Tag: education

The Future of ….

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What’s more, he argues:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unbidden Thoughts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And we all know what happened next.

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

The State of Engagement

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

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

The simple truth is that:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In other words, Explorers keep exploring.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Coda

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

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

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

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

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

We, in education, can and must do better.

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Deeper Learning

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Which of course begs the question:  why not?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

The Death of Thinking?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I spluttered; I fumed; I cursed:

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

“It’s the Snapchat, Stupid”—Part 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

Also (to quote Brooks again): 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It’s the Snapchat, Stupid”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Coda

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

Math Deficits, AI, and Other Current Conundrums

One of the advantages of this time of year for me as an educator is the ease in workload as the academic calendar makes the turn from first semester to second semester.  Exams are done; final grades calculated; coursework caught up; and for a brief window of time, there is nothing needing any kind of assessing (i.e. I’m done grading for a while!).  It means I can get caught up on news and research in the world of education that are not immediately critical to my specific everyday needs and to reflect on what insights this information might have for the larger mission of teaching and learning.

Two such items to catch my attention this time around involve math and AI.  The first, a report issued this past September, chronicles the severity of the academic decline in math skills of our youngest learners.  The latest research is indicating that the children who were pre-K or kindergarten during the most severe restrictions of the pandemic not only lost a critical learning window when it comes to math; they are, in fact, not catching up to pre-pandemic levels the way their older elementary age peers are.  Worse, many of them are actually falling further behind, and what makes this fact so highly problematic is that there is a limited window during brain development for mastering such skills effectively.  Hence, the long term impact of a failure to do so can have devastating economic consequences—for both the individual and our society—and that means that this “math gap” that a portion of an entire generation is facing is not inconsequential.

Moreover, that may be even more true for those of us entering the later stages of our lives.  As Jenny Anderson and Rebecca Winthrop report out, “in a survey by Gallup and the Walton Family Foundation of more than 4,000 members of Gen Z, 49 percent of respondents said they did not feel prepared for the future. [In addition,] employers complain that young hires lack initiative, communication skills, problem-solving abilities and resilience.”  Hence, we already have individuals entering the workforce self-identifying as ill-prepared; just imagine what today’s second graders are going to be like as the long-term caretakers of late Boomers (such as myself) and every single Gen Xer and early Millennial! It is difficult not to shudder.

Nor is AI going to be the answer to this “math gap” problem.  The other report to catch my attention came from researchers at the University of Pennsylvania who studied the impact of using AI as an aid to learning math.  1,000 high school students were divided into three groups:  a third had full access to ChatGPT while completing practice problems; a third had limited access to a tutorial version that would give hints but not divulge any answers; and a third did their work the traditional way.  The results were very clear:  while the first group solved 48% more practice problems correctly and the second group solved an incredible 127% more problems correctly, the first group earned 17% lower grades than the control on the final test and the tutorial group scored the same as the control.  In other words, good old-fashioned “grind it out” for the win.

Of course, when analyzing the data more deeply, the researchers found that part of what they were observing were flaws in the bot itself.  Its computations were sometimes wrong (8%) and “its step-by-step approach for how to solve a problem was wrong 42% of the time.”  However:

the researchers believe the [biggest] problem is that students are using the chatbot as a “crutch.” When they analyzed the questions that students typed into ChatGPT, students often simply asked for the answer. Students were not building the skills that come from solving the problems themselves.

Again, score one for basic grit; something we’re going to need to aid our current 2nd graders in learning if they are to bridge their “math gap” successfully.

What is more, this general capacity for doggedness is something we are all going to need to reacquire if we’re going to meet the massive challenges facing our world today.  While ruminating about these math and AI stories from September, the more recent world was also impinging on my awareness, and as often happens in those circumstances, a kind of Gestalt emerged with an insight I had glimpsed before but never fully fleshed out.  I was listening to Brittany Luse interview former Missouri congresswoman, Cori Bush, on the NPR show, “It’s Been a Minute,” and Ms. Luse kept trying to get Ms. Bush to address how a progressive political agenda could survive in the face of the recent election to which Ms. Bush kept responding that change takes time—an answer Ms. Luse just didn’t seem to want to hear—and as I listened to this repetitious back and forth, the proverbial “light bulb” went on:  change does take time, but that’s an answer nearly no one in today’s world can psychologically hear anymore.

