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/.

A Letter to the Class of 2026

I won’t be concluding here by revealing the meaning of life.
But I do have thoughts.
—Oliver Burkeman

It happens to me with increasing frequency, these days,
that writing takes the form of prayer.
—Lydia Millet

Dear Members of the Class of 2026,

Ever since I first had seniors to graduate, I have always had parting words. Sometimes it has been a collection of favorite quotes. At others, a hard-earned personal insight. Occasionally, I have spoken the traditional commencement clichés (as well as the usual words of farewell), and on more than one occasion, I have even sent some of you out into the world with a Zen koan. But then a pandemic hit, sending all of us scurrying to the isolation of our homes, denying me my usual venue for sharing these final (admittedly unsought) thoughts, and thus, the ritual of this annual letter was born.

Of course, I write to you for the same reason the institutions who have nurtured you will hold ceremonies and the families who love you will hold parties: to honor this pivotal moment in your journey. These reflective rites of passage are critical to a social species such as ours because they hold up to our collective attention the common values we share, and whether joyful (think weddings) or sad (think funerals), they remind us to take this unearned gift called life more seriously and to recall the fundamental qualities that make us human. Hence, on the road to full adulthood, remember to honor moments such as these and to be patient with your elders when they get all weepy and fawning over you in the coming months; it will be you doing the weeping and fawning one day.

Remember, too, to immerse yourself fully in your own celebrations, to participate actively in your own life. Too often, we can find ourselves so focused on the planning and execution of an event—or worse, trying to capture it—that we fail to notice our place in the moment itself. This can be especially true in today’s world of social media (where I once watched a group of my students work so hard to video a stadium-like wave they wanted to generate that they never actually made the wave itself happen). Therefore, I urge you make deliberate time to notice this important transition in which you find yourself. Try sitting still. Watch a sunrise. Journal on a page. Hike a trail. Do whatever you can to make the necessary intentional pauses required to embrace with full awareness what is happening to you “now.”

Of course, residing mindfully in the moment is an important lesson to remember your entire life, not just for times of ritual. Millennia of wisdom literature has been clear that “you can have a hundred tea ceremonies; you could even have all of them with the same people. But you can only have that ceremony, that cup of tea once. Then that stretch of time evaporates forever” (Burkeman, p. 141; original emphasis). Thus, we need to inhabit any given space and time we find ourselves in as if it could be our last because the harsh reality is that it could. Granted, this charge to live in the “now” is an ideal, never quite fully realized or truly attained. But the alternative is to walk through life reacting blindly—or at best, blurrily—(and frequently passively so) to every random or premeditated change that buffets you. Only to the degree that you can center and focus yourself fully can you proactively steer yourself successfully—and with confidence—through the inevitable challenges and roadblocks simply being alive will throw at you.

What’s more, one such difficulty already confronts you before you even step into your next chapter. The unrestrained explosion of artificial intelligence (AI) has some comparing its potential social disruption to that of the Industrial Revolution (from which one can argue we are still recovering), and you are going to spend your entire adult lives amidst this fallout. Technologists got so busy trying to see what they could do that they never bothered to ask “should they?” and now Claude, Anthropic’s most recent AI release, is capable of writing and running its own self-generated code without its original authors having full knowledge of—and therefore final say over—what Claude is actually doing with itself. The result? An AI tool that could allow any person on the planet with access to the web to hack any digital infrastructure. As Thomas Friedman puts it, “I’m really not being hyperbolic when I say that kids could deploy this by accident: ‘Honey, what did you do after school today?’ ‘Well, Mom, my friends and I took down the power grid. What’s for dinner?’ ”

I know, I know. Way too dark a turn for what is supposed to be a pseudo-commencement speech. Those are meant to be cheery and uplifting, full of friendly advice and quirky bits of parental type wisdom. But ugly truths are no less real for being ugly, and one of the hardest ones I find myself confronting each year when I author this epistle is the seemingly ever-growing reality of just how f-ed up a world my fellow elders and I are leaving to you. Billy Joel may have been correct when he wrote about not starting the fire, but that does not excuse the many individuals who have deliberately poured gasoline on it (both literal and metaphorical). If it is true that we borrow the present from the future, then I regret to say that we will be returning damaged goods to your generation with negative interest on the loan.

