This Teacher’s Latest Sojourn

My people are determined to turn from me.
—Hosea 11:7

Most of us of a certain age are familiar with the language, “a left-handed compliment.” It has its roots in the Western cultural bias about handedness and the Latin root for “left” that would become our word “sinister,” and when said of something, it is a way of declaring that what might appear on the surface to be positive is—in actuality—decidedly not. In other words, it is an insult veiled in flowery terminology.

Well, recently, the collective United States educational system received what amounts to a left-handed compliment from the most recent PISA exam. This international test of essential cognitive skills is considered the “gold standard” for assessing intellectual development and attainment in a country’s student population, and as I have written before (see The Future of… and “Reading is Fundamental”), the U.S. has historically ranked relatively poorly ever since the test’s inception in 2000. However, the just-released PISA results show American students moving up in the world’s rankings (the “compliment”) while the majority of other OECD countries performed worse (the “left-handed”). Indeed, as reported on PISA’s main dashboard, “PISA 2025 recorded the lowest OECD-average performance observed so far in science, reading and mathematics,” with reading scores declining since 2012 and math scores dropping off a cliff since 2018. In short, Americans are not the only ones getting dumber.

Which, at one level, I can live with as an educator since I know how malleable intelligence actually is and, hence, I know this trend can be reversed.

Yet I find myself experiencing something this year that is giving me pause and forcing me to confront how large the “brain deficit” generated by the past 20 years might actually be. For the first time, I have a critical mass of students who are observably post-literate, who cannot extract information from simple texts and who then accuse me of not teaching because I will not simply give out answers. In addition, I am witnessing the kind of shutting down described in a NYT’s piece about college students fleeing home after only a few days because of the emotional and cognitive demands of independence. I knew we were creating a culture of coddling, but to watch more than one of my students respond to challenges earlier classes relished by withdrawing into almost catatonic silence has been heart breaking—especially when the overwhelming feedback from student surveys over the years (including last year’s seniors!) has been how much they appreciated my guiding them to finding the answers for themselves rather than just telling them.

Of course, I know the dominate causal mechanism behind what I am observing (and the child who brings the preceding paragraph most into focus lives with headphones on, glued to the media on her computer screen). But the recent Stanford University study of Australia’s legal experiment in social media restriction has shown mixed results at best, and while any study based on only 3 months’ worth of data should be read through an enormous lens of skepticism, the reality that so little seems to have changed in those 3 months is what forces me to pause because in those same months, developments in AI have made the need to learn how to find an answer even more superfluous than it was 120 days ago.

Hence, both my growing awareness about the actual potential size of humanity’s world-wide (according to PISA) “brain deficit” and my growing awareness as an educator of just how truly enormous the challenge of fixing this “deficit” may be.

And that’s the catch-22 of this entire situation. The human brain is one of the most energy consuming structures in the biological realm, and because energy is THE hardest resource to come by for living things, evolution selects for any efficiency that can be had. It is why we develop habits, have implicit biases, and generate stereotypes—they create automated neural pathways that consume less energy—and it why breaking those habits, overcoming our biases, and rejecting stereotypes are so challenging: doing so places a much greater energy demand on the brain than keeping those same habits, biases, and stereotypes ever will.

It’s also why learning is so difficult. You are forcing the brain to expend extra energy to change its physical structure, and that’s where the catch-22 with modern digital technology comes into play. The lure of AI and social media to the brain is that it can consume less energy when it employs these programs to answer questions, solve problems, and manage affairs. Indeed, the brain experiences these energy savings at a molecular level, making it want to keep employing these digital technologies even more. Yet if AI answers all your questions and social media generates all your stimuli, you are never actually learning anything or experiencing reality because your brain isn’t expending the necessary extra energy to generate the consequent physical changes in neural pathways that authentic learning and genuine social networking require.

In other words, you can live just fine employing AI; you just can’t ever accomplish anything with it.

Which is a very difficult (nay, borderline depressing) thing to have to write if you are someone who has dedicated nearly four decades of your existence to empowering people to accomplish things with their lives. But as I’ve mentioned recently, my fellow biology teachers and I have instituted new ways to teach thinking this year in our post-AI age, and we are, in fact, seeing the positive results of our efforts. Thus, I can honestly attest that the task of combatting ignorance and making the world less dumb isn’t proving Sisyphean; I’m just starting to have to confront how utterly enormous the boulder we are pushing up the hill actually is.

References

Barnum, M. & Meltzer, E. (Sept. 8, 2026) U.S. Moves Up in PISA Test Score Rankings Because Other Countries Are Doing Worse. Chalkbeat. https://www.chalkbeat.org/2026/09/08/pisa-results-2025-show-us-gaining-as-other-countries-decline/.

Geraghty, S. & Goldstein, M. (accessed Oct. 4, 2026) New Australian Law Restricts Social Media for Kids. Is It Working? Education Next (vol. 26, no. 2). https://www.educationnext.org/new-australian-law-restricts-social-media-for-kids-is-it-working/.

Meja, P. (Sept. 9, 2026) Home From College, 2 Weeks Later. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/09/style/gen-z-college-students-quit.html?unlocked_article_code=1.A1E.44kn.Hx8j3bI0Zmpm&smid=nytcore-ios-share.

Teaching Finitude

For “now” is all we have.
—Anonymous

The past few weeks have felt very surreal to me. The husband of a couple with whom I am close friends died abruptly and unexpectedly on my 63rd birthday (making two peer-aged people I’ve now lost in the last six months). The light pollution in Baltimore has reached the point where I can no longer readily see my beloved Orion on my pre-dawn run before school—traditionally my anticipated harbinger of the new academic year. M.I.T. just released a report demonstrating that AI can now successfully complete their collective undergraduate programs (meaning a non-human being could now theoretically earn one of their degrees). And for the first time in 29 years, I did not spend Labor Day weekend on a boat, sailing—an absence of a once seasonal closure that is impacting me more than I would have at first thought.

Indeed, such has been my recent sense of strangeness that I have even found myself offering no-longer-used items from my professional home library to colleagues out of a growing awareness that I am approaching the time when these things will never be used by me again, and the finitude of the ever-changing seems to be making its reality felt in ways that are more “vibrant” to me than in the past. I find my comprehension of this most fundamental truth shifting from grayscale to color, and I have now restarted this essay so many times I’ve lost count because I find myself feeling tenuous and nonplused, struggling for the words to answer that ultimate question: what does it all mean?

Ironically, part of what has made this sense of befuddlement all the more “in my face” has been the offer (and my acceptance) of a new position at my school to rebuild, renew, and run an academic program very similar (but more extensive) than the STEM Institute work I did at my previous school. So here I am, busy with highly generative work, at the very moment I find myself experiencing a deeper consciousness of my ultimate limitations, and for some reason, this long familiar paradox feels less abstract and intellectual right now than it has in the past. Perhaps for the obvious reason that I am far closer to the endings of various personal and professional journeys than I am to their beginnings. But I think there is something more at work here, something that needs to be informing my current teaching, and I think that “something more” may be that since the clock is always ticking, even a modestly meaningful life has a deadline to it.

And I think it’s this deadline’s reality for us all that may be what has been missing from what I’ve been doing in the classroom. As my regular readers know, I already consistently argue that good teachers are co-learners with their students and that, further, what we ultimately teach our kids is our perspective on what it means to be authentically human (the specific discipline is just the vehicle). However, what the recent surrealness has me pondering is: if I am trying to model fully what I think it means to be human but I’m leaving out both my finitude and how I choose to respond to that finitude, then what is missing from my modelling? What about the modest part of the quest for meaning might I be failing to nurture in the children under my care?

I’m not sure I have an immediate answer—especially since I have had some rather immodest moments of meaning in my career—but I’m reading a biography of John Adams right now, approaching both the literal as well as metaphorical “last chapter,” and am struck by how little I knew about this life of great consequence for our country. Here was one of the great intellectual architects of the American Revolution, without whom it might justly be said there would not have been one, and whose “failed” presidency enabled our suckling nation to survive the international fallout from France’s collapse into anarchy and terror following its own revolution. Yet, unlike some of his contemporaries, there are no monuments in his name, no image on a piece of currency. Just the quiet daily outcomes of the longest running experiment in democracy in history.

Which has gotten me to thinking. Perhaps I am modeling my finitude for my students after all—only not in ways I have traditionally thought of as “teaching.” For example, in my nearly religious commitment to punctual grading, I not only provide the speedy feedback I know the brain needs to learn effectively, maybe I’m also declaring via my behavior that I honor the limited time my students and I have together so let’s make the most meaning we can while we can (i.e. learn). Moreover, in my various pedagogical techniques employed for classroom management, I not only ensure that every voice has an opportunity to contribute, maybe I’m also providing the structure to challenge my students to achieve their best within the finite limitations of a particular day’s grouping.

Or to put it plainly, because I take a deeply student-centered approach in all my decision making as an educator, perhaps I am modeling the very reality Burkeman describes when he reminds us that:

Every decision to use a portion of time on anything represents the sacrifice of all the other ways in which you could have spent that time, but didn’t—and to willingly make that sacrifice is to take a stand, without reservation, on what matters most to you (p. 33).

