The Philosopher & the Neuroscientist - A Conversation with Zak Stein and Mary Helen Immordino-Yang

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

I think at this point, the way we talk about it, the whole notion of learning is a red herring. Learning is not the aim of school. Learning is the means. The aim of school is human development.

One of the things we did in the schools was start to measure way too much stuff and start to pin way too much to measurement.

Hi and welcome back to the podcast. My name is Tim Logan and the podcast is brought to you in partnership with Notosh. Thank you so much for joining me for this very special episode featuring two of the most important voices calling for radical change in education right now. Dr. Mary Helen Imordino-Yang has been on the podcast before. You can hear that in episode 66. She's the professor of education, psychology, and neuroscience at the University of Southern California Rossier School of Education, and she's also the director of the USC Center for Effective neuroscience, development, learning, and education. Joining her today is Zach Stein, who is an educational philosopher and developmental psychologist who is the co-founder with Daniel Schmachtenberger of the Consilience Project. Zach is also the co-founder with Theo Dawson of Lectica, a nonprofit dedicated to the research-based, justice-oriented reform of large-scale standardized testing in K-12, higher education, and business. You can also hear Theo in episode 92. Zach and Mary Helen met each other on the Mind, Brain, and Education master's degree at Harvard Graduate School of education, and both of them went on to publish work with the great Curt Fisher, who was the professor of education and the director of the Mind, Brain and Education program at Harvard. And you'll hear both of them reference Curt a few times in the conversation. The conversation starts with an explanation of the amazing data coming out of Mary Helen's lab that confirms the vital need for focus on transcendent thinking and human development in our schooling systems. We then touch on intergenerational transmission, the misplaced focus on learning outcomes, the importance of meaningful work, the place of the digital and AI, and the necessary shifts in the way that we do assessment. This is one of the most important episodes that I've recorded since starting the podcast, and I urge you all to share it widely with anyone involved in the important work of transforming education.

Hey, Zach.

How are you?

Good.

How are you doing?

I'm well.

Yeah. Hi, Marianne.

Hi, Zach.

Hey, Mary Ellen. Good to see you.

Very happy to reunite you two. Awesome. Well, I mean, firstly, huge thanks to both of you for coming and for making the time. I know how busy both of you are, but I was so inspired to do this when I heard from Zach. We had a great conversation with some amazing young people with the IB Festival of Hope that Zach was part of, and then he mentioned that you knew each other from Harvard, and so I just thought I genuinely believe, totally biased obviously, that you are the most interesting, exciting thinkers around education from a philosophical and neuroscientific perspective. And I just thought—

Oh, okay. Thank you for your vote of confidence.

Exactly. So just putting you together and I'm basically, I'm just going to light the tape and then just leave you to it and it will be a phenomenal conversation. I have no doubt, but thank you first for joining.

My pleasure.

Amazing. I'd love to start maybe if we can spend a little bit of time setting the context, obviously, you know, you're both coming up with really important and inspiring ideas about the shifts and the transformations that need to happen in education. But just as a context setting piece first, Mary Helen, if I come to you first, I know that Zach's been tracking the youth mental health crisis closely and your, the way you've talked about the way that young people's mental health challenges and the way that the education system is currently structured is a real contributor to that very kind of fierce goal direction, you know, only tapping into certain neural networks, et cetera. So maybe if we could start there, if you could say a little bit about that and why you think those two things are quite closely coupled, and then Zach can maybe respond from his perspective about that.