However, lest you think it inevitable to succumb to the flames, allow an experienced firefighter to offer some tools for combating life’s flare-ups even if they don’t always smother them completely. First and foremost, maintain perspective. And by that, I do not mean simply be empathetic or have multiple ways of looking at a situation or try to understand the context of a what you are dealing with (all of which are good things to do). No, I mean PERSPECTIVE such as the kind told of Rabbi Simcha Bunim, who is said to have had two slips of paper in his pockets at all times, one of which contained the Hebrew phrase, “Bishvili nivra ha’olam” (“for my sake the world was created”) and the other, “V’anokhi afar v’aefer” (“I am but dust and ashes”). He navigated life allegedly removing one or the other as needed, and I have seldom encountered a higher wisdom. Your life is finite, and therefore knowing how to identify when something demands your all-in investment of everything you have to offer and when something is like a dropped scoop of your favorite ice cream lying melting on the pavement is perhaps the greatest skill you will ever acquire.

Related is the ability embodied by the famous story from the Buddhist tradition about the farmer whose horse ran away one day. For those unfamiliar with it, what happens in this tale is that a series of events follow this seeming misfortune, and with each event, the farmer’s neighbors either cry out “What terrible fortune!” or exclaim “How wonderful” depending on whether sympathy or celebration seem the appropriate response to what has happened next in the story. Yet the farmer, every single time something happens, always replies, “Maybe.” Maybe it’s terrible; maybe it’s wonderful. He alone in the story understands that we cannot know any situation’s ultimate outcome—including those where you’ve gone “all-in” and those where you’ve cut your loses—and that, thererfore, all we can ever do in life is to experience what happens (even when we are the author) and then choose how we respond. Like I said, Perspective!

The next tool I have to offer for fighting life’s fires may sound odd, but the science behind it is strong: be bored. Yes, intentional boredom is a secret superpower against the world’s conflagrations, and here’s why. For starters, it promotes your capacity for delayed gratification, which Mischel’s famous Marshmallow Test has demonstrated promotes a whole host of life-long benefits, including better health, better educational outcomes, better work satisfaction…the list is extensive! Including the fact that people with better gratification-delay have more resilience and more grit.

However, what makes boredom even more significant than these “quality of life” factors is what it does for your brain’s ability to think. In our digital age of 24/7 universally immediate appeasement of our neural reward circuits—where a dopamine rush is always only a mere click of your device away—the ability to think in a focused, conscious, deliberative fashion is rapidly joining the physical atrophy of today’s couch potatoes. Furthermore, just as we know that the body requires regular exercise and proper diet to maintain its structural and physical health (medical knowledge we only actually first recognized in the mid-1950s), so too does the brain need regular thinking about complex ideas to maintain its health as well. Hence, just as a diet of twinkies and extensive lounging are bad for the body, so is a diet of Tik Toks and AI bad for the brain. Boredom is the antidote because it forces the brain to find something interesting to think about, strengthening its mental muscles.

What’s more, all that additional thinking in the absence of all that dopamine—remember, you’re bored—creates the conditions for improving one of the most important of our three primary intelligences, creativity. We need brains with strong capacities for making previously unseen connections between purportedly unrelated ideas if we are to find solutions to our most intractable problems. And making Tik Tok videos mimicking other Tik Tok videos or asking ChatGPT to draft an essay is not going to build those kinds of brains. That’s like going to the gym and having robots lift the weights for you. Worse, it’s like going to the gym, filming the equipment and calling that a workout.[i] Only true boredom will engender an increase in creativity, and in the absence of boredom, any decrease in creativity can have very practical consequences. For example, entrepreneurship in this country (i.e. economic creativity) has been on the decline for the last four decades (dipping the most in the past 15 years),[ii] and most recently, the draconian efforts of Trump’s DOGE have guaranteed that scientific progress in the U.S. (i.e. cognitive creativity) will be lowered for decades to come. Therefore, want to save the world? Increase your boredom; both your brain and your future children will thank you for it.