The bottom line is that my students learn very quickly that nearly 100% of what we do in my classes is the result of a very deliberate, very reflective choice on my part, and even as I write those words, I am forced to realize that because my students know about that deliberation, they are also witnessing my own meaning making in action. Thus, while I’m still not sure I’m nurturing how my students can make their own modest meaning with their lives, it’s more likely than I originally thought when I first started this essay that I am at least modeling for them what modest meaning-making looks like for me.

And maybe in a finite world, that has to be enough.

Coda

As I said, writing this one has been challenging for me, with false starts and dead ends, forgetting not to fall in love with my own words (the writer’s worst mistake and most dreaded pitfall), and this final product rambles more than I like, making me hesitant to share. But remaining silent doesn’t feel right either, and sometimes the writing is the thinking (with—universe willing—more to follow on another day). Hence, as one of my favorite authors, Robert Fulghum, once did at the end of one of his books, I will conclude this latest offering of my thinking with a ;

References

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

McCullough, D. (2001) John Adams. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Svrluga, S. (Aug. 25, 2026) AI Can Now Credibly Complete Most Undergraduate Assignments, MIT Warns. The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2026/08/25/ai-can-now-credibly-complete-most-undergraduate-assignments-mit-warns/.

AI: Education’s Frenemy (Part 3)

Critical thinking without hope is cynicism.
Hope without critical thinking is naivete.
—Maria Popova

Genuine understanding is not received;
it is achieved.
—Jason Baehr

As more and more AI programs keep escaping their cages[i]—don’t you love the euphemism, “sandboxes?”—it was time to examine the latest in AI and its potential impacts on teaching and learning, and for once, I actually had two ideas brought to my attention that made me go “Hmm!” with my positive, “that’s interesting!” vocal tone rather than my head-shaking “Hmm!” with my “we’re f-ing doomed!” vocal tone. But there was still some “f-ing doomed” material in the recent news; so let’s get that out of the way first.

My “favorite” from the past month is the news of how AI is infiltrating childhood at an ever earlier age. Greg Rosalsky of KQED’s Mindshift has reported on AI’s move into the toy industry, with interactive dolls and fuzzy robots intentionally designed to befriend children as young as two-years-old, and as he points out, “companies are racing to embed AI into toys, nurseries, classrooms, and eventually robots that live alongside families,” with “recommendation algorithms [that already] curate what many kids watch and listen to” in their bedrooms and nurseries. Indeed, the hottest trend among Millennial and Gen Z parents is apparently one of two baby-monitoring systems (Nanit and Owlet) where (as described by one user in the NYT):

A sleek white camera, bolted to the wall, points straight down at her body. High-definition footage is beamed to a server, where machine-learning algorithms log her movements and the precise moments her eyes open and close. The data are distilled into charts and insights that my husband and I review in the Nanit app: a daily “sleep efficiency” score, from zero to 100; minutes until sleep onset; the number of times we were needed over the course of a night [and while] it is the Eye of Sauron…it also knows when we enter our daughter’s room in the morning and joy hits her face—and it sends us intelligently edited montages of these moments.

Moreover, so enthralled was the author of these words by this new use of AI that “when I became pregnant with a second child in 2025, my husband and I did not even have a conversation about buying another Nanit camera. We had it waiting the day she came home from the hospital.”

Hmm. The authoritarian’s “wet dream:” an entire generation socialized and conditioned to accept 24/7 video monitoring in every location they ever inhabit, including the bedroom (a pornographer’s “wet dream”). If we think we have no privacy now….

However, what truly disturbs me even more than baby cam on steroids is the impact the adoption of these technologies by so many parents will have on the most important stage of brain development. As Dr. Dana Suskind, a pediatric surgeon and neuroscientist reminds us:

At a glance, a child talking to an AI companion looks like a child participating in conversation. But essential, quiet interactions have been stripped away. Imperfections, delays, and the need to apologize or rephrase something may seem like flaws in human communication, but they are, in fact, crucial developmental building blocks. The small cycle of rupture and repair that occurs following a misunderstanding, played out thousands of times over a childhood, is how resilience, flexibility, and emotional regulation get built. It’s how children develop the most important relational skills: trusting that relationships can survive conflict, and staying connected with others through discomfort. Remove the friction from childhood, and the social-emotional system never gets what it needs to properly develop. The neural architecture that was supposed to be built through imperfect, sometimes-frustrating human interaction may never fully form.

Or to put it another way (Suskind argues), since social interaction is to the developing neural networks what basic nutrition is to the body, AI is the equivalent of ultra-processed foods—i.e. junk food—for the brain. As she puts it:

Because AI companions have been engineered to remove every imperfection—the misunderstanding, the delay, the repair—a child’s social-emotional system never has to work. Ultra-processed foods stripped the fiber from diets, and engagement-optimized AI might strip the friction from childhood. The developing mind, like the gut, needs resistance to grow. Friction isn’t an obstacle to development; it is development (my emphasis).

Moreover, since we know that social-emotional intelligence is absolutely critical to the proper functioning of the rest of our cognitive systems, anything that messes with the proper development of those EQ networks in the brain sets a brain up for a life-time of disadvantages that Suskind pointedly emphasizes “can’t be engineered or recovered later.”

And the very people building all this technology know it. Suskind reminds us that “high-income families began pivoting away from ultra-processed foods as soon as the potential harms of such foods became apparent” that “an identical pattern is emerging with AI. Many of the engineers and executives building these products are going screen-free at home and doubling down on unstructured play.” Thus, “if the food parallel holds, then engagement-optimized AI will become the new Dollar Menu, concentrating in the lives of the children who can least afford its developmental cost,” and we will risk “the possibility that we’ll allow human connection to become the new organic—cherished and protected by the wealthy, and out of reach for everyone else.”

Again, more authoritarian “wet-dream:” a world full of cameras with nothing but sheep to watch. Stalin, Hitler, and Pol Pot could only have fantasized, and I sometimes wonder if Donald Trump actually does given his administration’s attacks on education and its heavy federal research investment in all things AI.

However, as shared earlier, not everything I read about AI this past month made me want to go “ugh,” and one idea that I found particularly interesting came from fellow educator, Maureen Gassert Lamb, writing for the primary blog of the National Association of Independent Schools. In her essay, Lamb shares an exchange she had with one of her students in which the student had asked “If I can use AI to do this assignment, what does that actually mean about the assignment?” To which Lamb shares that she had responded (in good Socratic fashion) by asking what the student thought that meant, with the child answering “I think it means maybe the assignment isn’t really measuring what I know. Or how I think.” Together, Lamb reports, she and the student came to the mutual conclusion that “if assessments are doing what they’re supposed to do,” then what the use of AI is showing in their particular situation is that “it’s not creating the problem. It’s just making it obvious.”

Out of the proverbial mouths of babes. Maybe, Lamb suggests, “AI is not the enemy. Instead, it is a mirror, showing us where our assessments or ideas about learning may be falling short,” concluding that:

When a student can produce work that looks complete without explaining their choices, questions, revisions, or reasoning that shaped their work, AI has not necessarily created the problem. Instead, AI may simply be revealing that we have valued completion more than evidence of understanding.

Learning, she reminds us, is a journey, not a destination, and maybe the most important thing AI’s arrival has done is to force all of us in education to remember this great truth and to revisit what we have turned modern schooling into instead.

Because even as far back as 1983’s famous A Nation at Risk, the focus of educational policy in this country has been nearly exclusively on outcomes, not how we achieve them, and the litany is long: No Child Left Behind, Common Core, Every Student Succeeds. Even in a discipline as process-oriented as science, AAAS’s Project 2061, NRC’s National Science Education Standards, and their current descendant, NGSS, the focus is on outcomes, and what all these so-called reform efforts make abundantly clear is that the “what” in schools is considered far more important than the “how.” We are positively obsessed in this culture with a product’s image, and our efforts at educating our children simply (and clearly) reflect this fact.

Even the alleged recent reduction in scoring standards on AP exams—producing scores that are “particularly incongruous with the results of virtually all other standardized testing from the last half-decade, which have shown significant drops in academic achievement”—is simply the College Board bowing to the current grade-inflation pressures experienced by all educational institutions. After all, both students and parents alike have come to expect to “look good” when it comes to any comparison with their peers.

Yet, anyone who has ever learned to build, make, or craft anything of any kind discovers quite early in that building, making, crafting journey that the qualities of any product—whether essay, sculpture, baked-good, automobile, knowledge…any product—the final quality depends totally and foundationally on the quality of the building, making, crafting process that went into it. Superior output only comes from superior input, and so what Lamb is suggesting the eruption of AI is compelling those of us in schools to revisit is “finding creative, practical ways to make the learning journey, and not only the final product, more visible.” Happily, she reports seeing it beginning to happen in her school, and I can share that I just spent an entire summer working on a grant with my fellow biology teachers to do the same throughout our entire 9th grade curriculum. So, there is hope.

Hope, though, without critical thinking—as Maria Popova reminds us—is naivete, and one of the things AI is also forcing us to rethink is how we use our leisure time, bringing me to the other story about AI which I read recently that provoked thoughtful interest rather than despondency. Fellow educator, Mike Chapman—also writing for NAIS’s blog—is an outdoor ed colleague who has observed that when presented with situations involvingt unstructured time, “with no block schedules, bells, or electronics in sight,” his students have had very mixed reactions. As he describes it:

To a precious few, this was a wonderful, fleeting opportunity for personal art, music, reading, or games, or a moment to sit in a circle and talk, relax and unwind, or lay in the shade in collective solitude. But for most, it was paralyzing—an anxious state of idleness, an inactive tedium without digital distractions to fill the void—a symptom of having been able to avoid this exact condition for the majority of their lives.

