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Confronting Ugly Truths

Blind, closed,
Suspicious, afraid,
Ignorance
Protects itself,
And protected,
Ignorance grows.
—Octavia Butler,
Parable of the Talents

I remember when I first learned about the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre.  I was in my mid-fifties, and I was listening, ironically, to the NPR station out of that very city as I was driving down I-44, headed west to visit my beloved New Mexico.  The local broadcast was carrying a story about the debate over reparations for the descendants of the survivors, and I distinctly recall thinking “how is it possible for me to have lived to be 53 years old and never have heard of this before now?” I was appalled that a significant dark chapter of our history had never made it into any textbook or lesson I had ever encountered during my schooling years, and I can still feel the consequent internal shift in my paradigms as I realized how much more unpacking my white privilege still needed than had been done to date.

I share this preface because about a month ago, I was again listening to NPR when the series Throughline came on as I was prepping for my morning run, and they were airing an episode about the science fiction writer, Octavia Butler.  Butler—who black, female, and gay was the antithesis of the stereotypical sci-fi author—is a voice I have known about for many decades but whom I had never actually read, and by the end of that Throughline, I knew it was time to change that fact.  Fortunately, my school’s library has copies of what are considered her three most significant works, and so I borrowed both volumes in the Parable series and got to work. 

And after reading them, I can declare categorically that I would choose to live in Orwell’s 1984, Huxley’s Brave New World, and Collins’ The Hunger Games trilogy COMBINED before I would ever willingly live in the dystopian hell that Butler describes.  So nightmarish did I find the alternate reality she sets forth that there were times when I had to compel myself to read further.  What she writes is just that bleak and disturbing.

Yet why, a reasonable reader might ask, would I do that? Why force myself to read something so obviously discomfiting? My answer is: for the same reason that I should have learned about the Tulsa Race Massacre long before I did.  Ugly truths are no less truths, and it became very clear early on in both books that Butler is using her own experience as a black, gay woman in the Los Angeles of the 1990s to inform the storyline.  She is effectively elaborating what it is like to live as a black person in this country, a woman in this country, and a homosexual in this country, and very little of that experience is “pretty.”  It is why I don’t think I can ever read what is considered Butler’s other most significant work, Kindred, because while I have understood for quite some time now the horror that nearly 100% of black women in this country’s history experienced rape (and often multiple times), the awareness that one would not exist as a black person today without that long ago act of rape (and sometimes not so long ago)….  I have no words.

Still I write, and I do so because part of what makes Butler’s work so compelling to this privileged white, heterosexual male is that she confronts readers of any background with the reality that ugly truths inform and impact all of our lives and that the most dangerous thing about ignorance of any kind is the threat it poses to acknowledging this reality.  We already avoid so-called inconvenient truths at our peril; we avoid ugly truths at our demise.

Which is, of course, fine with the current administration in charge of the Executive branch of this country.  The less truth the better as far as anyone in the White House is concerned.  Ignore the U.S. Constitution and the Rule of Law.  Ignore medical science and its impact on public health.  Ignore climate change and its consequent loss in lives and livelihoods.  Ignore the murder of two U.S. citizens in cold blood. Ignore basic human moral decency.  Ignore. Ignore. Ignore.

The danger of ignoring, though, is the cultivation of ignorance, and as Butler wisely observes, ignorance will do anything and everything in its power to grow.  We are watching that reality even now as one of the greatest social experiments in human history—a nation “of the people, by the people, and for the people”—systematically self-immolates because we don’t like confronting ugly truths about ourselves. Doing so is messy, uncomfortable, and regularly painful, and the simple certainty is that I owe my very existence to violence perpetrated upon others because there is at least one rape, murder, or pillage somewhere in every genetic line. In addtion, I owe at least a portion of my current status and wealth in our society to the programmatic violence that was slavery in this country.  I do not “enjoy” knowing either of these facts, but their knowledge enables me to understand what actions I must take with others to create the conditions for less violence, more empathy, greater compassion, and increasing justice for “all God’s children.”

Again, the most perverse conviction of the Trumpian weltanschauung and those who seek it is the belief that returning to the willful ignorance of a previous age—when closets weren’t just for clothing, misogyny was hip, and the N-word not forbidden—will somehow make the perceived “flaws” in the liberal agenda for building a more humane, equitable, and ecologically sound world go away.  Trump and his allies (which ironically include some women and people of color) want to make “everything better” once more for the white male heteronormative hegemony, and their principal tool in these efforts is the elevation of ignorance:  to promote falsehoods, to attack even the most vaguely unpleasant truths, and to disable critical thinking through a firehose of compassion fatigue.  All to maintain a caste system grounded in a myth of American exceptionalism.

Which brings me to a personal “ugly” truth I find distressing and distasteful to acknowledge: the realization that I, too, have bought into to certain components of that myth.  Don’t get me wrong; anyone who has read pretty much anything I have written knows my embrace of the truth that the United States is fundamentally and foundationally a racist, sexist patriarchy built on the blood of generations of disadvantaged people.  We’ve got a LONG way to go before declaring ourselves “the New Jerusalem.”  But in fits and starts, we did at least seem to be going—chattel slavery was abolished; my mother would eventually possess her own credit card; there is a minimum wage—and that’s where I realized the impact of the myth on myself:  I believed the social experiment itself was exceptional, that a “nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal” could survive anything thrown at it and eventually evolve into its more noble potential.

However, I now have more than a year of observable primate behavior of the basest sort to confront me with the ugly truth that the American experiment in democracy is no more exceptional than any other social construct humans have invented, all of them utterly dependent on the qualities of the experiment’s participants.  Qualities that right now I am at my most pessimistic about, especially given the rise of technologies with deliberately designed algorithms to cater to the human brain’s most primitive whims.  Ignorance growing indeed!

Yet pessimism doesn’t let me off the hook.  As I have oft quoted my mentor, the Jewish philosopher, Steven Schwarzschild, “just because the world is ending doesn’t excuse you from getting dressed for dinner.”  The American experiment may not be exceptional, but that doesn’t make the fight for civil rights, empowering women, and fair compensation for employment any less important or worthy an endeavor.  If anything, that is the actual value of ugly truths:  without confronting them, you cannot grow and change for the better.

Which, interestingly enough, is a significant message in Octavia Butler’s work.  None of her protagonists are hapless, helpless, or hopeless.  In the face of world’s they did not create, they are the very embodiment of strength, resilience, and resolve, and they manage their lives successfully amidst the proverbial “gloom and doom”—much as humans have been doing daily ever since our ancestors first evolved a little over 350,000 years ago.  We have been fruitfully navigating ugly truths for a very long time.

So tomorrow morning, I will get up as I have now for more than thirty-seven and a half years and head off to school.  I will teach my students of all colors about the heightened cortisol levels of their dark-skinned classmates and the negative impact this has on their daily health and lifespans.  I will teach my students of all sexualities and genders about the evolution of the LGBTQIA+ phenotypes throughout the entire animal kingdom and why natural selection has maintained these value-added traits for millions of years.  I will teach my students of all socio-economic backgrounds the realities of a finite planet and its limited carrying capacity for any species and why, thererfore, it might be a good idea to learn how to consume less and to share more.  And I will teach my fellow carbon-based lifeforms that the natural cycling of this critical element has been vital to the wellbeing of our planet for billions of years but that continuing to abruptly dump millions of years of fossilized photosynthesis into the atmosphere might not be our smartest idea as a species.

In other words, I will teach truth, however unfashionable or ugly it might be, and I will fight ignorance, however quixotic that can sometimes feel.  Because to do anything less is to dishonor the millennia of ancestors who confronted their own ugly truths to make our lives today possible.  The lie presently in the White House may be endangering the American experiment, but that lie only succeeds if we ignore it.

References

Arablouei, R., et al. (Jan. 1, 2026) Winter Book Club: Octavia Butler’s Visionary Fiction.  Throughline.  https://www.npr.org/2026/01/01/nx-s1-5643047/winter-book-club-octavia-butlers-visionary-fiction.

Butler, O. (1993) Parable of the Sower.  London: Headline Publishing Group.

Butler, O. (1998) Parable of the Talents.  London: Headline Publishing Group.

Where Will We Go from Here?

You’ve got to be proud of your wounds.
—Nancy Pelosi

One of the great challenges I have when I’m writing these days is having anything I say remain remotely significant before getting the chance to upload it, such is the deranged chaos of the Trump presidency.  Because I can only compose on weekends during the school year, I will start discussing my reaction to something I’ve encountered only to have what I’m writing about feel almost banal before I can return to it.  Case in point, here is how this current essay began quite recently:

As most who know me can well imagine, I have been a loyal subscriber to Scientific American for almost 30 years now.  In addition, I am one of those readers who actually starts on the first page and reads the entire issue cover-to-cover, including the math articles I can barely follow at times.  I’m just that curious. 

However, as the ancient dictum about cats reminds us, sometimes curiosity can be a dangerous thing—or at least psychologically problematic—and so I found myself finishing up the December 2025 issue just moribundly depressed—or at least discouraged.  With one exception (which, ironically, was about post-partum depression), every feature article contained gloomy news about the future.  There was the story about oil and gas companies pivoting to plastic to keep their profits flowing as more people purchase all-electric vehicles.  Potential individualized cancer vaccines are being defunded by Kennedy’s HHS while Martian soil samples are now trapped inside NASA’s Perseverance because of Trump’s budget cuts to basic research.  And the “highlight” of all “highlights:”  a story about AI avatars for grieving the dead.  Heck, even the commentary section contained news of more teenagers turning to chatbots as alternatives to personal relationships.  It was just dark reporting piled on top of dark reporting.

I share all of this because I want readers to know the kind of mental mindset I was in when—on only the second day of the new year—I read the following headline in my local newspaper:

“Paramedic Under Investigation for Explicit Videos Defends Urinating in Family’s Food.” 

Yes, reread that.  Defends.  Urinating.  In food.  A headline featured not in a tabloid but in a reputable news source was informing me that someone who society entrusts with people’s lives was arguing that it is okay to piss on material intended for human consumption. And that wasn’t even what had gotten him into trouble!