However, if you do decide to save the world, be absolutely certain to keep that perspective I spoke of earlier. Firefighting is never easy work, and after your idealism has been scorched a few times, it can be all too easy to become cynical or—worse—apathetic. The simple truth is that it just isn’t possible to confront the reality of our limited lifespans and not ask, how much can any one person truly do? Indeed, this recognition of our finitude can engender simultaneous feelings of both excess responsibility and utter inadequacy, and since—to paraphrase the philosopher Hegel—the nature of being finite is to have the seed of your passing as your essential nature (i.e. “the hour of [your] birth is the hour of [your] death”), then firefighting itself has the potential to feel pointless. If I can’t make my existence matter, why bother?

Yet “maybe our responsibility isn’t to justify ourselves before [the universe], but to embody as completely as possible the momentary expression of it that we are” (Burkemen, p. 157)—to live a modestly meaningful life. Which brings me to my final toolkit offering for this letter: the capacity to distinguish between want and need and to balance them appropriately. Not that I don’t think most of you already know the difference between the two. But we are at a juncture in your lives where illustrating how easy it is to get the two mixed up is, well, easy. Because, right now, I am confident that most of you want—maybe even desperately—to go away to college this coming fall. So much so that I’m equally confident that you have probably convinced yourself that this “want” is really a “need,” that you need to go to college. You don’t, though. Your biological survival is in no way dependent on your matriculation at an institute of higher education, and in fact, you could live the rest of your life after graduation never “cracking another book” as they used to say.

Now, if you want the kind of employment that feels emotionally purposeful and financially gainful, then, yes, you need to go to college because a basic bachelor’s degree is the required, necessary precursor to certain types of careers. Or if you want a life partner with certain qualities, then you need to date individuals who possess them, and if you want long physical health, then you need proper daily exercise and diet. Put simply for any given “want” you might have, there will always be a corresponding need, and so identifying those “wants” most important to you will enable you to identify what “needs” you will have to meet to obtain them—including if one of those “wants” is a better world than the one we currently have.

There may come a time, though, when you still have some unfulfilled “wants” but no real unfulfilled “needs”—at least as Maslow’s famous hierarchy would define them—and when that happens, you face a choice: remain discontent in the face of life’s realities, forever chasing after what eludes you, or find satisfaction in those same realities, embracing with gratitude and humility what you have already found. It will be up to you to decide, but should you find yourself at such a future juncture, before making a choice, never forget the wisdom of the farmer:

Maybe.

Congratulations and good fortune in the coming years!

References

Burkeman, O. (2024) Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Friedman, T. (April 7, 2026) Anthropic’s Restraint Is a Terrifying Warning Sign. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/07/opinion/anthropic-ai-claude-mythos.html.

Newport, C. (March 27, 2026) There’s a Good Reason You Can’t Concentrate. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/27/opinion/technology-mental-fitness-cognitive.html?unlocked_article_code=1.WlA.6ZKN.Zf47rdbx8Sqm&smid=nytcore-ios-share.

Stokel-Walker, C. (April 7, 2026) Scientists Invented a Fake Disease. AI Told People It Was Real. Nature. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01100-y.

[i] Which, as a sidebar, is basically what the Marvel and DC franchises have been doing now for more than two decades—I mean how many reboots of Spiderman and Batman do we need?? As The Boss once wrote, “fifty-seven channels and nothin’ on.”

[ii] For anyone wishing to learn more about this decidedly non-partisan issue, it has been well documented by organizations as far apart on the political spectrum as The Brookings Institute and The Heritage Foundation.

Nostalgia

I was so much older then.
I’m younger than that now.
—Bob Dylan

A report came out this month about the growing number of colleges and universities that are trimming down the hours required to earn a basic bachelor’s degree (with corresponding approval from the numerous accreditation bodies) so that a student can now achieve their B.A. or B.S. in three years rather than in the traditional four. Much was made about the cost savings to individual students, the faster increase in people entering the workforce in high-demand fields, and even the need to join certain professions as quickly as possible before AI takes them over. It was all very utilitarian and pragmatic, and as I read it, I could not help but recall this long-ago Doonesbury I keep posted in my classroom and, like the Chancellor in it, wearily sigh.