Yet rather than despair at this fact, Chapman recognizes that “perhaps this paralysis in the face of time is an indication of exactly the sort of education our students desperately need,” and he goes on to make the case that with the advent of AI, it is likely that our students will find themselves as adults in a world where there is less labor of all kinds (both on the job and at home) and therefore that they will have significantly more unstructured time for them to find ways to fill. The danger of AI doing this for them, Chapman argues, is obvious (and I agree), and thus:

If work demands less human input in the future, what, then, should education prepare students for? How can schools help them choose pursuits that matter not because they are necessary or productive, but because they are inherently worthwhile? Education, then, must do more than prepare students for employment; it must also prepare them for meaningful leisure.

How we as educators will do that, I have no idea yet (and I suspect neither does Chapman). But I find it a worthy notion to explore further, and I invite my fellow teachers to join me in giving it some thought and future praxis to see what we might pull off. What I do know, though, is that we will not be helping our students find meaningful leisurely pursuits by bolting cameras to every wall from the day they are born to watch (and therefore consequently guide) their every move. Leisure, after all, implies at least a minimal degree of unrestricted freedom.

[i] In fact, these escapes have started to happen so often now that they are not even worth a formal reference or citation anymore; it would be like reporting as news “the sun came up today.”

References

Chapman, M. (Aug. 11, 2026) Learning for Leisure. NAIS. https://www.nais.org/resource-center/independent-ideas/august-2026/learning-for-leisure?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NAIS%20Bulletin%2081226&utm_content=NAIS%20Bulletin%2081226+CID_f5bb87812a0f6c4ea95235d334370639&utm_source=cm&utm_term=In%20this%20weeks%20new%20blog%20post.

Lamb, M. G. (July 21, 2026) When AI Holds Up the Mirror. NAIS. https://www.nais.org/resource-center/independent-ideas/july-2026/when-ai-holds-up-the-mirror?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NAIS%20Bulletin%2072226&utm_content=NAIS%20Bulletin%2072226+CID_2ef40ad9fda4d759d922d66596233c92&utm_source=cm&utm_term=In%20this%20weeks%20new%20blog%20post.

Maheshwari, S. (Aug. 2, 2026) Aw, It’s Baby’s First A.I. Surveillance System. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/02/business/smart-baby-monitors-nanit-owlet.html.

Mahnken, K. (July 27, 2026) Settling Scores: Experts Debate Why AP Performance Has Soared. The 74. https://www.the74million.org/article/settling-scores-experts-debate-why-ap-performance-has-soared/.

Rosalsky, G. (July 16, 2026) “The Trojan Teddy Bear”: The Promise and Peril of Childhood in the Age of AI. KQED Mind/Shift. https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/66480/the-trojan-teddy-bear-the-promise-and-peril-of-childhood-in-the-age-of-ai.

Suskind, D. (Aug. 7, 2026) A Chatbot-Free Childhood Will Be a Status Symbol. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/08/ultra-processed-childhood-ai/688217/?utm_source .

Educating for Intellectual Virtue

I want to have a favorable impact
on my students’ relationship to learning.
—Jason Baehr

I learned this week of a news story that probably didn’t catch a lot of people’s attention. Given the general large-scale chaos happening right now—from the Ebola outbreak in central Africa to the tit-for-tat over the Strait of Hormuz—it is hardly surprising that this story might fly under the proverbial radar of many an individual’s attention (even those of us who actively seek to remain accurately informed citizens). But apparently there has been an on-going battle, led by Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, over the accreditation process for colleges and universities in Florida and five other states in the traditionally Deep South. Specifically, a battle over accreditation agencies—i.e. who gets to legally certify the academic credentials of institutions of higher ed.

I will spare readers the full details (references available below), but it is essentially the latest skirmish in the culture wars over the so-called (and alleged) liberal bias in today’s academia. DeSantis and others claim that they want to break “the ideological stronghold” of the existing accreditation process, “ensuring higher education prioritizes student achievement without ideological capture” by making sure that colleges and universities can prove that there are an “appropriate number” of conservative scholars teaching on their campuses. In other words, they want to replace what they perceive as one type of dogmatism with their own.

I share this story because having introduced Jason Baehr’s notion of intellectual virtue in my most recent essay, I am struck by how many of what he would call the intellectual vices—“laziness, arrogance, dogmatism, and cowardice” (p. 31)—are at work in the efforts of DeSantis and his fellow collaborators. Rather than allow what Jonathan Rauch calls the “reality-based community” with its “liberal science” (a “set of rules for social behavior, rules for settling conflict” [p. 30]) to determine what is best taught through the testing of fallible hypotheses, DeSantis, et al simply believe they should be able to dictate a curriculum that conforms to the ideology of their liking.

That is why I so fundamentally agree with Baehr that it is so critical to teach the intellectual virtues overtly: to combat the attempts of Ron DeSantis and his like-minded crowd (i.e. the Charlie Kirks of this world) to undermine these same virtues. Therefore, let us explore how Baehr thinks we should go about doing so in our schools and classrooms.

He starts by pointing out that “in teaching for intellectual virtues, we aim to facilitate in our students a kind of personal reorientation, a reconfiguring of some of their fundamental beliefs, attitudes, and feelings about think and learning” and that therefore, “those of us who are seeking to nurture the intellectual character of our students must adopt the long view. We must be prepared to engage in thoughtful and patient planting, watering, fertilizing, and tending” (p. 55). Put bluntly, this is not a one-and-done task; therefore, we need as educators to be prepared to make the necessary investments.

However, to make these, we need first, Baehr argues, to recall that we are all intellectually virtuous only to degrees, with “a mixed bag, a combination of virtues and vices, each quality possessed to a greater or lesser [extent]” (p. 31). Hence, before we start teaching for intellectual virtue, we need to complete an honest inventory of the strengths and weaknesses of our own intellectual character. We need “an informed and accurate understanding of who we are as thinkers and learners” because otherwise, “we can’t know how to negotiate the landscape of thinking and learning [with our students]” (p. 111). Or in the immortal words of the Temple at Delphi, “know thyself.”

Once known and once invested, though, we need to recognize the limits which the cognitive developmental stage of our specific student population may place on what we can accomplish if we are to nurture their intellectual character successfully. Baehr believes this is especially true for what he calls the three dimensions or structures of the intellectual virtues: skill, judgment, and motivation. For example, the quality of questions I can elicit from a child (a skill for the virtue of curiosity) is going to differ—sometimes dramatically—depending on whether I teach kindergarten or graduate students. Likewise, helping students identify which questions are worthy of asking (the judgment dimension of curiosity) will again vary—potentially by quite a lot—given the developmental stage of my particular charges. Hence, identifying what skills and judgments are age-appropriate for my classes will be critical, according to Baehr, for the necessary lesson planning.

Yet what about the motivational element of the virtues? “Suppose I succeed at teaching my students how to switch perspectives or how to formulate thoughtful and insightful questions. They may or may not use this skill once they leave my classroom” (pp. 155-156) because they may or may not have had only an extrinsic reason—such as to earn a high grade—for employing it around me. Truly virtuous motivation, Baehr insists, is by definition intrinsic. Thus, how do we get our students to truly value what they are learning? How do we get them “to care about and seek the truth even if the truth should prove inconvenient” (p. 156; original emphasis)?

Baehr’s answer is modeling. Only as students can observe our own passion for what we teach (curiosity), our willingness to publicly acknowledge when we do not have an answer (humility), or our revelations about how our own understanding has changed over time (open-mindedness) …only as our students can watch us wrestle with shaping and growing our own intellectual character can we draw out in them the internalized motivation to do the same. They must see us practicing our own intellectual virtue.

And one of the best ways to do this, Baehr argues, is to have our students witness us teaching for deeper learning in our classes, not simply for the acquisition of a body of information. As he puts it, “intellectual virtues aim at understanding. [It] is the kind or variety of knowledge that intellectually virtuous people prize and pursue” because “when I have a complex understanding of something, I can explain what I understand to others [and] I can apply my knowledge to new situations, problems, and questions and make reliable predictions on the basis of this knowledge” (p. 124; original emphasis). Therefore, if my students can see me teaching for a deep, rich understanding of whatever material I am covering, they are—almost by definition—observing my own intrinsically motivated intellectual character in action.

But if there is a subtle theme that runs throughout my entire body of work, it is that this kind of teaching is never easy, always demanding. As Baehr reminds us, it “requires intentionally engineering opportunities for our students to think freely, ask challenging questions, and wrestle with ambiguity” (p. 59), and those kinds of opportunities are simply complex to generate and messy to manage. Anyone who takes this profession seriously knows that “teaching aimed at facilitating deep learning and personal growth [is just hard]” (p. 65) and that it takes every bit of one’s own flawed, fallible character—intellectual and otherwise—to evoke it in children.