How did we get here? And more importantly, where do we go? While I pretty much know the answer to the first question (much of my writing is about it), I find myself feeling so mentally gob-smacked right now by everything that headline implies about us as a culture, that I am at a loss for any possible answer to the second one.  Essayist Robert Fulghum reminds us to be wary of judgment, that “change the name, and the story is told of you.”  But I find myself living in a world where there are now “shoes” I just cannot envision ever “walking in” and where there are now entire “warehouses” of such footwear strolling around our public domains.  Granted, this guy got into trouble because he crossed a boundary in what remains of our social norms, but look at what our President’s done this past year and how much of our paramedic’s trouble is just his lack of political capital?

Oh! To go back to the relative naivete of when I wrote those words! News of some nitwit videotaping his genitals pales—indeed becomes outright invisible—when held up against the unprovoked invasion of a sovereign nation and a government condoned murder of a mother of three.  My bewildered appall at someone defending their stupidity appears almost silly now when compared to the disgusted outrage I should feel at the absolute madness coming out of the minds of this administration.  Where do we go, indeed!

Yet as tempting as it is, I can’t just rant.  Cursing the darkness solves nothing, defeats nothing, illuminates nothing; it doesn’t even ultimately make the curser feel any better.  The only way to banish darkness is to irradiate it, to make it fully visible for the evil it is and to chip away at its shadow with truth, honesty, and integrity.  Admittedly, those three things feel in short supply right now (with AI threatening their very existence in today’s world).  But as an educator (and especially as a science teacher), I am here to tell you that we in the veracity-manufacturing business are still hard at work, doing our best to fight the fundamental root of all evil: ignorance.

And a partner in that fight is nuance—bringing me to a marvelous book I just finished entitled, The Light Eaters.  In it, the author, Zoë Schlanger, explores the latest science about our green friends, the plants—who, for those who don’t know this, literally build their bodies out of light itself and then pass that light onto us in the form of food—and near its beginning, Ms. Schlanger shares a sentiment both pertinent to this discussion and too beautiful not to pass on when she writes:  “the world we could have if complexity was not backgrounded was the world I wanted to live in.”  She then effectively invites the reader to join her in doing just that during the remainder of the book, and as I simultaneously processed both her book and the stupidity coming out of the White House, I began to realize that THAT was the root of all the overall awfulness of Trump’s actions (as well as those of any other petty tyrant): the “backgrounding” of the complexity of truth.

What’s more, I realized that this dismissal of truth’s fundamental nuanced nature is not only the foundation of Trump’s evil, it is also the source of its ultimate downfall.  Because reality is going to BE complex regardless of whether any human might wish it otherwise.  You can rip a brutal dictator out of his bed in the middle of the night, but doing so isn’t going to cause multinational corporations to suddenly risk billions of dollars in investments in a just-destabilized country.  You can invade and terrorize entire communities of people, even murdering some of them in cold blood, but you still cannot make the jobs the foreign-born fill any less central to our economy or any more likely to be filled by so-called “real” Americans.  You can even go on national television and bully the citizens of this country about the “affordability myth,” but you can’t make the price of groceries and housing come down with tariffs.  The bottom line is that everything the Trump administration does offers nothing but simplistic (and often simpleton) responses to complex situations, and the people impacted—including his MAGA political base—have only seen those situations get worse.  We are in desperate need of nuance.

Yet such a thing is challenging to find in today’s society, and before I address what we might do to change that fact, I do need to acknowledge first that I get the desire for simplicity; I truly do.  I know firsthand the deep psychological longing for simple, binary, black-white, on-off, arithmetic answers:  1+1=2; a2+b2=c2; plug in “x” and find “y.”  No need for the difficulty of adjusting one’s personal lifestyle or worldview.  No need for the complications that come with inconvenient truths such as climate change or human infidelity.  No need for the involvedness of truly “loving your neighbor as yourself.”  Nice simple solutions, and I can get back to my Netflix.

Life, though, (as I continue to repeat ad nauseum to anyone who will listen) is messy.  Always has been; always will be.  Even math, that ultimate arbiter of simplicity, gets messy once you reach calculus (I will never forget the class where I discovered that an integral could have more than one totally correct answer!).  Therefore, messy is simply “baked in” (just ask the quantum physicists), and no amount of apps or AI is ever going to remove all the messy from our lives (just ask the biologists).

Which brings me back why I write any of these essays—education.  If ignorance is the root of all evil, then teaching and learning about what is true and real is the ultimate defense for the good.  Furthermore, that teaching and learning can only lead to any good if it is messy and nuanced in its character and structure.  What I think that needs to look like is the fundamental point of this whole on-line project; so I’m simply going to steer anyone interested to actually read some of the chapters in my book to learn more about my concept of “authentic engagement.”  But for now, I conclude this particular set of musings by offering one possible interpretation of what I think Nancy Pelosi might have meant when she spoke the words in this essay’s epigram in an interview I once overheard:  messy and wounded are inexorably linked; so wherever possible, engage in messes where you can be proud of your inevitable injury. The wounds are how we show we cared.

References

Doyle, C. & Bansil, S. (Jan. 2, 2026) Paramedic Under Investigation for Explicit Videos Defends Urinating in Family’s Food.  The Baltimore Banner.  https://www.thebanner.com/community/criminal-justice/chris-carroll-baltimore-county-paramedic-XQODS6ZUQVH4TPPSCSUFNKBQSA/.

Fulghum, R. (1989) It Was on Fire When I Lay Down on It.  New York: Villard Books.

Schlanger, Z. (2024) The Light Eaters.  New York:  Harper Perennial.

The Future of ….

My original title for this essay was “the future of education.”  But if you’ll stay with me, you’ll see why I ultimately decided on the ellipsis, and why the potential future of education (at least in this country) led me to that choice.  It has to do with the fact that there are some serious challenges to teaching and learning in the United States right now (as well as significant chunks of the rest of the world) that have caught my recent attention and that have me pondering the future of all manner of educational practice moving forward.  Hence, it was time to take up my metaphorical pen and paper again to share my musings—as always in the act of hope that some might find them adding at least a degree of value to their own reflecting.

One of these challenges, of course, is the now ubiquitous one of digital technologies and their latest AI variants, and because I have already written so much on this particular topic, I simply invite anyone interested to visit my archive for those essays.  Today, my only addition to this subject is to share that while Australia had the courage to pass a law banning access to social media to anyone under the age of 16 over a year ago, it has taken my school nearly a year and a half of sometimes fierce debate among the faculty about well-researched brain science simply to finally collect students’ cellphones during the academic day.  American individualism at its finest!

No, the two challenges catching my interest in the past month both involve the intersection of demography and child development, and the first of these has to do with plummeting birthrates in much of the world’s developed economies.  Here in the U.S., for example, the number of babies being born annually has dropped below the replacement level of 2.1 children per couple, and while the environmentalist in me sings hosanna for the planet’s sake, the educator in me who lives in a capitalist economy recognizes the threat this poses to schools across the land.  In Maryland alone, the loss of more than 11,000 children from the public schools this academic year (an estimate that nearly tripled during the week it took to write this) has endangered funding in several of our counties, and the competition among the area private schools risks becoming cut-throat as institutions with sometimes literal centuries of existence struggle for butts in chairs.  Already, three such schools in my immediate area have shut their doors in the past five years, and even a Baltimore City public charter school with a 30-year storied history just announced its closure. 

Those are all lost jobs—as well as lost professional experience and wisdom—and the impact is likely only to exacerbate the teacher shortage already facing this country as the economic uncertainty confronting anyone thinking of entering the profession continues to grow.  However, for me, the saddest truth about these school closures is that they are lost opportunities for certain children to find their safe and successful learning “niche.”  My niece was never able to find hers, and it almost cost her her life; so I know firsthand how important the quality of a learning environment can be.  Shuttered and silenced classrooms leave gaping holes in any community, and in the coming decades, what is happening today will only be the beginning.  As Marguerite Roza, the director of Edunomics at Georgetown University puts it, “cratering birthrates will seriously remake education in the country”—and unlikely for the better.

But there is perhaps an even more insidious challenge presented by the contemporary link between demography and child development, and that is the impact of the current cost of early childhood education in this country.  Pre-K schooling for even a single child costs the typical family more than they pay for monthly rent in 17 of the 50 states, and nationwide, more than 60% of families cannot afford the kind of high-quality daycare so critical to developing brains.  We know now that age 0 to 5 is the most important stage of growth for the human brain—with impacts that last for the entirety of an individual’s lifespan—and we know equally well that maximizing this growth requires well-trained, highly attentive adults guiding the process, with more than just one or two such adults present (the “takes a village” cliché has some literal truth).  Furthermore, without this level of investment of adults in infants’ and toddlers’ lives, the quality of all future learning is compromised, and there is a direct correlation between a country’s investment in early childhood education and the PISA scores (the world’s gold-standard for testing academic progress) of their high school-aged children.

Yet if so much is at stake, why would our country not invest significantly in providing superior pre-K education—especially given the potential long-term economic benefits vs. economic costs? Part of the answer has to do with how our society has historically sought to use markets as the solution to so many of our social problems.  Economies of scale and technological innovation have lifted much of the world—and especially us—out of poverty and material want; so why wouldn’t they—the thinking goes—be able to solve any seemingly intractable problem?

However, you can’t increase productivity in the interactions between an adult and a 2-year old (the genetic limitations of both their respective attention-spans preclude it), and you can’t innovate a way to make a small child any less of a time-suck.  Hence, as Senior Fellow at the think tank Capita, Elliot Haspel, points out: the bottom line is that market forces are incapable of solving the need for well-trained, well-compensated adults “caring for and shepherding the brain development of [our] very young children.” 

What’s more, he argues:

that market failure makes childcare essentially a hot potato. No one has any incentive to do that work, and everyone has an incentive to dump that work downstream onto others who are more vulnerable than they are — from policymakers onto families, from fathers onto mothers in many cases, and not even just to mothers, but from mothers in more privileged positions onto paid care providers.

Simply put, no one wants to acknowledge that small children are expensive, demanding, and inconvenient and that all the proverbial “king’s horses” and all “the king’s men” can’t make this reality be otherwise.  Thus, we find ourselves today with either brain-drained, exhausted mother’s forced to stay at home (which the data is clear is not optimal for brain development either; again “the village”) or with families who already need two incomes to meet basic needs having to compromise those needs to pay for the childcare the second salary demands.

Which actually circles us back to the “cratering birthrates” as more and more adults are now deliberately opting out of having children simply because they cannot see how they can afford them.