It was like a syllogistic moment out of one of those scenes in The Queen’s Gambit where the main character manipulates the chess pieces in her mind while staring at the ceiling.  Premise 1: Digital technologies have all but destroyed any capacity for delayed gratification in enormous swathes of the human population; the creation of AI has simply been the pinnacle of these efforts, offering instant essays, instant math solutions…instant chimeras of any manner of complex thought.  Yet (premise 2) ALL real, authentic, lasting change is NEVER instantaneous, and so (conclusion) we find ourselves today living in a society in desperate need of change with almost no capacity for the patience to achieve it.  Instead, when the needed change doesn’t happen right away, too many of us now either give up and disengage in fatalistic disgust or succumb to the Siren’s song of fallible simplistic-ness (if I may coin a word).

And the outcome of the recent election is a classic example.  While a six-year study of the prices of 96 items at a Walmart in Georgia revealed that the overall price increase between 2024 and 2023 was a mere 0.7% inflation, that same study points out that the price increase between 2024 and 2019 was 25%.  Given, I’ll suggest, that five years to an adult memory is probably the equivalent of the 15 minutes in the famed Stanford Marshmallow Experiment and you had most of society declare in early November that they wanted their “one marshmallow” now! and be damned the “two marshmallows” they could receive from patience with a (documented!) growing economy.  Hence, the guy touting instant access to the single “marshmallow” won because it was the simplistic solution to a perceived “immediate” need.

Moreover, the fact that the solution offered was a materialistic one was key to the public’s response.  In a society obsessed with stuff, entire populations of this country were prepared to ignore all the other bellicose threats Trump promoted—no matter how potentially detrimental to their own immediate lives and communities—and such is the power of this collective obsession that today, we are willingly standing by as a nation as corporate leaders such as Mark Zuckerberg openly prepare to sacrifice truth itself to maintain their profits against any legal onslaughts from the incoming administration about fact-checking (and God help you if you have the temerity to try to call out this greed in a nation-wide publication!)

So where does all this leave me as an educator? First, I’ve got children who can’t do basic math.  Second, I’ve got AI that can’t solve the problem and actually threatens to exacerbate its difficulties.  Third, I’ve got a society too incapable of delayed gratification to deal with either of these first two problems (let alone the enormous ones such as climate change and environmental degradation), and I’ve got a simpleton to lead them getting sworn into the Oval Office.  Kind of a grim outlook for a grim winter.

However, there was one other story during this down time that came to my attention that reminded me that there is a solution to these problems (or any other), and that is: patient, steady, determined resolve.  Granted, the story itself is really kind of trivial, namely that my alma mater officially rebranded itself as “WashU.”  But you need to have the insider view of the story that underlies this story to know why it uplifted my spirits, and so please bear with me as I fill in some of the “behind-the-scenes.”

It starts in 1982 in the Public Relations Department of a university recognized regionally for its excellence, who has recently hired a new director who has made a small name for himself at some other midwestern schools for raising the profiles of those institutions.  Washington University in St. Louis wants to stop being known as “the Harvard of the Midwest” and start being said in the same breath as Harvard instead.  It wants to be “Washington.”  The only problem is that there are at least 20 other institutions in this country that have “Washington” in their name, and all the locals and students know this school by its folksy title, “WashU.”

Enter the new director, Fred Volkmann—who has as one of his employees, a sophomore work-study student, hired to run the mimeograph machine and mail out press releases to the local and regional media outlets.  Fred recognizes that there is authentic marketing power in the folksy, “WashU,” and he has a plan, a plan he generously shares the broad strokes of with his young work-study student (helping with the grunt work of the first rebranding campaign) who impudently wonders aloud why we can’t just make the switch immediately to “WashU?” Said student is given a quick but firm lesson in the intricacies of PR, and he goes back to mailing press releases.

By now, of course, any reader has filled in the blanks, and as an alum (and that former employee), I have watched Fred’s plan unfold from afar for over 40 years.  I have watched my alma mater achieve the national recognition it aspired to all those years ago.  I have watched its brand change from “Washington University in St. Louis” to “Washington University” to “Washington”—all stages in Fred’s original plan.  But when he retired about eight years ago, there was as yet no “WashU,” and I wondered if “Washington” might be the end of things.  That is until this past fall, when I learned through my alumni magazine that Fred’s grand dream from the early 1980s had finally come to fruition and that, henceforth, the official branding of my alma mater would be and is “WashU.”