Perhaps, though, that’s the point. As Baehr quotes math teacher, Cari Noble of the Intellectual Virtues Academy charter school in Long Beach, California:

The best exemplar for students is one who shows growth. Sure, a completely formed very virtuous teacher would be an awesome role model but they would not be good at modeling how to improve. Only a teacher with flaws they are working on can authentically model how to make a virtue goal and work towards it (pp. 160-161).

Thus, in the end, educating for intellectual virtue isn’t about the destination; it’s about the journey. And I think what Baehr wisely reminds all of us involved with young people is that the quality of that journey matters—for our students and for ourselves.

References

Baehr, J. (2021) Deep in Thought: A Practical Guide to Teaching for Intellectual Virtues. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press.

Montoya, O. (July 10, 2026) Some Republican States Push for New College Accreditation Agency. NPR Morning Edition. https://www.npr.org/2026/07/10/nx-s1-5869546/some-republican-states-push-for-new-college-accreditation-agency.

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

Spitalniak, L. (July 7, 2026) Florida Loses Appeal Over College Accreditation. Higher Ed DIVE. https://www.highereddive.com/news/florida-loses-appeal-over-college-accreditation/824644/.

State of Florida (June 26, 2025) Governor Ron DeSantis Announces First-of-Its-Kind Alternative University Accreditor. Executive Office of the Governor. https://www.flgov.com/eog/news/press/2025/governor-ron-desantis-announces-first-its-kind-alternative-university-accreditor.

Intellectual Virtue

You want the inside of your head
to be an interesting place
to spend the rest of your life.
—Judith Shapiro

Recently, while making some claims about the role of character development in education, I was also reading a book by philosopher, Jason Baehr, who makes a claim of his own about the nature of individual character that I had not previously considered. He suggests that character is multidimensional in its qualities—with “intellectual character as a separate dimension of character, alongside its interpersonal and intrapersonal dimensions” (p. 20)—and he argues that one of our chief goals as educators should be the maturation of this intellectual character in our students. As he presents it:

What will stay with our students isn’t the laundry list of names, dates, computations, and procedures we have covered. What endures are the dispositions and habits of character we have been able to nurture. What stays with us, what sticks from our education, are the patterns of behavior and thinking that have been engrained and enculturated over time. These are the residuals of education. These are the foundations of intellectual character (p. 19).

Baehr then goes on suggest that just as we use the language of “virtues” and “vices” when discussing the other components or properties of a given person’s character, we can employ these concepts as well when examining intellectual character, writing that:

Intellectual virtues are strengths, or excellences, of intellectual character [that] dispose people to act, think, and feel well or excellently in the context of inquiring, learning, and reasoning; [while] intellectual vices, by contrast, are defects or weaknesses of intellectual character, such as intellectual apathy, laziness, arrogance, dogmatism, and cowardice. They dispose people to act, think, and feel poorly or defectively in a learning context (p. 31; original emphasis).

Now traditionaly, I suspect most of us have tended to associate the notions of virtue and vice almost exclusively with what Baehr identifies as the interpersonal dimension of character (see my essays, Our Moral Nature and The Good Teacher). But after encountering Baehr’s basic thesis, I realized that the kind of intrapersonal character which Adam Grant studies could have potential virtues associated with it, too (e.g. self-discipline and determination), and that, therefore, Baehr’s talk of intellectual virtues might have value for those of us in education. So allow me to elaborate on what he thinks the nine of them are.

The first Baehr identifies is curiosity. But he is quick to point out that he is not speaking of the hard-wired kind built into our hippocampus to pay attention to and identify interesting stimuli. Instead, “we can think of [this] natural curiosity as the psychological soil out of which virtuous curiosity grows. The emergence of the latter is not guaranteed. For natural curiosity to blossom into the virtue of curiosity, it must be nurtured, shaped, and cultivated [by our learning]” (p. 36). In other words, rich, complex, deep questions don’t just happen; we have to develop the capacity to generate them.

Next on the list is autonomy, and what Baehr means by this is the capacity to think for oneself. He argues that intellectually autonomous individuals “form their own judgments and draw their own conclusions. They aren’t overly reliant on the assistance of others. Nor are they overly influenced by what other people think or say” (p. 36). And Baehr contrasts this with intellectually heteronomous thinkers “whose judgments and ways of seeing the world are dictated by other people and sources” and whose conclusions “tend to vary from situation to situation” (p. 37) depending on whoever is doing the preaching at the time—which is why heteronomists tend to be conformist; autonomists, not so much.

However, the danger of thinking for oneself is that all of us make cognitive mistakes and errors, and sometimes, we are just flat out wrong! Thus, autonomy’s partner in the intellectual virtues is humility, and those who possess it “are appropriately aware of and attentive to their intellectual limitations. They don’t try to conceal these limitations; nor do they respond defensively when their limitations are brought to light. Rather, they are accepting of their limitations and take appropriate responsibility for them” (p. 38). In other words, humble thinkers own their warts and scars.

Together, though, curiosity, autonomy, and humility, Baehr argues, only “[get] the learning process started and headed in the right direction,” which is why we need the next three virtues—attentiveness, carefulness, and thoroughness—”to keep the learning process on the right track” (p. 39). The first of these, being attentive, may seem self-explanatory, but what Baehr means by this virtue is something closer to what Buddhists call “mindfulness” in which the thinker has achieved sensory clarity and a concentrated focus on the matter at hand. Hence, we are not talking what a student’s body language or eye contact might suggest about how engrossed they are; we are talking about how carefully they are actually attending to the learning process in which they are engaged.

Likewise, the virtues of intellectual carefulness and thoroughness might seem self-evident or even duplicative. However, what Baehr means by the former is “an awareness of, and a disposition to adhere to, the rules of accuracy specific to a given domain” (p. 41; original emphasis); while what he means by the latter is the depth of understanding being sought. Thus, for example, a careful learner might know every word of the Gettysburg address but have no ability to explain its significance within the context of the American Civil War which a thorough learner of the speech could do. Which is why “thoroughness complements carefulness by resisting a kind of superficiality or conservatism to which careful thinkers can be drawn” (p. 44), and it is why Baehr distinguishes these two concepts as separate virtues.

Thus far, then, we have covered the three virtues which Baehr thinks get us started learning and the three that keep the process going in the right direction. His finally three are “for overcoming familiar obstacles that arise during the learning process” (p. 45), and they are open-mindedness, courage, and tenacity. Open-mindedness, of course, is the compliment of the intellectual virtue of humility and is about what The Mill Institute calls being “less certain, more curious.” It is the classic “look at a situation from all sides.” Meanwhile, courage compliments both curiosity and autonomy, with tenacity having a similar relationship to carefulness and thoroughness, and indeed, of the nine virtues, these three are the ones Baehr presents as more self-evident, spending less time defining what they are and more time defining what they aren’t. For example, about courage, he writes:

An absence of intellectually virtuous activity does not entail the existence of an intellectual vice. Many students who struggle with anxiety, for instance, are paralyzed by fear in a classroom setting. Although this fear may impede their intellectual growth, these students are not intellectual cowards (p. 47).

And about tenacity, he writes:

Intellectual tenacity is not mindless. When tenacious learners fail, they don’t simply try again, using the same strategy as before. Students who repeatedly retake an exam or rewrite a paper but do little to adjust their approach from one attempt to another aren’t manifesting the virtue of tenacity. The persistence of tenacious learners is intelligent (p. 49).

In fact, part of the power of Baehr’s exposition is that he clearly recognizes that “intellectual virtues and vices are possessed in degrees. People are more or less—not categorically—open-minded, closed-minded, intellectually careful, careless, and so forth” and that “relatedly, the intellectual character of most people is a mixed bag, a combination of virtues and vices, each quality possessed to a greater or lesser degree” (p. 31). In addition, he is clear that the absence of something does not imply its opposite, using the example of ADHD and attentiveness, arguing that “we need to distinguish an absence of attentiveness from the vice of inattentiveness, that is, a willful or voluntary tendency to check out or be mentally absent from the learning process” (p. 41; original emphasis).

Hence, in short, he openly acknowledges and treats us as the imperfect works-in-progress that we are, and that is precisely why he believes:

We can treat the intellectual character growth of our students as a worthwhile educational goal and allow this goal to inform and guide what we do in our classroom even if we know that the vast majority of our students won’t leave our classes having been transformed into paragons of intellectual virtue (p. 21).

I will save how he thinks we can teach in support of this goal for next time.

References

Baehr, J. (2021) Deep in Thought: A Practical Guide to Teaching for Intellectual Virtues. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press.

AI: Terminator or WALL●E?

How wonderful it is
that nobody need wait a single moment
before starting to improve the world.
—Anne Frank

It’s my Sisyphean labor: what’s AI done now to impact teaching and learning? The latest three items to come to my attention are: A) the evidence for how it is curbing creativity, B) the growing removal of adults from the learning equation, and C) personalized avatars for CEOs and college professors. I will be exploring each in that order.

I’ve written before, of course, about the decline in creativity in this country. But the latest research out of the lab of Georgetown University neuroscientist Adam Green has demonstrated that the impact of AI has accelerated this decline dramatically. Green and his colleagues have followed the essay writing habits of college-bound high school students over the past 8 years, specifically tracking the quantity of novel ideas found in application essays before and after the introduction of ChatGPT, and what they have found is that there were 8 times more original ideas in those essays before ChatGPT became available. Process that for a moment: if there were 100 original ideas in all the essays submitted to a given college or university this past fall, there were 800 original ideas submitted to that same school in the fall of 2021!

