If you were to poll people today about the greatest challenge facing not just this country but humanity itself, the list of logical candidates that come immediately to mind might include the pandemic (duh!), the climate crisis (another no-brainer), and the authoritarian threats to democracy (including numerous state republican legislatures here at home).  However, I would argue that an even greater challenge we face today is misinformation (and its manipulative cousin, disinformation), and I am not alone in this conviction.  The World Health Organization has actually called the attack on empirical truth today in various media and on-line venues an “infodemic,” and in one of my favorite political cartoons of the past year (for which I can only provide a link due to copyright), Bill Bramhill of the New York Daily News has the traditional Four Horsemen—War, Famine, Pestilence, & Death—joined by a fifth called “Misinformation,” riding right along beside them, head buried in a cellphone. 

Yet, psychologists who study and research the phenomenon of “fake news” point out that probably the greatest challenge facing us is neither the misinformation nor disinformation itself but rather the very nature of how our brains process information in the first place.  The science shows that we are all susceptible to what Sander van der Linden of the University of Cambridge calls “the six degrees of manipulation”—impersonation, conspiracy, emotion, polarization, discrediting, and trolling—because anytime we hear something, we instinctively process it through our pre-existing biases, employing what is known as “selective skepticism” to filter our attention.  Indeed, so potent and hard-wired is this confirmation bias, that even when we later hear a correction that we deliberately choose to accept as valid, our thinking and decision making will still operate employing the original message.  In other words, we will regularly behave subconsciously out of the original bias even when we have rationally embraced that it is false or wrong.

What this all means for lucid reasoning is sobering.  Our tendency in education is to assume that if we can just convince people to fact check enough or teach individuals how to discern legitimate sources of information from spurious ones, then rational thought and empirical truth will prevail—that we can persuade hesitant individuals to vaccinate and mask up; that we can convince climate change deniers of our mutual peril; that we can make the right to vote equally accessible to all.  We want to believe that the data will prevail and that people can indeed recognize when the emperor truly is naked.

Yet our pesky brain seems to be standing in the way of everyone (or maybe anyone!) achieving authentic insight, and to get some idea of just how easy it can be do go down the proverbial rabbit hole of misinformation and disinformation, I recommend exploring an on-line activity developed by van der Linden and his colleague, Jon Roozenbeek, called Go Viral!  Especially for those of us who do not spend our days on TikTok, Yik Yak, and Instagram (avoid them even!), this plunge into the world of social media and its role in van der Linden’s “six degrees of manipulation” is quite revelatory as to the power of these technologies to shape how we experience and interact with others in the world.  If you have never experienced the power of “likes,” the dopamine hits that come with them, and the ugly choices one might make to keep them coming, then this on-line game can be positively eye-opening.

What are we to do, then, if even our own brains seem against us? How do we successfully fight misinformation and disinformation in ourselves—let alone society at large? It can feel like a futile battle, and anyone who has seen the recent Netflix satire, Don’t Look Up, about an extinction-level sized comet hurtling toward the earth knows exactly what I’m talking about when I say it seems as if a just, harmonious, healthy society is simply no longer possible in the worldin which we live.  As Stephan Lewandowsky of the University of Bristol points out, “even in the best of all possible worlds, correcting misinformation is not an easy task,” and “psychologists who study fake news warn that it’s an uphill battle, one that will ultimately require a global cooperative effort among researchers, governments, and social media platforms.”

However, perhaps all is not lost.  That game van der Linden and Roozenbeek developed? It turns out that its purpose is to inoculate and immunize individuals against the power of “fake news,” and the research into its impact has shown that it boosts a person’s ability to identify and resist misinformation for a full two months after playing it.  What’s more, if all the adults in children’s lives would start taking their stewardship of the future seriously, we would not even have need for such a game in the first place.

What do I mean by that? I mean reading a book to your toddler instead of shoving a screen in front of their face to occupy them.  I mean denying smartphone technologies to those too young to know how to use them appropriately because otherwise we are doing the equivalent of giving guns and alcohol to our children and expecting their undeveloped prefrontal cortices to make smart choices.  I mean contacting your legislator and demanding social media reform, and if you are a legislator, having the guts to standup to a monopoly that threatens the very fabric of our society.  I mean getting off our own devices and living in the immediate now: experience boredom and the creativity it engenders, examine the quality of one’s thoughts, touch another’s life with your actively focused attention.

As for educators, I’m afraid we do indeed have our work cut out for us.  We have to be willing to collect every cellphone in the room at the start of every class.  We have to be willing to immediately but kindly drop whatever is happening in a lesson to address a falsehood the moment it pops up in class just as we would a micro-aggression.  We have to teach media literacy in the context of our subject matter even if doing so means we don’t get the Krebs Cycle or the 30 Years War covered.  Most importantly, we have to model the embracement of empirical truth in our own behaviors if we are to expect and encourage our students to do the same.

Anything less on the part of all of us who are adults, and our children are not going to get the future they deserve.

References

Abrams, Z. (March 1, 2021) Controlling the Spread of Misinformation.  American Psychological Association. https://www.apa.org/monitor/2021/03/controlling-misinformation.

Committee on Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs. (Oct. 28, 2021) Social Media Platforms and the Amplification of Domestic Extremism & Other Harmful Content (Full Committee Hearing). The United States Senate. https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/hearings/social-media-platforms-and-the-amplification-of-domestic-extremism-and-other-harmful-content.

Staff (March 28, 2019) Reading to your toddler? Print books are better than digital ones.  Michigan IT.  https://michigan.it.umich.edu/news/2019/03/28/reading-to-your-toddler-print-books-are-better-than-digital-ones/.

If we don’t get this right, then it will affect their trajectory in life. So we have to get this right.
—Mohammad Choudhury, Maryland Superintendent of Schools

Learning’s Lost

Since the initial days of the pandemic, I have made no attempt to hide my concerns as an educator for the potential long-term costs of this disease to today’s children.  Whether writing about the impact of pivoting to all virtual learning in the spring of 2020 or the possible disruption to brain development in our youngest this past winter, I have been actively pondering and discussing how our collective handling of this disease might be altering future generations ever since the very first lockdowns occurred.

Well, the official statistics are now in (at least in Maryland), and the picture is as grim as I and others have feared.  Only 15% of children in grades 3-8 passed the Maryland Comprehensive Assessment Program math test (given this fall for diagnostic purposes only), and only 35% passed the English test—a drop from pre-COVID of more than half for the math scores and 8% for the English scores.  Furthermore, statewide, only 40% of those entering Kindergarten arrived with the necessary toolkit to be ready to learn at the start of the current school year (down from 47% in 2019), and in the Baltimore City Schools, that number was only 25%.  Gloomier still, as State Superintendent Mohammed Choudhury points out, “the declines were worse among students who have been out of in-person school for the longest.”

Not that Maryland is alone.  Nationwide, of the 12 states that have collected data so far, the decrease in math and English skills has been on average 14% and 6% respectively.  Thus, my home state is right there in the mix when it comes to the amount of damage to learning the pandemic has caused, but that is a dubious claim at best to “celebrate.”  The simple truth is that all the educational setbacks forecast by myself and other have come to fruition, and to quote Choudhury again: “I was not surprised by what I saw.  I was just waiting for this moment.”

Numbers, though, do not tell the whole story.  It’s not just learning skills students are missing coming into schools this year; their emotional and intellectual stamina to engage in learning has weakened as well.  I have seen it in my own high school students as we have returned to in-person learning, watching them struggle to rebuild the mental “muscles” required to deal with workloads and pace-of-day that more closely resemble pre-pandemic times.  Yet mine at least had something to build back up.  Our youngest learners have not even had the chance to start building those “muscles” in the first place.  Preschoolers, for example, are arriving at schools expecting instant gratification, struggling with basic skills such as sharing and waiting one’s turn, and even something as rudimentary as toilet training has regressed because “children ages 3 to 5 have never been to a bathroom outside their own home” (Mugele).  As a result, “the development pace of almost everything related to our youngest learners has slowed, and the transition to school life is taking longer” (Bowie). 

“Longer,” though, is more than a little problematic for this age-group of children because as the neuroscience and education research of institutions such as the Center for Advanced Study of Teaching and Learning at the University of Virginia have shown, the most dramatic learning takes place prior to third grade.  These are the critical years in which the foundation for all future learning is laid, and with the pandemic interrupting the normal brain development of our youngest learners for three academic years now, we have genuine grounds for concern about their long-term academic success.  Toss in the possible epigenetic changes I wrote about recently, and as Superintendent Choudhury argues, “if we don’t get this right, then it will affect their trajectory in life.  So we have to get this right.”

Moving Forward?

What, though, will it mean to “get this right?” What will that look like? What should it look like? Spokespersons and stakeholders for the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future (our new multi-billion dollar education reform program) have presented the case that it should look primarily like funds for tutoring and other forms of direct remediation to get kids caught up, along with staff development for addressing their emotional and mental health needs brought on by virtual and hybrid learning.  All of which are fine, but these all assume a “fix it” approach to the problems the pandemic has created in education—as in, “fix it and forget it.”  It is a solution that employs the dysfunctional mechanistic, Cartesian approach to teaching and learning that started this whole education project of mine in the first place, and what no one in education (or society at large for that matter) seems to want to address is that the very nature of the pandemic is not going to allow a “fix it and forget it” solution to how to “get this right” for anything, including schools.

For example, the need for the Prince George’s County schools to return to virtual learning until mid-January due to the explosion of new COVID cases is only the most recent example of the fact that this virus is not going away, and its disruptions to our society are permanent.  No matter how badly all of us in schools (and the rest of life) may desire to “return to normal”—to “fix it and forget it”—the reality is that the dynamic interactions of SARS-CoV-2 with the human body are inherently ecological in character, and ecological relationships are, by definition, perpetually in flux, ever changing. 

Which means that the kind of change needed to “get this right” is not about fixing; it is about adapting.  As Nancy Mugele, Head of Kent school has remarked: all of us in education “have had to be flexible, patient, and ready to teach skills that students would normally come to school possessing.”  What I will argue, though, is that this extra flexibility and patience is the new normal.  The speech delays, for instance, which Mugele has observed in their youngest students is going to continue to require her teachers to focus “more on intentionally developing language skills, letter sounds, and pronunciation” for the foreseeable future because the environmental conditions of the pandemic that have generated this delay are not abating.  That was the illusion presented with the roll out of the vaccines:  that here was a magic genii that would make everything right again. Ecological relationships simply don’t work that way, and therefore, we aren’t simply going to “fix” the educational damage our children have endured; we are going to have to adapt to managing it.

However, adaptation puts the emphasis on teaching and learning’s qualities, not its quantities, and the problem here is what UT Austin professor, J.W. Traphagan calls our society’s obsession with “quantocracy”—the “idea that everything must be counted and then judged on the basis of how many of something we have accumulated” (and where the one who dies with the most “wins”).  Simply look back to where I started this post: with statistics about the Maryland Comprehensive Assessment Program and the pandemic induced drop in test scores.  Even the economics of our schools are about quantity, with the number of “butts in seats” directly determining the amount of state funding a given school receives. 