Sure. So, I mean, I'll just sort of jump in. I mean, I think if you think about, uh, what we've known for centuries and what we're really starting to understand in the, you know, with modern tools now also about the nature of human development, the core need for individuals to self-actualize through their relationships, through the thinking they do. Through the ways in which they, you know, bring agency to the co-construction of cultural spaces. And then you think about the way our education system is designed. I mean, especially I, I focus a lot on adolescence education because I just think it's been so neglected and is so inappropriate developmentally. I mean, it's not like we don't support the development of the skills and dispositions of mind that kids are going to need to be successful, happy adults. It's like we actively punish them. And design for them to be inhibited almost on purpose. I mean, not to be sort of dystopian about it, but I think in a lot of contexts we design for school to teach kids capacities for inhibiting their own sense of self, their own sense of agency, their own ability to think deeply about complex problems, to engage with the sort of ethical and systems-level values and beliefs and assumptions that are undergirding the design of the structures that govern our society. And then, you know, the unsurprising but tragic outcome of that is that we have a mental health crisis that is sort of appearing out of nowhere, right? Somehow suddenly kids are showing us that this system is really, really not supporting what they need to be able to develop into happy, healthy people who are productive, who can engage with others in productive and ethical ways, uh, who are disposed toward considering alternate and multiple perspectives on problems, who are inclined to notice when situations call for a sort of broader, more transcendent kind of deliberation, like where it's not just about what's happening here and now, there's actually a broader historical context or a broader sense of possible futures that really needs to be considered before we can know how to understand what's happening here and now. You know, those kinds of dispositions are not supported and, like I said, in many cases directly punished and undermined For sure.

And just maybe, because I think one of the reasons that so many people are really excited by your work is not only the, the messages that it conveys, but also the, the data that you're bringing forth from a neuroscientific basis.

I think that's the key thing. I mean, I think you can talk about this till the cows come home, but if you really want to understand what's happening, we have to design new ways to study it. We need to, and that's the piece that I feel like I bring. Like trying to really identify what are the indices in development that we could start to reveal that would give us insights into the underlying nature of the problem in today's space and time, right? I mean, youth today are not living 100 years ago. They have different systems they're part of. They have different tools they're using. They have different structures that are organizing their social access to the world and things like that. And we need to understand how those systems are impacting and influencing You know, the organization of the space in which kids grow themselves. And, you know, there are— do you want me to talk a little bit about some data?

I mean, maybe the Executive Control Network and just the 3 network pieces.