Interestingly enough, our country once did provide nearly universal daycare for our smallest children.  During World War II, the need for women in the nation’s factories drove congress to pay for daycare centers across the country that cost those families the equivalent of $10 per day in today’s money (imagine only $3700 a year for childcare!), and staffing was not an issue because it was considered one’s patriotic duty to contribute to the cause.  However, once the war ended, the patriarchy reasserted itself, and so we find ourselves in the mess we have today, with parents of all varieties mortgaging their economic futures just to have families and American society enduring the largest collective drop in intelligence since the 6th and 7th Centuries in Western Europe.[i] 

It is challenging time to be a toddler in the United States.

And that’s the reality that compelled this latest round of writing and why I am pretty confident that anyone reading this can figure out the reason for my original working title.  However, to connect the dots explicitly: fewer children in schools is likely to lead to even less investment in education (both human and capital); less investment is likely to lead to lower and poorer quality education; and that is likely to lead to pre-K teaching and learning—if there even is any—that fails to adequately develop little brains to their optimal capabilities.  We are obviously still going to educate our children, but the character of that education and its results may not be what our society needs to thrive…or maybe even survive.

Hence, the ellipsis in my title.  The future of education isn’t just about what goes on in classrooms and schools, and it isn’t simply about what I and many others do for a living.  It is about the nature of the act of learning itself, and that means the future of education is the future of everything human.  What we learn as children—every concept, every skill, every thought—is the entire foundation of our adult lives, and as the author of the Gospel of Matthew wisely had Jesus say, that foundation can be one of rock or of sand.  Right now, I sense we are at a great tipping point in this country (and perhaps this world) where we still have the power to build on rock instead of sand.  But we are dangerously close to defaulting to the latter, and should that happen, then the author of Matthew is quite clear about the consequence:

The rain fell, and the floods came,
and the winds blew and beat against that house,
and it fell—and great was its fall!
—Matthew 7:27 (NRSV)

[i] As a total sidebar, I find it intriguing that in the era from 1965 to 2005, the productive adult brains of those war era babies with their subsidized daycare produced some of the most robust R&D, discoveries, and inventions in all of human history.  Hmm! Coincidence? Correlation? Or causation? You decide.

References

Bowie, L. (Nov. 24, 2025) Maryland Schools Lost Students This Year, Early Estimates Show.  What’s to Blame? The Baltimore Banner.  https://www.thebanner.com/education/k-12-schools/maryland-schools-enrollment-declines-C6FWKKHNYZH4DNJWAUOM4KLDGE/.

Griffith, K. & Richman, T. (Dec. 9, 2025) Maryland Public Schools Lost Over 11,000 Student This Year.  The Baltimore Banner.  https://www.thebanner.com/education/k-12-schools/maryland-public-schools-enrollment-drops-I7FPW6AIAJGNFDXFQDBMNMLME4/.

Kahloon, I. (Oct. 14, 2025) America is Sliding Toward illiteracy. The Atlantic.  https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/10/education-decline-low-expectations/684526/.

Kukolja, K. (Nov. 29, 2024) Australia Passes Strict New Social Media Bans for Children.  NPR All Things Considered.  https://www.npr.org/2024/11/29/nx-s1-5210405/australia-passes-strict-new-social-media-bans-for-children.

Lora, M. (Dec. 5, 2025) How a West Baltimore Charter School’s 30-year Legacy Collapsed in Months.  The Baltimore Banner.  https://www.thebanner.com/education/k-12-schools/new-song-academy-closed-charter-school-baltimore-NIBASIGPAZA6HJKTS3JDH2BSCU/.

Luse, B; et al (Nov. 24, 2025) Kids are Expensive.  Do They Have to Be? NPR It’s Been a Minute.  https://www.npr.org/2025/11/24/nx-s1-5617226/kids-are-expensive-do-they-have-to-be.

A Matter of Scale

To exist is to participate in an endless cycle
of neither creation nor destruction,
but redistribution.
—Zuyva Sevilla

I form light and create darkness.
I make weal and create woe.
I the Lord do all these things.
—Isaiah 45:7

In the late 1970s, videographers Charles and Ray Eames filmed a short, 9-minute  documentary exploring what it might be like to experience reality at a variety of different scales, from the subatomic to the cosmological.  This now iconic (and apparently trademarked) video, the Powers of Ten™, would become the gold standard in many a science classroom for teaching about the concept of magnitude, and for the tiny fraction of my readers who were never exposed to it during their school years or whose memories recall it only vaguely, I recommend a brief pause here to take a short cognitive detour to watch it before continuing.

Because “scale” very much informs this posting’s essay.

It started with the article I mentioned last time about black holes and the accelerating rogue stars shooting across interstellar space at 400 times the speed of a bullet.  Reading that, I couldn’t help but wonder at the enormous dimensions of time and distance this research was hinting at, and I also couldn’t help but think about how absolutely amazing it was that we have the time and resources to know such things and how absolutely utterly irrelevant this knowledge was, is, or ever shall be to the survival of any human that has, does, or will live. 

Unless, of course, we’ve not been looking at quite the right quadrant in the night sky with our telescopes.  Then, one of these hypersonic suns may very well plow into our solar system unbeknownst to us, instantly reducing every quark of matter from Mars to the Kuiper Belt into pure plasma.

But that’s sort of the whole point: everything we experience involves a degree of scale, and the character of that scale can change in less than the wink of an eye.  Take the kind of privilege I wrote about in Unbidden Thoughts:  while differences in economic status may impact how likely one is to engage in proactive civic action (i.e. I have the wealth to fight against Trump), widen the gap of that status enough and suddenly you have the storming of the Bastille—or in our case, potentially, the new, unfinished White House ballroom.  Or—using my other example of privilege from that essay—increase the degree of illiteracy enough in this country and all the AI in the world can’t prevent the consequent financial collapse (go read economist Paul Krugman’s substack if you want the terrifying details).

The bottom line is that matters of scale are all around us, and it behooves us (I know; a very “me” verb) to identify them, pay attention to them, and—ultimately—choose how they will guide our actions.  For example, at the scale of the Big Bang, the very process of evolution that led to an organism capable of understanding its own origin as a species is irrelevant and empty of all meaning:  our mere 80-year organized structure of atoms does not last long enough in a 15-billion-year sequence to count as even a fleeting moment. 

Heck, simply from the perspective of the Voyager probe’s famous “pale blue dot,” astronomer, Carl Sagan reminds us:

Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there—on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

However, simply because we are an organism who can possess such a breadth of awareness does not mean that we can actually live at such scales.  At the very least, basic biological needs prohibit it—you have to eat, you have to sleep, and you have to excrete; all very immediate requirements of one’s attention.  Yet, precisely because we can possess a sense of scale well beyond these things, humans have a bad habit of forgetting the dimensions at which we truly do operate, insisting on striving for what is ultimately unattainable and making ourselves miserable in the process: like anyone, I can have a modestly meaningful life, but nothing I nor anyone else ever does will last at the scale our minds are capable of envisioning.

Acceptance, though, of this fundamental truth about our finite nature needn’t result in the anguished cry of Shelley’s Ozymandias—something my adolescent charges regularly and consistently forget as they persist in their belief that every test, every grade, every performance must somehow have life-altering consequence.  I can inform them all I want that when they are my age, they will not remember this academic moment at all, and that the brain science is clear that real learning only follows equally authentic failure.  But they possess neither the fully wired pre-frontal cortex nor the sheer quantity of dunder-headed adult moments to truly comprehend—let alone embrace!—what I am saying to them.  EVERYTHING means EVERYTHING to a teenager, and at best, I can hope that some of my offered adult outlook gets remembered at some future “Ah ha! THAT’s what he was talking about!” moment.

Yet this adolescent preoccupation with the “drama of it all” is, itself, a matter of scale.  And a very age appropriate one, too.  In fact, while I recall being as theatrical in my magnification of the state-of-affairs as the next teenager, the only two actual formal assessments (i.e. tests) I remember from my high school years are the Anatomy final at the end of my Junior year and the AP English exam at the end of my Senior one.  What’s more, the reason I remember these specifically has nothing to do with the weight of their impact on my life but because both situations involved highly intense emotions. In the case of the Anatomy exam, my best friend at the time had convinced me to see the midnight opening of The Empire Stikes Back, where we picked up a couple of the girls standing in line, and so I didn’t start studying for a 7:30 a.m. exam until 3:30 that morning. Meanwhile, at the conclusion of the AP English exam, one of my fellow classmates marched over to me and snarled in a voice drowning in vitriol, “THAT had to be hard even for YOU!”

As for the material content of either test? Nada.

Thus, at age 62 and counting, I am left with a fun, playful memory from my youth along with a somewhat painful, searing one—both of which simply reside with all the other electronic files buzzing around my synapse from a lifetime of emotionally intense experiences.  Again, a matter of scale: is the “I” my brain creates each moment simply the sum-total of my memories? Or are my memories simply a subset of what my brain uses to create “me?” Am I my fate or is my fate my doing? Or is it, perhaps, a little of both-and?

I ponder these things right now because in addition to reading about black holes and literal shooting stars I have also been reading some more Oliver Burkeman (whose work is dedicated to encouraging people to live at realistic scales and who has to have a playfully mischievous sense of irony that it will only take 4 weeks). And I have been doing all this reading while simultaneously living with the anxieties of the college admission’s process manifesting in most of my classes, a government shut-down (thankfully over for a while) that is leaving my neighbors threatened with starvation and no health care, and ICE agents terrorizing whole populations throughout the United States.  Add in the most stunningly beautiful fall foliage seen here in the mid-Atlantic in my memory, one of the best set-building crews my former colleague and I have ever had for the fall Musical, and my gratitude for meaningful employment, a secure domicile, and financial security and…OMGg! So many different magnitudes of scale for the brain to cope with that I can practically feel the cortisol and dopamine sloshing around inside my skull in mutual antagonism!

But again, that’s the point.  We all live at different scales all the time, and while the knowledge of genocides in Darfur, the Congo, and Gaza leave me simply depressed because there is little, directly, that I can do about them, I can ease my seniors’ distress about the next chapter of their lives; I can donate to my local foodbanks and organizations that fight injustice; and I can steward my gifts and my talents to impact my immediate world constructively.  I can engage in hope.