Yet, the truth is that those stats tell us very little about the individual students or their character as learners, and the refusal of so many parents to return their students back to pre-pandemic schools may say something about the quality of education they realized their child was receiving when they could see it firsthand on a screen.  Regardless, the disruption of the pandemic is here to stay, and it is going to fundamentally alter the availability of any kind of quantity; so “getting it right” is going to require a different approach to the problem than simply the availability and distribution of resources.

But that brings me back to what started the Light a Candle project in the first place:  that the metaphor and paradigm we need for education is an ecosystem, not a machine.  And the truth is that ecosystems of any kind are intricate, non-linear structures that either adapt as an entire collective of relationships or perish.  Hence, we can start recognizing the nuanced complexities in our schools as well as society brought on by the realities of the pandemic and start adjusting our behaviors accordingly (e.g. providing noise cancelling headphones to 3-5 year olds to help them cope with anxiety about using public toilets). Or we can stay the course of one-dimensional attempts to “fix & forget” we are currently on toward the kind of civil breakdown historian Jill Lepore discusses in her thought-provoking piece, “Is Society Coming Apart?“

I will examine the challenges facing how we might accomplish the first choice in my next post.

References

Bowie, L. (Dec. 9, 2021) Dramatic Drop in Student Test Scores.  The Baltimore Sun. https://www.baltimoresun.com/education/bs-md-maryland-test-scores-20211208-wk5aen5r5bfx5eag2p57pamjcy-story.html.

Bowie, L. (Dec. 14, 2021) Kids Are Coming Back to Schools.  The Baltimore Sun. https://digitaledition.baltimoresun.com/html5/desktop/production/default.aspx?&edid=fd7d909a-ba04-4d6e-9449-b67b84df593b.

Lepore, J. (Nov. 25, 2021) Is Society Coming Apart? The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/nov/25/society-thatcher-reagan-covid-pandemic?utm_source=pocket&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=pockethits.

Mugele, N. (Nov. 9, 2021) How COVID-19 Affects the Youngest Learners. NAIS. https://www.nais.org/learn/independent-ideas/november-2021/how-covid-19-affects-the-youngest-learners/?utm_source=tw&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=mc&utm_content=hw#.YYw1vKg6RrU.linkedin.

State of Maryland (2020) Maryland Commission on Innovation & Excellence in Education. http://dls.maryland.gov/pubs/prod/NoPblTabMtg/CmsnInnovEduc/2019-Interim-Report-of-the-Commission.pdf#page=11.

Traphagan, J.W. (Dec. 5, 2021) We Should Want Quality, Not Quantity. The Baltimore Sun.  https://digitaledition.baltimoresun.com/html5/desktop/production/default.aspx?&edid=1e402ed8-cf55-4ae4-a6e5-07bdcbfb5901.

Recently, my mother and I were chatting over zoom when she asked a most unanticipated question: “are the schools in your area offering ‘mental health’ days?” I was nonplussed; the idea of a “mental health” day has a long history in our family, and my sister and I were allowed one per quarter during high school if we kept our grades up.  So I wasn’t exactly sure what she was asking.  However, I replied that I knew the Baltimore County Schools had recently announced they were giving the Wednesday before Thanksgiving off to reward teachers and staff for working so hard to return to in-person learning, and I asked her whether that was the kind of thing she meant.

It turned out that she did, in fact, mean “mental health” days and that the school districts in the St. Louis area are taking what are effectively “snow days” from time to time, supposedly to support the mental health and wellbeing of students and staff alike as they continue to struggle with the impacts of the pandemic.  My niece, who is a sophomore in high school there, has apparently had some already this year, and my mother was curious about how regional this phenomenon was and what my thoughts were as an educator about it.

Little did either of us know that what we were discussing at the time turns out to be part of a far larger pattern, reported on this past week on NPR, and that the justification being offered by at least some of the St. Louis area schools about aiding mental health might not be so magnanimous after all.  With the pandemic only intensifying and accelerating the staffing challenges already confronting education, it seems that schools at all levels in this country are now fighting on a sometimes daily basis simply to keep their literal doors open.  Add in the bus driver shortage (so prevalent here in Maryland that I don’t even feel the need for a citation for this claim) and we not only have under-staffed schools; we have under-studented schools.

The simple truth, as my sister, the social worker, reminded me the other day, is that “burnout” is rapidly becoming a by-word for all who work in the human services sector of the economy, and insufficient employment in our schools is going to join overwhelmed hospitals and overworked actual mental health care providers in weighing down any return to “normalcy” we are longing to experience.  Indeed, the very day the NPR story aired, I learned the sad news that one of the teachers at my school who had only just been hired in August—and a 15 year veteran in the profession!—had resigned effective immediately, citing his uncertainties about his ability to care for the kids anymore.  Other colleagues, of course, have had to pick up his classes, putting an ever-greater burden on them, and the risk of popping even more “rivets” increases.  Toss in the new omicron variant of COVID, and one might begin to think that the wonder isn’t that NPR can report on so many schools cancelling classes unexpectedly; the wonder is that so many schools are managing to stay open at all. 

Yet, what has me motived to write once again isn’t the growing mental and emotional ennui and exhaustion that people who actively care for others are feeling right now.  No, what has triggered this particular post is something one of the people interviewed in the NPR story said.  The reporter was speaking with a mother from Montgomery County about their board of education’s decision to cancel the half-day of school the Wednesday before Thanksgiving when this individual remarked that:

Sitting there in the audience as a parent, it really hit me that I … and everybody in our community can no longer count on the public schools. And I feel like after the last year and a half, there was a lot of that sentiment that this is just not something we can count on [anymore].

Here was someone from one of the wealthiest school districts on the planet—whose teachers cannot even afford to live in the county where they teach and so face enormous daily commutes in the D.C. traffic—and she’s complaining about the inconvenience of losing what was a half-day schedule in the first place.  To say I heard those words with a wide range of emotional response is a restraint on my part (and a lot of cortisol in the amygdala for that early in my morning!).  But my overwhelming feeling was a sense of angry sadness because this mother’s words were simply capturing the essence of what so many interviewed in the story were basically complaining about:  we need schools to babysit our children so that we can go about our adult lives, and we’re tired of having our adult lives unexpectedly interrupted. 

Now, having written extensively before about how anti-child and anti-parenting our culture has become, hearing it yet again shouldn’t have surprised me or pressed so many of my proverbial buttons quite so quickly.  But part of the reason why I say my reaction was “angry sadness” is that the insight this NPR story provoked was the realization that we have created a socio-economic system of such massive consumption that it requires our schools to serve as housing centers for our children simply to function.  In fact, listening to the hourly-wage essential-work parents interviewed for this story, it was clear:  they have no choice but to see schools this way because without essentially tax-funded day-care centers for their children, no one in the house eats and even the house could disappear. 

However, just because our schools do serve this purpose doesn’t mean they should, and while I’m not naïve—education in this country has always served an economic role—school-as-babysitter should not be one of them.  What’s more, the fact that the pandemic has revealed our economy’s total reliance on this school-as-babysitter paradigm to sustain itself should give all of us significant pause.  Because what it says about a society that it has become so consumed with consuming that its citizens must live paycheck to paycheck isn’t pretty.

In fairness to the NPR story, it did address the negative impacts these disruptions in schools are having on children’s learning, especially at-risk children and those with special needs, and I add my voice that the sooner we address all the learning loss the pandemic is creating (about which I have spent much of the past year writing), the sooner we can rebuild our economy and stabilize our collective lives once more.  But if all we do is return to the old paradigm that understands our educational system simply for the role it plays in enabling the full adult employment needed to drive our consumption-dependent version of capitalism, then we will have missed the opportunity for reflection and educational change which the pandemic has provided us. 

I do agree with President Biden that we can build back better.  But only if we change our understanding of what “better” means.

References

Casert, R. & Woodward, C. (Nov. 27, 2021) Latest Variant Raises Alarms.  The Baltimore Sun.  https://digitaledition.baltimoresun.com/html5/desktop/production/default.aspx?edid=b9d0869c-d482-4d22-8580-334a16babaab.

Kamenetz, A. (Nov. 23, 2021) Parents are Scrambling After Schools Suddenly Cancel Class Over Staffing and Burnout. NPR Morning Edition.  https://www.npr.org/2021/11/23/1057979170/school-closures-mental-health-days-families-childcare-thanksgiving-break.

Not knowing eternity is to do evil things blindly.
—Lao Tzu

To everything there is a season and a time to every purpose under heaven.
—Ecclesiastes 3:1

To understand today’s posting, I’m going to need to teach some biology first.  Specifically, I am going to need to explain a concept that most people even with a background in biology are not always aware of—the concept of epigenetics.  This idea and its field of study explore how environmental impacts on an organism’s genetic code can be passed down through generations independent of the genetic code itself, and it is yet another stake in the heart of what for decades was considered the Central Dogma of genetics:  that a sequence of DNA codes for a specific protein which produces a specific trait.  Turns out, per usual, the truth is more complicated.

What’s more, it can also seem somewhat eerie, especially when we look at an example of epigenetics in action.  Take the common white rat.  This favorite of genetic research everywhere has a gene, called fosB, that directly impacts the nurturing behaviors of female rats with their young.  Normal rat mothers will actively groom their offspring, cuddle with them, and perform other calming, attentive behaviors that significantly support and impact their offspring’s proper development.  However, there is a mutation possible in the fosB gene that can render a rat mother perpetually anxious and inattentive toward her offspring—which if passed down through the germline makes future daughters and granddaughters, etc. anxious and inattentive as well.

So far, seems like classic inheritance, right? Inherit the normal fosB gene, and you’re an attentive, nurturing mama rat; inherit the defective fosB gene, and you’re an anxious and negligent mama rat.  Ah! But it turns out that if you take female baby rats with normal fosB genes and place them with an inattentive, neglectful mother, these rats with normal fosB genes will grow up to be anxious and distracted mothers themselves.  And so do their daughters and granddaughters even as the normal fosB gene is passed on to them!  In fact, it can take up to 8 generations of rats before this normal fosB gene starts working properly again in the mother rats.

What gives? We know that differences in environment can impact whether a specific gene is activated or not, and a classic example is the extra melanin production in human skin in response to strong exposure to UV light radiation.  But when there is less UV light, this melanin production decreases.  Change the environment; change the activation and/or activity of the gene.  With the fosB gene, though, we seem to have a situation where it is as if one time exposure to UV caused my skin to stay perpetually high in melanin and then I passed this trait down to my children, their children, and their children’s children.  Given the power of the genetic code (I look like my father for a reason), how is it possible that a one-time environmental impact can cause the impact itself to be passed on independent of the gene involved?

