Mary Helen Immordino-Yang

They started memorizing all the names of the dinosaurs and what they ate and what kind of teeth they had and all this kind of stuff.

And, you know, no one stops and says, oh, my four-year-old is really on track to becoming a paleontologist, right?

What is it that they're doing?

They're developing their proclivity for learning.

They're experiencing a little bit of expertise.

They may probably even know more about something than their parent does.

How empowering is that?

And they're searching out new learning about something that isn't in their immediate here and now that they have to go to museums or books to learn about.

And that's the developmental nature of that learning process.

But when our kids get to be teenagers, we somehow think that the learning is mainly about stashing little nuts in their head like a squirrel, right?

where it's about how many little things can you shove in there?

And we forget that the point is just like with those four-year-olds, the content is important.

You need a breadth of content, right?

And ways of thinking about things.

But what's really important is that you learn proclivities for deeply engaging with expertise, with ideas, with evidence, with thoughtful ways of analyzing and understanding things.

But we often in mainstream secondary education do not do this.

We substitute content for developmental opportunities to learn to think.

Yeah, well, I got news.

Like the wide real world isn't working very well for a lot of kids, right?

And so we keep doubling down on starting with the basics and working our way up and the kids are absent, right?