Which leads me to one final thought related to exploring Burkeman’s efforts to do likewise.  It was interesting to read his 28 essays (one for each day in a month) because while some of them brought fresh insights into how to handle the finitude of being human, others evoked moments of “been there; done that; already know it.”  And that got me to thinking about one of the most important scales of all for the individual: aging.  It turns out— I continue to learn—that some of life’s most significant understandings just come with growing older, and the extra twelve years I have on Burkeman are just enough for me to have found some of his ideas bemusing—in the same way I look at my current students and have to shake my head sometimes with a smile on my face, thinking “You’ll get it…eventually” while simultaneously feeling blessed to have seen so many former of them into adulthood to know that they do.

It is, after all, just a matter of scale.

References

Burkeman, O. (2024) Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts.  New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Plait, P. (Sept. 2025) The Black Hole Next Door.  Scientific American. Pp. 83-84.

Sagan, C. (1994) https://www.planetary.org/worlds/pale-blue-dot.

Srikant, K. (Feb. 26, 2025) Fact Check: Is there a consensus that a majority of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck? Econofact.https://econofact.org/factbrief/is-there-a-consensus-that-a-majority-of-americans-are-living-paycheck-to-paycheck.

Unbidden Thoughts

priv◦i◦lege (priv⸍’l) n.—a special right or immunity granted or available
only to a particular person or group; an unearned advantage

In my own highly imperfect way, I try each day to remind myself what my white, male, cisgender, heterosexual privilege “buys” me in our society—to recall how blessed I am to have my health, work that I love, and the economic stability to spend my evenings watching Netflix.  However, recently, I have had a couple of experiences that have caused me to view both my own individual privilege as well as the general inequitable distribution of it in our society in a whole new way, and the insights this has provided about the current political situation in this country have been illuminating.

The first incident occurred while I was walking to breakfast one Saturday morning and I encountered two men having a heated discussion over money.  I only caught about 30 seconds of it as I passed them on the sidewalk, but that was enough for me to know that the two men were acquainted enough for the one to loan the other money to cover some household expenses, that the loaner was in anxious need of being repaid to cover some of his own, and that neither of them were adequately employed to cover everything.  Indeed, I recognized the shirt uniform of a local grocery store on the loaner, providing me with a very realistic idea of his likely weekly income.  It was clear there was no danger of things escalating to physical violence, but it was also equally clear that the attentions of these men were wholly occupied with their financial dilemmas and nothing else.

That’s when the insight struck, unbidden: the economic realities of their lives pretty much precluded either of these men from having the time or energy—the luxury—of concerning themselves with the current political situation in this country.  Daily survival was consuming all their attention, and as Maslow wisely observed, until you have met basic physiological and safety needs, there are absolutely no additional inner resources for anything else.  Concerns about democratic norms and Trump’s authoritarian behaviors are meaningless white noise to someone apprehensively worried (if not panicked) about food, clothing, and shelter.

Now, I had never considered the notion that civic engagement might be a luxury—a privilege—but as I recalled an incident in my own early adult life where I made a very stupid financial decision that forced me to eat nothing but cooked white rice and unseasoned lentils for a month (and I wish I was joking or exaggerating), I realized that of course such engagement is a luxury! We can talk all we want about responsible citizenship, but as an individual, I or anyone else must have the additional resources beyond survival and safety before someone can literally afford to take on that responsibility.  As an affluent white male, I can express my outrage at the Trump administration all I want and as loudly as I want because my economic status more than meets my basic needs.  I have the privilege of being pissed off.

But that got me to wondering how many other people in our society find themselves in the same situation as the two men I encountered, and while the answer is, frankly, a “moving target”—some surveys have the percentage of households living paycheck-to-paycheck as high as 62%, some as low as 34%—the most conservative evaluations done by Jeffrey Fuhrer of the Brookings Institute identifies 43% of American households as unable to meet the benchmark of what he calls “the cost of a basket of basic necessities.”  In other words, for nearly half the families in the United States, their total monthly incomes do not cover the cost of paying for the fundamental necessities to meet Maslow’s physiological and safety needs.

Which means that a disturbingly high number of people in this country simply do not have the necessary luxury to worry about the fate of their immediate communities, let alone the fate of the nation or something as abstract as “democracy.”  Add in the fact that these individuals therefore also do not have the extra “bandwidth” to be sorting the disinformation and misinformation flooding their lives, and the state-of-affairs right now in our society suddenly makes a lot more sense to me than it did a couple of weeks ago: if you are truly a “have-not,” then the only “truth” that can matter is whatever enables you to be less “not.”

Granted, that may sound awfully cynical of me. But like I said, I remember my own beans-and-rice moment, and I know for a fact that I did not spend a lot of that month worried about the Iran-Contra Affair of the Reagan presidency.

Yet, what those in the MAGA movement might be more likely to accuse me of than cynicism is elitism, and that brings me to my other experiential insight of the recent past. Again, another breakfast.  Only this time, the unbidden thought came as I was reading an article about black holes.  Apparently, the gravitational well of the super black holes at the center of galaxies can slingshot actual stars through space at tremendous velocities, and in fact:

S5-HVS1 was the first confirmed such hypervelocity star, and it’s moving at more than 1,700 kilometers per second.  Feel free to take a moment to absorb that fact: an entire star has been ejected from a black hole at more than six million kilometers per hour [four orders of magnitude faster than the 4,200 km/hr of the fastest bullet]. The energies involved are terrifying (Plait, p. 84).

I learned further that the Large Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy orbiting our own has its own super black hole and is consequently effectively “shooting stars at us!”  Granted, the asteroids in our own solar system are far more problematic (ask the dinosaurs!), but still….

I know; I digress.  Back to my unbidden thought.  Or perhaps I should I say thoughts, plural. First, here I sat with the time and leisure to read something interesting that had no practical value to my physiological or safety needs.  Second, I also had the benefit of a level of education that enabled me not only to comprehend this article but to have the consequent and correlating cognitive capacity to parse and analyze the very threats to democracy and our social order that the Trump administration now presents.  In other words, I can be outraged at Trump’s actions because I can fully understand what the consequences of them are.  Again, I possess the privilege—of a different kind—to be pissed off.

Now, education should neither be a “luxury” nor a “privilege”—especially in a democracy!—yet sadly, the historical record in this country reveals that education has seldom been an absolute right for everyone in the population.  The closest we probably came was in the post-war years following WW2, with the GI bill and Brown vs. the Board of Education (along with some other curricular reforms such as “the new math”).  But even those efforts often faced heavy resistance or were not equitably distributed, and by the end of the school busing conflicts of the 1970s and the rise of the Reagan era in the 1980s, an unbiased, just, and equivalent education for “all” began once more to be a “right” of only the more affluent.

Not that there weren’t significant efforts to change this trajectory.  The “No Child Left Behind” and the “Every Student Succeeds Act” were national legislative efforts to improve America’s schools—as were the creation of the Common Core set of national educational standards for literacy and numeracy.  But, too often, the assessment methods of these efforts ended up being either punitive in character (with poor urban and rural school districts frequently taken over by state boards of education) or publicly unpalatable (the Common Core demonstrating how badly devolved critical thinking skills had actually become in the U.S.).  Thus, by the time of the pandemic, an equitable education for all in this country had been on a steady decline for over a decade, and even where it was happening (as Mehta & Fine demonstrated), the quality was at best mediocre.

And we all know what happened next.

Which brings me back to my unbidden thoughts of these past few weeks.  First, they are obviously correlated.  One’s level of education and one’s economic security go hand in hand, and so it should not be surprising to find so many people in our society dispossessed of the “privilege” of civic engagement—nor the rise in authoritarianism that comes with that.  Second, my newfound awareness that civic engagement is in any way or to any degree a privileged luxury that not everyone in our society has full, unfettered access to frankly horrifies me—it is not a truth I am thrilled or excited to learn.  But, third, now that I am aware of my additional privilege, it is incumbent on me to employ it as best as I am able to combat the negative changes I see today in our society, and I believe where I can do that best remains for now the classroom.

Moreover, the reason why I believe that this is true is because of the life and work of fellow educator, Paulo Freire.  For those not familiar with him, Freire revolutionized the teaching of reading in his native Brazil, empowering once illiterate farmers and dayworkers in his country to confront the authoritarian power structures of their day, and so successful were Freire’s efforts that he was exiled by the 1964 military junta.  However, the seed he planted remained, and a little over a decade later, he returned to his native land, where his literacy efforts would one day lead to some of Brazil’s first democratically elected governments.  Today, the power of that educational legacy remains, and Brazil’s democracy has recently survived (and imprisoned) its own Donald Trump. Thus, never doubt what the power of the written word and the education it provides can do.

Nor, for that matter, the power of those who can—and still do—read. I keep writing my hope for a reason.

References

Freire, P. (1970) Pedagogy of the Oppressed.  New York: The Continuum Publishing Company.

Fuhrer, J. (June 20, 2024) How Many are in Need in the US? The Poverty Rate is the Tip of the Iceberg. The Brookings Institute. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/how-many-are-in-need-in-the-us-the-poverty-rate-is-the-tip-of-the-iceberg/.

Mehta, J. & Fine, S. (2019) In Search of Deeper Learning: the Quest to Remake the American High School.  Cambridge:  Harvard University Press.

Plait, P. (Sept. 2025) The Black Hole Next Door.  Scientific American. Pp. 83-84.

Srikant, K. (Feb. 26, 2025) Fact Check: Is there a consensus that a majority of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck? Econofact.  https://econofact.org/factbrief/is-there-a-consensus-that-a-majority-of-americans-are-living-paycheck-to-paycheck.

The State of Engagement

How we spend our days, is, of course,
how we spend our lives.
—Annie Dillard

As anyone reading my most recent essay will recall, one of the major factors Harvard Researchers Jal Mehta and Sarah Fine identified as inhibiting deeper learning in America’s schools is student disengagement.  Children today, especially adolescents, have difficulty seeing the point of school, and as authors Jenny Anderson and Rebecca Winthrop point out in their book, The Disengaged Teen, who can blame them:  “kids witness the world around them—wars, social injustice, climate change, disinformation, technology that can write novels and counsel on heartache—and wonder why on earth they have to learn the Pythagorean theorem” (p. xiii).[i]  Include the fact that only 4% of them report experiencing the deeper learning discussed in my last essay (or the deeper teaching promoted by this project), and life in schools can seem not only pointless but mind-numbingly dull as well (which might explain why 75% of them report cheating regularly). 

The simple truth is that:

[Our] young people, hungry to learn and grow, overwhelmingly associate school with apathy and stress.  Trapped in buildings that feel like prisons (teens’ words, not ours), they are stressed out by a weird combination of competitive pressures and insufficient stimulation, and they develop a frustration that fuels a pervasive lack of meaning in their daily existence (p. xiv).