It turns out that our cells have two processes, methylation and acetylation, that enable them to take certain sections of our DNA and keep those sequences either permanently unavailable for expression (methylation) or always available for expression (acetylation)—basically keeping some genes “off” at all times while others are kept perpetually “on.” Which makes lots of biological sense for a complex organism such as ourselves (and our rat friends) because since we all come from a single fertilized egg, every cell of our bodies possesses every single gene, and I do not want my brain cells, for example, ever activating my digestive enzyme genes. Nor do I want the cells lining my stomach ever activating my neurotransmitter genes.  In a similar fashion, since every cell of my body is a eukaryotic cell that needs to transform energy, manufacture proteins, and other tasks common to all my cells, I want the genes for these general functions always activated.

Certain genes, though, such as the fosB gene in rats, can be either methylated or not and still others, such as the one for cortisol in the human brain, can either be acetylated or not.  Therefore, there are certain genes where their expression, their “on-off” status, is very environmentally dependent, and it turns out that this status can be passed down from one generation to the next without any actual alteration in the genetic code itself.  It is a process that is well documented but not yet fully understood, known as epigenetics, and it has revolutionized our understanding of a whole host of human traits from obesity to mental illness.

What, though, does any of this have to do with the primary focus of this project, namely education?

Well, what triggered this walk down my memory lane was hearing neuroscientist, Bessel van der Kolk, speaking with Krista Tippet and revealing that he was one of the survivors of the Dutch Winter during World War II—an event that we now know to be one of the most significant epigenetic events of the Twentieth Century.  The basics are that during the last winter of the war (1944-45), the famine conditions were so severe in the Netherlands as the retreating Nazi’s stripped the country of every resource available that any fetus conceived in the fall or early winter methylated key genes associated with metabolism to help it survive the starvation.  Any fetus, though, conceived in the late winter/early spring—and therefore benefiting from the famine relief brought by the surging Allied troops—did not. 

How do we know all of this? It turns out that when an explanation was sought by the Dutch medical system for why the children and grandchildren of the winter babies seemed to inherit all of their parents’ tendencies toward obesity, hypertension, and cardiovascular diseases while the children and grandchildren of the spring babies did not—populations that were each basically the exact same generations and so should display similar medical patterns—researchers found that the presence or absence of methylation markers appeared clearly on the DNA samples taken from each of these two groups, separated by a single environmental event.

Again, though, I can hear a reader wondering what any of this has to do with teaching and learning?

It turns out for anyone not familiar with his work that van der Kolk specializes in the impact of trauma on the mind and body, and he was conversing with Tippet about the potential impacts of the pandemic’s trauma on people.  That caused me to have one of those small epiphany moments as all the ideas of trauma, the Dutch Winter, COVID, and epigenetics coalesced into a single thought:  what epigenetic impact will the pandemic have that could potentially impact generations of humans to come?

We know, for example, that trauma of any kind has the potential to cause epigenetic changes, and in fact, part of what makes Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) so challenging to treat is the on-going highly elevated levels of cortisol in the brain (acetylation in action!).  Moreover, while the kinds of environmental events that can trigger PTSD in individuals is not likely to cause the PTSD itself to be passed down (since the acetylation isn’t occurring in the gamete cells), the elevated cortisol from any pandemic stress a pregnant mother might be experiencing can enter her blood stream, crossing the umbilical cord to the developing fetus, where it can impact gamete cell development (something similar is what happened in the Dutch Winter).

And since cortisol levels in the brain are critical to the success or failure of the memory process (see Chapter 3), how the regulation of those genes gets passed down to future generations impacts all future teaching and learning.  Any stress induced epigenetic changes the pandemic is having on all our genomes has the potential to impact education’s effectiveness for at least a couple of generations (the great grandchildren of the winter babies displayed healthier phenotypes).  Therefore, whether the pandemic causes the mutism of a young boy challenging his Baltimore City school teacher’s attempts to teach him right now or the pandemic produces inheritable methylation and/or acetylation of key genes governing brain development in the future, the pandemic will very likely be impacting how we teach and learn for decades to come.

What’s more, I haven’t even touched upon what epigenetic changes the pandemic might be causing to genes governing an individual’s physical health and the known impact that can have on learning.  Hence, when the experts keep saying that we have no idea yet of what the long-term impacts of COVID are, we need to recognize that they are not just talking about the direct medical consequences it might have for an individual who contracted the disease.  They are talking about the unknown long term potential impacts on every single one of us for possibly generations.

Which can feel scary and overwhelming and despairing even if you are not a fellow educator facing pandemic children in the classroom right now (and might explain the behaviors of the “roaring 1920s” even if they didn’t know the biology then).  However, I would conclude by offering a note of cautious optimism:  those winter babies? They did, in fact, grow up to help rebuild Europe, and they and their children lived long enough to help form the European Union, and—in a definite piece of irony—their grandchildren lived long enough to produce the healthier great-grandchildren who are presently rioting in the streets of the Netherlands protesting the restrictions of their own “Dutch Winter” that will introduce its own set of epigenetic change. Who said nature doesn’t have a sense of humor?

The simple truth facing us at this time (and always if we have the wisdom to recognize it) is that life’s cycles transcend us, with eternity sweeping us along in its currents, and it is how we navigate this journey that ultimately matters.  Change is the only thing that is changeless, and as the generations before us had to deal with their own “winters” as best as able, so too must we deal as best we can with ours.

Remember, hope is a verb.

References

Bowie, L. (Nov. 14, 2021) “We Didn’t Ask for This.”  The Baltimore Sun.  https://digitaledition.baltimoresun.com/html5/desktop/production/default.aspx?edid=a9897f19-3d9f-4abf-9819-2260fef2a265.

Carey, N. (2012) The Epigenetics Revolution.  New York: Columbia University Press.

Nestler, E. (December, 2011) Hidden Switches in the Mind.  Scientific American.  Pp. 77-83.

Tippett, K. (Nov. 11, 2021) Bessel van der Kolk: Trauma, the Body, and 2021.   On Being. https://onbeing.org/programs/bessel-van-der-kolk-trauma-the-body-and-2021/#transcript.

One key reason parents will pay for a private school education is the more individualized attention teachers can pay to their child, and so for twenty-five years now, the last week of October and the first week of November have involved an annual ritual for me of writing a detailed report on every single one of my students at the end of first quarter.  The expectation for these reports is that I will provide an individualized appraisal of both the academic and social-emotional progress of each child, using observable phenomena to support my evaluation; if I were still in my public high school days, it would be the equivalent of a parent-conference night where every single one of my 120 or so students’ guardians actually showed up to have a conversation with me about their child.  “Grades & Comments” are a lot of work.

They provide, though, a great snapshot of the state of education at one’s school as you reflect on the insights provided by other colleagues (whether proofing comments as a grade-level dean or reading them as a student’s advisor), and from snapshots shared with colleagues across the land (and even around the world), the picture right now is a little bleak looking.  The physics teachers at my school, for example, report having to spend the entire first quarter remediating their junior’s and senior’s math skills simply to get to the point where they can teach the actual physics—with all the consequent loss of 8 weeks of content that otherwise would have been covered.  Colleagues from area schools who, like me, teach biology to Ninth graders have all been commiserating together that we’re on the third lab report of the year and are not seeing the growth in the mastery of experimentation skills we have observed in the past.  And my friends in the humanities are struggling mightily with reading and writing skills that are at least 4 months behind where they should be.

In fact, 97% of the teachers in the U.S. alone report observing significant learning loss among their students, and if you live in the developing world, the situation is even uglier.  The United Nations has identified at least 48 countries whose school systems are at extreme or high risk of total collapse, and most of these are in sub-Saharan Africa where the global inequities in access to education were already exacerbated.  Thus, if you are someone like 17-year-old Mathias Okwako of Uganda—who must now mine swampy soil for gold dust using mercury, a known neurotoxin he can absorb directly through his exposed skin—then your learning loss after 77 weeks out of school may be permanent.

And it’s not just traditional knowledge learning that is being lost.  Educators around the world are reporting on how immaturely so many of their students are behaving given their chronological ages, and I can certainly add my own anecdotal voice to theirs.  I have been watching my seniors this year struggle with their executive brain functioning in puzzling ways that remind me regularly of Tenth graders I’ve taught, and it wasn’t until my Homer Simpson “Doh!” moment that I recalled that the last time these seniors were in normal school was about two-thirds into their sophomore year:  in terms of the development of their social-emotional intelligence, my current seniors are Tenth graders, and it makes me somewhat anxious for them heading off to college next fall.

What’s worse is that none of the loss I have been describing is likely to rebound quickly given that in our country alone, tens of thousands of teachers and students have already had their school year significantly disrupted by the need to quarantine after testing positive for COVID.  Compound the problem with the staffing issues confronting schools today, and we’ve got a very real potential crisis in learning world-wide that could ripple through our economies and political systems for decades to come.  We are already experiencing what mere supply chain issues caused by the pandemic can do to the costs and conveniences of daily life; just imagine what would happen if there are not enough adequately educated people to create supply chains in the first place.

All of which brings me back to a point I made early on in this pandemic, and that is: we are all enduring a natural disaster, and we have got to start thinking and acting about it that way.  Just this past Friday during our professional development day, we were examining data from a safety survey our students had taken at school, and I was surprised by how many of my colleagues were so shocked by the level of trauma the survey revealed our students are still feeling.  How can so many very bright people not recognize that what we are all enduring right now is going to leave permanent scars on every single one of us?

I feel similarly perplexed at how many people don’t get that our economy is never going to be the same again, either.  Our shopping habits, our consumption habits, our job-hunting habits, our work habits…nothing is going to return to the world of 2019, and since so many of us keep failing to understand this—viewing this pandemic as it if were the common cold where the illness only temporarily disrupts life before a quick return to normal—people keep getting upset and frustrated by the “refusal” of the pandemic to allow us to get back to our previous lives, not recognizing that what is rapidly becoming an endemic disease has disrupted and changed our lives forever—whether we like that reality or not!

Which is not to say there is no hope or that healing and wellness cannot occur.  But as a society, we have got to start grappling and grasping with the new reality that what constitute hope, healing, and wellness now look different! To use an analogy from the medical field, stroke survivors can and do rebuild meaningful, fulfilling lives.  But they are not the same lives, nor are they the same people afterwards, and the same must be said of all of us who have lived through this natural disaster.

That, though, brings me back to my kids and that survey.  Along with the voices of pain from last year’s experiences, there were voices of joy at the return to in-person learning, and anyone who has paid any attention to the news this week has heard the excited voices of 6- and 7-year-olds as they have been interviewed about their vaccinations and what it can mean for seeing grandparents and having sleepovers again.  Rebuilding is happening, and learning losses are being remediated; it is simply going to take a long time and will look nothing like before.

In the meantime, my fellow educators and I must help our students learn to how to thrive in this reality.  For example, for my current seniors, the pandemic has been high school.  Lockdowns, hybrid classrooms, on-line learning, masks—these are the only high school experience they will ever have (as can equally be said of the elementary and middle school experiences of children of other ages).  It is therefore incumbent on any of us who work with children to help them all embrace and celebrate the person each of them is becoming during this time and to help them all begin to understand one of life’s eternal truths: that “now” is all any of us ever actually have; that each of us seldom truly controls what that “now” is like (our individualist delusions to the contrary); and that, therefore, whatever “now” we are experiencing is when we must be our truest, best, most authentic self because when else can we be?

