Mandy Oaklander | October 18, 2026

If you know CPR, you have the power to save a life. Speed matters most in a cardiac arrest. In a new essay for TIME, Dr. John Maa and Meng Yang make the case for why students should learn this emergency technique in schools.

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Why aren’t we teaching everyone CPR?

By Meng Yang and John Maa

Justin Sullivan—Getty Images

In 2024, two Michigan high school students were sitting in the bleachers during a student-teacher basketball game when their physical education teacher collapsed from cardiac arrest. They had both recently learned cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) at a career-focused technical nursing center and rushed to help, beginning chest compressions and using an automated external defibrillator (AED) before emergency responders arrived.

Thanks to their actions, their teacher survived, and is one of approximately 350,000 Americans who experience an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest each year. Roughly nine out of ten will not survive.

We often describe the difference between life and death as a matter of speed: how quickly emergency services arrive and how fast a hospital can intervene. But in reality, cardiac arrest outcomes often depend on whether someone nearby begins CPR in the first few minutes, which rarely belong to emergency responders, but instead to whomever is standing closest: a classmate, teacher, stranger at a basketball game, or someone waiting for a train. Every minute without CPR sharply reduces the chances the patient will live long enough to reach a hospital.

Read the full story here.

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