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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.

Flailing to Thrive

If you are here unfaithfully with us,
you are causing terrible damage.
— Jalal Al-Din Rumi

This topic is a challenging one for me.  Those closest to me know that I am not the biggest fan of my half of the species and that I can tally on one hand the number of fellow males I would count among my close friends.  In fact, I usually simply tolerate most of the other males in my life.  I loathe the banal culture of the “locker room,” and I am so actively antagonistic to the patriarchy that I like to claim that my mother jokes that she raised two children and one feminist and that it wasn’t her daughter.  Bottom line, I much prefer the company of women—to the degree that in classic couples situations where the men and women usually pair off with their respective genders, you will find me in the kitchen with the women.  There is a reason I spent the majority of my teaching career at a single-sex all-girls school.

However, today I find myself once again in a fully co-ed environment where I have a professional duty to authentically engage all my students for purposes of nurturing them to become their best authentic selves, and so I read Clair Cain Miller’s article in the New York Times with a profound sense of downheartedness.  I already knew that suicide rates have always been generally higher for men than for women and that those rates have increased for all young people in the past decade—much of it directly attributable to the impact of social media ([expletive deleted] Snapchat!).  But to learn that the suicide rate in the population of males I work with has effectively doubled from 11 per 100,000 to 21 per 100,000 since 1968 was disturbing to say the least.  That’s over 4,600 teenage boys and young men dead by their own hand in 2023 alone—a rate that only goes up as they age.

Why? What could be causing an increasing number of males—in a fundamentally patriarchal society!—to fail to thrive? Part of the answer seems to be economic.  As the types of positions traditionally identified with masculinity—so-called “blue collar” jobs—have been increasingly eliminated by robots and other forms of automation, the remaining employment opportunities and those where there has been steady job growth rely more and more on the so-called “soft skills” traditionally associated in our culture with women.  Which in a patriarchy can be viewed as problematic.  As Tracy Dawson, a 53-year old unemployed welder from St. Clair, Missouri, made abundantly clear in a 2017 interview: “I ain’t gonna be a nurse; I don’t have the tolerance for people.  I don’t want it to sound bad, but I’ve always seen a woman in the position of a nurse or some kind of health care worker. I see it as more of a woman’s touch.”

Of course, attitudes such as these have been around for a long time (pop-culture was recognizing this fact as early as the late 1970s, and Bruce Springsteen made a career out of examining them).  However, Robb Willer, professor of sociology at Stanford, is blunt when he states that, today, “the contemporary American economy is not rewarding a lot of the characteristics associated with men and masculinity, and the sense is those trends will continue.” So where does that leave the Tracy Dawson’s in this world? It leaves them under- or unemployed in an increasingly shrinking part of the work-force (see chart below)—with all the consequent potential for undermining and harm to an individual’s sense of self and well-being.

Yet, underlying this employment issue and any subsequent potential changes in how men in America perceive themselves today is an even deeper root cause and one that directly impacts me as an educator.  Since learning is the gateway to everything about a person’s life, any changes in educational status will impact a person’s entire existence, and the reality is that today, starting as early as kindergarten, boys are arriving in our schools less prepared than girls, both in academic readiness and their behavior.  The likely reason for this is the increased focus on college-readiness that has taken over schooling in the past two decades, forcing educational institutions of all kinds to emphasize academics at earlier and earlier ages.  That is something which boys, who usually mature later than girls, are less prepared to handle, and as a result, boys are not getting the same academic head start that girls now are.  Furthermore, this gender gap in academic performance continues to persist in today’s schools as both sexes move up through the grade levels, resulting in women being more likely to graduate, earn higher G.P.A.s, and even go on to college.  Indeed, women now outnumber men at the college and university level with 66% of female high school graduates compared to 57% of the male ones.

Again, where does this leave the young Dawson’s in this world? Well, since the link between matriculation from college and broader career prospects and higher earnings is well documented, it leaves a lot of them increasingly left behind economically, frequently still living with their parents, and ever more susceptible to the reckless ravings of an autocrat.  As Jonathan Rauch articulates in his Constitution of Knowledge, these are the men who hear the perfectly authentic and valid challenge to their male privilege, look at their employment prospects and long-term financial outlook, and reply “Privilege?! What privilege?!”  It is precisely because the implied social contract of the American patriarchy told them that simply being male guaranteed them a degree of status in our society that the perceived failure to deliver on that “promise” has resulted in men who will storm our capital, vote for a self-declared “dictator for one day,” and sometimes literally kill themselves out of their despondency.

So what are we, as a society, to do? The feminist in me may be tremendously excited by the data showing how far the status of women in our country has improved since my childhood (still can’t believe my own mother once could not have her own credit card!).  What’s more, the educator in me still knows how far there still is to go for women to achieve true equity with men in this country (especially in the face of the patriarchy’s current pushback under the Trump administration).  However, just because I personally am not a cheerleader for men does not mean I believe that they somehow do not deserve to have lives of meaning and purpose.  ALL humans deserve that.  Indeed, the foundational flaw of both the patriarchy and systemic racism is their refusal to believe this very thing!

However, the automation of the workplace continues unabated, and with AI, this is even going to start being true of some of the so-called “white collar” jobs.  Thus, it will not just be the unemployed welders and longshoreman dealing with the ennui in their lives; it will also be the unemployed estate lawyers and radiologists confronting their lack of purpose.  Which brings me full circle after my brief (but important) digression to my original question: what do we do about this?