Or to put it perhaps as starkly as possible, the German psychiatrist, Victor Frankl is reputed to have said to a fellow inmate digging a trench with him in a Nazi concentration camp: “this is where you’ve got to find your happiness—right here, in this trench, in this camp” (Monks of New Skete).  Because when else will you when all there is for anyone is the right now?

References

Bowie, L. (Sept. 28, 2021) More than 4,000 Maryland Public School Students Have Tested Positive for COVID.  The Baltimore Sun.  https://www.baltimoresun.com/education/bs-md-quarantine-schools-20210928-6fddt6pjc5aovokstbqr5pinmq-story.html.

Holt, L. (Nov. 4, 2021) Nashville Schools Struggling Amid Pandemic Setbacks.  NBC Nightly News.  https://www.nbcnews.com/nightly-news/video/nashville-schools-struggling-amid-pandemic-setbacks-125423685742.

Monks of New Skete (1999) In the Spirit of Happiness.  Boston: Little, Brown and Company.

Muhumuza, R. (Nov. 3, 2021) Ugandan Kids Lose Hope Amid School Closures.  The Baltimore Sun.  https://digitaledition.baltimoresun.com/html5/desktop/production/default.aspx?&edid=224347a8-0363-4361-91a9-76be8c7e642f.

The lion has roared; who will not fear?
The Lord God has spoken, who can but prophesy?
—Amos 3:8

Should a man reach eighty, he has had eighty Septembers.
It does not seem like many, said that way.
It seems as if there are so few
each one should have been better used.
—Travis McGee

I have always appreciated that Judaism celebrates its new year in the fall.  As a teacher, autumn has been my new beginning for over 32 years now, and it is always with a smile of remembrance that I look up each morning on my pre-dawn run and see my old friend, Orion, in the southern sky.  I always know that when that particular constellation is visible, it is the time for my “deep gladness” to go to work.

I have also always appreciated that the Jewish New Year is at the time of harvest and that at the very heart of the Ten Days of Awe lies Yom Kippur, a day set deliberately aside for taking stock of oneself.  It is an opportunity for a type of self-accounting for who one has chosen to be the previous year and who one will choose to be in the year to come, and again, as a teacher, the start of the school year is my time for thinking about lessons learned from the previous year, about how I will adjust my teaching and what new ideas I will try, and about how things this year will be different.  Hence, the notion of a time for deliberate self-reflection to recall that I, too, like my students, remain a work-in-progress appeals to me.

And part of that self-reflection this fall has me simply musing about life in year two of the pandemic.  Things are certainly different in school this fall.  In-person classes have brought some much-needed joy and energy back to teaching and learning, and the difference between my zoom zombies last year and my eager, puppy-like 9^th graders this year is so stark that at the end of just our first class together I had to fight back tears of happiness.  The flip side, of course, is that the return to the pace of a normal school day has challenged teachers and students alike as we have struggled to rebuild those atrophied mental (and sometimes literal) muscles, and the necessity for masks, social distancing, and now weekly COVID testing are still no less psychically wearing as perpetual reminders of what we don’t yet have back from the “before times.”  But all-in-all, at little over a month in, I don’t know any of us in schools who aren’t celebrating the difference between last year and this one.

Or I should more accurately say “at least any of us in schools here in Maryland,” where wearing masks in Pre-K thru 12 schools is mandatory and every college and university is requiring proof of vaccination to attend in-person classes.  If I am a student or teacher in Florida or Texas, I have a governor who could legitimately be charged with manslaughter for school policies that have already cost youth who are ineligible for the vaccine their lives.  If I am a student or teacher in Idaho, I am at risk of dying if I contract COVID at school from an unmasked peer because there may not be hospital space for me due to the need to ration medical care.  And if I am a student or teacher along the Gulf coast, I may not even be in school yet because two climate-change related hurricanes in little over a week have so flooded and wrecked the power-grid in my town that there is no place for me to attend.

However, regardless of where a student or teacher lives in this country, they at least all have access to some manner of education, regardless of how benign or contentious that access is.  If I am a female student or teacher in Afghanistan right now, that is no longer the case, and I am most decidedly not celebrating the difference between last school year and this one.  It took the Taliban mere days to reverse 20 years of progress, and I must confess that as someone who dedicated 23 years of my career to the education of teenage girls (and would be still if not for changes in administration), this one hits close to home.  In fact, I almost do not have words for my despair, knowing that all the data shows that the status of women in a society determine the fate of that society.  The more respect, education, and legal status women have in a society, the more that society’s economy thrives, the healthier its population is, and the more stable, uncorrupt, and democratic its government.  It is that simple, and it is why I dedicated so many years to empowering young women in the STEM fields where they have historically been under-represented.

It is also why I look at what the Taliban are doing overtly (and what so many societies do covertly) and shake my head in bewilderment.  Men denying women rights is simply shooting oneself in the foot because in such societies, the men are worse off there as well!  From a strictly self-centered pragmatic standpoint, you would think the patriarchies of the world would get a clue and start promoting the status of women because then their own collective wealth, well-being, and power would be better off and more stable if they did so.  Their behavior and choices are utterly irrational.

I know.  We are not a rational species, and if I ever needed a reminder of that, it came in our first week of school when an e-mail was sent out that the boy’s bathroom outside the 9^th grade commons space was now closed due to vandalism.  Since that went counter to my experience so far of this 9^th grade, I was a little puzzled until enlightenment came in the form of an NPR story.  Apparently, the latest trend in social media is to perform a “devious lick” (the latest adolescent slang for “steal”), taking a structure out of a public bathroom and posting this “triumph” on a TikTok video—with the larger the structure, the greater the social cache.  Schools across the country have apparently been having to close and repair bathrooms as soap dispensers, mirrors, sinks, and even entire urinals and toilets have been ripped from their mounts to earn “hits” and “likes” on TikTok. 

My own school is no less immune than any other to the undeveloped pre-frontal cortices of adolescent boys and the role of social media in their lives; hence, the e-mail earlier this month. What’s more, if I needed further proof than such collective idiocy that technology and social media will be our downfall, learning recently that there are Facebook pages that contribute to the recruitment for human trafficking, that there are internal documents showing that Facebook’s management knows this, and that Facebook refuses to block or take down these pages because doing so would hurt their revenue stream….well, at least the recent Senate hearings about the negative impact of Instagram on teenage mental health has forced Facebook to delay development of its new Instagram for Kids app for children under the age of regular Instagram’s use agreement. 

Granted, that’s a miniscule victory in a world where a recent study on young people’s anxiety over government inaction on climate change revealed that over half of the 10,000 sixteen- to twenty-five-year-olds interviewed across 10 countries think humanity is doomed and 40% expressed reluctance to have children themselves due to their fears about their future.  But it is a victory, and I am not sure how many of those we have left.

Which brings me to my final musing, a subject that I have been wrestling with deeply this school year as we remain grasped in the pandemic’s talons: when do we acknowledge the certainty of an injury and its inevitable loss? I keep thinking of the analogy of terminal cancer patients and the point in the battle where many make their peace, stop their treatments, and prepare for hospice.  They know the certainty of the outcome of the disease, and they own—even sometimes embrace—the reality of hat truth.  Similarly, with my students, I want them developing their agency for change, but I also don’t want them wasting that agency tilting at windmills.  When, I keep asking myself, do I teach them how they can affect positive change, and when do I teach them about the necessity to perform triage? How do I help my share of those interviewed 10,000 understand that while the irreparable damage they fear is certain and the kind of future they were taught to envision is no longer viable, that that does not mean they will have no future at all?

Moreover, how do I help them develop the tools to construct their futures in ways that enable them to work around the massive damage they inherit to construct meaningful and fulfilling lives? I do not have answers to these questions, but I know finding them is going to be critical for those of us in the classroom because otherwise, it could prove very challenging to keep hoping.  And my regular readers know that I am all about hoping!

That’s it for now, then. Such are the musings rummaging around in my head as the school year gets off to a new start—thoughts from my educational frontline to yours. For everyone out there in the classroom, stay safe and stay well!

References

Morning Edition (Sept. 17, 2021) NPR.  https://www.npr.org/programs/morning-edition/2021/09/17/1038169044/morning-edition-for-september-17-2021.

Weekend Edition (Sept. 19, 2021) NPR.  https://www.npr.org/programs/weekend-edition-sunday/2021/09/19/1038681715/weekend-edition-sunday-for-september-19-2021.

I do not know how to refute an incredulous stare.
—David Lewis

The Danger of Simple Solutions

We live in an ever increasingly complex and interconnected world, where our capacity as toolmakers has enabled our species to alter the actual climate of the entire planet and even the degree of wobble of the axial tilt on which the earth rotates.  Yet as discussed in my last posting, too many of us in our society are increasingly ignorant about this complexity—with the brain’s Dunning-Kruger Effect making things even worse as the degree of this ignorance contributes to how ignorant we are about our ignorance. As a result, we are witnessing a growth in uninformed populism that believes “that making policy and governing in technologically advanced, economically complex, and ethnically diverse societies isn’t all that hard, and therefore, anyone can do it” (p. xv).¹

Or to put it another way, our collective ignorance about the complexity of modern life leads many of us to believe that common sense should be able to solve any problem we might find ourselves facing.  Granted, it is a cynical cliché to say that so-called “common sense” isn’t very common, but the truth is that on a day-to-day basis, what we think of as “common sense” serves us just fine.  I do not, for example, need to know or solve the formula for determining the force of friction between a tire and the road to know to slow down if it is raining while I am driving. 

However, when it comes to complicated problems (e.g. designing a tire to maximize friction in the rain):

common sense is not sufficient.  Cause and effect, the nature of evidence, and statistical frequency are far more intricate than common sense can handle.  Many of the thorniest research problems often have counterintuitive answers that by their nature defy our common sense. (Simple observation, after all, told early humans that the sun revolved around the earth, not the other way around.) (p. 54)

We may look, then, at complex problems and want simple solutions; moreover, our common sense might even appear to provide them:  if there are people starving somewhere, send them food.   But if those starving people live in a politically destabilized country such as Yemen, where delivering the food would require the costs of military intervention and potential loss of life to do so, then suddenly, the solution is not so simple.  Furthermore, when we strive for simple solutions to complex problems, the simple solution can often simply be dangerous—such as suggesting that the easily produced malarial medicine, hydroxychloroquine, protects someone from COVID-19. 

Hence, when it comes to the increasingly complex world in which we find ourselves, we need to address the problems and challenges we uncover with lots of intelligence and informed expertise—something the current educational state of much of this country’s populace makes problematic.  As Tom Nichols puts it: “the celebration of ignorance [in our society] cannot launch communications satellites, negotiate the rights of U.S. citizens overseas, or provide for effective medications, all of which are daunting tasks even the dimmest citizens now demand and take for granted” (p. 218).  Therefore, if we are to endure as a society in the face of global pandemics, the dangers of climate change, etc., we must cure at least some of our country’s collective ignorance before it’s too late.