Yeah, I think some of the data that we have right now, we have a big neuroimaging study. So we have, you know, studies of really excellent educators in low SES contexts looking from neuroimaging to in-depth interviewing of various sorts to doing their authentic teaching work with their real kids while in an MRI scanner with psychophysiological recording of all these things. And, uh, looking at what they actually do in the world and how kids experience that in the world with an outside team of observers. So we've got these really neat systems-level data that we're trying to understand what actually goes into excellent teaching in these spaces. So there's that whole data set, but the data that I'll talk about right now are longitudinal data from teenagers. So we followed kids from low SES backgrounds. Every kid had at least one parent who was born and raised to adulthood outside of the US. Because I wanted there to be true ethnic diversity in the sample. And we went into these schools and recruited kids to come to the lab and talk to us about how they understand the world. Basically, we spent a whole day with each kid and we did extensive interviewing about, you know, what have you seen in your neighborhood? What do you— how do you understand why those things happen? You know, how do you think these different people in that scenario were feeling and thinking? You know, if you could imagine any solution, you know, to fix that problem that you see, what would it be? We also have a sort of standardized protocol that we do with the kids. So these are 15, 16, 17-year-old kids when we start, where we put together a whole corpus of mini documentary stories that we wrote about real teenagers from all around the world who are in all kinds of interesting, complex situations. And then we sit with them for 2 hours and they, we show them, you know, a video. We tell them the story, you know, this is this girl in this place called Pakistan. Have you ever heard of that place? Well, and there's this group called the Taliban. You ever heard of them? Okay. So they believe that girls shouldn't go to school and here's this girl who wants to go to school and here's what happened. And then we ask them, how does this person's story make you feel? That's it. How does this person's story make you feel? Feel is ambiguously cognitive and affective as a word on purpose, right? And then they can say whatever they want. And those interviews are videotaped. And then we move the kid into the MRI scanner where they want a short recap of the video. Like they see Malala out there saying like, they can't stop me. I go to school here, there, or anywhere, right? And then it just stops. And they have a long gray screen to think about how they think about this thing. And then they can report to us in real time. Pushing buttons, because that's all we can do from the scanner without screwing up the data, right? How strongly emotional they feel about this story, how strongly engaged they are with the story. We're measuring psychophysiology, so like heart rate and galvanic skin response rate, sweating on the bottoms of your feet, and also neural activity. And then we also do a scan that's called a resting state scan where we just let the kids just relax, think about whatever they want for 7 minutes in the scanner while we take pictures of their brain, right? Which captures the neural dynamics of just what they kind of muse about when they're not given a task to do, when there's nothing to look at but a clean nature scene, right? And then we bring the kids back 2 years later and do the protocol again, and then we follow them into young adulthood. And what we find is a lot of interesting things. So you asked about the executive control network and what we found in the cross-sectional data from the first wave, right? So when you bring the kids in, mainly 14, 15 years old, and we look at what happens in their brain when they're thinking about these stories. What we're really interested in doing is looking at individual differences in how kids experience those stories, how they make meaning out of those stories, and how those differences—cultural, developmental, individual differences—are related to systematic differences in the way in which neural and psychophysiological and experienced states emerge, right? So the patterns of correspondence between brain activity, embodied activity, and what they say they are experiencing at that time. And what we can show, which is quite incredible I think, is that there are trial by trial, so story by story, depending on the way a kid conceptualized their reaction to that story, we can predict differences in the neural correlates of thinking about that story when they subsequently are in the scanner. And so there's kind of two broad ways of thinking about the stories. And there was this, like, this is the dissertation work of Rebecca Godley, who is one of my students, you know. So she found, you know, 65 different things to code in the ways that kids were taking perspective and experiencing emotion and doing all this stuff. But basically, we were able to reduce it statistically to two big factors. And these will not be a surprise to Zach, right? And it's like, thank you so much, Curt, for inventing these, yeah, things in my mind. But there's a sort of more concrete, empathic, direct context-dependent way of reacting to the story. They can say things like, oh, that poor girl, I feel so bad, I wish I could help her. And kids who do that more across the whole experiment have more executive control network activity. And in their real world, they have better relationships, more acceptance of diversity. They get along really well. People like them. Their teachers say they're super nice kids. All