There are at least two things in education we could do right away.  The first is to consider restructuring the configuration of our early elementary classrooms when it comes to males.  Just as there is data showing that single-sex classroom environments benefit middle-school aged girls in the math and science disciplines (and there are co-ed schools both public and private that segregate their populations accordingly for these classes during those years), there is data suggesting that a single-sex environment may benefit K-3 boys in terms of behavioral discipline problems, enabling them to focus better on their learning at this critical age.

Which leads to the second thing schools could be doing to address why some boys and young men are falling behind: teach and employ restorative justice practices in our schools instead of the more traditional punitive approach.  The data is clear: boys are far more likely to receive punishments (and frequently harsher ones) for poor decision making than girls do—especially among children of color—and the data is equally clear that by using restorative justice techniques, teachers and administrators alike can help students better manage their emotions and behaviors and find constructive resolutions in situations of conflict.  Schools that employ these practices have all shown improved academic performance, and they are safer communities for their inhabitants—again, particularly among children of color.

One additional thing I think we could be doing to address the segment of boys and young men in our population who are struggling to thrive is to reconsider what intelligences we choose to value.  Historically, we have always tended to undervalue the kind of critical thinking and problem solving associated with certain jobs such as waiting tables or wiring a house—or welding.  But in the recent hyper-focus on “college readiness,” practical, less traditionally academic intelligences have received progressively fewer and fewer formal supports.  The vocational tech programs of my youth—we had an entire high school in my district devoted to them—have been steadily dismantled and their government funding withheld or withdrawn, to the point where we actually have a critical shortage of such labor in this country.  Resurrecting the vocational tech schools of the past, as educator Mike Rose points out, would go a long way toward addressing a whole host of issues confronting our society—one of which I would like to suggest could be providing the young Dawson’s of our society with both a sustainable income (no one’s automating plumbing for the foreseeable future) AND a sense of meaning and purpose.

As for the one other thing I think might be helpful when addressing this essay’s topic, I will save that for next time.

References

CDC (2023) Suicide Among Adults Age 55 and Older, 2021.  https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db483.htm#:~:text=Among%20adults%20age%2055%20and%20older%20in%202021%2C%20the%20suicide,%28age%2085%20and%20older%29.

Darling-Hammond, S. (May 18, 2023) Fostering Belonging, Transforming Schools: The Impact of Restorative Practices.  Learning Policy Institute.  https://learningpolicyinstitute.org/product/impact-restorative-practices-report.

Miller, C.C. (May 14, 2025) It’s Not Just a Feeling: Data Shows Boys and Young Men Are Falling Behind.  The New York Times.  https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/13/upshot/boys-falling-behind-data.html.

Miller, C.C. (Jan. 4, 2017) Why Men Don’t Want the Jobs Done Mostly by Women.  The New York Times.  https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/04/upshot/why-men-dont-want-the-jobs-done-mostly-by-women.html.

Rauch, J. (2021) The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press.

Rose, M. (2014) The Mind at Work: Valuing the Intelligence of the American Worker.  New York: Penguin Books.

UCLA School Mental Health Project (2025) Single-Sex Education: Pros & Cons. https://smhp.psych.ucla.edu/pdfdocs/singleeduc.pdf.

“It’s the Snapchat, Stupid”—Part 2

Treat people as if they were what they ought to be
and you help them become what they are capable of being.
—Goethe

I have never been more afraid for America’s future in my life.
—Thomas Friedman

In the original TV series, Dragnet, the character Sgt. Joe Friday is alleged to have said “Just the facts, ma’am.”  But like Bill Clinton’s association with “it’s the economy, stupid,” it is a total fabrication.  The famed comedian, Stan Freberg, said something similar in his parody of the show, and what would now be called a meme was born, with “just the facts, ma’am” forever associated—incorrectly—with Joe Friday.  However, just as the meme connected with former President Clinton served as a useful lens for an earlier essay about education in this country, “just the facts” is an ideal one with which to start this posting; so here are just a few of the most relevant ones:

  • 40% of fourth graders today read below the basic level on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), meaning that they “cannot grasp the sequence of events in a story.”  It is the worst performance for this grade-level in 20 years.
  • 33% of eight graders today also read below the basic level on the NAEP, meaning that they “can’t grasp the main idea of an essay or identify the different sides of a debate.”  It is the worst performance for this grade-level in the five decades since the inception of the exam.
  • In terms of reading engagement outside of school, 34% of fourth graders now report that they read only 30 minutes or less each day, and though a mere 34% of eighth graders reported reading for fun in 1984, that number has now dropped to 14% in 2023.
  • As for the United States’ adult population, 30% of them can only read at the level of a 10-year-old, and both numeracy and literacy levels as measured by the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies have dropped consistently among those ages 16-65 (see graphic).
https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/piaac/2023/national_results.asp

Now since literacy of any kind is the foundation for the ability to reason and the basis for all background knowledge needed to make good decisions in a complex world, then these facts are extremely problematic—and that is a very generous understatement.  As New York Times columnist David Brooks puts it—quoting retired generals Jim Mattis and Bing West—“if you haven’t read hundreds of books, you are functionally illiterate, and you will be incompetent, because your personal experiences alone aren’t broad enough to sustain you.”  Reading—and lots of it—is the keystone to our capacity for critical reasoning, and just as the absence of a keystone species in an ecosystem will lead to its collapse, the absence of reading in a country’s population is a recipe for the breakdown of our entire social order.

And before I am accused of hyperbole, I am already witnessing the potential for this breakdown in my own classes and have been now for over a decade.  Like Anya Galli Robertson, who teaches sociology at the University of Dayton, I too have continued to “give similar lectures, assign the same books and give the same tests that [I] always have,” and like Professor Robertson, I too have seen firsthand how “years ago, students could handle it; now they are floundering.”  Moreover, while the mental coddling I’ve written about before is definitely playing a role in this situation, the even bigger causal source for this general decline in my students’ collective IQ, CQ, and EQ is their poor reading habits.  Habits due in no small degree to the amount of screen time spent on their phones. 