The Journey to Date

Cures, though, require understanding a condition’s underlying pathology, and so a logical question is: how did we get to this point in the first place? Here is where I want to revisit Tom Nichols general argument and dive a little more deeply into his work.  He presents five factors—all of which are mutually reinforcing—which he believes have contributed to what he calls “the growth of willful ignorance,” and for those who would like a deeper dive into each of them, I strongly recommend his book.  But for now, I want to explore the five factors briefly to see how understanding them might point us toward a cure.

One of the challenges to curing our ignorance is a biological one, which psychologists call “confirmation bias.”  This is our brain’s tendency to “hear things the way we want to hear them” and to “reject facts we don’t like” (p. 39).  It evolved to aid our survival because privileging any data that affirms or reinforces actions that have kept a person alive so far is likely to continue keeping said person alive into the future.  To use my well-worn leopard example, if running from something brown and spotted kept an individual alive, any future data that suggests “brown and spotted” is harmless is information that person is simply going to ignore.  Even if the majority of “brown and spotted” things in this world are, in fact, good for someone and this fact can be demonstrated, the tiny minority of “brown and spotted” that is dangerous is where the brain that survived the leopard focuses its attention.  We all instinctively confirm what we already believe to be true about the world.

Which is fine when it comes to very pragmatic things such as hungry predators or food sources. But confirmation bias can get highly problematic when it comes to personal values, social constructs, and explanations about ultimate meanings.  As Nichols puts it, “we can take being wrong about the kind of bird we saw in our backyard, or who the first person was to circumnavigate the globe, but we cannot tolerate being wrong about the concepts and facts that we rely upon to govern how we live our lives” (p. 67). 

Furthermore, when facts conflict with values, values will win nearly every time. Indeed, so strong is the brain’s confirmation bias that not only will people reject the evidence right in front of them, they will even attack the source of that evidence.  As a 2015 study at Ohio State University revealed, “when exposed to scientific research that challenged their views, both liberals and conservatives reacted by doubting the science, rather than themselves” (p. 69; original emphasis).  Therefore, confirmation bias can cause us to resist even well-documented and confirmed realities about the world, rejecting these “inconvenient truths” even when they might aid our literal survival (as vaccine resistance and the COVID delta variant are making all too abundantly clear).

But an “inconvenient truth” is still a truth, right? So it should simply be a matter of finding effective ways to chip away at confirmation bias with enough persistence and evidence to combat people’s individual degrees of ignorance.

However, what if “truth” itself were up for sale? In our postmodern era, the very concept of truth has come under attack (see COVID-19, Climate Change, and Other Inconvenient Truths), and Nichols argues that the second impediment to curing our collective ignorance is the belief held by many today that “truth” is somehow at the discretion of each individual, that thoughts of any kind—whether personal belief, emotional response, or empirical data—are all equally true simply because they are an idea held by someone.  “Inconvenient truths” can then become “fake news,” and when you combine this solipsistic narcissism with confirmation bias, you get as society where:

Americans no longer distinguish the phrase “you’re wrong” from the phrase “you’re stupid.”  To disagree is to disrespect.  To correct another is to insult.  And to refuse to acknowledge all views as worthy of consideration, no matter how fantastic or inane they are, is to be close-minded” (p. 25).

Fueling such egotism is the fact that each of us today has unlimited access to a nearly infinite number and variety of thoughts of every kind.  The Internet of Everything is Nichols’ third impediment, and it is on our devices 24/7.  We are drowning in information, and because we keep our devices with us nearly 24/7—even disrupting our sleep to check in for fear of missing out—we are drowning in a cacophony of competing points of view, causing us to fall back on our confirmed biases even further.

What’s more, this sea of data triggers still another feature of our brain:  choice-overload.  It turns out that when the brain is confronted with too many choices—say brands of pasta on a grocery shelf—the mind will actively disengage and simply not make a choice—it just will not buy pasta at all.  Marketers know this research and use it when designing things such as grocery stores or big box chains, and it is why you never find all 25 of the brands of toilet paper that a quick Google search can reveal in any one store:  people’s brains just couldn’t choose.

It is also why “not only do people know less about the world around them [today], they are less interested in it” as well (p. 133).  The availability of more information than humans have ever had access to leaves brains so overwhelmed that even where we could potentially cause individuals to learn “inconvenient truths” and successfully fight their tendency for confirmation bias, their brains will tend to shut down to what is still yet more choices of information.  The result is that “alone in front of the keyboard but awash in websites, newsletters, and online groups dedicated to confirming any and every idea, the Internet has politically and intellectually mired millions of Americans in their own biases” (p. 132).

And awash we can remain because all this technology has collided with the realities of capitalism—where nearly unlimited media can become commodified.  TikTok and Instagram exist because the sharing of information can be bought and sold; FOX News and MSNBC exist because people will pay to reinforce their own echo-chambers; even relatively balanced sources of information such as NPR exist because people like me (full disclosure) are willingly to be a sustaining member.

Yet when news and information are for sale, the result is “a chaotic mess that does not inform people so much as it creates the illusion of being informed” (p. 143).  As Nichols nicely summarizes this fourth impediment to curing collective ignorance:

The problem is not that all these networks and celebrities exist, but that viewers pick and choose among them and then believe they’re informed.  The modern media, with so many options tailored to particular views, is a huge exercise in confirmation bias.  This means that American are not just poorly informed, they’re misinformed (p. 157; original emphasis).

Moreover (and the final of Nichols’ impediments), what was once a bulwark against all this misinformation and ignorance (with its insistence on simplistic solutions to life’s challenges) is no longer as functional in our society as it has been in the past.  A college education in the liberal arts was once the hallmark of a culture that respected the complexity of the problems the modern world, and while Nichols argues that it is the commodification of higher education—treating students as customers—that has led to its dysfunctionality (something I don’t feel qualified to affirm or deny), the data he shares showing this dysfunctionality is very real.  I have actually read the original University of Chicago study Nichols references (every confessedly dry word of it; it’s a slog!), and in it, Arum and Roksa tested over 100,000 undergraduates from hundreds of colleges and universities across the United states for changes in their critical thinking abilities during the time they earned their degrees.  What they found is that a little over 80% of the undergraduates they tested as freshmen and then as seniors failed to demonstrate ANY improvement in their critical thinking skills.  Nada.  Four years of so-called education, and the quality of their thinking had not changed one iota from high school.

Again, Nichols wants to blame this state-of-affairs in higher education on the “customer knows best” approach which today’s excess supply of schools use to recruit an increasingly dwindling supply of students.  He suggests that “the protective, swaddling environment of the modern university infantilizes students and thus dissolves their ability to conduct a logical and informed argument” (p. 99).  But regardless of whether he’s correct or not about the causal mechanism (again, I don’t feel qualified to comment), the fundamental truth is that higher education in this country is no longer producing a critical mass of the kinds of minds which could successfully combat the confirmation bias, “fake news,” overwhelmed brains, and media commodification that are producing the collective ignorance endangering our country.

To quote Apollo XIII astronaut, Jim Lovell: “Houston, we have a problem.”

The Cure?

How do we tackle it? How do we combat the culture of collective ignorance that imperils democracy itself?  As a citizen, a relatively obvious answer comes to mind:  regulate the social media platforms that spew the dis- and misinformation and make the equivalent of our current laws for libel and slander part of Google’s, Apple’s, and other technology’s corporate reality.  As an educator, an even more obvious answer comes to mind:  mandatory classes in media literacy and civics throughout the K-12 years, with passing a course in both becoming a national high school graduation requirement—especially given that it took the political fights over the handling of the pandemic to increase the percentage of American adults who could name the three branches of government from a ridiculous 39% in 2019 to a still pitiful 51% in 2020!

But there is a larger solution that already exists to fight our society’s collective “willful ignorance” and one which all of us who teach in any capacity—pre-K through PhD; parent, coach, or formal classroom—have full access to: we can create opportunities for failure.  Cognitive science has repeatedly shown that “learning seems to occur only if the learner pays attention, thinks, anticipates, and puts forth hypotheses at the risk of making mistakes” (Dehaene, p. 178; my emphasis).  Therefore, if we want to fight ignorance of any kind, we need only create deliberately designed occasions for learners of all ages to screw up, to make the mistake, fail at the attempt, and then to grow from the immediate, constructive, nonjudgmental feedback we provide them.  In other words, if we want someone to learn how to stand back up, we must carefully choose to trip them to fall. And do it again and again.

Yet too often, in settings both formal and informal, we have created “a culture of affirmation and self-actualization that forbids confronting children with failure” (p. 78).  We have done so, I suspect, because we have so heavily associated intellectual effort with the act of grading, the assignment of grades, and the many other forms of judgmental, fixed-mindset feedback that when we say a child has failed, we risk calling said child a failure. And since most of us who work with children know the consequent inequities such a claim can cause, there is a strong desire to avoid causing children to make mistakes of any kind. 

The science, though, is clear:  failure is the key to learning and therefore the key to curing our culture’s current infatuation with anti-rationalism.² The challenge, then, is: can we do it in time? That’s the real crisis facing us right now “because a a stable democracy in any culture relies on the public actually understanding the implications of its own choices” (p. 231). We have large segments of our population who can’t even seem to grasp the purpose of vaccines and mask wearing during a pandemic, let alone how their consumptions habits are undermining every ecosystem on the planet. Thus, we find ourselves with hospitals that are overrun and overwhelmed; with wildfires larger than some of our States; and with election laws in the majority of states actively hindering access to voting. These are not the conditions for a stable democracy, and unless a large enough swath of our population can learn to make better choices, we face a very shaky and uncertain future as a country.

That seems a rather grim way to end matters, and frankly, I wish I could say I can offer any solutions other than to keep helping my own individual students fail successfully and to fight the battle of the ballot box with my vote.  But I do know one thing: failure of any kind always causes learning of somekind!…including what will be learned if we fail to confront the current world’s “inconvenient truths” in time.

¹Author’s note:  all quotations in this essay are from the Nichols’ book unless otherwise indicated.

² Author’s note:  since I elaborate the best-practices for how to achieve this kind of constructive failing in Chapter 6, I will leave any interested reader to turn there for more details on how we can be curing our country’s “willful ignorance.”

References

Annenberg Public Policy Center (Sept. 14, 2020) Amid Pandemic and Protests, Civics Survey Finds Americans Know More of Their Rights.  The University of Pennsylvania.  https://www.annenbergpublicpolicycenter.org/pandemic-protests-2020-civics-survey-americans-know-much-more-about-their-rights/.

Arum, R. & Roksa, J. (2011) Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses. Chicago:  University of Chicago Press.

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

Iyengar, S. & Lepper, M. (2000) When Choice is Demotivating: Can One Desire Too Much of a Good Things? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Vol. 79, No. 6, pp. 995-1006.  https://faculty.washington.edu/jdb/345/345%20Articles/Iyengar%20%26%20Lepper%20(2000).pdf.