that kind of stuff. They can also, and these two things are uncorrelated, which basically means a kid could be high on both. Right? So it's not like you do this or you do that. They can also say, wait a minute, I didn't know not everybody in the, you know, in the world doesn't get to go to school. Like, that's not right. Right? And they can start thinking about, but what, but me in my world, I do this all the time. I never, I took that for granted. Maybe I should work harder to try to figure out how to make that possible for everyone. That's because now that I think about it, school's really how you get to where you, you make choices about what your life's gonna be. And Everyone everywhere should be able to do what I get to do, you know, that kind of thing. And so we coded that, we called that transcendent thinking, which is kind of like abstract thinking, except it's, we define it by the fact that it transcends the current situation, right? So it's, it's thinking that is about the why, the history, the possible implications, the ethics, the experience of the other person. It's things that you can't directly see and infer based on what the story is. So in order to be able to think about the stories in that way, you actually have to disengage from the story and from Malala and from feeling bad for her because that's not relevant. And instead think about, wait, what does this mean for the way the world is set up or could be set up and where I am in it and what I could be doing in it, right? And the more kids do that, the more they then show this other pattern to that story in the scanner. So it's like this complex pattern. First of all, they're showing more activity in this system called the default mode network. So it's like the internal sensation of consciousness and it becomes the kind of mode neurologically in which you think about things that aren't in the here and now. So it's things like autobiographical memory and values and beliefs and narratives, you know, all kinds of things that are complex that you can't actually directly look at Malala and see them there, right? And so we see more activity in that network, but there's also other things that are modulating the degree to which that activity actually statistically predicts that the kid was— had a transcendent construal to the story. And those are that we get early activity in the executive control and then profound deactivation in the executive control as the ball comes up, right? So it looks like profoundly deactivating below that kid's own baseline of executive control is after they've sort of marshaled their mind into the place where they can effortfully think about what this means rather than just idly daydream or something like that with that network, then they have to get their executive control and the regulation and the real-time embodied, you know, control out of the way so that they can then kind of free-form construct a narrative that is by definition not instantiated in the real physical world and the real motor control of your actual body. And all of these predictions of transcendence are stronger when the kid says they are experiencing strong emotion at that time. So strong emotion in the context of a transcendent construal is organizing the neural correlates. But strong emotion in the context of a concrete construal is just making a freakout fit. Okay. So it's like emotion in the context of ideas is a very powerful organizer of cognitive growth. Thank you, Kurt. Okay. I wish I could tell him this because he was so right. Yeah. I mean, he had the networks all wonky, but the idea was right. Right. So here's the really key kicker. What we show is that the more kids are doing this, which is involving the trade-offs of these networks in real time, we have them just rest and we look at how those networks are correlated with each other in real time. And then we take them back 2 years later and we have them rest again in the scanner. And what we show is that this tendency to transcendent thinking, which is, by the way, not correlated with IQ. We did full-scale IQ on the kids. Not correlated with SES, not correlated with their parents' education level. Okay. So it's something the kid is bringing to the space. I'm not saying they invented it out of nothing. I'm sure they have relationships and everything, but it's not just a factor of having been educated more or something like that. Right. What we show is that transcendent thinking predicts the increase in the coordination between the executive control and default mode networks, which are kind of trading off. They're like a seesaw. They're the opposite, like, modes of the brain over time. So in other words, we are predicting the future of that child's brain growth above and beyond anything we ever knew predicts brain growth, like IQ, based on the way the kid engages with meaning-making around complex social stories. So that's, that's really, I think, powerful, powerful data. And it's under review right now, I should say, at Nature Communications. We don't know what the reviewers are going to think. But, uh, you know, it's a powerful statement for the role of the person and their own dispositions to think in these ways, which I should say all the kids did it at least some. So all kids could do it, right? Every kid did it at least a couple times across that 2 hours. And then it's their disposition of mind, which is driving them to interpret the world in particular ways and to work at trying to make sense of what they see and who they are in that space. And as they do that, they're growing themselves. And as they're growing themselves, they're also growing a kind of neural stability which produces well-being and a capacity to manage yourself in relationships.