Also (to quote Brooks again): 

Not just any screen time.  Actively initiating a search for information on the web may not weaken your reasoning skills. But passively scrolling TikTok or X weakens everything from your ability to process verbal information to your working memory to your ability to focus. You might as well take a sledgehammer to your skull.

Or more accurately, a broom.  To see why, a little brain science from my own classroom is in order.  Each year around this time, I have my senior anatomy class perform a series of experiments.  I give them a standard short-term memory (STM) test in the absence of their cellphones; we do a few other learning activities; then they take the exact same test a second time while grasping their phones in their hands after playing with their devices for two minutes.  Data is scored, loaded into the spreadsheets, and then we wait until the next class where we do the exact same sequence of events with a different but equivalent STM test—only this time, no phones are present at all.  Again, data is scored, and I “innocently” ask how many of them scored better the second time—to which every hand in the room rises, and I use this fact to introduce the concept of working memory.

Put simply, working memory is like a temporary storage shelf that your hippocampus uses to place items from your immediate STM that you might want to add eventually to long-term memory (LTM).  It’s a parking lot for thoughts and experiences needing evaluation as to whether they are important enough to dedicate to your LTM, and it’s why you can recall what you had for dinner last night—something that is no longer in your current STM awareness—but cannot say what you had for dinner a month ago (unless you have one of those extremely rare autobiographical memories).  Basically, your working memory still has last night’s dinner on its shelf waiting for processing while nearly every previous meal you’ve ever eaten has been swept from the shelf as not having enough significance for LTM (again, those special ones you do remember got the required import tag).

Having taught all this to my students, what I do next is bring up the graph below, and this is when their eyes all widen and why I do not, like David Brooks, have to say “so the main cause is probably screen time” (my emphasis).  The blue line represents the impact on STM of asking it to store and recall increasingly longer sequences of random letters.  It is the averaged student data from the very first STM test, and it is exactly the trend neuroscience would expect.  The yellow line represents what neuroscience says should have happened after my students took the exact same test a second time that first day (and which did happen with the second STM test).  The red line, though, is what happened when my students were holding their phones after playing with them while taking the exact same test a second time: the mere physical presence of the devices wiping their working memories clean.  Groundhog Day for the brain, every day, 365 per year.

Anyone not unnerved at least a little by this data about our devices is probably not reading this essay in the first place, but if not convinced, then, like David Brooks:

My biggest worry is that behavioral change is leading to cultural change. As we spend time on our screens, we’re abandoning a value that used to be pretty central to our culture — the idea that you should work hard to improve your capacity for wisdom and judgment all the days of your life. That education, including lifelong out-of-school learning, is really valuable.

However, as I reminded my seniors this year, let’s be generous and assume anyone reading this essay gets that our society’s changing habits about reading and learning may be endangering our very future.  Then the logical question to ask next is: how our society is handling this potential crisis?  Again, “just the facts” can be useful:

  • The Baltimore City Public Schools have had to close their tutoring program for reading remediation for 1,100 students because of the withdrawal of $418 million dollars in promised pandemic recovery funds (as a district, they will not be alone).
  • The former CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment—the “apotheosis” of demanding intellectual engagement!—has been confirmed as the next United States Secretary of Education, with the explicit charge to dismantle and destroy the entire department (the executive order was signed a month ago).
  • Harvard University has lost more than $2 billion in federal research funds for having the temerity to basically say that critical thinking matters (with additional threats to their tax-exempt status on the line).
  • And, finally, as a country, we have ceded to China the global leadership in research output in the fields of chemistry, physics, and earth & environmental science (with biology and the health sciences soon to follow due to the recent defunding of the NIH and the firing of many of their scientists).

That last fact may be the most telling one, and it is why I was sorely tempted to title this essay “The Stupidifying of America.”  Our collective education system in this country no longer produces enough “home grown” PhD scientists and engineers, as well as other levels of expertise, to meet our most basic economic needs, and the “cruel farce” that is the Trump administration is simply going to make things worse.  As Thomas Friedman points out:

Do you know what our democratic allies do with rogue states? Let’s connect some dots.  First, they don’t buy Treasury bills as much as they used to. So America has to offer them higher rates of interest to do so — which will ripple through our entire economy, from car payments to home mortgages to the cost of servicing our national debt at the expense of everything else…[Thus] bond yields keep spiking and the dollar keeps weakening — classic signs of a loss of confidence that does not have to be large to have a large impact on our whole economy…[Furthermore,] you shrink all those things — our ability to attract the world’s most energetic and entrepreneurial immigrants, which allowed us to be the world’s center for innovation; our power to draw in a disproportionate share of the world’s savings, which allowed us to live beyond our means for decades; and our reputation for upholding the rule of law — and over time you end up with an America that will be less prosperous, less respected and increasingly isolated.

Like Friedman, I am truly frightened for our country, but like Goethe, I know what I need to do in my small corner of influence to combat the rising tide of ignorance, anti-intellectualism, and antipathy.  As the sign at one of the Hands Off protests suggests, I’ll keep teaching critical thinking to my students—in the hope that future elections might turn out for the better.

References

Bowie, L. (April 4, 2025) Baltimore Schools to Cut Tutoring and More After Trump Administration Backtracks on Funds.  The Baltimore Banner.  https://www.thebaltimorebanner.com/education/k-12-schools/baltimore-city-schools-federal-funding-AM5PH4I6G5B3PCG66S6RC3IKDE/.