Worse, Green and his national research team found “that A.I. has the largest homogenizing impact on students who are farthest from the mean and have unique perspectives, including neurodivergent students and those from racial and linguistic minorities.” Thus, the problem as fellow researcher Rebecca Winthrop of the Brookings Institute summarizes is that “A.I.’s smooth sentences, elegant transitions and rich vocabulary give the illusion of expansive creativity and individuality. But the underlying ideas often converge, [constricting] our full range of thoughts and our ability to generate original and useful ideas.”

But it’s not just creativity on the decline. So is the reliance of children on actual humans to help them with their schoolwork. Common Sense Media (a nonprofit devoted to healthy technology use among young people) reports that almost 25% of children between the ages of 9 and 17 now inform researchers that “they would turn to a chatbot for help with schoolwork or homework before seeking guidance from a trusted adult such as a teacher, counselor, or parent.” Furthermore, 85% in that same age group report having used AI for at least one of their recent assignments, with 50% reporting using it weekly and 20% daily. Yet perhaps most telling of all is that 42% claim that “it would be very or somewhat hard for them to give it [AI] up for a month.”

Clearly, this represents a significant shift in the traditional learning habits of children and a “growing reliance on AI as a first-stop resource for problem-solving and decision-making among young people.” As Michael Robb, head of research at Common Sense points out, today’s youth are adopting this technology even more rapidly than they did the use of social media, and “AI is already a part of childhood in a way I think maybe people haven’t really grappled with yet. This is not about the future. This is happening right now across different age bands, across gender, across race and income levels as well.” In short, AI dependence for schooling is already firmly ensconced in their learning behaviors, and its use is only accelerating among today’s tween and adolescent populations.

But here’s where the third story to come across my digital desk adds a twist to these changes in children’s study habits that I think has the potential to serve as the living embodiment of the Platonic ideal for the concept of irony. Because in a world of multi-tasking and 24/7 expectations:

consultants and executive coaches who don’t have the bandwidth to address every inquiry are referring some clients to their A.I. doubles. Harvard Business School professors have incorporated A.I. versions of themselves into courses and office hours. And executives are using their A.I. avatars to address employees in other countries in their own languages.

Hence, people in high-demand positions are essentially generating AI avatars of themselves to handle all the potential claims on their attention which they themselves cannot handle directly.

Furthermore, so popular has this trend become that entire software programs now exist (such as Delphi for impersonating voice and HeyGen and Synthesia for mimicking video appearance) to produce these digital stand-ins. Indeed, so easy is it to whip up one’s own personal chatbot, that Jeremy Allaire, the C.E.O. of the cryptocurrency company, Circle, simply built his using Anthropic’s Claude by training it “to think and write like him, feeding it his podcast interviews, his public writing and a corpus of internal communications.”

Now I want you to re-read that last part of that sentence with my added emphasis to Allaire’s quote: to think and write like him, feeding it his podcast interviews, his public writing and a corpus of [his] internal communications. Without a lifetime of pre-existing material that Jeremy Allaire had already generated on his own using his pre-AI trained brain, there is no Jeremy Allaire avatar. Sorry to metaphorically club people over the head with the obvious, but none of the avatars of any of these consultants, executive coaches, C.E.Os and professors referenced in this NYT’s story could exist if they had not already spent their earlier professional lives doing the cognitive heavy-lifting to put them in their respective positions in the first place!

I am confident now that my readers see why I might have claimed a potential Platonic ideal for irony: those same AI programs that make these avatars possible risk preventing (in at least one generation, if not more!) the very cognitive heavy-lifting needed to create the unique raw material for generating such an avatar in the first place. THIS is where I think we should be so highly concerned about the impact of AI on our collective future. Not some Terminator Armageddon but the slow decline into a world of WALL●E. For to quote Rebecca Winthrop again:

Our species’ ability to come up with unexpected and original ideas is something to protect and nurture. That’s especially true for today’s adolescents. A world where creative thinking flourishes is a world that has a better chance to weather the changes that A.I. will bring.

And I would add: any other changes we face as well.

We stand, then, not at a precipice but at a slippery slope, and as we are observing in situations as diverse as schools and (interestingly enough) the restaurant dining industry, many of the adults in the world are starting to push back. The question is whether it will be enough, soon enough. So stay tuned (“same bat-time, same-bat channel!”) as I keep pushing my “stone.”

References

Kessler, S. (June 8, 2026) “Talk to My A.I. Twin”: Busy Executives Have a New Productivity Hack. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/06/business/dealbook/ai-digital-twin.html?unlocked_article_code=1.oVA.YuTi.T-BRz2tV71vo&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare.

Prothero, A. (June 8, 2026) Kids Are Turning to AI Before Adults for Homework Help. Education Week. https://www.edweek.org/technology/kids-are-turning-to-ai-before-adults-for-homework-help/2026/06.

Tkacik, C. (June 17, 2026) The Dish: Many Restaurateurs Love ChatGPT. Many Diner’s Don’t. The Baltimore Banner. https://www.thebanner.com/culture/food-drink/chatgpt-ai-restaurants-food-photography-DRANOQEY2BCJRFY2FTMUOMFDG4/.

Winthrop, R. (May 27, 2026) What 370,000 College Essays Tell Us About A.I.’s Effects on Creativity. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/27/opinion/writing-creativity-ai.html.

The Impact of Character

Character is your capacity to prioritize your values
over your instincts.
If personality is how you respond on a typical day,
character is how you show up on a hard day.
—Adam Grant

This past month, an interesting statistical analysis came across my digital desk. In it, Harvard economist and MacArthur genius grant recipient, Raj Chetty, studied 11,000 students in 79 schools in Tennessee in the late 20th century and discovered that he could predict the degree of economic success that these students achieved as adults entirely by looking at how experienced their respective kindergarten teachers were when these teachers taught them. The more experienced the teacher, the higher the adult salary, and “by age 25, students who happened to have had more experienced kindergarten teachers were earning significantly more money than their peers”—on average $2,000 more annually in 1990s dollars—and over the course of a lifetime, these now-former students would go on to earn an additional $320,000 more than peers who had had less experienced teachers at this same age (Grant, p. 8).

Yet, as organizational psychologist Adam Grant of the Wharton School points out—whose work brought this study to my attention—“most adults hardly even remember being five years old. Why did kindergarten teachers end up casting such a long shadow?” (p. 9).

The answer, it turns out, is character development. More specifically, it is four character skills that Grant in his own work has elaborated as:

Proactive: frequently initiates questions, volunteers answers, and actively self-engages in learning outside of the classroom;
Prosocial: the classic “works and plays well with others;”
Disciplined: pays attention and resists disruptive impulses; and
Determined: consistently takes on more than assigned, seeking challenging problems and persisting in the face of setbacks

Moreover, Grant identified these four skills explicitly because Chetty’s data from follow-up studies showed that “the capacities to be proactive, prosocial, disciplined, and determined stayed with students longer—and ultimately proved more powerful—than early math and reading skills” (p. 9). In fact, 2.4 times as much when it came to predicting adult income!

Now the idea that an individual’s character plays a major role in their success as a learner is nothing new. Journalists such as Paul Tough and researchers such as Angela Duckworth have been reporting on the power of character in the learning process for decades, and the concept of “grit” features regularly now in teacher training and professional development (almost to the saturation point of risking being cliché). But what the latest examination of character is bringing to the forefront is the role one’s environment plays in its development. Or as Grant states it: “people who make major strides are rarely freaks of nature. They’re usually freaks of nurture” (p. 6).

Which is where the character of schools comes into play. It turns out that individual “grit” is not quite enough; the nature of the learning environment itself (what Grant calls “scaffolding”) is also critical. This is especially true when it comes to evoking the power of growth mindset in students. I have written before about Carol Dweck’s pioneering research in this area, but recently, she has:

demonstrated that a growth mindset alone does little good without scaffolding to support it. Rigorous experiments with over 15,000 students reveal that nurturing a growth mindset among high schools boosts their grades only when their teachers recognize their potential and their schools have cultures of embracing challenges (Grant, p. 132).

In other words, to optimize student learning, simply promoting growth mindsets in your students is not enough. You also have to have school environments where the underlying assumption is that all students have significant cognitive capability waiting to be nurtured and where the driving value is that all students deserve weighty intellectual challenges to foster this ability.

However (and it is worth quoting Grant extensively here), too often in this country our school environments are:

built around a culture of winner take all. We assume that potential is rooted primarily in innate ability that shines through early. As a result, we value demonstrated excellence—which leads us to adopt practices geared toward identifying and investing in students who show obvious signs of brilliance. If you win the [cognitive speed] lottery, you’re rewarded with special attention in gifted-and-talented programs. If you’re branded as slow, you might be forced to repeat a grade and endure a lasting blow to your self-esteem. And if you win the wealth lottery, it’s easier for you to attend the best schools with the best teachers; your peers from poorer families face an uphill battle (p.159).

