Eileen

How does it foretell

possible different kinds of futures as we play it out over time.

So that ability to sort of move beyond the immediate current details of the things you can directly discern and witness and infer from a situation and to grapple with how those connect to bigger ideas and powerful values and beliefs and stories and concepts, that's what we're calling transcendent thinking.

Absolutely.

I think that's a beautiful example, right?

And then swimming and the ways in which it's enabled people to engage in particular kinds of sports or particular kinds of historical activities over time and all of that that you now as a mature adult thinker bring to this one concrete activity.

That is your capacity to think transcendently about concrete action-oriented goals.

So in your example, Shankar, you've learned to swim, but you've also understood the act of learning to swim in this much broader way.

that connects to other people and to broader issues of sociality and societal access.

That's the highlight of a really thoughtful way of learning about something.

How do we support young people in engaging in that kind of thinking routinely in school?

I think what we're learning is that the ability to grow yourself and to learn in meaningful ways goes far beyond just simply storing away, stashing away in your brain like a file door, little pieces of information that you then retrieve on cue

that the most important sort of central aspect of the learning process that enables you to have information, to recall that information, and to utilize it advantageously, effectively in the world moving forward,

comes through the connection of this information into our subjective experience of being in the space as a learner and feeling the opportunity to learn.

The emotional thought processes that we engage in as we think our way through learning opportunities become the kind of hat stand on which all the information is hooked.

And so to get back into that information, you re-experience the whole of the enterprise.

And it really points us to a new view of what's central and what the starting point is in education.

Rather than thinking about how do I get this person to this end point, you think, who is this person?

How can I facilitate them experiencing this opportunity to think about this new content in a way that they will grow themselves into someone

for whom this content is part of who they are and how they understand the world.