Brooks, D. (April 10, 2025) Producing Something This Stupid is the Achievement of a Lifetime.  The New York Times.  https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/10/opinion/education-smart-thinking-reading-tariffs.html.

Friedman, T. (April 15, 2025) I Have Never Been More Afraid for My Country’s Future.  The New York Times.  https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/15/opinion/trump-administration-china.html.

Lukianoff, G. & Haidt, J. (2018) The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting Up a Generation for Failure.  New York: Penguin Books.

Nation’s Report Card (2025) National Assessment of Educational Progress.  https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/.

NCES (2023) Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC).  https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/piaac/2023/national_results.asp.

A Letter to the Class of 2025

I was raised, if your heart’s beating, you play.
—Gary Woodland

Dear Members of the Class of 2025,

Several years ago, when I first started my project to help improve education in this country, I wrote a letter to my graduating seniors in the midst of the worst of the pandemic’s lockdowns and posted it for them to read from the isolation of their homes.  I spoke a lot about the generative power of truth and the corrosive power of lies, challenging them to build a better world than the one they were inheriting, reminding them that “hope” is a verb, and today, variations on those themes have now featured prominently in every letter I have written to each graduating class ever since.  This one will not be an exception.

Part of the reason for that, of course, is because moments of closure in our lives, milestones that mark the end of one journey and the start of another…they just naturally lend themselves to recalling the needs and demands, the ideals that inform every journey.  It’s why all commencement addresses fundamentally sound the same:  use your potential wisely; pack appropriately for the trip; stop and reflect from time to time; remember to love and be loved; and…here are three life lessons to aid you on your way!

Put simply, these moments of closure remind those of us older than you of similar times in our own lives, and because we care, we just want to provision you with some final wisdom for the road—to prepare you for the occassions of darkness we know inevitably await you. I know.  Pretty heavy stuff for such a celebratory occasion.  But like my letter to the class of 2020, I find myself writing once more during a time of tremendous turmoil, with a petulant child trying to tear it all down because he never learned how to work and play well with others, and thus, I find myself needing to be a little more overt about those “three life lessons.”

One of which is (and extremely appropriate to our current situation): avoid “magical thinking.”  This is the term anthropologists use to refer to ritualistic behaviors done with the intent of somehow modifying something over which one has no actual control (e.g. if we sacrifice this goat, the rumbling volcano will not erupt).  But, in today’s broader parlance, it can also refer to thoughts or deeds that simply ignore this lack of control.  They can be as harmless as the superstitions behind game-day rituals before a sporting event or as devastating as the delusion that tariffs will cause corporations to abandon their investments to rebuild in the United States.  However, the consequence of any magical thinking is always the same: engaging in actions that cannot have any actual bearing on reality.

Not that the actions themselves do not have consequences.  The goat is dead; the “lucky” jersey must be washed; markets tumble.  But the intent behind the actions remains no less disconnected from their ultimate impact, and it is this intent that can be truly hazardous. 

Which leads me to perhaps the most dangerous magical thinking of all (and “life lesson” dos!): the notion of “the Perfect Life.”  This is the misbelief that “if I just go to the right school…if I just marry the right person…if I just find the right career…if, if, if…if I just do the right things, then my life will be exactly the way I want it to be.”  It is the fantasy that you can achieve a life completely free of frustration, boredom, discomfort, and disappointment, and quite cynically, it is a fantasy that quite a few people make a LOT of money off of—especially today’s social media influencers who try to convince you that if you just follow their lead, buy their product, do as they do, etc. that all will suddenly become bliss.  Indeed, an entire medical field exists because of the magical thinking behind the notion of a Perfect Life, earning its practitioners $11.8 billion dollars in 2022 alone—and that’s not including the cosmetic industry itself.  All of them, people and companies alike, with the expressed intent of making you feel inadequate about yourself so that they can sell you something.

However, there is no such thing as the Perfect life, never has been and never will be.  Moreover, while all of us will engage in the occasional wishful thinking to cope emotionally with life’s finitude—the “if only I can get through this week, then everything will be okay” moments—it is when this wishful thinking turns into magical thinking that we run into trouble.  When “if only I…” becomes the sole, primary motivating force in your life, then you condemn yourself to a Sisyphean existence of dismay and defeat. And that’s because there will always be a next “if only I…”—some obstacle to your “final” success, some obstruction to your “ultimate” happiness—and in the meantime, you just wasted who knows how much of your finite time on this planet feeling disappointed, disillusioned, and dyspeptic.

Therefore, do not wait until you are a middle-aged, career-obsessed individual with ulcers to learn not to engage in the magical thinking of the Perfect Life.  And along the way, try to avoid Perfect Life’s cousins: “You Can Have It All” and “You Can Be Anything You Want to Be.”  No.  You cannot.  Period.  I want each of you to know (as I have written before) that you will have numerous opportunities to do a wide variety of things in this world and that, as an educator, I hope I have helped you begin to decide which of those choices you might finally find yourself investing in one day.  But you are a finite organism on a finite planet with a finite lifespan (read The Price of “Pie” if you want to see just how finite), and thus, you will have no choice but to make lasting decisions about how to spend your finitude (remembering that failure to choose is itself a choice).  You cannot have it all; you cannot do it all.  And you cannot even do everything you wish for; hence, I encourage you to make decisions along your journey that are as thoughtful and informed as they can be (knowing that you will never have all the data) and then invest yourself as best you can, remembering that life is not a “to do” list. 