Granted, there are powerful socio-economic realities these institutions of higher education are trying to address with this new approach—both their students’ and their own. Student debt in this country is nearly $2 trillion dollars, with the average borrower in debt for around $40,000, and I know from my own family how large that number can truly get as one of my relatives continues to pay off educational loans greater than their mortgage! Furthermore, shrinking birth rates have schools at all levels in the educational pipeline scrambling for their organizational lives to keep lights on, doors open, and the teaching staff employed. It is a fraught time to be a tuition-based business!

I also want to acknowledge that for nearly all its centuries of existence, academia has been the almost exclusive domain of wealthy males whose leisure to philosophize and experiment—“to embrace both the joys and sorrows of intellectual maturation!”—rested on the hard (and usually uncompensated) labor of women, the enslaved, and young children. We may laude Socrates’ and Confucius’ wisdom and Copernicus’ and Al-Biruni’s empirical insights. But an entire underclass of people toiled to make what they achieved possible, and even today, the skin color of those attending higher education’s classes is regularly much lighter than those maintaining its campuses. As for my own four years of undergraduate work, they were made possible by a large community of people whom I’m ashamed to say I did not even see at the time.

But what I did see then was how precious an opportunity I had to immerse myself in all that collective knowledge and to explore intimately the many disciplines and outlooks that adulting might one day prevent me from having the leisure to do. Hence, I deliberately feasted like a glutton. Of course, not everyone does—Arum and Roska were able to write their book for a reason after all. But for me, those four years were the beginning of my journey toward education’s ultimate goal, wisdom, and while like my pal, Socrates, I know this journey is an asymptotic one, I know as well that without that time apart to do all that growth, I would not have what little of this precious resource I actually do possess today. And in a world so desperately in need of people with as much wisdom as possible, anything that might stunt its potential growth should give us all pause. Thus, my nostalgia for what feels like a bygone era for higher ed: where will wisdom’s enkindling come from now?

Then again, where will passion for anything in education come from in the future? I ask because the other thing making me nostalgic right now is a rather superficial contest I am currently participating in that came across my desk from the National Science Teaching Association entitled, “America’s Favorite Teacher.” It involves essentially employing one’s social contacts to cast votes for you as a teacher, and it is a blatant fundraiser for a legitimate science education organization (not NSTA). While the participating teachers cannot do so, everyone else who casts a ballot can purchase votes for their candidate through charitable donations to this organization, and the donations are even tax-deductible. There are no qualifications for the teachers involved other than active employment in the classroom, and the winner of this essentially silent auction gets a significant monetary prize.

I know, I know; WHAT was I thinking?! However, before the preceding paragraph causes the few active followers I actually do have to sever all ties with me immediately, my only reason for participating in this silly contest is that it came across my desk at the exact same time a beloved colleague of mine was in the final stages of dying from ALS. She was a French teacher at my school, and a program very dear to her was our two-week Foreign Language Immersion program for which there is a dedicated financial aid fund to help students to participate in who might not otherwise have the means. I have told my social “network” (what there is of it) that anything I earn in this contest will be donated to that fund in her honor because the last thing I could possibly need at this point in my career is any more professional recognition.

Yet, it is precisely the intersection of those two facts that has me feeling nostalgia. I can still recall the time in our society when being a teacher was revered and honored, when it was even referred to as—or at least highly visible lip-service given to—the noble profession. Beyond the usual teacher appreciation week, there wasn’t any real need for elevated public recognition or awards, and there certainly wasn’t that kind of need when it came to funding in classrooms. Furthermore, when education’s well did begin to run dry and the profession began to be a regular scapegoat for society’s ills (yes, that’s a lot of cliched metaphors), the various recognition programs seeking to elevate public awareness of good teaching (such as Disney’s American Teacher Awards and Toyota’s Tapestry Grants) still demanded that recipients meet some standard or degree of excellence. Maybe not every educator was a Jaime Escalante of Stand and Deliver fame, but solid individuals were held up to whom younger teachers could aspire. I know; I was one of them.