Indeed, sixty percent of young people today report having no sense of meaning or purpose in their lives, and 44% of those ages 18-25 report feeling that they do not actually matter to another person!

That’s terrifying.  What’s more, it should alert every fully grown adult in our society to the realities of today’s youth and set everyone on a course to rectify this situation.  But how? In a world where many of those same fully grown adults are experiencing almost as much ennui, dismay, and hopelessness as their children, how do we bring meaning, purpose, and caring back into young peoples’ lives?

One possible answer is what Anderson and Winthrop propose in their book.  These authors rightly observe that it is not literal disengagement that is happening in our children’s lives but rather the mode of engagement they are participating in that is impacting how they perceive both school and themselves.  These authors go on to identify and describe four such modes—Passenger, Achiever, Resistor, and Explorer—and they make the case for the superiority of the last of these modes (an argument resembling Mehta’s and Fine’s for deeper learning). They finish by providing insights for how to help children transition from any of the other three modes into the Explorer (with parents are their target audience).

However, while primary caregivers may be who this book is aimed at, the educator in me found some useful insights as well.  Hence, let us take a deeper dive into Anderson’s and Winthrop’s discussion, starting with the Passenger.  This mode, of course, is the dominant one in today’s schools.  “It is the most common mode of engagement, with almost 50 percent of young people from sixth to twelfth grade saying their learning experiences at school inspire coasting” (p. 31), and the sad reality is that being in this mode may “make Passengers possibly the most rational learners we have:  They are responding to an under- or overwhelming environment by doing what they have control over.  They check out” (p. 37).  Hence, like the “treaties” Mehta and Fine refer to in their work, these are the students who agree to do the class assignments in exchange for teachers not micromanaging their every move, and in return for this minimal investment, adequate progress gets made toward graduation and the eventual release from perceived “imprisonment.”

Where this approach to school gets problematic, though, is that “too much surface-level learning means Passengers develop poor learning habits and miss out on the myriad benefits that come from digging in and taking risks with their learning.  Students in this mode are ‘wasting their time developmentally’ when it comes to building good learning skills” (p. 32), and that means they risk entering adulthood without the necessary cognitive toolkit to do everything from successful adulting to gaining full employment in a knowledge economy.

Which is why, Anderson and Winthrop point out, so many parents push for—and schools typically reward—the Achiever mode, the one where every stereotype of the “ideal” student resides.  Children in this mode are the ones with the well-honed executive function and materials management skills.  They are the ones who complete every assignment (and all extra credit opportunities), who have resumes of extra-curriculars at least a page long (single-spaced), and who take every accelerated or College Board AP class they can fit into their already over-booked schedules.  They are the students for whom teachers write glowing, hyperbole-filled letters of recommendation, and they are the ones who never see the inside of the assistant principal’s office (that’s the disciplinary one for the uninitiated).

These are also the children who have complete emotional meltdowns when the grade isn’t at least 95%.  Perfectionism is the danger lurking for individuals in this mode of engagement, and resilience is not a strength they are likely to develop.  Achievers seldom have a sense of their own agency, and as a result, “all kids operating in Achiever mode are missing something: a level of self-awareness and proactivity that could help them be brave, take risks, and think about their own interests and goals in the education process, not just the goals that teachers and schools set for them” (p. 81). 

Furthermore—and for obvious reasons—creativity is also a challenge for the Achiever, leaving them with stunted CQs and little capacity for reflective critiquing.  That’s problematic because “when we fail to reflect, we miss the chance to notice that [perhaps] our strategies aren’t working.  [Thus,] rather than adjust, we [risk doubling] down and [working] harder at something that doesn’t work at all” (p. 183).  Achievers will find gainful employment and manage adulthood, but they risk living stunted lives, forever chasing the next accomplishment, never satisfied with the “now.”

Yet they will live lives (as will their fellow Passengers).  The danger of the third mode of engagement that Anderson and Winthrop explore, the Resistor mode, is that they might not.  In this mode, children do everything the term implies:  they consistently and regularly misbehave in school; they are often chronically absent; they participate in high-risk activities outside of school; and they are the ones who live in the Assistant Principal’s office.  These are the students with strong negative reputations among the faculty, and therein lies the problem (and true threat) this mode poses for a child who is stuck in it: namely that “too often when kids are resisting, adults see them as problem children rather than children with problems” (p.88).  It then becomes all too easy for a young person to internalize the message adults are sending—that they are their problems—and that is an identity that can kill.  Hence, it behooves all the adults in the life of a Resister to remember that, like Passengers, their choices are often quite rational ones for coping with overwhelming problems (if I’m starving, then stealing food makes a lot of sense) and that is why, as the founders of an organization devoted to helping children transition out of Resistor mode put it, “our greatest task is to buy students time to grow into themselves without giving up on them” (p. 103).

To grow into one’s self, though, requires acquiring a sense of identity that possesses agency, and therefore, “to find an identity, you actually have to look for it, you have to explore” (p. 120).  That is Anderson’s and Winthrop’s fourth and final mode of engagement, the Explorer, and students in this mode are the ones who are truly thriving.  They are the ones engaged in Mehta’s and Fine’s deeper learning, the ones generating novel and creative ideas and taking healthy risks.  They are the ones using their agency to stand for something, fall down, and then learn how to get back up again.  Hence, children in Explorer mode are discovering how to be their authentic selves. 

More importantly, though, is the fact that “when young people are engaged in [even] one part of their lives [in this way]—a class or an extracurricular activity—it spills over to other areas” (p. 47).  Indeed:

when students are interested in something, their ability to persist with cognitively repetitive and exhausting tasks doubles.  For example, students [in one study] spent time on a difficult but mind-numbing task and were then given a short break to read or write about something that interested them.  When presented with another boring and taxing task, their persistence was boosted by 30 percent because they were “replenished” by the interesting thing.  Their energy did not run out; it was refueled (p. 50).

In other words, Explorers keep exploring.

Which brings me to what I think of as “aiding and abetting.”  The reality, Anderson and Winthrop point out, is that everyone spends varying amounts of time in all four of the modes of engagement presented here, and they do so throughout their entire learning lives.  Each of us can and does pivot from one to another (sometimes spending years in a particular mode, sometimes experiencing all four in the same 24 hours). Thus, what I find myself asking in a world where 44% of 18-25 year-olds don’t think they matter to anyone else is this: how do we help children identify the mode they are in; how do we help them transition more effectively from one to another; and how do we help them spend as much time in Explorer mode as possible?

The answer for parents, it turns out, (and the challenge) is to talk more with their teenage children.  “Discussion is to adolescent develop what cuddles are to infants: foundational to building healthy brains” (p. 141), and the data across all OECD countries is clear:  when parents asked several times per week what their child did at school, math scores of these same children went up 16% points—even after accounting for differences in the socio-economic status of the households.  Thus, if you are a parent, the proverbial bottom line for helping your child manage their journey through their various modes of engagement is to speak with them regularly.

And don’t just ask “how was your day?”  Anderson and Winthrop devote an entire chapter to the kinds of language and questions parents can ask to open up the conversation with their teenage child rather than close it down (e.g. “what did you learn in science today?” or “teach me about what you did in history”), and while space here does not permit a full elaboration of all they have to educate about this aspect of parenting, the gist of their message is clear:  “talk to them about what they learn at school and what is happening in their lives, cheer on their academic pursuits, and help them get through hard times.  This, much more than direct homework help, helps teens grow” (p. 142).  Or as one of the parents (and a fellow educator) said when interviewed about his own successful work with his own daughter:  “Notice. Ask. Play. Iterate.  Do it again.” (p. 153).

That last advice sounds a lot like what goes on in a classroom, and thus it helps inform the challenges for schools to answer my “aiding and abetting” questions.  First, schools need to be much more intentional about teaching students how to navigate the ways they are engaging in school because “when schools don’t create any space for powerful reflection, they undervalue the imagining network and the development need for adolescents to begin making meaning of what they are doing” (p. 197).  Second, schools and the educators that compose them need to perceive themselves more as gardeners than as carpenters because:

rigorous research across multiple countries shows that in classrooms where teachers support students’ agentic engagement, kids get better grades and do better on tests.  This is compared to classrooms in the same schools where teachers do not provide an environment that lets kids explore (p. 110; original emphasis).

Third, since “we want young people to spend their days learning well” (p. xxv), what we need to be spending more time on in schools is teaching children how to learn well and not simply assuming they will somehow absorb this “how” through some sort of intellectual osmosis.  The brain science on this is clear (see Medina; Dehaene; and/or Brown, et al just to scratch the surface).  Those of us in schools just need to start paying meticulous and deliberate (and deliberative) attention to this science.

Yet that may point to the greatest challenge of all for schools and parents alike: the willingness to let children fail.  Anyone who has trained athletically knows that to build muscle, you first have to tear it down, and “to build the muscles of an Explorer, young people need to practice trying things, falling down, reflecting on why they fell, and getting back up and trying again.  That is how any child learns to ride a bike” (p. 70), and it is how anyone learns anything deeply. 

Including how one learns resilience.  As Anderson and Winthrop point out, “we can do hard things because we have done hard things” (p. 252) only if we have, in fact, engaged in hard things! Granted:

we want kids who can get to the right answer.  But we also want kids who know why it is the best answer among a sea of possibilities.  We want kids who are adaptable and can explore hard questions in complex environments.  They need [difficult challenges where failure is an authentic option] if things are to feel meaningful and joyful, leading to emotional engagement, which so many lack, busy as they are [simply] completing tasks (p. 198).

Therefore, what ALL the adults in young peoples’ lives need to be doing is helping our children manage their stress, not extinguish it.  Because only then will we help them become the grown-ups they needed us to be when they become our age, and only then will they live bravely in “a messy world [where] to learn well is an essential ingredient to what it means to live well” (p. 260).

Coda

If all the brain science to date could be summarized in a single phrase, Anderson and Winthrop do it nicely when they write that “brains develop the way they are used” (p. 99).  Or as the author of Curious, Ian Leslie puts it: “curiosity is contagious. So is incuriosity.”  Which is why I was so deeply disturbed recently to learn about a new school in Austin, Texas called Alpha School where:

students spend a total of just two hours a day on subjects like reading and math, using A.I.-driven software [and then] the remaining hours rely on A.I. and an adult ‘guide,’ not a teacher, to help students develop practical skills in areas such as entrepreneurship, public speaking and financial literacy (Salhotra).