There we go. I did ask. I mean, blimey. Yeah, you guys have a whole story.

I was like, so what?

It's amazing. It is amazing. And, and that's why people, I know colleagues of mine are just super excited. It's like a neurobiological kind of justification for progressive education, right?

But it really is.

Yeah. But sorry, Zach, just from your perspective, just feel free, pick up on obviously anything there, but I'd love to hear your thoughts.

I mean, there's so much there, right? Like, cuz what you ended up not saying, Mary Helen, was that, and that way of thinking isn't what schools are generally promoting.

That's right. Yeah. No, no. That's right.

And that I think is very problematic. And so there's this deep question as you began. So if schools aren't doing that, and that's the kind of natural way the brain would essentially get on those good trajectories, and then the kids kick back into some kind of mental health. And then the question is, well, why the hell are the schools doing that? Like, what's the sociological explanation for why build the system that actually works against itself? And so this notion that like a couple of things are occurring, I think, and that are related to this question of One is the digital. So the other thing that's happened to the adolescents is the digital, and that is one of the reasons that the schools are now failing faster and worse than— Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's like exacerbating.

So, so there's this way that there's a new— so like, we didn't always read, and then we were— we became reading beings, and now we're something else. We're digital beings. I don't know what it is, but my guess would be that something is occurring that's disrupting normal socialization. And even things like face recognition neuronal recycling. Like, there's a whole bunch of weird stuff at the level of perceptual disruption, sensory integration, as a result of the screen-based socialization. So this is a factor. But the schools— what is occurring is a classic pattern, unfortunately, in civilizational collapse research, which— and they call it diminishing returns on investment in complexity. So at first, you invest in the complexity of schools as a social control function. And they work great during early industrialization. You're getting all these immigrants into the big American cities and you build these bigger and bigger schools and they're like factories and you don't have to worry about controlling your executive function. We'll control it for you with these bells and beating you and all. So like you actually, you build a system of social control. And at first, a little bit of investment in that complexity, added social complexity, gives very large returns. But you reach a threshold with a certain problem-solving approach, namely with the idea of a school, period. You reach a threshold with that idea of solving social control where now the more you invest in making it more complex, the worse it becomes. And so I think with No Child Left Behind, we crossed a threshold of making the system of control more complex, trying to think that therefore we would make better outcomes, and we started to get negative returns on the investment in complexity of social control. And so this is happening in many of our systems. It's happening in food systems where it's actually kind of— you get better food from your little dinky garden than from some like massively scientifically complex optimized efficiency agribusiness, right? So it was great at first and then we get diminishing returns on solving the problem that way. And so I think we're reaching a point where solving the problem of intergenerational transmission through schools has become very problematic. I think the digital is doing that and I think the shifting nature of the broader society, as you mentioned, Mary Helen, all of these other systems that gear into the educational system themselves are being disrupted. So if you do have the luxury of an adolescent not to be so overscheduled that you can assume a closed body posture and sit back and reflect on your future—

you have to be safe, you have to have time, you can't do it.

Safety and time. And when you start to do that, what are you going to realistically think about your future? So that's the other thing. There's a lot of difficulty telling true things to kids about what the future is going to be like. And so I think this is one of the things that's driving it, is the uneasiness in our culture about the future of all this. And so that's what's nice about the default network, is you locate yourself in time and space. But one reason you don't want to go there, which is why meditation is hard and other practices are hard that actually allow you to just open your mind and daydream you can think is that when there's uncertainty, when there's risk in your vision, it's harder to do that. So, so yeah, so I'm kind of leading up to this broader point, which is that the adolescent mental health crisis is like a canary in the mine way to think about civilization in general. That when you look at the history of civilizations collapsing, especially the ones that are well documented, the breakdown of intergenerational transmission is one of the places where the problems start to occur most profoundly first. And so that means that thinking about stopping some of the worst eventualities from occurring as we rebuild some of our systems, like our energy systems and our food systems, I would argue that we need to think about educational innovation first and foremost and primary. Because even if we solve these technical problems, like we sequester carbon and we align AI and all that shit, if we do that, but then we can't teach the kids to do it or they don't care that we did it or they're angry at us or whatever, if we don't solve the problem intergenerational transmission, then it doesn't matter how clever we are in our generation. So there's a primacy to this. And the other thing that happened, I think, is that the schools as we know them were built kind of before the sciences of learning reached maturity. And so Mary Helen, what you're describing is actual science in education, which we've never kind of really— We've never had.

No, we describe the outcomes, but we've never looked at the mechanisms scientifically.

Exactly. So in that sense, of course we need to redesign this institution at a very foundational level. It's like, so I think that's very important too, to get that there's a threshold we crossed in understanding human development that does dictate a different basic form of education system. And so there's a lot to say about that. So that's my reflection, and that's incredible work.

Amazing. It really is. Thank you.