Which brings me to that mandated third “life lesson” required of all commencement moments everywhere:  you always have a choice; you just have to be willing to pay the cost. Want to become a neurosurgeon? Then you will give up nearly two decades of training time that won’t be available for family and friends.  Want to have children? Then you accept the dozens of years’ worth of financial and emotional burdens required to raise them to adulthood (and often beyond).  Want a life partner? Then you need to embrace all the daily compromises that that will demand to make it happen.  The simple reality is that free will does not mean freedom from consequences; it simply means that part of any decision is determining whether it is worth the price or not.  It can be as simple as choosing to do A rather than B on a weekend afternoon, knowing that B will not get done.  Or, it can be as dramatic as quitting a job in protest, knowing that financial insecurity just became your new reality.  Regardless, as renowned psychotherapist Sheldon B. Kopp once put it, “you are free to do whatever you like.  You need only face the consequences.”

That last line, though, has to be one of the scariest ideas ever because if we join it together with the imperfect nature of our finite lives, we can find ourselves frightened that we are somehow not making the “right kind” of choices—the kinds of choices that are somehow worthy of their consequences.  Then we risk trapping ourselves in a vicious cycle of indecision where we put absolute value on each choice as if the very worth of our lives was on the line every time.  We risk becoming immobilized in the quest for so-called “best” decisions, and then life really does become “what happens while you’re busy making other plans”—in this case, about your future “best” possible choices. 

Of course, this notion of ideal choices is simply another variant of the Perfect Life form of magical thinking, and yet what makes it particularly challenging to avoid is the reality that every choice does actually have a consequence.  However, there are consequences and there are CONSEQUENCES, and unless you wish to waste a great deal of that finite life of yours “making plans” instead of living at least a modestly meaningful existence, then learning how to tell the difference is crucial.  Because one of the great fallacies (and failures) of our culture is the fact that so many of us seem to believe that we must somehow justify the simple fact that we are alive.  Too often, the message we hear is that we have “failed our potential” if we have not fundamentally transformed the world in one fashion or another.  Well, reality check:  you did not choose to be born; you simply are.  In addition, the gut-punch truth is that everyone’s final destination is the same; so the time that you are here is a gift you didn’t—and in fact couldn’t—earn and one that has no claim on you whatsoever.

Which doesn’t mean, as the golfer Gary Woodland suggests, that you don’t play.  Yes, from a certain perspective, your entire existence consists only of the consumption of oxygen, the production of carbon dioxide, and the transformation of various organic compounds; you are essentially nothing more than a chemical machine that runs, on average, for 80 years before breaking down and getting recycled into yet another chemical machine.  However, from the more nuanced perspective acknowledging both human cognition and agency, you also have the power to have a significant impact on the qualitative experience of all that chemical machinery—both your own and what surrounds you—and you have that power for the better or for the worse.  You can, to paraphrase Milton, “make of life a heaven or a hell,” and therefore how you use your finite time does matter; it just doesn’t need to have cosmic importance.

Not that you cannot (nor should not) aspire to have a lasting impact.  The New York Times columnist, David Brooks, is correct when he writes that “every society on earth has a leadership class of one sort or another [who need] sensible views about authority so that they don’t childishly rule imperiously from above—[individuals who] embrace the obligations that fall on them as leaders, to serve the country and not their own kind.”  Moreover, he is equally correct that if we want a society where everybody flourishes, we are going to need such leadership on steroids to establish better future institutions of governance (assuming we manage to survive the current imbecilic sociopath residing in the White House).  Because only when we have leaders who listen to all their fellow citizens, anticipate everyone’s needs, and guide the social change to meet them will we finally find ourselves living in a truly just and equitable society.  Maybe some of you are up to the challenge.

I know, that’s a big ask.  Right up there with fixing climate change and all the other damage that my fellow elders and I are leaving you to try to repair.  What’s more, anyone who has ever constructed anything—a Lego model, a theater set, a curriculum, even a meal—knows firsthand how much harder it is to build than to tear down.  But that’s why—again!—it is SO important not to engage in magical thinking.  When there is so much that needs fixing (and some of the repairs are truly global!), you can easily find yourself at times feeling cognitively overwhelmed and fatigued to the point of paralysis.  This is especially true in today’s 24/7 digital—for which modern psychology even has a term. It’s called “compassion fatigue,” and it can make taking any sort of action seem pointless.

However, as author and journalist, Oliver Burkeman, points out, the solution to compassion fatigue is both ridiculously simple and yet incredibly challenging (for fear of the judgement of others): embrace your finitude and pick your battles; choose which change you will seek to be and let the rest go, trusting that others will choose different battles than yours.  Indeed, one could argue that “in [our] age of attention scarcity, the greatest act of good citizenship may be learning to withdraw your attention from everything except the battles you’ve chosen to fight” (p. 36) and then giving those battles what you can.

And before you think giving what you can cannot possibly be enough to have an actual impact, I will share a small piece of my own journey.  Most reading this will know that I commute to work by walking and have done so now for nearly 30 years.  Well, there is an exercise I have one of my senior classes do where they calculate the amount of carbon dioxide released into the air from burning fossil fuels, and on a whim, I did the calculations with them a little over a year ago on how much CO2 my decision to walk rather than drive has kept out of the atmosphere.  Turns out the answer is a little over 30 metric tons, which is the equivalent of 9 football fields worth of forest.  Or to make that a visual many people reading this can understand, it is the equivalent of growing or preserving a forest occupying the entire campus of Friends School of Baltimore.  Thus, never doubt your individual power to effect positive change.  Even the smallest of decisions, enacted consistently can have profound impacts.

But that brings me to a point I try to make each year, and that is to be graceful with one another.  Each of you will make mistakes along your journey, mistakes that will impact others, including people you love.  You will bruise and be bruised because sin is real.  Yet, you have the power for compassion—to forgive yourself as well as others—and with it, you therefore have the power to restore wholeness in a broken world—the employment of which is the ultimate form of hope.