Worse, this school is the flagship for a movement that includes the Miami-Dade County Public Schools (the nation’s third-largest district) where, as I actively write these words, they are “introducing Google chatbots for more than 105,000 high schoolers” (Salhotra).

Now any regular reader knows my thoughts on AI, social media, and technology in general.  But after the MIT study released this summer demonstrating that ChatGPT actually inhibits thinking (see Lemonade), the notion that entire schools risk making their charges deliberately dumber (and by design!) is horrifying.  Furthermore, what ties this unfolding educational movement to the topic of this essay is that we know (again from the brain science as well as the catastrophe of the pandemic) that learning is a social process.  We know as well that “a mind-bending amount of research shows that the best predictor of life satisfaction is the quality of relationships we have” (p. 191). Thus, how the so-called educators behind this Alpha movement can reconcile what they are doing with the realities of what it means to be fully human explains, to me, a LOT of the experience of those 44% of 18-25 year-olds I keep referencing.    

Put plainly, Annie Dillard’s epigram at the start of this essay is one of life’s fundamental truths, and if you spend the majority of your day in school with an AI, then you spend the majority of your learning life with an AI. Since a similar failed experiment involving computers and education has already played out multiple times over the past few decades, you would think those of us in schools would have learned better by now. Moreover, for those who believe you can have an actual relationship with an AI and thereby meet the social conditions necessary for successful education, there is already the soulless anguish of the 44%—a number that will only grow bigger if the Alpha Schools of this world succeed.

We, in education, can and must do better.

References

Anderson, J. & Winthrop, R. (2025) The Disengaged Teen: Helping Kids Learn Better, Feel Better, and Live Better.  New York: Crown Publishing Group.

Brown, P.; Roediger III, H.; & McDaniel, M. (2014) Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning.  Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Dehaene, S. (2020) How We Learn: Why Brains Learn Better Than Any Machine…for Now. New York: Penguin Books.

Leslie, I. (2014) Curious: The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends on It. New York: Basic Books.

Medina, J. (2018) Attack of the Teenage Brain. Arlington, VA: ASCD Books.

Medina, J. (2014) Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School.  Seattle:  Pear Press.

Salhotra, P. (July 27, 2025) A.I.-Driven Education: Founded in Texas and Coming to a School Near You.  The New York Times.  https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/27/us/politics/ai-alpha-school-austin-texas.html?unlocked_article_code=1.cE8.fbGD.JPscHXYtIEf7&smid=url-share.

[i] Unless indicated otherwise, all quotes in this posting are from The Disengaged Teen.

Deeper Learning

The problem with schools isn’t that they are no longer what they once were;
the problem is that they are precisely what they once were.
—Roland Barth

As mentioned in my most recent essay, I spent a portion of my summer reading the research of Jal Mehta and Sarah Fine of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and in their work, they explore the status of what they call “deep learning” in America’s public high schools.  They characterize “deep learning” as having three fundamental properties:  mastery, identity, and creativity, and they elaborate on these properties as follows:

Mastery because you cannot learn something deeply without building up considerable skill and knowledge in that domain; identity because it is hard to become deeply learned at anything without becoming identified with the domain; and creativity because moving from taking in someone else’s ideas to developing your own is a big part of what makes learning “deep” (p. 299).

Or as educator David Perkins marvelously summarizes it: “playing the whole game at the junior level.”

Mehta and Fine also describe in their work that the classrooms where deep learning is taking place are spaces where “students had real choices, learning by doing was the norm, there was time to explore matters in depth, and students were welcomed as producers rather than receivers of knowledge” (p. 5).  They then describe teachers successfully generating this kind of learning as individuals with strong links between their sense of self and their sense of purpose, educators who:

sought to empower their students; they wanted them to be able to approach both their fields and other life situations as people who could act on the world and not simply have the world act on them.  While their hopes for their students as people came first, they cared about their students through their disciplines or subjects (p. 351; original emphasis).

However, while looking for these aspirational qualities of deep learning in nearly 100 schools scattered across the country and across the socioeconomic spectrum—ranging from progressive charter to International Baccalaureate to traditional comprehensive—what they actually found was not a lot of deep learning.  Over the six years of their research, more than 300 interviews of administrators, teachers, and students, and over 750 hours of classroom observations, what they found was that the long-standing model for learning still dominated:  teacher as transmitter; pupil as recipient.  Indeed, “in classroom after classroom, students were not being challenged to think.  Roughly speaking, about 4 out of 5 classrooms we visited featured tasks that were in the bottom half of Bloom’s taxonomy” (pp. 24-25), and it was clear that performance was valued over learning—with “treaties” between the students and teachers where students basically did what their teachers asked and, in return, the teachers did not micromanage every aspect of student experience. 

Mehta and Fine did find examples of individual schools that did one of the three features of deep learning extremely well, and as I mentioned in Lemonade, they found individual teachers where deep learning was occurring in nearly every school.  But these individuals were consistently the isolated minority in their building, and no school was found where all three—mastery, identity, and creativity—were the governing paradigm for school life.

Which of course begs the question:  why not?

One answer discovered was inertia.  The teacher-as-transmitter learning model has been around millennia while the student-as-active-problem-solver model is only roughly a century old. Combine that with parent resistance—especially in the higher income schools where parents associate their own success with their own traditional teacher-as-transmitter learning—and there has not been a lot of political pressure to change.  In addition, with all “the state and district demands for breadth over depth and pressures for external credentialing,” what you have is a “core grammar of education that involves racing through a mass of information with few opportunities for choice or for exploring a subject in depth” (p. 249).

However, it is not only inertia that is preventing deep learning from being prevalent in our schools.  The most successful teachers providing it in their classrooms spoke of long, lonely journeys, with few role models and little mentoring.  Many had to earn enough of what my mother likes to refer to as “deviant’s credits” to enable them to buck the system, and Mehta and Fine are clear that “our most successful examples had to buffer themselves from external pressures” to conform (p. 44).  Add in the reality that “there is no world where a supervisor would watch 15 minutes of a surgery or a trial and make consequential decisions about a doctor’s or lawyer’s professional performance” (p. 395), and the absence of general respect for the profession leaves little external motivation to take that long, lonely journey to becoming a deeper learning educator.

Nor is that journey a simple one even for those who do undertake it.  Part of what Mehta and Fine identified in their research was that when examining the traits of the most effective teachers they observed, there was no “one-size-fits-all.”  Each deep learning teacher had struggled through discovering their purpose as educators in their own unique way and had their own individual understandings of how to “play the whole game at the junior level.” Hence, examples of deep learning educators seldom contained any overlapping features beyond the fact that each had embedded becoming a teacher into their sense of identity. Or to put it another way, in deep and important ways, each of these teachers was the curriculum in their respective classes.  Which, as the authors note, tends to frustrate those in education who are seeking best practices or simple technical solutions to confront the problem of deep learning’s absence from America’s schools.

Yet lest we put all this absence of deeper learning in America’s classrooms completely on the proverbial shoulders of the adults, our authors also discovered that student disengagement plays a significant role as well.  Chronic absenteeism, the allure of cellphones, the new cultural normal that in-person is optional…all contribute to the statistics that between 5th and 11th grade, the number of students reporting that they find school engaging drops from 75% to 32%, and “since students have to be at school to take the poll, even the 32% underestimates the level of disengagement, because the most disengaged have dropped out of school and are not in the data” (p. 27).  Furthermore, even when students seemingly are engaged, the lower levels of cognitive demand Mehta and Fine found in most of their classroom observations has the potential to lead to situations such as this one where:

One teacher told us that when she tried to refer to material that students had successfully answered questions about on a state science exam only three months earlier, the students not only didn’t know the content but argued that they had never seen it before! (p. 200).

Which points to something the neuroscientist in me recognizes that I’m not certain Mehta and Fine do.  They are correct when they assert that the deep understanding that comes from deep learning “requires both a significant repository of factual knowledge and the ability to use that factual knowledge to develop interpretations, arguments, and conclusions” (p. 12).  But the first portion of that claim—”a significant repository of factual knowledge”—requires a large amount of time, energy, and mental investment to get it embedded in the brain’s long-term memory (where we know from work on creativity that knowledge must reside or the brain literally won’t use it to think).  Indeed, one of the explanations frequently offered for the lack of deep learning in schools of all kinds is that students must master the basic skills and knowledge before they can engage the material more deeply.

However, Mehta and Fine rightly point out that the teachers they observed who employed deep learning “led with authentic complex tasks, and embedded within those tasks the basic skill-building needed to take on those tasks” (p. 326).  So deep learning is not antithetical to developing “a significant repository of factual knowledge.”  What is, is time.  If I’m “playing the whole game A at the junior level,” then—to paraphrase Oliver Burkeman—I’m choosing not “to play the whole game B at the junior level.”  I can’t.  As Burkeman wisely observes, any choice I make automatically precludes my other options, and therefore, the time spent to achieve deep learning in one discipline means a lack of time to achieve deep learning in another because our amount of time is finite and our brains simply work the way they do.

Hence, I will suggest that part of what may be keeping deeper learning from taking place more often in our public schools is the choices we have made about curriculum and what counts as being educated.  We can only accomplish the current breadth of disciplines at the expense of depth, and so we may need to make some challenging choices about what we want our children learning deeply if we want deeper understanding to occur in our schools—recognizing that that itself also comes with its own risks as the world of computer science is learning the hard way right now, with AI replacing the entry-level coders currently coming out of college.  Crystal balls are always cloudy, and as Harvard economist, David Deming, points out, it can actually be “quite risky to go to school to learn a trade or a particular skill, because you don’t know what the future holds.  You need to try to think about acquiring a skill set that’s going to be future-proof and last you for 45 years of working life.”

Bringing me to one final thought on why Mehta and Fine found so little deep learning in the classrooms where they visited; something they fully acknowledged right at the start of their work.  And that is the fact that:

Perhaps the most important reason that there has not been more deep learning in American schools: limited public demand for it.  The qualities associated with deep learning—thinking critically, grappling with nuance and complexity, reconsidering inherited assumptions, questioning authority, and embracing intellectual questions—are not widely embraced by the American people. (p. 38).

We are fundamentally an anti-intellectual society, and in many ways, our public schools (and a lot of our private ones) simply reflect this fact back to us.

