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.