Lewis, S. (March 2, 2021) Hydroxychloroquine, Once Touted by Trump, Should Not be Used to Prevent COVID-19, WHO Experts Say.  CBS News. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/hydroxychloroquine-not-effective-prevention-covid-19-world-health-organization-donald-trump/.

Nichols, T. (2017) The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters. New York: Oxford University Press.

Pappas, S. (Sept. 25, 2018) Humans Contribute to Earth’s Wobble, Scientists Say.  Scientific American.  https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/humans-contribute-to-earth-rsquo-s-wobble-scientists-say/.

The complexity of our society owes its existence
to the multiple improvements
that education brings to our cortex.
—Stanislas Dehaene

The United States is now a country obsessed
with the worship of its own ignorance.
—Tom Nichols

Anyone who has read my Introduction or followed the LaC Updates knows that I believe one of the fundamental pillars for a teacher’s authentic engagement in the classroom is a thorough grasp of what the neuroscience reveals about how human brains function.  Chapter 3, in fact, is devoted to what I consider the minimal knowledge about the brain that even the most novice educator should possess before working with children.  However, during my summer hiatus since my last posting in June, I have been deliberately catching up on the latest cognitive research, and what I have newly learned has profound implications not only for the teaching and learning process but for the current state of education in our society as well.  Hence, I invite all my readers to join me for this update on the brain and, if you are a fellow educator, to share out this information as well.

The Myth of Tabula Rasa

From previous studies (see Medina, Gazzaley/Rosen, & Seth), we already know that our immediate awareness is a projected mental model of the world generated by the brain—a “controlled hallucination”—which is tested against the data from the sensory inputs to determine its veracity.  Our brains accomplish this task through evolutionarily pre-selected algorithms employed in the various sensory cortices, and the consequence is that our immediate awareness is always living slightly in the future, “fantasizing” what the world around us might be like, constantly double-checking to see if we are correct. 

However, for the longest time, there has been a working assumption that any changes in the quality or character of this “fantasizing” (i.e. learning) was due exclusively to the input received from the environment—that the brain was a “blank slate” onto which the senses composed our knowledge (e.g. how to distinguish one face from another).  Experiments by noted Swiss psychologist, Jean Piaget, and those who followed seemed to affirm this assumption, and within the limits of their tools and methodologies, these researchers made valid conclusions from their evidence. 

But science is a process, and with the fMRI scans and other techniques available today, we now know that any understanding of the brain as a tabula rasa is a total myth. In fact, what the most recent research has revealed is that evolution has pre-loaded our brains with certain algorithms (and the parts of the cortices to process them) for modeling the world such that the brain “always starts with a set of a priori hypotheses, which are projected onto the incoming data, and from which the system selects those that are best suited to the current environment” (Dehaene, p. 26). 

Among these pre-loaded algorithms are the concept of objects, a sense of number, intuitions about probabilities, knowledge of animal autonomy, language acquisition, and facial recognition, and with them, a newborn explores the world with certain innate understandings of it already in place—meaning that just as a baby does not need to learn to see (the visual cortex just does it), neither do they need to learn “that the world is made up of objects that move coherently, occupy space, do not vanish without reason, and cannot be in two different places at the same time” (Dehaene, p. 54).  They simply employ this knowledge from birth to make accurate predictions about the objects in their immediate environment and then use this innate knowledge to learn ever more complex ideas about objects (such as what factors make an object fall or stay put). 

Therefore, what the most current cognitive data on infants demonstrates is that:

we come into the world with a vast number of possible combinations of potential thoughts.  This language of thought, endowed with abstract assumptions and grammar rules, is already in place prior to learning.  It generates a vast realm of hypotheses to be put to the test [where] our brain must act like a scientist, collecting statistical data and using them to select the best-fitting generative model (Dehaene, p. 52).

It is an understanding of the brain that borders on Platonism, suggesting that “each human baby’s brain potentially contains all the languages of the world, all the objects, all the faces….” (Dehaene, p. 52)—everything it must ever know. However, “a vast realm” is not infinite, and what other recent research shows is that learning absent some constraints simply does not exist.  All brain algorithms employ pre-loaded assumptions about what they are predicting, and our genes lay down the necessary brain architecture to guide our learning within these restrictions.  In other words, in the same way the optical cortex and its algorithms limit what can be seen—because natural selection has ruled out predicting models about UV and Infrared wavelengths since there are no sensory inputs to test them against—so too, the brain’s pre-loaded knowledge algorithms place certain limits on what we can learn—again because “from evolution, we inherit a set of fundamental rules from which we will later select those that best represent the situations and concepts that we will have to learn in our lifetime” (Dehaene, p. 79).

Yet, there are limits and then there are limits, and here is where the brain’s known plasticity comes into play.  Most of us when talking about education and learning are not talking about the kinds of learning an innate number sense is going to produce (e.g. counting).  Instead, we’re talking about things like reading and history and science, etc.—cultural things—and when it comes to these, cognitive psychologist Stanislas Dehaene is worth quoting extensively because I could not summarize the findings better:

any cultural learning must rely on the [hijacking] of a preexisting neural architecture, whose properties it [repurposes].  Education must therefore fit within the inherent limits of our neural circuitry, by taking advantage of their diversity, as well as of the extended period of neural plasticity which is characteristic of our species.… According to this hypothesis, to educate oneself is to [repurpose] one’s existing brain circuits.  Over the millennia, we have learned to make something new out of something old.  Everything we learn at school reorients a preexisting neural circuit in a new direction.  To read or calculate, children [repurpose] existing circuits that originally evolved for another use, but which, due to their plasticity, manage to adapt to a new cultural function (Dehaene, 121-122).¹

Thus, for example, when we learn to compare the sizes of quantities, fMRI scans reveal that our brains grow additional neurons in the number detecting area of the cortex.  Later, when we learn the Arabic numeral system (the 1, 2, 3…most of us are familiar with), a fraction of these neurons become exclusively dedicated for this purpose, only lighting up in the scans when we are manipulating these numerals.  This pattern of repurposing our innate number detecting neurons continues such that “all of us, at any stage of the cultural construction of mathematics, from elementary school students to Fields Medal winners, continually refine the neural code of that specific brain circuit” (Dehaene, p. 127)—and only that specific brain circuit; without our brain’s pre-loaded innate number sense, mathematics as a field of knowledge would simply not exist.²

Timing is Everything

Something similar happens when we learn to read.  However, here the fMRI brain scans and other research reveal the reality of the human brain’s evolutionary limits.  We know from earlier neuroscience studies that the brain possesses not only plasticity but also preservation (see Chapter 3 for an overview), and what the recent work of Dehaene and others about reading has shown is that because of this balance, there are windows of time when the brain’s ability to reconfigure its neural networks are more open and windows of time when this process is less open.  To understand the how and why, let’s explore what happens in the brain as a person learns to read.

There are two innate brain abilities employed in the act of reading—language acquisition and facial recognition—and the way it works is that the group of neurons in the left occipital lobe of the visual cortex that evolved as the primary facial recognition circuit get repurposed to become what is essentially the brain’s letter repository.  The language centers in the left hemisphere can then use this data to assemble word recognition and apply the necessary syntax rules (acquired from learning how to speak) to generate understanding.  Thus, because we evolved to recognize faces and talk, we possess the necessary neural circuitry to hijack to invent writing and reading.  Indeed, the better a person can read, the slightly slower they recognize faces as this processing gets shifted to the right side of the visual cortex; illiterates in fact respond more intensely to faces than literates do.

Which leads us back to the plasticity/preservation challenge.  The longer an individual remains illiterate, the more the primary facial recognition neurons lock themselves into their original evolutionary purpose, making it harder and harder to repurpose them for reading.  That is why grown adults who are trying to learn to read for the very first time struggle so hard at the task and why they never becoming truly proficient at it even when they are successful.  Too much of those parts of their brains that could have been repurposed for reading have become preserved for other functions, limiting the plasticity available for performing the task.

Similarly, children with diagnosable reading difficulties also face a plasticity/preservation challenge.  While the research into the “why” is on-going, brain scans of individuals with dyslexia or comparable conditions universally show reduced activity in the left occipital cortex when exposed to words.  Something in these children is preventing their brains from repurposing the primary facial recognition circuit, and so interventions are needed to help their brains repurpose a different set of neurons before they can become successful readers—something which, again, must be done before these alternative (still unknown) neurons in the visual cortex get locked into some other purpose. 

Hence, “the conclusion is simple:  to profoundly [repurpose] our visual cortex and become excellent readers, we must take advantage of the period of maximum plasticity that early childhood offers” (Dehaene, p. 138).  Moreover, we must do so because it is just not literacy versus illiteracy that is at stake.  Someone who can read has almost double the short-term memory abilities of an adult who never attended school, and IQ increases several points for every additional year an individual’s degree of literacy improves.  How the visual cortex gets repurposed impacts the entire brain’s capacity to learn.

Avoidable Disaster?

What is true for the visual cortex and its role in reading, though, is also going to be true of objects, probabilities, and all the other innate brain circuits.  The bottom line is that learning brings multiple improvements to the entire cerebral cortex, and the implication for education of these most recent findings about innate algorithms and plasticity windows is obvious.  The brain’s malleability versus conservation flexes in different cortical locations at different times as we mature (generally declining after full adulthood is reached).  Therefore, those of us who are preK-12 teachers need to maximize the different optimum learning windows during childhood to establish the foundation and conditions for the ability for lifelong learning.

And nowhere is this truer than with those who teach our youngest children.  Any delays in the development of literacy and numeracy during their prime window in early childhood can snowball quickly, and the poor reader who reaches my high school classroom is going to be put at significant disadvantage for learning the skills of abstraction and metacognition whose prime plasticity window is adolescence—which in turn puts the quality and capacity of that individual’s adult learning even further at risk than simply being semi-literate.

It also puts just about everything else in said person’s life at risk as well.  I have already written extensively about how failures in learning contribute to the systemic racism and its consequent costs for individuals in this country (start with Equality vs. Equity), and I how looked extensively at how the pandemic is likely to exacerbate this failure even further (start with The Tally So Far).  But it was not until I was recently reading Tom Nichols’ argument in The Death of Expertise that I began to consider the true enormity of the consequences if we fail to do what the neuroscience says to be doing in our educational systems.

Nichols, a faculty member at the U.S. Naval War College and the Harvard Extension School, claims that “we live in an age of resolute narcissism…swaddled in a sense of sullen, unfulfilled entitlement that makes self-correction and continued learning almost impossible” (p. xvi).  He argues that the typical American rejects the empirical rules of evidence, refusing to learn how to argue logically, and that consequently: “the foundational knowledge of the average American is now so low that it has crashed through the floor of ‘uninformed,’ passed ‘misinformed’ on the way down, and is now plummeting to ‘aggressively wrong.’ People don’t just believe dumb things; they actively resist further learning rather than let go of those beliefs” (pp. xx-xxi). This, he claims, not only puts at risk centuries of knowledge (antivaxxers anyone?) but undermines the very means to develop new understanding (such as how an individual’s behaviors contribute directly to climate change).  Put it all together, he states, and “we court any number of avoidable disasters” (p. xviii), not least of which is the undermining and collapse of our Republic.