Why, though, should we care? I know; it’s a rhetorical question.  Anyone who has read my letters to my graduating seniors knows why we should be concerned about the lack of deeper learning in our schools, and anyone who has observed the first 8 months of the Trump presidency really knows why.  But I would like to give the final word this time to Mehta and Fine, whose book went to press right toward the end of Trump’s first term in the White House and whose final words in their book are:

Perhaps the most important role [schools] play is training our future citizens.  These are people who will need to be able to tell truth from fantasy, real news from fake news; they will need to understand that climate change is real; and they will need to be able to work with people from other countries to solve the next generation of problems.  If we cannot shift from a world where learning deeply is the exception rather than the rule, more is in jeopardy than our schools.  Nothing less than our society is at stake (p. 400).

References

Barshay, J. (Aug. 4, 2025) 7 Insights About Chronic Absenteeism, A New Normal for American Schools.  The Hechinger Report.  https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-7-insights-chronic-absenteeism/.

Board of Editors (July/Aug. 2025) Education in the U.S. Needs Facts, Not Ideologies.  Scientific American.  P. 88-89.

Horowitch, R. (June 2025) The Computer-Science Bubble is Bursting.  The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/economy/archive/2025/06/computer-science-bubble-ai/683242/.

Mehta, J. & Fine, S. (2019) In Search of Deeper Learning: the Quest to Remake the American High School.  Cambridge:  Harvard University Press.

Lemonade

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful
committed individuals can change the world.
In fact, it’s the only thing that ever has.
—Margaret Mead

A genius is a man who takes the lemons Fate hands him
and starts a lemonade-stand with them.
—Elbert Hubbard

Quite recently, my father and I found ourselves unexpectedly stranded on our sailboat in the middle of the Chesapeake Bay with a dead diesel engine.  The nearest port-of-call, Solomon’s Island, was at least six nautical miles away, and what little wind there was was coming from the wrong direction. Additionally, the final moments before we frantically shut the engine down were full of screaming warning lights and alarms, and so the future of the engine itself was weighing on our minds on top of the immediate dilemma in which we found ourselves.  We could be looking at a catastrophic end to our time with this boat.

I share all of this because while we waited for the tow to arrive (unsolicited shout-out to BoatUS!!), we could have sat baking our brains out, bobbing for hours in the mid-day sun. Anyone familiar with the Chesapeake in mid-July knows how uncomfortably hot and humid it normally is at this time of year. Yet, for only the second time this summer, a strong cold-front had passed over our heads just a little over an hour before the breakdown (we had watched the cloud line move across us), and thus, instead of 95+ degrees in the shade, a humidity of 80, and a tropical dewpoint in the mid-70s, we found ourselves anchored amidst one of those rare, glorious summer days we occasionally have here in the mid-Atlantic with crystal blue skies, a temperature in the low 80s, humidity in the 50s, and a fall-like dewpoint in the low-60s. 

All I could think was: lemonade.  If we had to endure a crisis, at least a stunningly beautiful day made things a little less sufferable.

Bringing me to this essay’s central theme: what to do with the mounting number of “lemons” we have right now—especially for those of us in education? There is, of course, Trump’s Supreme Court sanctioned dismantling of the U.S. Department of Education and the loss of all the research that has made such positive impact on America’s schools—especially in the science of reading, one of life’s most critical skills.  Add the loss of food subsidies (SNAP benefits) from the so-called “Big Beautiful Bill,” and we will have hungrier children in our classrooms for which the data of that negative impact on learning is well established.  Then there is the recently revealed research from MIT that my arguments in my last essay now have actual EEG data recorded from brains showing AI’s negative impact on brain engagement, with users of ChatGPT consistently underperforming “at all neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels” compared to the control groups.  Toss in all the unvaccinated children that will be entering our schools this fall, and you have a regular petri dish for infectious disease impacting everyone’s learning as well.

What’s more, this list of “lemons” when it comes to education (let alone our larger society) doesn’t even scratch the surface of what I’ve felt compelled to write about in the past two years.

However, as I begin to prepare to enter year 37 of my teaching career, I was recently reminded of the power of the few to effect positive change when I joined my mother working for a day for a food mission program where she is a volunteer.  She has mentioned this work now for quite a few years during our regular zoom conversations, and my impression has always been of this substantial group of people preparing and distributing numerous meals to people in need in the north St. Louis neighborhood where this program takes place.  Yet when I arrived to help out at the end of this past month, I found that my mother was one of only four people cooking and packing up 200 meals that particular day, and as I added my assistance over the next few hours, I couldn’t help but marvel at what this tiny, dedicated crew was seeking to accomplish each week.

Now I am not naïve.  The efforts of my mother and her three other volunteers are not going to solve the food shortage crisis facing the citizens who live in north St. Louis.  They are not addressing the larger systemic problem, and I am confident that they are fully cognizant of this fact.  But for at least a day, 200 of their fellow human beings went to bed, hunger satiated, able to sleep more deeply, and while individually, such acts may appear fruitless, collectively, they add up to remind us all of the power of compassion, kindness, and generosity to make “lemonade” out of life’s inevitable “lemons”—”lemons” which are handed to everyone, everywhere, in all walks of life.

Which brings me to my other recent reminder of the power of the few.  During my visit with my mother where I helped in the program where she volunteers, I was also finishing up reading (yes, reading; always reading!) a book by Harvard researchers Jal Mehta and Sarah Fine about how we might generate deeper learning in our schools in this country.  It is a study I will be writing much more about in a future posting, but the chapter most relevant to this current discussion is about the authentically engaged teachers they did find in some of the schools where they visited.  Consistently (and dishearteningly), these teachers were the exceptions in their schools.  Yet every school had them, and while they were not going to fix the systemic problems preventing deeper learning from happening for all the students in their respective schools, they were making a positive difference in the lives of those with the good fortune to inhabit their individual classrooms. Hence, at least some children were getting their intellectual hunger satiated.

Reminding me of one of education’s most famous cliched fables, the starfish story—an anecdote my very first principal told the assembled faculty at the start of my very first day as a professional.  For the tiny minority reading this who do not already know it, the quick recap goes as follows:  a great storm has tossed thousands of starfish up onto a beach where they lie suffocating; an old man walking the beach sees a young man strolling along, picking up one starfish at a time and tossing them back into the sea; the old man chastises the younger for engaging in such a Sisyphean task; to which the young man picks up the next starfish, tosses it into the sea and replies “it matters to that one.”

Everywhere this fall, there will be teachers engaged in the deeper teaching that leads to deeper learning.  They may not be the majority. But they will be there. Tossing one “starfish” at a time back into the “sea.”  I will be trying to join them as I have every year for nearly four decades.

Lemonade anyone?

References

Aurino, E., et al. (2020) Food for Thought? Experimental Evidence on the Learning Impacts of a Large-scale School Feeding Program. Journal of Human Resources (11:1123).

Chow, A. (June 23, 2025) ChatGPT May Be Eroding Critical Thinking Skills, According to a New MIT Study.  TIME.  https://time.com/7295195/ai-chatgpt-google-learning-school.

Mandavilli, A., Rosenbluth, T., Paris, F. (July 31, 2025) Childhood Vaccination Rates Have Dropped Again, C.D.C. Data Shows.  The New York Times.  https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/31/health/child-vaccinations-decline-cdc.html.

Mehta, J. & Fine, S. (2019) In Search of Deeper Learning: the Quest to Remake the American High School.  Cambridge:  Harvard University Press.

The Death of Thinking?

Rage, rage against the dying of the light…
Do not go gentle into that good night.
—John Donne

It started with an assignment.  My students were learning to use the standard APA-style citation method employed in the sciences, and one of my students who is a faithful and almost fanatical rule-follower kept calling me over to ask how to cite his next item of research.  After multiple attempts at re-explaining the process, I finally simply asked this student to show me his screen. This is what I saw:

Now, my student hadn’t done anything atypical of today’s learner.  He had typed his query directly off my instruction sheet into Google and awaited the response.  It is, of course, not a good research habit (and one I keep trying to fight), but when I saw what it had produced, I was unnerved; I had not realized how much AI had invaded internet search engines.  Here I had spent all this time teaching my students how to vet websites for academic and scientific reliability—an essential critical thinking skill, especially in today’s flood of misinformation and disinformation—and yet, here, confronting me on my student’s screen was an AI summary of only potentially relevant sources with no distinct authors or web addresses for my student to cite.  No wonder he was confused!

So I showed my student how he could click on the little link symbol you can see there on the image right after the word “change” in order to bring up the list of web sites the AI had used for its summary, and I demonstrated how to find the source he needed among those sites so that he could formally cite it in his project.  But if not for my own critical thinking skills enabling me to know what the AI was doing, both my student and myself would have been left in the dark, making unsubstantiated claims, reporting the thoughts of others as our own without any attribution to the original thinkers.  The literal definition of plagiarism.

To say that I, as an educator, was appalled and alarmed by this development is like stating that hydrogen bombs make a noise when they go off (hyperbole intended!).  However, I shortly thereafter read an editorial piece on Bloomberg that reminded me that my collegiate level colleagues have it even worse right now.  At the preK-12 level, good schools are still doing a lot with pencil and paper in their classrooms, including formal assessments that require actual knowledge and the ability to think through a problem unaided by technology.  But presently in academia—at institutions whose very raison d’être is the production and refinement of critical thinking!—“outsourcing one’s homework to AI has become routine” and “assignments that once demanded days of diligent research can be accomplished in minutes…no need to trudge through Dickens or Demosthenes; all the relevant material can be instantly summarized after a single chatbot prompt.”

Even more incredible (confirming a rumor I’d heard) is the fact that apparently more and more professors are starting to employ AI themselves to evaluate student work, leading to the mind-boggling and ultimately untenable reality of “computers grading papers written by computers, students and professors idly observing, and parents paying tens of thousands of dollars a year for the privilege.”   The Editorial Board of Bloomberg News is indeed spot on when they declare that “at a time when academia is under assault from many angles, this looks like a crisis in the making.” 

The coffin’s nail for me, though…the camel’s straw, the road’s end, the coup de grace…pick your cliché for finality and mine from this past month was the screenshot below:

I had read this remarkable article in Scientific American on the genetic fluidity of sex and gender in sparrows, and I wanted to share it with my fellow biology teachers for use in our inheritance unit next year (as well as some separate electives we each teach).  So I scanned the article as a PDF to make it more permanently accessible for all of us, and that’s when I saw the message from ADOBE up there in the lefthand corner:  “This appears to be a long document.  Save time by reading a summary.” 