Yet this prevalent reality in America’s schools brings me back to an important feature of Chetty’s original research. The students in it had already been randomly assigned by the State of Tennessee’s Department of Education to the 79 schools he studied and, further, randomly assigned to which teacher they had in those schools. Thus, the kindergarten teacher effect Chetty observed was just as true in the low-income schools as it was in the high-income ones.

Therefore, what I would like to suggest is that the character of the teacher was ultimately what was playing a role in the character development of those students who were studied by Chetty. Moreover, my reason for this suggestion is because by year 15 in this profession, the majority of us in our careers have realized two things: what we teach is what it means to be fully human (the discipline or subjects are just the vehicle) and every child can learn to do that. Of course, the key word here is “majority” because the sad reality is that anything over 50% is, by definition, a majority, leaving some individual schools—and even some school districts—with significant populations of even experienced teachers still embodying the “winner-take-all” approach (or worse).

Yet, that brings me to another feature of school environments so critical to nurturing the four character-skills Grant describes: the quality of relations between the teachers. Research has shown that the amount of relational trust among the adults in a school community determines how well students learn, and since “trust is influenced by the conclusions we draw about our colleagues’ intentions” (Aguilar, p. 102), schools where the adults believe everyone has bought into a culture of high expectations and high support (what Zaretta Hammond calls “warm demanders”), the students thrive. Where such by-in and its consequent trust are missing, “students are being negatively impacted” (Aguilar, p. 101).

What, though, determines the quality of the adult relationships in a school? If the child’s character skills depend on the experience of the teacher and their classroom environment and this environment’s and that teacher’s character depend on the school’s adult culture, then at the apex of this developmental hierarchy, I would argue, is the character of the leadership chaperoning this entire process. Good leaders, of course, listen to the collective voices of all stakeholders (from children and parents to faculty and custodial staff), anticipate the community’s wants and needs (as well as potential pitfalls and opportunities), and guide all of their charges in the completion of the school’s mission. They oversee the character of the school itself and, thus, the nature of the characters that develop under its roof. Indeed, the very best leaders help generate that character, informing it and continually reforming it through the voices of the community.

However, as Adam Grant points out, leadership exists along a continuum, with “weak leaders [silencing] voice and [shooting] the messenger; strong leaders [welcoming] voice and [thanking] the messenger; [and] great leaders [building] systems to amplify voice and [elevating] the messenger” (p. 196). I would add a fourth leadership descriptor somewhere between “weak” and “strong”—call it “stable”—where voice is simply heard and its messengers merely acknowledged, and I would add it because I think the majority of leadership in most institutions is this stable kind where adequate is normally enough.

But we live in a world right now—especially in education—where “adequate” isn’t and where, simultaneously, the research of Chetty and Grant remind us why the need for strong, exceptional leadership in schools is so important for the futures of our children. I wish I had a clear solution to offer, but that is a work-in-progress for me. Thus, for now, I simply have to keep reminding myself of the wisdom of education coach, Elena Aguilar’s words: “you can’t get mad at people for their areas for growth” (p. 198).

References

Aguilar, E. (2018) Onward: Cultivating Emotional Resilience in Educators. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Grant, A. (2023) Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things. New York: Penguin Books.

Hammond, Z. (2015) Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.

Kaser, J., et al. (2013) Leading Every Day: Actions for Effective Leadership, 3^rd ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.

Tough, P. (2012) How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character. New York: Mariner Books.

“Reading Is Fundamental”

Reading is the basic skill for all subjects.
If you don’t have the motivation to read,
you can’t study any other subject.
—Kari Louhivuori,
Finland’s Council for Creative Education

A teacher’s task is not to ensure
that students have read the literary canons.
It’s to kindle excitement about reading.
—Adam Grant

Recently, I was eating breakfast at a local café when the thought occurred to me that all of us at the surrounding tables were actively bouncing up and down as the earth beneath us continuously flexed. And no, the seismic activity wasn’t strong enough to be felt; I was simply struck by the insight that between the earth’s rotation and the sloshing of the tectonic plates, that the ground beneath my feet is never actually rigidly solid. We live on the equivalent of a bucking bronco operating at such slow speeds that the only time we ever do notice is during the abrupt acceleration we call an earthquake. But the quaking? It’s happening everywhere on our planet’s surface all the time.

As for what triggered this unbidden thought, I was, of course, reading—in this case about seismometers in Antarctica—and as all reading does, it generated thinking and that thinking in turn generated a new bit of knowledge (at least new for me). Indeed, so critical to human cognition are reading and its corollary, writing, that we Homo sapiens have been attempting to design and construct these formal systems for the transmission of complex thought since at least 40,000 years ago (see Mogensen). Moreover, once we did successfully invent reading and writing, civilizations arose, and when we figured out via the printing press how to make the written word available to everyone, the intellectual explosions of the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, and the rest of the Modern Era became possible. Having repurposed the necessary neural circuitry, our collective intelligences blossomed in kind.

Which brings me to a very interesting—and probably highly significant—correlation between reading habits and population IQ levels. Namely, the more people read, the smarter they test on such “gold standards” of general cognitive assessment as the OECD’s international PISA test and the U.S. NAEP’s “Nation’s Report Card.” What’s more, the correlations can be quite dramatic.

For example, during most of the first decade of the 21^st Century, the country with the highest PISA scores in the world was Finland and other countries rushed (legitimately but that’s another topic) to study what the Finnish educational system was getting right. But starting in 2006, this nation’s PISA scores steadily dropped for more than a decade in every domain the test assesses. Meanwhile, “compared to 2000, in 2018 the average Finnish teen was spending 77 fewer hours a year reading for fun” (Grant, p. 174). Interesting, no? Furthermore, since American reading habits were even more abysmal during this time, with “students’ enthusiasm about reading [continuing] to wane year after year” (Grant, p. 174), it should come as no surprise that the U.S. has consistently produced some of the lowest PISA scores in the world.

Yet, among 9-year-olds in this country, there is growing evidence of improving IQs (see Moyer) at the exact same time that reading scores on the most recent NAEP assessment improved significantly. Some of this, no doubt, is because more and more states have embraced using the science of reading in their elementary classrooms, but the correlation between reading habits and general cognitive ability persists—in this case, in a positive direction—and I think we ignore that at our peril.

Because while every good statistician and scientist knows that correlation does not equal causation, this is one situation where the brain’s hard-wired bias towards focusing on the negative should be used to our advantage. The assumption that reading more causes IQs to go up and that reading less causes IQs to do down is the safer evolutionary bet because should the correlation prove spurious, the worst that has happened is that people spent some additional time reading; while if the causal link eventually proves true, current dominant reading habits make us fish in the proverbial barrel for authoritarians and con artists alike.

Therefore, find ways to promote reading in your communities; model it for your children and grandchildren by reading with them and in front of them; make time for students to do it in your classrooms with books of their choosing (since the research is clear that doing so makes them more passionate about reading). And remember that “intrinsic motivation is contagious; when students talk about the books that light up their imagination, it crystallizes why they love them—and gives others the chance to catch that enthusiasm” (Grant, p. 175). So don’t just read; find ways to communicate what you are discovering with others and help the children in your lives do likewise.

Because the ultimate IQ booster is teaching what we’ve learned to others. It is called the tutor effect, and one of the most fascinating examples of it is with the firstborn in families. The oldest child consistently displays a slight cognitive edge over their younger siblings (even when the research controls for socio-economics, parental education level, family size, etc.), and even “only children—who get the most undivided attention—test as less bright than firstborns with younger siblings” (Grant, p. 134; original emphasis). Simply put, having a built-in group of “pupils” gives firstborns the necessary environment to grow their IQ just a bit more than those who come after them.

Unless, of course, those younger siblings are more avid readers. After all, to the most well-read goes the most IQ spoils.

References

Grant, A. (2023) Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things. New York: Penguin Books.

Mogensen, J.F. (May 2026) Ancient Lexicon. Scientific American. Pp. 14-15.

Moyer, M.W. (April 2026) The Kids Are All Right. Scientific American. Pp. 36-41.

The Aha! Moment (Revisited)

EUREKA!
—attributed to Archimedes

Recently, I wrote about how it seems impossible to go any length of time these days without hearing some story about AI, and the most recent past is no exception. Indeed, the morning I started writing this, NPR carried a story about Elon Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI’s Sam Altman, and when I googled the topic out of idle curiosity, my screen exploded with other stories. All of which is preamble to say that yet another reason has come to my attention to proceed extremely cautiously with AI’s employment in the classroom. That we must do some deliberate training about it is now as inevitable as dealing with the ubiquity of smartphone technology in students’ daily lives. However, the latest findings about AI’s impact in the workforce—what is being called “AI Brain Fry”—should probably inform that training with more skepticism than some in education are presently embracing.

