Mary Helen Immordino-Yang

Those are incredibly important things to achieve.

You must learn things in school.

But that's not the ultimate purpose of school.

That's the means to the ultimate purpose.

The ultimate purpose, the outcome is human development.

So we have to ask ourselves, what does having learned this enable in the kids as they move forward?

How does having been here and experienced this learning opportunity change who they are developmentally moving forward?

How does it change their proclivities to engage with information, their dispositions to think about complex information in this field?

How does it change the way they understand and think scientifically, who they position themselves to be when they move through the world?

And that is meaningful, developmentally oriented education.

The learning is important, it's critical, but it is not the endpoint.

It's the means.

The endpoint is the development, and we've neglected that.

Yeah, I think that's partly true.

But I also think that once kids develop a real disposition to learn, once they develop a curiosity and a way of approaching the academic opportunities you provide for them, that really puts the agency in their pocket rather than in the adults'.

what happens is kids can accomplish super things.

But what's true is that when we overly constrain and make them learn a broad range of things without the opportunities to really go deep, what happens is that all of the learning becomes superficial and it ends up not sticking with them anyway.

What's really key for young people to develop is the disposition

to deeply engage with learning and the self-awareness in the learning process to know what it feels like to really understand something, what it feels like to become an expert.

One way I explain this is when we look at little kids, lots of us have been or had four-year-olds who got super fascinated with dinosaurs.