So let me leave you here with a small bit of wisdom I have passed on before, an idea in Zen Buddhism known as “Mu.”  “Mu” is the understanding that sometimes when we find ourselves with an intractable problem, that perhaps we are not asking the right question(s).  Thus, a Zen master will regularly tell a struggling disciple, “Mu”—you need a different perspective.  Therefore, I share this concept of “Mu” with you because as you make your finite choices about your finite life, deciding which consequences to pay and which limited battles to fight, you will regularly find yourself very humanly second-guessing yourself.  And in those moments, my permanent advice to you will always be, “Mu.”

Congratulations and best of luck!

References

Brooks, D. (Feb. 27, 2025) We Can Achieve Great Things.  The New York Times.  https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/27/opinion/government-great-progressive-abundance.html.

Burkeman, O. (2024) Meditations for Mortals.  New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Milton, J. (1667) Paradise Lost (available in multiple formats)

The Price of “Pie”

Equal Rights for Others
Does Not Mean
Fewer Rights for You.
It’s Not Pie.
—Popular Bumper Sticker

The entropy of any closed system
increases over time
with each energy transformation
within that system.
—The Second Law of Thermodynamics

What I’m about to say is not likely to be news to anyone who isn’t actively living under a rock: simply staying alive has become more expensive.  The Waffle House franchise now has a surcharge on its egg dishes (understandable given that the price of eggs has risen 15.2% in just the past four weeks and a whopping 53% since this same time last year).  A middle-aged couple in Baltimore must share a row house with five other people merely to meet the $1500 a month rent—that is until they recently received notification of the non-renewal of their lease and are now facing homelessness.  The state of Maryland has a $3 billion dollar budget gap it must close by the end of this legislative session, and with more than 50% of households in this country already “cost burdened” (meaning that they must spend more than 30% of their income on housing), Elon Musk and Donald Trump have decided to create additional economic insecurity for tens of thousands of federal employees simply to “save” what is less than 1% of the overall federal budget. 

Hmm.  That rock is starting to look awfully inviting. 

Which is why as I surveyed all the news during the first month of the second Trump presidency, I realized that it might be time to revisit some themes I first explored in what was only my second posting back at the start of the pandemic.  Titled “Maybe It’s Pie After All…,” it examined some scientific realities about the natural world that would be worth bringing to folks collective attention again because while this information might not immediately help in the current situation, it can provide what Diana Butler Bass calls “a framework for understanding that helps make sense of where we’ve been” (something she does a marvelous job of for the current situation from a historical perspective).  Therefore, let’s turn to what I sometimes refer to in my environmental science units as “the law of homeostasis.”

In the original essay, I introduced readers to the field of population dynamics and the reality that no environment has limitless resources, that even the earth is a finite system, and that therefore there are always only finite ways to distribute those resources as well.  The example I gave was how:

in a room of 3 people and 9 balls, the distribution might range from a single person having all 9 while the others have none to each person getting 3.  But the number of ways to divide the balls up between them is finite, and the same is true for the resources in any given ecosystem.

I then explained that the consequence of this for a population of organisms is that the size of that population must always fluctuate around a set maximum value because while some specific members of the total population might overuse resources to reproduce, their overuse of those same resources deprives other specific members of the total population to do likewise, resulting in their death.  Hence, while some members of a population are always adding to it, others are always subtracting from it because there is only a maximum population size a given ecosystem can support.

What I did not talk about at that time, though, is that this same concept of a set maximum applies to the resources themselves in any given ecosystem as well.  The second law of thermodynamics ensures that in a closed system, any order or level of energy in that system can never increase beyond a set value, which means—to use my earlier example—in a room of 3 people and 9 balls, there can never be more than 9 balls.  Moreover, with time, the distribution of those 3 balls is guaranteed to be randomly distributed between the 3 people since that is the maximum level of order the room can maintain without an input of outside energy.

But what if that room could somehow get that input so that one person could again snatch up all the balls (i.e. add order)?

Ah! That’s where biology’s “law of homeostasis” comes in.  An accepted working definition of “life” in science is any system capable of transforming energy to resist entropy.  Or in other words, any closed system capable of taking in energy from the outside to seek to maintain its order.  It’s why we as animals eat and why plants photosynthesize (the sun being the ultimate source of energy outside our collective biological systems).  However, it is also why all life ages: we are resisting entropy, never stopping it, and that is why all life at whatever level of complexity one wants to describe it—from cells to biomes—is constantly fluctuating around a set point of maximum energy and order. 

A reality that is as unchangeable, absolute, and tyrannical as physics’ law of gravity and chemistry’s law of the periodicity of matter:  the law of homeostasis.

What, though, does any of this have to do with the price of eggs? Or housing? Or state budgets? The short answer is that it debunks the very foundations of the economic capitalism on which those things currently depend; the long answer is that that claim will take some unpacking.

Let’s start, then, with one of capitalism’s central premises: the continual growth of production.  Capitalist economies are built on the concept of always growing one’s production of goods and services.  We even measure a country’s worth by its Gross Domestic Production and how much that GDP increases from one year to the next.  Yet, in a finite closed system such as the planet Earth, perpetual growth is no more possible than a perpetual motion machine—and for the same basic reason, that pesky second law of thermodynamics! It is why ever since capitalism became the dominant economic system on our planet, we have had regular economic recessions and depressions, crashing things back to the fluctuation point of available resources at that particular moment in time.

However, a strong counterargument has always been made that while these periodic crashes do occur, the economic periods following them show an increase in production that has steadily grown the world’s collective wealth and quality of life over the past two centuries—the foundation of the worn cliché that a rising tide lifts all boats.  Moreover, I say worn because as discussed in my earlier essay, the mathematicians who study capitalist, free-market economies have discovered the exact opposite, and now we are in a better position to understand why. 