Like I said, a rather trivial story—especially in a world where Palestinians are enduring threatened genocide and Los Angeles, California is basically burning to the ground.  Yet, I think it is also a story full of potency and import because it is the story of the fundamental power of patient, steady, determined resolve to change the world.  Like Fred, all any of us can do is plant seeds and quietly tend them, keeping faith that the crop will eventually bear fruit, and like Fred, there is a lot of anonymity to that task (most people reading this will never have heard of him).  Therefore, when I think back to my earlier question in this essay, “where does all this leave me an educator?” it leaves me as it always does (and always will!):  planting the seeds of knowledge, critical thinking, and wisdom in my students, doing so one day, one lesson, one moment at a time—something no AI or material “stuff” is ever going to be able to do. 

It is not an easy task. Nor is the patient, steady, determined resolve needed to accomplish it a comforting reality.  But it is the task at hand, and as I have oft quoted Luther, those of us committed to this profession “kann nicht anders.”  Our world and its future are literally depending on it.

References

Anderson, J. & Winthrop, R. (Jan. 2, 2025) Giving Kids Some Autonomy Has Surprising Results. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/02/opinion/children-choices-goal-setting.html.

Barshay, J. (Sept. 2, 2024) Kids Who Use ChatGPT as a Study Assistant Do Worse on Tests: Researchers Compare Math Progress of Almost 1,000 High School Students. The Hechinger Report.  https://hechingerreport.org/kids-chatgpt-worse-on-tests/.

Camera, L. (Sept. 20, 2024) In the Rush to COVID Recovery, Did We Forget About Our Youngest Learners? The 74.  https://www.the74million.org/article/in-the-rush-to-covid-recovery-did-we-forget-about-our-youngest-learners/?utm_source=The+74+Million+Newsletter&utm_campaign=6dcaab7edb-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2022_07_27_07_47_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_077b986842-6dcaab7edb-176301373.

Isaac, M. & Schleifer, T. (Jan. 9, 2025) Meta Says It Will End Its Fact-Checking Program on Social Media Posts.  The New York Times.  https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/01/07/business/meta-fact-checking.

Luse, B., et al. (Jan. 8, 2025) Is The Squad Dead? Cori Bush on the Future of Progressive Politics.  NPR It’s Been a Minute.  https://www.npr.org/2025/01/07/1263511078/future-of-progressive-politics.

Mischel, W. & Ebbesen, E. B. (1970) Attention in Delay of Gratification.  Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 16 (2), pp. 329–337.

Selyukh, A. & Adolphe, J. (Jan. 14, 2025) NPR Shopped for 96 Items at Walmart to Track How Prices are Really Changing.  NPR Morning Edition.  https://www.npr.org/2025/01/14/nx-s1-5241014/walmart-prices-npr-shopping-cart-2024.

Science & Safetyism

Wrong opinions and practices
gradually yield to fact and argument:
but facts and arguments,
to produce any effect on the mind,
must be brought before it.
—John Stuart Mill

As an educator, one of the challenges of the safetyism I discussed last time is the reality that my students today are not as adept at critical thinking as my students earlier in my career.  They are simply less able to connect their claims to reliable evidence properly, and no, that is not just “old fogey-ism” on my part.  I can document the extra supports and other interventions that I have needed to steadily and increasingly add over the decades to help my current students achieve what their “elders” before them once achieved semi-autonomously (because a good teacher meets their students where they’re at; not where the teacher might wish they were). 

Digital technology, of course, has played an enormous role in this new reality for me as a teacher, but in exploring Lukianoff’s and Haidt’s concept of safetyism, I have begun to realize how much my students are arriving in my classroom having never really confronted the disagreeable ideas and opinions so necessary to the development of critical thinking as an intellectual skill.  In some instances, they have never even encountered them at all! Hence, I now see that the rise of safetyism in our society has been impeding the development of my students’ critical thinking as much as their lives as digital natives has.  In both instances, they have been able to systematically avoid cognitive unpleasantries such as boredom, dissonance, and inconvenient truths and so avoid learning how to deal with such things.