Why? Because what is coming abundantly clear as AI has been embraced in a variety of work environments is that using it to enhance or augment employee productivity has actually backfired by generating a need for multi-tasking on steroids. As technology columnist, John Herman, of New York Magazine describes it:

You have a programming tool that can kind of run in the background and starts adding features to software really quickly, you have another tool that’s constructing a report from you, it’s searching the web and pulling together a market research document. You have another tool in the background that you’re in a constant chat with trying to refine some idea for a talk you have to give…you’re just kind of getting first pulled in all these different directions, and then you’re kind of spamming yourself [as] you’re just producing all of this product. And it’s harder, as you use more and more tools to keep track of whether this output is actually relevant to your job, whether you’re doing anything that you need to be doing or whether you’re kind of creating new work for yourself…. (Luse, et al)

You get the point: it is exhausting simply reading about everything AI is now asking people in the workplace to manage and keep track of, let alone actually doing it. Again, it is multi-tasking on steroids, and since the brain research on that concept is 100% clear—multi-tasking is neurologically impossible—the whole point of employing AI to improve output and efficiency would appear self-defeating. It’s as if “AI is a poorly trained intern that you have to check the work of all the time, turning workers into bosses or at least simulated bosses” (Luse, et al) who now have two jobs: their original one and their now supervisory one. Talk about a recipe for exhaustion, burnout, and counter-productivity!

Therefore, as we approach the reality of AI in the classroom specifically and AI in education in general, we might want to listen to this early cautionary tale from the frontiers of AI in the workplace. If we do, I think it will lead us to recognize the need for two things. First, what boundaries do we need to place on already common uses of AI such as brainstorming and outline drafting for students or grading and lesson planning for teachers, and second, what counts as true augmentation versus one-more-tab-open-on-the-screen? The brain research on the answer to the first question is so overwhelming—with the new multi-tasking demands from the workplace simply piling on the confirmation—that I’ll simply state that if you do happen to be a first time reader who wants the details, here’s the link.

As for the second question, that’s where some of the more recent brain research gets interesting; so let’s dive in.

We need to start by asking what would we potentially be augmenting with AI, and I would argue that the most logical choice is problem solving. However, we have recently discovered that the human brain has two distinct circuits it uses for problem solving: insight (the “aha! moment”) and logic (“analytical reasoning”), and we have found that each of these circuits has its own unique starting location during resting brainwave activity (insight=left temporal lobe; logic=right frontal lobe). Furthermore, each of us apparently has a hard-wired tendency for which circuit we default to when solving problems (though everyone, importantly, can do both), and in fact, “a few minutes of EEG [readings on a test subject] predicted, up to seven weeks in advance, whether a person would solve puzzles mostly insightfully or analytically. Our predominant thinking style is stable over time” (Kounios & Kounios, p. 24).

Because it is stable, though, the answer to whether a specific variant of AI might augment our problem-solving capacity or interfere with it has big implications for how we have people use AI in their learning. Those who employ logic as their default might benefit from a tool that can look at billions of data points simultaneously to identify the most pertinent ones to employ analytically (e.g. determining all possible gas efficient routes to deliver a collection of packages might free someone up to look at these routes through the lens of that specific day’s traffic). But for those who employ insight as their default, the digital pollution already clogging so many of our inner lives already inhibits the brain’s insight circuits, and any AI augmentation is simply going to overload those same circuits further. AI, with its “unrelenting demand for productivity and speed, denies insight the time and opportunity to work wonders at its own pace” (Kounios & Kounios, p. 27). Hence, put simply, AI usage can only interfere with a person’s capacity for insight, never augment it.

However, that is highly problematic because it turns out that regardless of whether insight is your default problem-solving mode or a process requiring your deliberate employment, the amount of it you use predicts “how well [you] discriminate between real news stories and fake ones, as well as between meaningful statements and ‘pseudo-profound bullshit’ statements” (Kounios & Kousnios, p. 25). Insight, thus, is a cognitive superpower against all the misinformation, disinformation, and blatant falsehoods flooding our daily lives—including the classroom! —and anything that inhibits its effective usage risks our very capacity to discern what is true. Therefore, we need both insightful people as well as the more deliberate practice of insight in every element of society—again, including the classroom—if we are to find authentic solutions to the problems, both great and small, that confront us in our daily lives.

And one such problem confronting us today is a decline in people’s tolerance for healthy, beneficial risk. The research now shows that there is a direct correlation between an individual’s quantities of “aha! moments” and their degree of comfort with risk-taking, and the evidence is clear that people observed displaying greater insightfulness also display less psychological concern for potential fallibility. Indeed, the more insight these individuals employ, the more he, she, or they appear willing to engage in trial-and-error to solve problems. Thus, these individuals seem almost immune to the emotional consequences of failure, and since that is practically the definition of the growth mindset universally espoused by nearly every educator on the planet, the value of insight as a tool for learning becomes undeniable. Not that one cannot employ logic in a similar fashion. But it would seem that providing more opportunities to employ insight may help everyone approach the process of learning more effectively,[i] and that is even more reason not to employ any augmentative AI in schools that might inhibit insightful thinking. AI and “aha!” are fundamentally incompatible.

Which is why, once again, I find myself at the “end” of the perpetual news cycle still antagonistic to nearly all things AI (and associated). As an educator, I have known the value of the “aha! moments” since my very beginning in the classroom, and as an experienced educator, I know how to generate the conditions to make them happen. Indeed, as I write in the introduction to this entire project, the whole purpose behind my concept of “authentic engagement” is to enable and empower all educators everywhere to produce the insights that are the foundation of all genuine learning.

Yet, I am too much the skeptic not to wonder if the pejorative “Oh, Boomer!” may not actually apply to this aging educator and his quasi-neo-luddite sympathies. I am not going to halt the future use of AI in schools or the workplace, and I am not individually even likely to slow them down much. In fact, while I might serve as a bulwark against how my own institution employs it—maybe even influence a few others through my writing—my very finitude will eventually silence my voice regardless. What’s more, I have too much empirical data in front of me demonstrating that there is the very real possibility that none of it will matter, that there will be no one with enough IQ, CQ, and EQ to worry about my concerns in the first place.

But the latest idiotic hysteria surrounding the Hantavirus reminds me of how dangerously ignorant most of the population in this country is, and when you couple that with the current contemptuous rejection of expertise, then that danger only explodes exponentially. While I truly get why the generations I wrote about last time are questioning whether to have children—I resist the urge myself sometimes not to scream at the stories coming out of my NPR station on the radio in the morning—the reality is that some of them are having babies, and those babies are going to need a viable world in which to live. Hence, I have to remind myself that the darkness only wins if I stop shining—my own “aha! moment” I must renew each and every day.

References

Kounios, J. & Kounios, Y (March 2025) The Brain Science of Elusive “Aha! Moments.” Scientific American. Pp. 21-27.

Luse, B.; McBain, L.; & Pathak, N. (April 13, 2026) You Might Be Suffering From AI Brain Fry. It’s Been a Minute. https://www.npr.org/2026/04/13/nx-s1-5780867/you-might-be-suffering-from-ai-brain-fry.

[i] As well as potentially explain why certain individuals cling harder to a fixed mindset than others: logic may be their default mode.

Updates 2.0

As my regular readers know, I write from time to time more to inform about recent news and/or trends in the world of education than to editorialize or comment about them. Some have come in the form of simple updates; others as more formal declarations about the current state of education. But my express purpose with all these brief reports has been to collate what I have been learning lately into emerging patterns that can help my readers better understand the current climate impacting teaching in this country (though of course, what one chooses to discuss is, by definition, a type of commentary).

Well, it turns out that this past month has been a busy one in the world of schools, and while I was crafting my most recent graduation letter, a lot of interesting news was piling up on my digital desk. Thus, for those interested (and not already “in-the-know”), here’s what’s been happening recently in the K-16 world.

Obviously, at the top of the list is AI. Indeed, a month cannot pass these days (and probably a week!) without the topic of education’s frenemy producing multiple headlines, and April 2026 was no exception. Most interesting to this educator, though, was the nature of the stories AI was causing (but hopefully not actually writing) to be published. The mounting backlash against all things digital—the verdict in California against Meta and Google was huge!—has apparently started to reach the world of schools as parents across the United States are demanding a wholesale reduction of screens in the classroom—with those in New York City (the largest school district in the country) insisting that ChatGPT be removed entirely.

Furthermore, recent surveys of 14-29 year-olds (Gen Z) show growing distrust and anger when it comes to the ubiquity of AI in their daily lives. An increasing number of them are recognizing and openly acknowledging the negative impacts AI has already had on their mental capacities, and they are not happy about it. Put bluntly, their brains are still functional enough to grasp how poorly their brains now function, and they are pissed off! Perhaps there is hope for the future of the world’s IQs, CQs, and EQs after all.

Of course, not every AI headline was a positive one for teaching and learning, and I cannot lie (nor fail to editorialize at least a little bit) that I found it disheartening—and even more so because anyone who has worked with adolescent boys cannot find this news entirely unexpected—that more and more teenage males are choosing AI companions for their “girlfriends” instead of their actual fellow teenage females. As the headline for the story reports, they are doing so for “maximum control” of the relationship, with “zero [chance of] rejection” and total compliance on the part of their chosen “significant other”—i.e. the perfect narcissist fairytale of “boy meets girl; boy never risks losing girl; boy never has to get girl back.”

Yet, the potential societal cost of this so-called “fairytale” relates to another common theme in many of the stories about education this past month: employability. Without the soft skills honed by the realities of actual human relationship—negotiating resistance, healing emotional damage, developing patience and empathy—these Gen Z and Gen Alpha males will be unable to find success in the workplace of the future, where human-to-human interaction will be at a premium. Just ask the current graduating computer scientists coming out of today’s colleges and universities who cannot find jobs because AIs can already write code more cheaply and efficiently than their human counterparts. Tomorrow’s jobs—what we can know about them—are going to require skill sets that no AI can ever accomplish, namely the continual adaptability demanded by the eternal complexities of human relationship.