Today, though, nearly every one of those major teacher recognition programs has gone the way of the non-avian dinosaurs (Trump even killed the Presidential Awards for Excellence in Math and Science Teaching this past year), and now what is left is a group of underappreciated and frequently demonized individuals who are scrambling regardless of their teaching qualifications to garner what amounts to “likes” on social-media platforms so that an underfunded educational organization can keep its doors open. I am too old and experienced not to know that “the good ol’ days” are always a myth, but I’m hard-pressed right now not to think there were perhaps better ones. Oh well, at least the long, productive, and meaningful life of a former fellow educator will be honored, and future children who might not otherwise have had the chance will acquire some cultural perspective—otherwise known as wisdom.

Auld lang syne indeed.

References

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

Marcus, J. (March 11, 2026) Faster, Thinner: Colleges are Swiftly Trimming a B.A. Degree to Three Years. The Hechinger Report. https://hechingerreport.org/faster-thinner-colleges-bachelors-degree-three-years.

Where Will We Go from Here?

You’ve got to be proud of your wounds.
—Nancy Pelosi

One of the great challenges I have when I’m writing these days is having anything I say remain remotely significant before getting the chance to upload it, such is the deranged chaos of the Trump presidency. Because I can only compose on weekends during the school year, I will start discussing my reaction to something I’ve encountered only to have what I’m writing about feel almost banal before I can return to it. Case in point, here is how this current essay began quite recently:

As most who know me can well imagine, I have been a loyal subscriber to Scientific American for almost 30 years now. In addition, I am one of those readers who actually starts on the first page and reads the entire issue cover-to-cover, including the math articles I can barely follow at times. I’m just that curious.

However, as the ancient dictum about cats reminds us, sometimes curiosity can be a dangerous thing—or at least psychologically problematic—and so I found myself finishing up the December 2025 issue just moribundly depressed—or at least discouraged. With one exception (which, ironically, was about post-partum depression), every feature article contained gloomy news about the future. There was the story about oil and gas companies pivoting to plastic to keep their profits flowing as more people purchase all-electric vehicles. Potential individualized cancer vaccines are being defunded by Kennedy’s HHS while Martian soil samples are now trapped inside NASA’s Perseverance because of Trump’s budget cuts to basic research. And the “highlight” of all “highlights:” a story about AI avatars for grieving the dead. Heck, even the commentary section contained news of more teenagers turning to chatbots as alternatives to personal relationships. It was just dark reporting piled on top of dark reporting.

I share all of this because I want readers to know the kind of mental mindset I was in when—on only the second day of the new year—I read the following headline in my local newspaper:

“Paramedic Under Investigation for Explicit Videos Defends Urinating in Family’s Food.”

Yes, reread that. Defends. Urinating. In food. A headline featured not in a tabloid but in a reputable news source was informing me that someone who society entrusts with people’s lives was arguing that it is okay to piss on material intended for human consumption. And that wasn’t even what had gotten him into trouble!

How did we get here? And more importantly, where do we go? While I pretty much know the answer to the first question (much of my writing is about it), I find myself feeling so mentally gob-smacked right now by everything that headline implies about us as a culture, that I am at a loss for any possible answer to the second one. Essayist Robert Fulghum reminds us to be wary of judgment, that “change the name, and the story is told of you.” But I find myself living in a world where there are now “shoes” I just cannot envision ever “walking in” and where there are now entire “warehouses” of such footwear strolling around our public domains. Granted, this guy got into trouble because he crossed a boundary in what remains of our social norms, but look at what our President’s done this past year and how much of our paramedic’s trouble is just his lack of political capital?

Oh! To go back to the relative naivete of when I wrote those words! News of some nitwit videotaping his genitals pales—indeed becomes outright invisible—when held up against the unprovoked invasion of a sovereign nation and a government condoned murder of a mother of three. My bewildered appall at someone defending their stupidity appears almost silly now when compared to the disgusted outrage I should feel at the absolute madness coming out of the minds of this administration. Where do we go, indeed!

Yet as tempting as it is, I can’t just rant. Cursing the darkness solves nothing, defeats nothing, illuminates nothing; it doesn’t even ultimately make the curser feel any better. The only way to banish darkness is to irradiate it, to make it fully visible for the evil it is and to chip away at its shadow with truth, honesty, and integrity. Admittedly, those three things feel in short supply right now (with AI threatening their very existence in today’s world). But as an educator (and especially as a science teacher), I am here to tell you that we in the veracity-manufacturing business are still hard at work, doing our best to fight the fundamental root of all evil: ignorance.