How, then, do I address this reality, and why—as I implied at the end of my last posting—do I think my particular discipline has some built in advantages for doing so?  I have written before about the kind of general pedagogy I believe can promote and improve critical thinking skills (it is a major focus of this project). But today I want to address why I think that my teaching science specifically—rather than other possible academic disciplines—gives me an extra edge when it comes to defeating the educational challenges of safetyism.

 And I want to do so by turning first to someone who I am starting to think of as an intellectual kindred spirit, Jonathan Rauch.  I visited his concept of “liberal science” earlier in my writing when exploring his “constitution of knowledge.” But in reading some of his other work recently, I found that he has gotten me to “thinking about science as a set of rules for social behavior, rules for settling conflict” (p. 30) rather than simply a way of understanding the world.  He reminded me that disagreements are practically baked into a social species such as ours and that methods for resolving those conflicts inherently involve evoking claims about the truth in a particular situation.  Yet while anyone can make “three new [claims] every day before breakfast, the trouble is, they will almost always be bad [claims].  The hard part is figuring out who has a good [one]” (p. 64, original emphasis).  Hence, as Rauch reminded me, one of the most fundamental problems any society must cope with to survive is the epistemic one: the nature and limits of human knowledge.  Or as he puts it, “when is it legitimate for me to say ‘I’m right and you’re wrong!’ and to act accordingly?” (p. 35).

His own answer, of course, is only if such a claim has survived the crucible of liberal science.  Any proposition must endure repeated testing against the empirical realities of life and must have persisted repeatedly before said potential error can make any claim to a degree of truth.  For Rauch, that is the innovation and genius of the scientific process of truth determination:  not in doing away with human bias and ignorance but in channeling them.  As he argues, “the point of liberal science is not to be unprejudiced (which is impossible); the point is to recognize that your own bias might be wrong and to submit it to public checking by people who believe differently” (p. 67).  Science in Rauch’s outlook is the intellectual equivalent of natural selection, “[mimicking] the greatest liberal system of them all, the evolution of life” (p. 57).

And it is that last metaphor that has caused me to ponder whether the discipline I teach has some built-in advantages when it comes to resisting safetyism.  Because in learning science, a student in my class is inherently in conflict.  Conflict with preconceived notions.  Conflict with what the data you just collected tells you.  Conflict with the required skepticism that you could always be wrong…. 

I could go on, but the bottom line is that you cannot learn science and somehow evade the very thing safetyism seeks to prevent and avoid—conflict.  It’s not that other disciplines can’t have conflict built into them, too (and responsible, thoughtful teachers of those disciplines deliberately do so).  But having taught history, I know that one can offer a version of it where the conflict has been white washed from it, and I can imagine an English or Foreign Language class where what is read is very safe and unchallenging.  Science, however, literally cannot be taught without disrupting how a child looks at and experiences their world.

Not that science doesn’t still lose some of the battles.  As I was outlining this essay, a student was removed from one of my classes by a family upset with the demands of the course, declaring that my teaching was making their child feel emotionally uncomfortable and overwhelmed.  Ironically, this course is an elective; so the student had chosen to enroll, and I am extremely candid and forthright at the beginning of the year—with both students and parents alike—that a fundamental goal of this particular class is to create learning situation where children will intellectually fall down and that with my help, they will learn how to stand back up in the similar situations that they will encounter next year in college.  The metaphor I sometimes use is that of an academic drill sergeant but one who loves and cares, and the rationale I provide is summed up so nicely by Rauch that I may use his very words next fall:

The social system does not and never can exist which allows no harm to come to anybody.  Conflict of impulse and desire is an inescapable fact of human existence, and where there is conflict there will always be losers and wounds…The chore of a social regime is not to obliterate conflict but to manage it, so as to put it to good use while causing a minimum of hurt and abuse (p. 122).

I want all of my students prepared for adulthood and the necessary adulting that comes with that, and I know that if you never fall down, you can never learn to get back up.  My sadness for my now former student is that she was allowed to remain on the ground.

