coasts, you’ll be matched with a rural school in the Midwest. If you live in a GOP stronghold in the South, you’ll be paired with a school in the urban North. And if you’re from the countryside in Pennsylvania — which James Carville famously described as Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, with Alabama in between — you might talk with peers in one of the state’s big cities.

Call it “the American Hour.” Each week, for 60 minutes, students will discuss a different controversial issue in national politics. Each session will begin with short, prerecorded statements by advocates on each side of the question. If the week’s topic is gun control, for example, students might watch a five-minute talk by Sen. Chris Murphy (D., Conn.) in support of an assault-weapons ban, followed by a speech against it by Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Texas).

Then the students will Zoom into breakout rooms — with equal representation from both schools — to talk about what they just saw. Each room will be moderated by two teachers, one from each school, who will enforce a set of simple guidelines: no profanity and no personal attacks. You’ll be able to say that anyone is wrong, and why you think so, but you won’t be allowed to call them names.

Imagine if we did that, every week, in all of our schools.

The students wouldn’t necessarily agree with each other, of course. That’s the point: They would instead learn to disagree in ways that recognize their mutual decency and humanity.

The U.S. Senate is currently considering a bill to provide federal assistance for civic education. Although the measure has bipartisan sponsors, it has become entangled in precisely the kind of nasty, scorched-earth warfare that it seeks to alleviate. To its critics, the bill is a Trojan horse to smuggle critical race theory and ideological agendas into classrooms.

This just proves my point.

All the more reason for our schools to take the initiative now, by pairing up with each other for the American Hour. Let’s make America talk again by teaching a new generation of citizens how to do it.

Jonathan Zimmerman teaches education and history at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of “Whose America?: Culture Wars in the Public Schools,” which will be published in a revised 20th-anniversary edition in September by the University of Chicago Press.