And a partner in that fight is nuance—bringing me to a marvelous book I just finished entitled, The Light Eaters. In it, the author, Zoë Schlanger, explores the latest science about our green friends, the plants—who, for those who don’t know this, literally build their bodies out of light itself and then pass that light onto us in the form of food—and near its beginning, Ms. Schlanger shares a sentiment both pertinent to this discussion and too beautiful not to pass on when she writes: “the world we could have if complexity was not backgrounded was the world I wanted to live in.” She then effectively invites the reader to join her in doing just that during the remainder of the book, and as I simultaneously processed both her book and the stupidity coming out of the White House, I began to realize that THAT was the root of all the overall awfulness of Trump’s actions (as well as those of any other petty tyrant): the “backgrounding” of the complexity of truth.

What’s more, I realized that this dismissal of truth’s fundamental nuanced nature is not only the foundation of Trump’s evil, it is also the source of its ultimate downfall. Because reality is going to BE complex regardless of whether any human might wish it otherwise. You can rip a brutal dictator out of his bed in the middle of the night, but doing so isn’t going to cause multinational corporations to suddenly risk billions of dollars in investments in a just-destabilized country. You can invade and terrorize entire communities of people, even murdering some of them in cold blood, but you still cannot make the jobs the foreign-born fill any less central to our economy or any more likely to be filled by so-called “real” Americans. You can even go on national television and bully the citizens of this country about the “affordability myth,” but you can’t make the price of groceries and housing come down with tariffs. The bottom line is that everything the Trump administration does offers nothing but simplistic (and often simpleton) responses to complex situations, and the people impacted—including his MAGA political base—have only seen those situations get worse. We are in desperate need of nuance.

Yet such a thing is challenging to find in today’s society, and before I address what we might do to change that fact, I do need to acknowledge first that I get the desire for simplicity; I truly do. I know firsthand the deep psychological longing for simple, binary, black-white, on-off, arithmetic answers: 1+1=2; a²+b²=c²; plug in “x” and find “y.” No need for the difficulty of adjusting one’s personal lifestyle or worldview. No need for the complications that come with inconvenient truths such as climate change or human infidelity. No need for the involvedness of truly “loving your neighbor as yourself.” Nice simple solutions, and I can get back to my Netflix.

Life, though, (as I continue to repeat ad nauseum to anyone who will listen) is messy. Always has been; always will be. Even math, that ultimate arbiter of simplicity, gets messy once you reach calculus (I will never forget the class where I discovered that an integral could have more than one totally correct answer!). Therefore, messy is simply “baked in” (just ask the quantum physicists), and no amount of apps or AI is ever going to remove all the messy from our lives (just ask the biologists).

Which brings me back why I write any of these essays—education. If ignorance is the root of all evil, then teaching and learning about what is true and real is the ultimate defense for the good. Furthermore, that teaching and learning can only lead to any good if it is messy and nuanced in its character and structure. What I think that needs to look like is the fundamental point of this whole on-line project; so I’m simply going to steer anyone interested to actually read some of the chapters in my book to learn more about my concept of “authentic engagement.” But for now, I conclude this particular set of musings by offering one possible interpretation of what I think Nancy Pelosi might have meant when she spoke the words in this essay’s epigram in an interview I once overheard: messy and wounded are inexorably linked; so wherever possible, engage in messes where you can be proud of your inevitable injury. The wounds are how we show we cared.

References

Doyle, C. & Bansil, S. (Jan. 2, 2026) Paramedic Under Investigation for Explicit Videos Defends Urinating in Family’s Food. The Baltimore Banner. https://www.thebanner.com/community/criminal-justice/chris-carroll-baltimore-county-paramedic-XQODS6ZUQVH4TPPSCSUFNKBQSA/.

Fulghum, R. (1989) It Was on Fire When I Lay Down on It. New York: Villard Books.

Schlanger, Z. (2024) The Light Eaters. New York: Harper Perennial.