Now those who have read COVID-19, Climate Change, and Other Inconvenient Truths or Breaking Bad “Habits” will already know how fundamentally sympathetic I am to Nichols’ position. I am, in fact, one of those “others” he leaves it to to explain how we got to this “age of resolute narcissism” in the first place (see The Unprepared Generation).  What’s more, I plan to take a deeper dive into Nichols’ ideas in a later post.

But currently, I want to place what he is arguing within the context of what the new brain research informs us about learning.  First, if there are boundaries—however fuzzy—on the different windows of maximum plasticity for optimizing different types of learning, then there is an overall limited window for producing brains that can avoid the dangerous ignorance at work in our society today, and once a given individual is past this window, they now possess a brain either fully capable of productive lifelong learning or one that is actively preserving what I will euphemistic dub “ignorance” neurons in its various cortices.

Second, the overwhelming weight of evidence is that for at least the past four decades, most of the learning taking place in this country’s schools (public and private!) has failed to produce a critical mass of citizens who possess brains that are high functioning.  See notes 1, 4, & 5 in the Introduction for references, but the data is clear that an overwhelmingly large number of brains leave America’s classrooms with their “ignorance” neurons firmly locked into place.

Third and finally, once the optimal windows of plasticity in a brain have closed, brains that have preserved their “ignorance” neurons run head long into the Dunning-Kruger Effect:  the condition where those less skilled and less competent remain unaware of how unskilled and incompetent they truly are—or as the authors of the original study put it, “not only do [such individuals] reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it” (pp. 1121-1122). 

What the neuroscience is showing us, then, is that poorly educated people possess brains that learn poorly as adults, that are limited in their capacity to change this fact, and that are not inclined to do so anyway.  Or to put it wickedly bluntly, adults with “ignorance” neurons preserved and locked in are too stupid to know how stupid they really are.  And they act accordingly. 

Conclusion

The findings of neuroscience, then, would seem to help explain the very predicament Nichols contends we find ourselves in as a society, leaving a somewhat grim forecast for our future.  But those same findings also explain why the other two pillars of authentic engagement in the classroom—appropriately intimate rapport and teacher as co-learner—generate the conditions for the kind of learning the does result in brain circuits shaped and preserved for productive lifelong success and thoughtful, engaged citizenry.  By forming caring, trusting relationships with students and modelling for them what high-quality, successful learning looks like, teachers can optimize their impact during the brain’s years of maximum plasticity to produce the kinds of metacognitively aware thinkers our society and our world so desperately need.  We need authentic engagement in our schools now more than ever.

Granted, that is easier to write than to do.  In fact, reading the National Academy’s Call to Action for Science Education this summer, it was hard not to feel a pessimistic, almost defeatist sense of déjà vu as I thought “Thirty years, and we are still tasking educators with the same undone reforms.”  When I add in my observations of the destructive damages of the pandemic and climate change, I will admit it:  I am not very confident that whatever good there is of “the complexity of our society” will survive. 

But as I remarked in My Deep Gladness, I seem constitutionally incapable of not “lighting candles against the darkness,” and if I ever need a reminder of the real potency of that light, it came in the form of an “ah ha” moment this past spring from my school’s graduation ceremony. One of my seniors, who was one of the commencement speakers, unexpectedly referenced me by name during her speech, and I found myself bewildered.  Here I had just finished the worst year of my teaching career, under horrific conditions, at a brand-new school, and I learn that somehow, I had still managed to positively touch a child’s life.  To say I was bemused and nonplussed is an understatement.

Not until I was walking home afterward, though, did the little proverbial mental lightbulb go off, and I suddenly realized not only why I work so hard to practice—however imperfectly—authentic engagement myself but why I do the same to promote it in others and address its absence in too many of our schools:  as long as there is any real learning going on somewhere, sometime, there is hope, and where there is hope, there is a future worth fighting to sustain.

Therefore, as I start to prepare for my 34^th Fall working in schools, you will find me once again with my students, learning right beside them, working to show them they are loved, and—as always—following the brain science…wherever it may lead.

¹Author’s note:  the original French term Dehaene uses in this passage is “recyclage,” which has slightly different connotations in French than it does in English.  So I have replaced “recycle” with a term that better corresponds to his actual meaning, which is “repurpose.”  I will use “repurpose” throughout the remainder of my discussion.

²Author’s note: as a strictly philosophical aside, the limitations created by the innate learning circuitries of the brain on the learning process has interesting potential consequences for our understanding of epistemology:  if we can only know what the evolution of our brain’s architecture allows, then any organism with an alternative architecture (birds are a good example) could at least theoretically have knowledge that not only we do not have but cannot have because we do not possess the brain architecture to generate it.  We literally could not know that we do not know.

References

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

Gazzaley, A. & Rosen, L. (2016) The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World. Cambridge:  The MIT Press.

Kruger, J. & Dunning, D. (Dec. 1999) “Unskilled and Unaware of it:  How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments” in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77(6); pp. 1121-1134.

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

National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, & Medicine. (2021) Call to Action for Science Education: Building Opportunity for the Future.  Washington, D.C.:  The National Academies Press.

Nichols, T. (2017) The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters. New York: Oxford University Press.

Piaget, J. & Inhelder, B. (1969) The Psychology of the Child.  New York: Basic Books.

Seth, A. (Sept. 2019) “Our Inner Universes.” Scientific American; pp. 40-47.

We cannot blame technology for this state of affairs.
It is people who are disappointing each other.
Technology merely enables us to create a mythology
in which this does not matter.
—Sherry Turkle

An algorithm is only as open-minded and smart
as the human who built it.
—Rana el Kaliouby

Be on your guard and very careful,
for you are walking about with your own downfall.
—Sirach 13:13

Any of my regular readers already knows my strong, even impassioned, love-hate relationship with digital technologies.  I resisted owning a smartphone until 2014 because I had no desire to turn into one of the “alerts” junkies I was watching populate my life around me.  Yet, I have designed and built multiple websites since the late 1990s for the practical reason that the Internet enables me to reach an audience of greater than one.  I only finally purchased my android phone (no evil Steve Jobs for me!) because every business model on the planet just assumed that there was a miniature computer permanently attached to my fingertips and I needed to function in society.  Yet I have taught coding to my STEM students now for well over a decade for the simple truth that it engages the brain in some of the most rigorous and complex problem-solving available.  Like I said:  love-hate.

Part of the hate, though, is that the negative impact of our on-line lives on our actual lives has become well-documented.  Since the rise of digital technologies, clinical depression, loneliness, exhaustion, stress-levels, and anxiety have all seen sharp increases in the general population—especially in our youth—all directly attributable to the use of these tools.  Meanwhile, there has been a 40% decline in the markers for empathy over the past 30 years, with the corresponding rise in intolerance and bullying—again directly attributable to the use of digital technologies. There is even evidence that these devices have made us less economically productive (Homayoun). 

Furthermore, a strong argument can be made that smartphones in particular actively contributed to our poor handling of the pandemic and the size of our death toll in this country (see The Unprepared Generation Part 1 and Part 2), and I have already written elsewhere about the risks they pose to education.  Toss in a year now of “Zoom School” and “Zoom Work” where so many of us lived on our screens nearly 24/7 and is it any wonder that my sister, who is a clinical social worker who supervises case management for a large insurance company, reports between a 21-28% increase in mental health referrals in any given month from March 2020 thru May 2021?

What, though, is the causal link? Why does our use of digital technologies appear to generate so many negative consequences for so many individuals? The answer renowned computer scientist, Rana el Kaliouby, offers is this: our devices are making us functionally autistic. To understand how they do so, we simply need to recognize the fundamentally critical role that emotions and their corresponding facial expressions play in communicating successfully and meaningfully with others.  When we are on our devices, she argues, we are effectively always “face blind,” and since so essential are these non-verbal clues to human interaction “that, even before we are born, we practice our smiles in our mother’s womb” (p. 235), their total absence leaves us unable to judge or gauge how to behave appropriately in our digital exchanges—in much the way an individual suffering from autism does when interacting directly with other people.  As she summarizes:

Early in my work, I realized that when it comes to recognizing and interpreting feelings, computers are functionally autistic:  They can’t see or process emotion ‘data’ or respond to emotion cues…[therefore when employing them] without any real emotional connection, it’s easy to forget that we are talking to and about other human beings, and the absence of real-time social interaction twists and distorts our behavior.  When it comes to the digital world, our computers have trained us to behave as if we lived in a world dominated by autism, where none of us can read one another’s emotional cues” (pp. 9-10).

And since computers have become our dominant means for communication today, she concludes, we have all become functionally autistic in much of our interaction with one another.

el Kaliouby’s solution to this situation is interestingly enough, more technology.  She is one of the founding pioneers in the field of artificial emotional intelligence (Emotion AI), and her initial research was in fact to develop an algorithm that could read and process the emotions of facial expressions to aid those suffering from actual autism.  Her goal, with the help of the Autism Research Centre at Cambridge, was to develop an “emotional prothesis” similar to Google Glasses that an individual on the autism spectrum could use to process the emotional expressions of others in real time in much the same way that my corrective lenses enable me to process vision correctly.

Today, el Kaliouby heads the company, Affectiva, spun off from her research at the renowned MIT Media Lab, and she and her colleagues are producing some of the most cutting-edge algorithms for artificial emotional intelligence in the world.  Indeed, she has become a bit of an Emotion AI “evangelist” through her TED talks and work with the PBS series, NOVA, and her most recent focus is on the impact of robots in society. 

el Kaliouby recognizes that millions of current employment opportunities will either disappear or become fully automated in the near future, leaving only work that requires an person’s uniquely human EQ and CQ abilities (see Teaching Creativity).  In addition, she grasps that as robots enter more and more of our daily lives (Alexa is a primitive example), there will be an ever greater need for them to possess some rudimentary capacity for empathy (her story of getting ticked off at a literalist Alexa is one to which we can all relate!).  And, of course, being the “evangelist” that she is, el Kaliouby believes that the answer is more and better artificial emotional intelligence. 

First, she postulates that “Emotion AI will empower human beings to strengthen our uniquely human skills, the very skills that will be in great demand.  This is how we retain our EQ in a tech-driven world” (p. 269).  Second, she thinks we will have a better world when empathetic learning robots “democratize education for everyone, regardless of zip code or social or economic status;” when friendly medical avatars enable patients to ask the same questions repeatedly without feeling stupid, rushed, or judged; and when mental health providers can look for clinical signs of illness in speech patterns via smartphones because “after all, a lot of us today talk to our devices even more than we talk to our friends, family members, or health care professionals!” (p. 284).

