Mary Helen Immordino-Yang

the institutions and the settings and the situations that she learned about, for the values, the morals, the beliefs, for the possible futures, for the historical interpretations, for the identities that they invoke.

Kids did this in many different ways.

But the heart of transcendent thinking is that kids became deeply engaged with thinking about something bigger than what was directly in front of them.

Right.

So we asked kids who were not involved in any kind of criminal activity, who were not under any disciplinary action at school, who were passing all of their classes, who were from stable home situations.

So kids who were, you know, doing fine, as my grandmother would have said.

Right.

We asked those kids about the things that they'd witnessed and seen in their neighborhoods.

And they told us about a range of scary, dangerous criminal activity of various sorts.

But we didn't stop there.

We then went through with them and said, okay, so you said you saw a drug deal or you said you saw somebody get arrested or you said you saw somebody vandalize something or somebody get in a fight.

Why do you think that happens?

And how do you think the different actors in that scenario felt?

And how do you think the cop felt?

How do you think the little kid watching felt, right?

And then we asked them a really pivotal question.

We said, okay,

Imagine you were in charge and the people in your neighborhood who run things would do whatever you ask them to do as the new policy to try to make your neighborhood a better, safer place.

What would you advise them to do?

And there again, we saw an amazing range of answers where some kids stayed sort of in the immediate moment saying, well, these people are bad people.