Eileen

The deeper, bigger meaning, the emotional reason why things happen the way they do or could happen.

And that taps into a fundamental connection that we found in our work between transcendent thinking and emotion.

Sameer Zeki, for example, at University College London has a beautiful study from some years ago with mathematicians in which they showed mathematicians equations that are quote-unquote beautiful and equations that are quote-unquote awkward or ugly.

And just the fact that experts in math knew what you mean by this already tells you what it actually means to be an expert in math.

To be an expert means I can see an equation

and imagine in my mind all the powerful ways it could be used to explain phenomena in the world that matter, that ability to extrapolate and apply in many contexts is the essence of transcendence again.

So yes, transcendence can apply to things that are aesthetic and beautiful, but the wonderful thing is that the act of being able to do

begin to grapple transcendently with concepts can help us to imbue those concepts with beauty, even when those concepts are things that people who are not experts may not think of as quote unquote beautiful, like a math equation.

Oh, Eileen, you are absolutely 100 percent right.

And we are working very hard ourselves at USC and many of my colleagues to overhaul the education system.

So what we've done to design schools to improve outcomes and achievement levels, which, by the way, are also at historic lows.

is to buckle down on basics, to narrow things, to script things, to standardize.

And at one level that could make sense,

Unfortunately, it is completely contrary to the ways that human beings actually grow and learn.

We grow and learn through the active experiencing, the subjective emotional experiencing of content.

This leaves teachers like yourself, Eileen, in a really difficult place because you know what your children need is not what you are required to give them.

What we really need to do is step back

And for teachers, remind yourselves that ultimately the children are under your care and the care of your principals and administrators.

And we need to protect our teachers and our administrators who are working on behalf of children by helping them to have the autonomy they need to build into their curricula the kinds of structures that will enable young people to thrive as best as we can while also working to change the system.

But what we can do to the best of our ability is to mitigate their harms by interpreting them in a way for young people and for our practice that puts them in a less prominent place in the classroom context so that kids and families understand that they can exhale, they can settle in,