It was reading that last that gave me pause.  It reminded me of the words of another person associated with both MIT and digital technology who is not so rosy in her outlook:  Sherry Turkle.  Turkle has asked “what are we missing in our lives together that leads us to prefer lives alone together?” (p. 285), and after reading el Kaliouby’s memoir, I’m not sure the answer isn’t what she claims, namely empathy.  However, I am not sure that she and I meand the same thing by that term. el Kaliouby may claim that “through AI, Mabu [a home health companion robot] develops empathy for the user and, using that empathy, devises the best way to interact with him or her” (p. 275).  But what is empathy? If empathy is simply a programmed behavioral response—robot recognizes an input as “angry voice;” responds with programmed soothing words as output—then all Emotion AI is doing is providing yet another technology to cater to our narcissism and isolation from one another:  as the one young woman remarked to Turkle, why wouldn’t I trade in my boyfriend for a robot if the robot always demonstrated nothing but caring behavior toward me? (pp. 7-8).

Genuine empathy is the capacity to generate within ourselves a recreation of the experience of the other person.  When I see someone tearing up in response to something unkind that I have said, my brain immediately produces a similar feeling of emotional pain within me.  I “get it;” I empathize, and out of that empathetic response, I am forced to change, to respond appropriately and seek healing.  In fact, our brains even evolved dedicated cells, “mirror neurons,” for this very process: in a social species, they were and are critical for our very survival.

Any AI, though, is never going to have this capacity.  It will only display the programmed response through its algorithm to the set of inputs it is trained to associate with that response.  And while I agree with el Kaliouby that training AI to recognize emotional inputs is value-added—having your smartphone, for example, “read” the text you are about to dash off in a fit of spite and warn you not to hit send would make the world a better place for all of us—I want to challenge that perhaps teaching individuals the mindfulness and self-reflection to think twice in the first place might be even more value-added.  Likewise, empathetic learning robots and medical avatars might improve educational and medical situations where resources are limited, but that’s a “band-aid” for such problems.  Why not invest the necessary human capital in the first place to truly solve them?

As Turkle reminds us, because of our digital technologies, “we came to ask less of each other.  We settled for less empathy, less attention, less care from human beings” (p. xxi), and if, as el Kaliouby suggests, we address these matters with Emotion AI, then do we risk potential pathologies becoming normalized? Perhaps el Kaliouby is correct:  that because digital technologies are here to stay, we will all need Emotion AI “protheses” to function in the future just as I need corrective lenses to see now.  But where will the future EQ for developing these “protheses” come from once it is only the “digital natives” with their already underdeveloped EQs to write the algorithms? Also, who’s algorithms? el Kaliouby herself cautions that because China has “access to massive amounts of data on people collected by the government in ways a democratic society would not tolerate” (p. 303), it can produce AI algorithms more rapidly and more effectively than anywhere else in the world.  What might a totalitarian Emotion AI look like?

In her work, Turkle provides an analogy between the technology that brought us sugared soda water and the technology that brought us digital devices.  We embraced both with equal abandon, she points out, and it took us over a hundred year before realizing that the former was not good for us at all and, in fact, distinctly unhealthy for us to consume.  While I am sympathetic to el Kaliouby’s program and her clear passion for it—her work on autism has the potential to transform millions of lives, and the autonomous car that could protect a driver from themselves (as well as a smartphone that could) would most definitely make the world a better place!—my fear is that from the 35,000-foot level, what Emotion AI is really giving us is simply “diet soda.”

And anyone familiar with the link between long term exposure to artificial sweeteners and a significant increase in risk for developing type 2 diabetes later in life knows that diet soda isn’t much better for us than regular.  Turkle’s analogy continues to haunt.

References

Homayoun, A. (2018) Social Media Wellness: Helping Tweens and Teens Thrive in an Unbalanced Digital World.  Thousand Oaks: Corwin Press.

el Kaliouby, R. (2021) Girl Decoded: A Scientists Quest to Reclaim Our Humanity by Bringing Emotional Intelligence to Technology.  New York: Currency.

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

I want to talk today about creativity.  Our good friend, Webster, defines it as “1. the bringing into being; originating, designing, inventing, etc. 2. the bringing about; causing.” Modern neuroscience, meanwhile, defines it as the brain’s capacity to combine previously unassociated ideas in new ways (Leslie).  But regardless of one’s specific definition for it, creativity is a critical cognitive skill for success in life, and one that Fortune 500 CEOs unanimously vote is the most important quality for leadership in any discipline.  Creativity matters.

It can also be measured and taught.  We determine an individual’s “CQ” (joining IQ and EQ as identifiable brain capacities) by taking a measure of a brain’s “fluency” (the number of ideas possessed in long term memory [LTM]) and a brain’s “flexibility” (the number of conceptual categories in LTM), and from these derive an individual’s capacity for creativity. Furthermore, like IQ and EQ, an individual’s CQ is malleable and can change over time in response to environment and training.  Hence, in the same way that we can develop and strengthen a person’s IQ and EQ, we can teach someone how to be more creative.

Yet data suggest that by the time most of us reach adulthood, our CQ levels have actually declined. What’s more, the data suggest a possible culprit for this decline:  education.  When the CQ of preschoolers is measured, 98% of them score at the “creative genius” level (relative to the others in their age group).  But by elementary school, that number drops to 30%. By high school, it is 12%, and by adulthood 2% (Scala & Wolking).  Imagine! Just 2% of today’s adults have CQ scores at the “creative genius” level. What’s going on here?

I have already written about digital technology’s impact on the declining levels of creativity we see today and its corresponding decline in entrepreneurship in this country. But that decline is across all age groups.  What I believe is driving the observed steady decline in CQ as individuals grow up in our culture is the way the vast majority of them are taught over the course of their educational careers.  As I discuss in the Introduction, the dominant paradigm in most of our educational systems is a Cartesian one, where students are “machines” to be assembled and operated to acquire predetermined properties and then graded on how well each “machine” has successfully achieved these properties in order to assign it a specific value to society.  Thus, as a student progresses through this system, each is steadily told what they are good at and what they are not good at, and the “not good” is increasingly removed from their learning, depriving them access to the additional ideas (“fluency”) and categories (“flexibility”) that inform a person’s CQ.

It is little wonder, then, that by the time even a college educated individual has completed a major (the ultimate in restricting “fluency” and “flexibility”) and earned their degree that they have lost their “creative genius” as future adults.  Which is not say that they are incapable of being creative within the limitations of what’s available in their LTM, but the key word there is “limitations.”  Most schooling in this country steadily places more and more limits on what students are allowed to learn (can everyone say “tracking?”), and therefore, by adulthood, most of those preschool “creative geniuses” have ceased to exist.  CQ’s very malleability in this case works against itself.

Furthermore, it should also come as no surprise that the impact of schooling chipping away at a person’s CQ is even worse for students of color and those in poorer communities.  After all, as I discuss in more detail in To Grade or Not to Grade, the whole point of tracking is to socialize and adapt certain designated groups to “fill low status positions” (Spener, p. 61) that not only require minimal creativity but in fact actually need low CQ in order to tolerate what is being demanded of them.  I have little doubt, for example, that it is far easier to work for Walmart or Amazon if your “fluency” and “flexibility” have been systematically stunted by classes with lower standards and expectations, and so I suspect that if we explored even the small 2% of adults identifiable as “creative geniuses,” we would still see the impact of inequity there as much as anywhere else in our society.

However, what is most worrisome to me as an educator gets back to the fact that for everyone, CQ’s malleability seems to work against itself in our current educational systems.  And the reason why I find that so worrisome is that the same CQ malleability that can work against itself in the wrong educational environment can also be said to be true of IQ in our school’s as well.  As the work of Dweck and others have shown, intelligence is highly malleable, and the impact of grading and tracking on changes in individual students’ IQs over the course of their school years (both positive and negative) is well documented (Hammond).  Therefore, not only is the predominate existing school structure in this country undermining the capacity for creativity in children and adults alike; it is undermining our capacity for cognition as well.  Add in the fact that our digital technologies are making nearly all of us functionally autistic in our EQs when it comes to interacting with one another (el Kaliouby) and our repeated failures to tackle our entrenched social problems should no longer come as a surprise to anyone: we are basically systematically building brains to fail at empathetic, creative problem solving.

But we don’t need to be.  The alternative educational paradigm presented in this project works.  When children are authentically engaged by their teachers, all the “Qs” increase; I have seen it firsthand and in myriad educational settings.  Educators who employ the co-learning, appropriately intimate rapport, and brain science elaborated on in Part I transform their students’ lives for the better and produce effective citizens who can create a more just, economically fair, and ecologically sustainable society. 

What we can no longer afford, though, is for simply individual educators to do this in the isolation of the occasional odd classroom.  We need an educational system that does it, and we need that educational system ASAP.  Time IS running out on some of the problems facing us (see It Could (Will?) Be Worse), and unless as a society we start producing fully equipped empathetic, creative problem solvers, the January 6 insurrection will be just the tip of the proverbial iceberg of what is to come in the future of this country.

Which brings me to one last thought about creativity.  In our everyday vernacular, the word has very positive associations; we think of highly creative people as value-added and creativity as something aspirational.  However, I provided Webster’s definition at the start of this post for a reason.  Creativity is simply that: “the bringing into being” or “the bringing about” of something new. What that something new actually is depends not on how large a person’s CQ is but the qualities of the “fluency” and “flexibility” that produce it.  The number of ideas and the number of categories in someone’s LTM can be enormous and their CQ off the chart—a true “creative genius”—but if those ideas and categories are those of bigotry, prejudice, hate, etc., then what that genius creates can be horrific and decimating—the Nazi’s “Final Solution” and the American “Manhattan Project” were both examples of highly creative problem solving.

Therefore, it is not going to be enough to construct an educational system that improves the “Qs.”  How the system improves them matters, too.  Teaching entrepreneurship, for example, is a great way to teach creativity, but it also a great way to teach greed.  That is why the ecological paradigm of authentic engagement presented in this project is so critical for restructuring our schools.  Otherwise, we risk producing the “technically sophisticated and highly skilled barbarians” discussed in Chapter 7—right along with the highly creative conspiracy theorists and demagogues who can threaten a democracy.

References

Dweck, C. (2016) Mindset: The New Psychology of Success.  New York:  Ballantine Books.

Hammond, Z. (2015) Culturally Responsive Teaching & the Brain. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.

el Kaliouby, R. (2021) Girl Decoded: A Scientists Quest to Reclaim Our Humanity by Bringing Emotional Intelligence to Technology.  New York: Currency.

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

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

Scala, K. & Wolking, J. (2021) Innovative School Model Showcase: Entrepreneurship at Aspen Academy. NAIS Webinar. https://www.nais.org/articles/pages/member/webinars/2020-2021/nais-webinar-recording-innovative-school-model-showcase-entrepreneurship-at-aspen-academy/?utm_source=bn&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=mc&utm_content=cip.

Spener, D. (1996) Transitional Bilingual Education and the Socialization of Immigrants. Breaking Free: The Transformative Power of Critical Pedagogy, ed. By P. Leistyna, A. Woodrum, & S. Sherblom.  Boston:  Harvard Educational Review.

Whitman, G. & Kelleher, I. (2016) Neuroteach: Brain Science and the Future of Education.  New York: Rowman & Littlefield.