Since our planet—while genuinely finite—is SO enormous, capitalism as practiced around the world is able to create the illusion of perpetual growth in small subsets of our species by denuding whole sections of the planet where those same small subsets do not live.  As marvelously presented in The Story of Stuff (which if you have never watched, you should!), our productive wealth in the industrial world completely depends on turning huge swaths of our planet into ecological dead zones and toxic deserts.  And because those wastelands are almost never directly in front of our attention, this disconnect effectively makes it seem like there is no homeostatic fluctuation point when in reality, we must deficit spend the world’s resources to achieve this self-deception.

Which is why now, when we have deficit spent for so long, some of the proverbial chickens are starting to come home to roost—or more accurately not roosting at all in the case of actual chickens; hence, today’s price of eggs! It is why people can’t afford housing (the supply is too small to meet the need), and state governments are having to make cuts in programs (finite resources can only meet finite budgetary responsibilities).  Even the shell game that Trump and Musk are now playing with their massive layoffs in the federal workforce (before realizing that they might need people to track the avian flu outbreak; curse those egg prices!) is being done to try to convince the general public that the federal government is now somehow saving all this money—that all these “savings” from furloughed federal employees will somehow counteract the deficit spending from the earlier Trump tax cuts that he now wants congress to make permanent. 

The simple truth is that finite resources mean finite choices, and all the dismissal of truth in the world cannot make this or any other of reality’s inconvenient truths go away.  Furthermore, while a more equitable distribution of this finitude could currently enable 100% of the humans presently on this planet to live lives that meet more than just Maslow’s foundational needs, that still doesn’t make it any less finite.  6% of the world’s population simply cannot consume 38% of the world’s resources indefinitely, nor can that human population continue its current rate of growth for the same reason.  Like it or not, it is “pie.”

Of course, as just suggested, that does not mean that the “pie” can’t be more equitably distributed or that decisions about how we allocate our finite resources can’t be more just.  That’s what makes the budget shortfall here in Maryland, for example, so unnerving:  our so-called progressive Governor wants to balance the books in ways that will negatively impact people with disabilities, short-change our 988 mental health services, and defund portions of our state universities—along with underfunding the massive public education reforms known as the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future that only just got underway this current school year.  Worse, the proposed decreases in funding for this Blueprint for next year impacts and harms our most socio-economically vulnerable populations of children more than any other group, meaning that those who were about to finally get their fair share of the “pie” are suddenly facing having it taken back.

Again, it’s about choices, and it is about finite choices.  Perhaps most important of all, though, it’s about the values that inform those finite choices.  As I quoted Oliver Burkeman in an earlier essay, “every decision to use a portion of time on anything represents the sacrifice of all the other ways in which you could have spent time, but didn’t—and to willingly make that sacrifice is to take a stand, without reservation, on what matters most to you” (p. 33).  Simply put, each of us must decide how we will resist the entropy, knowing full well that the finality of that entropy is itself inevitable.

But even more significantly, each of us must make this choice knowing that how we choose to resist directly impacts how every other living thing resists as well, and right now, I would argue that too many of us are not making very good choices—which (as I remarked last time), if the morality of the situation doesn’t convince, then perhaps pragmatism will:  the ghosts of Louis XIV, Marie Antionette, and Czar Nicolaus can all too readily inform what really happens when the “have nots” get desperate enough.  Both the French and Russian Revolutions started out as riots over the cost of bread…eggs anyone?

References

Boghosian, B. (2019) The Inescapable Casino.  Scientific American, November.  Pp. 70-77.

Buchanan, L. (2015) American Entrepreneurship is Actually Vanishing.  Here’s Why. INC, May. https://www.inc.com/magazine/201505/leigh-buchanan/the-vanishing-startups-in-decline.html.

Burkeman, O. (2021) Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Creswell, J. (Feb. 12, 2025) The Soaring Cost of Eggs is Hitting Your Local Breakfast Spot.  The New York Times.  https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/12/business/high-egg-prices-restaurants.html.

Hager, E. (Sept. 17, 2024) In an Unprecedented Move, Ohio Is Funding the Construction of Private Religious Schools.  ProPublica.  https://www.propublica.org/article/ohio-taxpayer-money-funding-private-religious-schools.

Miller, H. (Feb. 11, 2025) How Bad is Maryland’s Housing Affordability Crisis? Ask This Baltimore Couple.  The Baltimore Banner.  https://www.thebaltimorebanner.com/community/housing/housing-affordability-crisis-maryland-ZBJJUD54SBH47J5CUNBGOJKNAQ/.

Wolfe, E. (Jan. 16, 2025) University System of Maryland Faces $111 Million Cut in Gov. Moore’s Budget.  The Baltimore Banner.  https://www.thebaltimorebanner.com/education/higher-education/maryland-college-budget-cuts-5PWJ2TSRTNAKLBTE5IZFDN5L6Q/.

Wood, P. (Feb. 3, 2025) Hundreds Rally in Annapolis Against Developmental Disabilities Administration Cuts.  The Baltimore Banner.  https://www.thebaltimorebanner.com/politics-power/state-government/disabilities-budget-cuts-rally-PP6YM4PLHNECNDVIJIPYHGXHXI/.

Wood, P. (Dec. 12, 2024) Moore Suggests Rollbacks to Marylands Public Education Plan are Coming.  The Baltimore Banner.  https://www.thebaltimorebanner.com/politics-power/state-government/wes-moore-blueprint-trump-23CLWJT7WNHZPELTXS7U7XCZRA/.