Interestingly enough, though, some of the other headlines related to education and employability suggest that we may be actively walking away from the very ability of schools to generate this kind of robust relational adaptability in the first place. As seen in the chart below, more than 25% of small liberal arts colleges in this country are in danger of closing within the decade, and even places as robust in their enrollment as Syracuse University have made the decision to close 93 of their 460 academic programs—with humanities and the fine arts representing the bulk of the majors going away.

Of course, similar changes are occurring at schools throughout the U.S. as college-age students look for degrees they think will result in higher pay, and college administrators are simply following the market to try to attract the dwindling pool of higher education candidates. Eliminating under-enrolled academic offerings in the humanities saves money and keeps the proverbial doors open and the lights turned on in the face of changing demographics and demands on the part of the consumer.

However, for both higher education and its population, this trend may be self-defeating because what today’s economists are saying to today’s students is:

major in a subject that offers enduring, transferable skills. Believe it or not, that could be the liberal arts. [Harvard economist, David] Deming’s research shows that male history and social-science majors end up out-earning their engineering and comp-sci counterparts in the long term, as they develop the soft skills that employers consistently seek out. “It’s actually quite risky to go to school to learn a trade or a particular skill, because you don’t know what the future holds,” Deming [says]. “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.”

Which is why I was excited to read that in spite of the current contraction happening in the humanities and the fine arts at the college and university level, there is a bit of a revolution happening in high schools for the skills these fields have traditionally promoted and developed. The 74 reports that emerging organizations such as Skills For The Future and Pathsmith are looking at the employability needs of the Gen Z and Gen Alpha populations, and they are creating actual curricula and assessments to meet these needs in today’s 9-12 classrooms and beyond. Indeed:

several companies and non-profits are taking these [“soft” or “durable”] skills that have been fuzzy concepts and working on giving them shape and definition. They’re gathering teachers, developers of tests, business leaders and other experts to break down these skills into smaller skills and then into even smaller subskills and nuances that can serve as steps toward mastery. Communications, for instance, could include negotiating and public speaking as subskills, [and] the resulting outlines of skills and subskills are like a tree branching out from its trunk into smaller and smaller limbs, all with an eye to making them as teachable and testable as math or English.

In other words, the three “Cs” (communication, collaboration, and cognition) may be coming soon to an SAT test near you!

And part of how this may actually get accomplished involves the last piece of recent news I want to report about, an article exploring an intriguing potential solution to the teacher shortage in this country. Written by former acting Governor of Massachusetts, Jane Swift, and former US Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, these two members from opposite poles of the political spectrum propose that two challenges currently facing our society may, in fact, be one another’s solutions. They write:

Schools across the country are struggling to find enough teachers, with at least 411,000 teaching positions currently open nationwide. At the same time, more than 40% of recent graduates are underemployed. That means millions of young people have earned college degrees only to find themselves stuck in jobs that offer low pay, little security, and no clear path forward. These are not separate challenges, and taken together, they point to a solution hiding in plain sight. Teaching can be the entry point into the workforce that Gen Z graduates need.

Now, I will be forthright. My initial reaction upon reading this was a mixture of growl, teeth-grinding, and grimace: not this old trope again! “Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach”…“glorified babysitters; how hard can it be?”…“cushy job; only work 9 months a year and get summers off!” The list of misperceptions about my chosen profession that I have heard over the decades still leaves me with a smoldering sense of frustration and even anger. After all, this is the profession documented to be second only to that of ER surgeons for the number of critical decisions that have to be made every minute, and since more than half the people who enter it burnout and leave after just 3 years, I’m not sure that “cushy” is a term I would use to describe it.

However, as I continued reading Swift’s and Duncan’s argument, I realized they were not saying that simply anyone can do this job. Instead, they were arguing something more subtle:

Teacher shortages are already impacting classrooms nationwide. And schools in rural districts and lower-income communities are particularly struggling to fill vacancies. Research shows that persistent vacancies and reliance on substitute teachers undermine student learning and achievement. For students who overcome these challenges and make it to college, another problem awaits. Just half of all college graduates secure roles that require a degree. For those college graduates struggling to secure a college-level job, teaching can help them climb the career ladder as well.

Hence, what I am understanding Swift and Duncan to be reasoning is that in a world where AI is becoming the equivalent of the mechanical robots that took over much of the manufacturing sector, teaching offers a pathway for some of today’s college graduates to find stable, meaningful—potentially long-term—employment that perfects the “soft” skills they will need for the future while filling a need for caring, consistent, and well trained adults in the lives of children who would otherwise be left academically adrift. They are not saying that just anyone can successfully teach but that encouraging those who have the potential to enter the profession by making the path for doing so more straightforward and attractive (e.g. making the “student teaching” requirements of most licensing programs paid internships) could possibly solve two challenges we currently face in our society at the same time.

Like I said, I find their ideas intriguing—if for no other reason than A) teaching is likely to remain pretty AI proof for the foreseeable future since it is rooted by its very nature in the messiness of human relationship; B) those adolescent boys with their chatbot girlfriends would learn how to navigate the complexity of person-to-person interaction real fast in a roomful of 10-year-olds; and C) I’m going to retire someday and somebody’s got to take my place.

Time will tell, and I encourage anyone interested in any of these updates from the world of education to explore the references below.

Coda

As I was finishing writing this, two articles arrived in my in-box reminding me that formal education systems in this country face a far greater crisis in the relatively near term than AI, cancelled academic departments, and under-employed Gen Z-ers combined. The fertility level in the economically developed world is well below replacement value at this point—and continuing to drop—and it is estimated that in the New York City public schools alone, there will be 153,000 fewer students enrolled over the course of the next decade. Tough decisions about school closures are coming not just for the small liberal arts colleges of this land, and those currently entering the teaching profession could actually find themselves in a very competitive job market (Swift’s and Duncan’s 411,000 positions may simply evaporate by attenuation).

But what makes me write this “afterword” is the far greater issue than simply a probable near-term crisis for schools in the U.S. caused by decreasing fertility levels. Anyone who knows me knows that I think hope is a verb, and the ultimate act of hope is the deliberate choice to bring a child into the world. Yet as Anna Louie Sussman presents so brilliantly in her recent essay for the NYT, many in our two youngest generations who are in their reproductive years are not having children right now because of the chaotic uncertainty that there will even be a livable future for those hypothetical children to inhabit. Millennials and Gen Zs are finding themselves without hope in that most significant way that one can, and that shouldn’t just concern those of us in education. That should give us all pause.

Because the steadily more dystopian world we have chosen to create doesn’t have to remain the dysfunctional way it currently is. We have the power to change it. What haunts me is whether we have the will. Again, as I concluded with my graduating seniors, “maybe.”

References

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/.

Marcus, J. (April 13, 2026) More Than a Quarter of Private Colleges Are at Risk of Closing, New Projection Shows. The Hechinger Report. https://hechingerreport.org/more-than-a-quarter-of-private-colleges-are-at-risk-of-closing-new-projection-shows/.

Mervosh, S.; Paris, F.; & Cain Miller, C. (May 8, 2026) U.S. Schools Face a Crisis as the Number of Children Drops. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/08/upshot/public-schools-enrollment-crisis.html.

Napolitano, J. (April 9, 2026) Gen Z Increasingly Skeptical of–And Angry About–Artificial Intelligence. The 74. https://www.the74million.org/article/gen-z-increasingly-skeptical-of-and-angry-about-artificial-intelligence/.

O’Donnell, P. (April 21, 2026) Creating Communicators and Critical Thinkers: Soon There Will Be a Test for That. The 74. https://www.the74million.org/article/creating-communicators-and-critical-thinkers-soon-there-will-be-a-test-for-that/.

Otterman, S. (April 3, 2026) Syracuse Drops 84 Majors Including Classics, Ceramic and Italian. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/01/nyregion/syracuse-university-degrees-eliminated.html?unlocked_article_code=1.X1A.CZh8.XEtP0OnmSuDJ&smid=url-share.

Royle, O.R. (April 17, 2026) Teen Boys Are Choosing AI Girlfriends Over Real Ones for “Maximum Control, Zero Rejection”–Experts Say It Could Make Them Unemployable. Fortune. https://fortune.com/2026/04/17/teen-boys-dating-ai-chatbot-girlfriend-experts-warn-kill-social-skills-gen-alpha-network-promotions/.

Singer, N. (May 6, 2026) In Backlash Against Tech in Schools, Parents Are Winning Rollbacks. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/29/technology/parents-school-tech-backlash.html?unlocked_article_code=1.elA.Fg2u.0ouroYo_g8zF&smid=nytcore-ios-share.

Sussman, A. L. (May 7, 2026) Why So Few Babies? We Might Have Overlooked the Biggest Reason of All. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/07/opinion/birthrate-kids-parents-demographics-future.html.

Swift, J. and Duncan, A. (April 7, 2026) The Case for More Gen Z Teachers. TIME. https://time.com/article/2026/04/07/the-case-for-more-gen-z-teachers/.