I spluttered; I fumed; I cursed:

“Of course it’s a long document you [expletive deleted] piece of software! That’s the whole point! To provide the reader with rich, nuanced knowledge and understanding of one of the most complex ideas in all of biology!!! If I had wanted my colleagues and I to have a [further expletive deleted] ‘summary,’ I first would have written it myself before giving it to them and then I still would have provided them the formal citation!”

In case you cannot tell, gentle reader, I was pissed.  Pissed at the seeming systemic and systematic attack on the human capacity to think (let alone actually valuing that capacity).  Pissed that there is clearly a market for this disparagement of thinking, and pissed that so few in our world seem to be upset by this dying of the light. I have known that scientific reasoning has been under assault for some time now, but the death of basic thinking itself?!

I know, I know.  One more thing to add to the agenda for my often Sisyphean-feeling profession.  But I’m not just pissed.  I am also deeply concerned, and something neuroscientist, Hanna Poikonen, wrote earlier this year is a good way to end this brief ragging on my part:

Each time we off-load a problem to a calculator or ask ChatGPT to summarize an essay, we are losing an opportunity to improve our own skills and practice deep concentration for ourselves…when I consider how frenetically people switch between tasks and how eagerly we outsource creativity and problem-solving to AI in our high-speed society, I personally am left with a question: What happens to our human ability to solve complex problems in the future if we teach ourselves not to use deep concentration? After all, we may need that mode of thought more than ever to tackle increasingly convoluted technological, environmental, and political challenges.

“May need” indeed.  My money’s on “will,” not “may.”

References

Maney, D. (March 2025) The Bird that Broke the Binary. Scientific American.  Pp. 48-55.

Poikonen, H. (Feb. 2025) How Expertise Improves Concentration.  Scientific American. Pp. 81-82.

The Editorial Board (May 27, 2025) Does College Still Have a Purpose in the Age of ChatGPT? Bloomberg News.  https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2025-05-27/ai-role-in-college-brings-education-closer-to-a-crisis-point?utm_source=pivot5&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=nvidia-breaks-records-with-44-billion-sales-despite-china-ban-1&_bhlid=31b2ce1fa3444fd1982e5d64eb0f1a1b6d1ab0f3.

Rebuilding the Inner Life

Change your thoughts and you change your world.
—Norman Vincent Peale

Smile, breathe, go slowly.
—Thich Nhat Hanh

In my most recent essay, Flailing to Thrive, I left off suggesting that I think there might be one more thing we could be doing as a society to address the struggles that males in our culture have been documented dealing with lately. I can now share that my motive for my pause is that this “one other thing” doesn’t just involve the sorts of focused interventions I discussed in that essay.  Instead, what I think we could be addressing as a society to benefit our boys and young men as they grow up would also benefit our girls and young women as well.  Specifically, I think we need to change how we socialize all our children as they mature. 

For example, despite all humans being equally capable of experiencing the full range of possible emotions, we regularly teach our children otherwise “through the gendered use of language.”  From an early age, our children learn “that certain emotions are more acceptable for girls than for boys and that women talk more about their feelings,” and studies have shown that significant numbers of mothers are “more likely to use emotional language when speaking with four-year-old daughters than with sons that age.” (Agarwal, p. 75). Consequently, a number of adult males in our society struggle with the healthy expression and processing of certain emotions, and this, in fact, is one of the reasons why men have the higher rates of suicide discussed last time and why dedicated intervention programs targeted just for men have needed development.

However, the “genderfication” of emotions is only a tiny subset of the role the affective domain has played in our socialization process.  For millennia in Western culture, there has been a bifurcation between the so-called “rational” and the so-called “emotional,” and ever since Heraclitus stepped into his river and Zeno found his paradox, the latter has been severely denigrated (along with the gender that has historically been most associated with it).  Oh, there have been intellectual moments of rebellion—the Epicureans, the Medieval mystics, the German & English Romantics of the 19th Century—but for over 2,500 years in our society, reason has been affirmed the supreme ruler of the cognitive domain and men declared its primary purveyor.

Or at least this was the case until recent neuroscience—with its fMRI scans—came along and dismantled this whole paradigm entirely.  For instance, we’ve known now for almost two decades that the brain does not engage in any kind of bifurcation of the “rational” versus the “emotional.”  Something as strictly analytical as the equation 2+2=4 has an emotive component to it, and even the darkest of grief has its ratiocinative side.  As I like to phrase it for my students, “every thought has a feeling; every feeling has a thought.”

Today, though, we are actually able to observe the neural networks involved in all this brain processing, and what that is revealing is revealing for this discussion.  To understand how, let us take a brief detour and familiarize ourselves with three of the most important of these networks.  One (and the one you are employing the most right this very moment) is the Executive Control Network or ECN.  This network enables each of us to pay attention to a specific task at hand (e.g.. reading this essay), to identify and employ the necessary rules (e.g. the syntax and grammar of reading), and to manage the behaviors needed for successful completion of this task (e.g. control of eyeball movements and body posture). 

The ECN then alternates with the Default Mode Network or DMN, which is the part of your brain most active when you are simply staring off into space. The DMN is what you employ when you are reflecting without any deliberate intent, and it is responsible for the creative problem-solving process (the so-called “Ah, ha!” or “Eureka!” moment). Indeed, as the person writing this essay, I am regularly drifting off to await my DMN to generate my next sentence or paragraph.

Which brings me to the Salience Network or SN.  This portion of our brain literally keeps us alive (heart pumping, lungs breathing, etc.) and generates the necessary emotional states—both simple and complex—required for survival as a member of a social species.  Yet the SN is also fully integrated into both the ECN and DMN, serving as the active switching mechanism between the two. What that means is that what we frequently think of as the “real” work of the brain—generating ideas, solving problems, learning, etc.—actually involves the very system of the brain that keeps us alive…including our emotional states.  Hence, as neuroscientist Mary Helen Immordino-Yang puts it, “emotions, rather than interfering with clear-headed thinking, drive clear-headed thinking—thinking that is rational, responsive to circumstances and morally aware” (p. 51; original emphasis).

What that means for how we socialize our children is profound.  Whenever we “genderfy” emotions and/or perpetuate the “rational vs. emotional” bifurcation myth, we interfere with how robustly the brain connects its SN circuits to both the ECN and DMN, and the link between this interference and an increased vulnerability to mental illness—especially in teens—is starting to be well documented.  Individuals who get “stuck” in their ECN due to weak SN connections are more prone to the different types of anxiety disorders; while individuals who get “stuck” in the DMN are more likely to experience clinical depression.  Either way, how we socialize our children around their emotional experiences directly impacts their brain development and how effectively their brains function; so being a bit more deliberative about it as caregivers and avoiding all manner of emotional “genderfication” would benefit all involved.

Especially in today’s digital wasteland of a cognitive environment. There, according to MIT theoretical physicist, Alan Lightman, we have trashed the ecology of our inner lives as badly as we have the ecology of the natural world, and we have done so for quite some time now. He, like Oliver Burkeman, attributes this to how we have blended our frenzied obsession with managing time with the ever-present technologies we allow to hold our attentions 24/7, and he insists that unlike the actual planet—where we have begun to acknowledge our harm and are even starting some interventions to repair things—the damage to our inner lives remains hidden from our view, unrecognized and unaddressed.

Now, in full disclosure, I have not read Lightman’s In Praise of Wasting Time, where he presents his arguments and offers suggestions for remediating the problem.  I am relying instead on remarks he said in his interview with Rick Steves.  But this notion that we have polluted our inner lives as badly as we have polluted our outer ones resonated so deeply with me from my work with today’s adolescents that I felt compelled to share.  Particularly because that is what the process of socialization does: it informs the construction of the inner life we each employ to generate our public life.  Thus, if we are dumping social media’s toxic waste there and poisoning the atmosphere with “genderfication” and AI generated contaminants, we are risking socializing our children to build inner lives—in both our boys and our girls—that are fundamentally dysfunctional.

Moreover, for over a dozen years now, we have seen what that does to people’s public lives in our society.  Just this past month, I had the misfortune of witnessing a man and a woman on a public street in a relatively posh part of town scream invectives at each other over a harmless traffic error, a situation that rapidly escalated to language shouted aloud which I would be ashamed to say in the privacy of my own head.  What’s more, I felt actual shame when—rather than risk intervening to help de-escalate what was happening—I sped up my pace to walk away from the scene as rapidly as possible because in the back of my head was the thought: “what if one of these idiots pulls out a gun?” Such is the world our collectively polluted inner lives has produced.

So what are we to do about all this? If you’re a parent or guardian, get your child off of screens.  More importantly, get yourself off your screens.  Stare off into space and clean up some of the litter in your own inner life.  Think about your word choices when it comes to emotions and model what healthy emoting and emotional processing looks like.  Be your best self as much as possible (and generous when you inevitably are not).  If you are an educational institution, ban smart phones of any kind from your classrooms if not your entire campus and deliberately teach emotional intelligence in your curriculum.  More and more schools have started to realize they need to do both but we are still far short of a critical mass.  Finally, if you are a fellow educator—committed to authentic engagement with your students—remember that hope is a verb: if we do not work determinedly to keep illuminating the darkness, then (to paraphrase John Donne) the not-so-good night wins.

Coda

I have written variants of the preceding paragraph so often now that I feel like one of those old scratched LPs where the needle keeps going over the same groove again and again—i.e. the proverbial broken record.  However, I also know that if I remain silent, if I do not repeat myself however many times it takes, then I am not actively hoping the way I fundamentally believe we are all called to do.  Which leads me to close this essay with a Haitian proverb that recently crossed my path: “Beyond mountains, there are mountains.”  Or as Miley Cyrus once sang, “it’s the climb.”

References

Agarwal, P. (Feb. 2025) Emotions Are Not Gendered.  Scientific American.  Pp. 74-75.

Immordino-Yang, M.H. (Feb. 2025) Growing the Adolescent Mind.  Scientific American.  Pp. 48-55.

Steves, R. (May 17, 2025) Program 683a: English Country Gardens; On Becoming a Gardener; In Praise of Wasting Time.  Travel with Rick Steves.  https://www.ricksteves.com/watch-read-listen/audio/radio.