“It’s the Snapchat, Stupid”

Every era casts illness in its own image.
—Siddhartha Mukherjee,
The Emperor of All Maladies

During his 1992 presidential campaign, then candidate Bill Clinton is alleged to have claimed, “it’s the economy, stupid,” when addressing the perceived economic failures of the Bush, Sr. administration.  He did not, in fact, actually say it (it was a campaign talking point of his advisor, James Carville), but that has not stopped this phrase from entering our cultural lexicon and becoming a meme used ever since by both pundits and politicians alike to explain the voting patterns of the American people.  It has even been suggested as the primary reason Trump won re-election: because of how so-called “average” or “ordinary” citizens were feeling about their pocketbooks.   

The reason, though, that this phrase has lately re-entered my working memory is because of the recent release of the results of the 2024 NAEP assessment, popularly known as “The Nation’s Report Card.”  For those not familiar with the NAEP, it is the one standardized test administered nearly universally to all 4th and 8th graders in this country since 1969 to benchmark how successfully we are teaching our children how to read and to do math. It is our one and only truly longitudinal look at how well America’s schools have succeeded at educating our children, and the 2024 report is pretty grim.  While math scores have shown some recovery from the pandemic loss, they are still lower than before the pandemic (part of a long term decline puzzling many educators), and children’s reading scores simply continued the steady decline they have been in since 2013.

Hmm.  2013.  Know what got released in late fall of 2011 and gained rapid popularity during 2012? Snapchat.  Then Vine in 2013, followed by TikTok in 2017.  In addition, during this time, the average age for a child receiving their first smartphone dropped steadily to 11.6 years-old, with children as young as 4 now having one. 

Notice a pattern here? Like the pattern in these graphs for both the math and reading scores before and after 2013?

Or notice a pattern in the change in rates of teenage depression in the past decade (especially among 13 year-old girls)?

Now I am too much the scientist not to understand that correlation does not automatically mean causation.  Spurious associations are so common and readily found that there are entire websites devoted them (one of my favorites is the amount of GMO corn grown in Minnesota and the frequency of global piracy in a given year).  However, I still remember intimately the shocked dismay I felt in the fall of 2013 when the average score on an assignment I had given to my most advanced students for more than a decade abruptly dropped from the steady “C” it had been from years prior to the nearly universal “F” it was that September.  I, of course, made the necessary adjustments and interventions and have continued to do so with all my students ever since.  But the number and depth of those adaptations have steadily increased every single year to date, and I’m not anticipating this demand letting up any time soon.

Again, Hmm.  “If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck….”  “Where there’s smoke, there’s….”  “It’s the economy….”  Cliches (and their modern equivalent, the meme) exist for a reason, and those that exist about the link between correlation and causation do so in part to remind us that sometimes we do not have the luxury of untangling the full extent of the causality in a given situation.  We need to act like it is a duck; like it is fire; like it is the economy.  Or in this case, like it is the Snapchat, etc. because the alternative risks the kind of long-term harm we are seeing in those graphs above.  Better to remove social media’s influence from our children’s lives on the likelihood that it could be disruptive to their proper mental and physical development than to wait to fully confirm (as the mounting research of Sherry Turkle, Jonathan Haidt, and others is doing) that it is.

Because if we want to witness a microcosm of a world in which daily use of social media has risen to an average of 95 minutes per person and more than 54% of people get their primary news from it, look no further than the past two weeks. As the Trump administration has deliberately sown chaos through a metaphorical fire-hose of executive actions, the consequent eruption of misinformation, disinformation, and conspiracy theories on social media among immigrants, federal employees, and foreign aid workers has all but paralyzed whole segments of our society and even our economy. We are in a societal freefall at present, and the only “parachute” is going to be calm, persistent, rational, and critical thought to separate what is truly happening from the fiction and lies so that people can persevere in their resistance to tyranny.

And remember. There is nothing more useful to a budding autocrat than an illiterate and ill-numerate population.  Hence, we had better take the necessary actions to help improve our nation’s math and reading scores and do it soon because the alternative has already arrived.

Coda

And speaking of that arrival, I got to experience an element of it firsthand while preparing this latest essay.  As my regular readers are aware, I work very hard to provide supporting reference for any statistical or factual claim I make in my writing and to cite properly all thoughts I cannot claim as uniquely my own.  However, a major source of some of that information is the federal government’s CDC and other scientific databases—all of which, as you can see from the screenshot below, are now under attack from the new administration (note the fine-print at the top about executive orders). 

Moving forward, I will continue to do my best to provide full references for anything I write, but since I often link to previous postings where the original sources of some of the citations have effectively disappeared, I ask my reader’s trust when visiting any of my earlier work that if I claimed it or quoted it, I promise the now gone website did affirm it.  

References

Ghorayshi, A. & Rabin, R.C. (Feb. 13, 2023) Teen Girls Report Record Levels of Sadness, C.D.C. Finds.  The New York Times.  https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/13/health/teen-girls-sadness-suicide-violence.html?searchResultPosition=1.

Haidt, J. (2024) The Anxious Generation.  New York: Penguin Press.

Singer, E. (Feb. 2, 2025) Thousands of U.S. Government Web Pages Have Been Taken Down Since Friday.  The New York Times.  https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/02/upshot/trump-government-websites-missing-pages.html.

Turkle, S. (2017) Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, 3rd Edition.  New York:  Basic Books.

Turner, C. & Mehta, J. (Jan. 29, 2025) Nearly 5 Years After Schools Closed, the Nation Gets a New Report Card.  NPR Morning Edition.  https://www.npr.org/2025/01/29/nx-s1-5270880/math-reading-covid-naep.