References

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

Rauch, J. (2013) Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought (Expanded Edition).  Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Updates

Regular readers know that I have three areas of interest that frequently occupy my attention: the impact of the pandemic on education, the ever evolving role of AI and technology on teaching and learning, and the strong current of anti-intellectualism in our society.  Well, this summer has been a busy one for all three of these topics; so it’s time for some updates.  We’ll start with the pandemic.

Early on, when COVID was actively disrupting all of our lives, I made some sober predictions about the cost of this disease to our children, and it saddens me to report that it turns out that things are even worse than I had prognosticated.  Teachers are now reporting that many of our littlest ones are arriving at school barely able to speak, that they are unable to remain still for brief periods, and that some do not even to know how to play with others.  Rudimentary pre-school skills such as how to hold a pencil or identify simple shapes (think circle, triangle, etc.) are missing, and caregivers of all kinds are reporting symptoms of anxiety and depression in children as young as four or five.

However, the situation appears even grimmer in our older children.  The gap in national test scores between recent and pre-pandemic scores has actually grown wider than anticipated, and “the gaps are so large that the average eighth-grade would need about nine months of additional schooling to catch up to pre-covid levels in math and about the same extra time to catch up in reading.”  The realities of human development simply do not allow for nine extra months, and so we are confronting an entire cohort of children who will be put at some degree of permanent disadvantage moving forward.  At least the little ones “only” need “2.2 more months of school to make up the reading gaps and 1.3 months for math.”

On the AI and technology front, the status of things is a little less “doom & gloom,” with interesting research about why paper remains better than screens.  The data about the advantages of handwriting versus typing when notetaking has been known for some time, but it turns out that even the simple act of reading something that is on paper versus reading the exact same thing on a screen produces better brain engagement and comprehension.  Scientists around the world have been analyzing the brains of early elementary age children with EEG and fMRI, and it turns out that “when children read on paper, there was more power in the high-frequency brainwaves” associated with higher-order cognitive function.  Why the brain acts differently between paper and screens remains a mystery, but that it does is now documented by multiple studies.

Of course, the creep factor of AI remains, with a company in China now offering to make avatars of dead loved-ones so that you can continue to “communicate” with the deceased.  But that’s a different issue for another day.  For now, “pencil & paper” are clearly winning, and those of us working with children simply need to pay attention accordingly.

Finally, it demoralizes me to have to report that the ACT has now made the science section of their exam optional and have even reduced their core exam by 44 questions, with shorter reading passages.  While I am not a fan of standardized tests, with their well-documented biases and other problematic features, I am also not a fan of dumbing things down even further in our general society than we already have.  The ACT rationalizes their decision by arguing that with this new flexibility—students can now sign up for four different varients of the exam (two of which do still include science)—that students can focus on their strengths and showcase their abilities in the best possible light while avoiding the fatigue of the longer, original exam.  But I am confident that the proverbial “bottom line” (pun intended) is simply that fewer students were signing up for the test, and that this was the organization’s way of trying to keep the dollars flowing—all at the expense of actually demanding that our children actually know something.

Well, that’s it for now.  For those of us in the classroom, important reminders of the challenges facing us as we adapt to the children in front of us (not the ones we might wish were in front of us), and for those not in the classroom, important reminders of matters impacting the society in which we all live.

Until next time.

References

Archie, A. (July 19, 2024) The Science Section of the ACT Exam Will Now Be Optional.  NPR.  https://www.npr.org/2024/07/19/nx-s1-5045587/act-exam-test-science-optional.

Barshay, J. (June 24, 2024) This Is Your Brain.  This is Your Brain on Screens.  The Hechinger Report.  https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-neuroscience-paper-v-screens-reading/.

Feng, E. (July 11, 2024) Chinese Companies Offer to “Resurrect” Dead Loved Ones.  It Raises Questions.  NPR Morning Edition.  https://www.npr.org/2024/06/17/nx-s1-5001751/chinese-companies-offer-to-resurrect-dead-loved-ones-it-raises-questions.

Meckler, L. & Lumpkin, L. (July 23, 2024)  Four Years After COVID, Many Students Still Losing Ground.  The Washington Post.  https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2024/07/23/covid-test-scores-learning-loss-absenteeism/.

Miller, C.C. & Mervosh, S. (July 1, 2024) The Youngest Pandemic Children Are Now in School, and Struggling.  The New York Times.  https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/07/01/upshot/pandemic-children-school-performance.html.