Can I add one thing before we go on about the intergenerational transition? So we, we wanted to try some kind of programming. I hate the idea of that, but we wanted to do something that might enable kids to increase their transcendent, their capacity for transcendent thinking without actually directly telling them to do this. Like, what do I do? So we partnered with a group called Sages and Seekers, which is an amazing group, by the way, where it's an intergenerational storytelling program. So, right, when you said intergenerational loss of communication, I'm like, and I have to tell you about this study, which is under review right now. So elderly people from the communities that the kids are in, teenagers, anybody who wants to come and commits to coming can sign up. There's no like you have to be anything to do it. Um, they're low SES communities, right? So we have the elderly people and we have the kids and they speed date with each other, get to know each other with all these cool little activities and then they pair themselves up to be friends to work. It's not a mentoring program. It's a work program where they tell each other stories that help them generate these narratives of their life, right? So elderly people are trying to do a kind of life review, right? And that makes them feel generative, like they have something to give back and like their life was worth something. And then teenagers are trying to invent a life that they haven't made yet. So they need a story about who they want to be. And they work together on this. And we had, you know, video diaries that the kids gave us every week on this 8-week thing. And the kids spontaneously over time start making these more transcendent reflections on their own self and on values and ideas. Right. And then those, the increase in transcendence, you know, does silly statistical things like moderates or mediates actually the increase in your sense of purpose and all this kind of stuff. Right. Yeah. Yeah.

Inner generation is key. Yeah.

It's such a basic answer. So basic. It's so like, and there you have it. You know what I mean?

And when you think like, what is education? Like, what's the basic, most primordial form of education? It's not the school and certainly not reading a book or looking at a screen. It's sitting with an elder and listening to them tell a story and then putting your own life in the context of their story, essentially. And that there's something about that, that just the doing of that creates meaning and purpose. As you're saying, both parties kind of need it. And it's funny that we have to create a whole, like, special programs to, like, do that. Oh, I know, like, amazing.

We have that program with cookies and the 8 weeks in the senior center to be able to do this. And I should also mention that was Rodrigo Rivera's dissertation work in my lab. Yeah. So he really should get credit for that.

Yeah. Very, very, very important. And that's like when I, again, I work in this field of catastrophic risk and one of the risks I talk about a lot is a catastrophic disruption of intergenerational transmission. And again, it's, it's one of the things that characterizes civilizations that collapse is basically the youth just split and you get either a generational war or you get the like intergenerational warfare, which is kind of what it looks like with the student loan thing. That's another That's another issue. It's not always the kids that attack first.

No, no, no, no, it's not always.

No. Yeah, exactly. So there's that. And then there's the, oh, we actually didn't teach the kids how to run this thing. Like, this is a very big, complicated society. It's hard to know all the moving pieces and we haven't taught the kids exactly how to do that. And then so we die without someone to replace us at the helm of some very complex institution or something like that. So the capabilities crisis. A shortfall of capability and intergenerational transmission, and then a legitimacy crisis where there's a shortfall of ability to say you should participate because it's valuable to participate, but you can't convince them to give their energy to the civilization. So there's many failure modes of intergenerational transmission. And the funny thing is, what you just described is the easiest way to solve it. It's like, well, actually, if we didn't sequester the old people in one institution and then sequester the kids in another, and then in that other one, we sequester the kids precisely by age the entire time so they never meet a kid who's 1 or 2 years older than them, maybe we could get— So that's an example of a weird design feature, I think, that again, from human development perspective, is radically antithetical to the way it should be. There should be a lot of interaction across age group and across different forms of eldership. And then the deeper issue, which is a harder one to fix, is the absence of kids in meaningful work that's solving problems in their community. So before the public schools, you had the guilds. And now the guilds weren't great, but the guilds were an opportunity for a kid at any age to be able to get into mentorship in a relationship where both he and the elder are working on a problem that the community needs fixed, like shoeing horses or something. And there's this way up and into, at a very early age, a sense of being able to contribute, being worthwhile. As opposed to now in school, the only person benefiting or not from your work is you. But the definition, one definition of work would be what I do matters to the society that I'm in or other people. So David Graeber has that book Bullshit Jobs. The idea being that there's a whole bunch of jobs where, yeah, you're doing a job, it doesn't really matter, it only affects you, you get paid or not. It doesn't like you're not contributing, it's just bullshit. And so to many reflective adolescents, school feels a little bit like a bullshit job. Like, why am I doing this? I know I'm doing this to compete with other kids to get into college and I'm building my own skills. But some of what makes them feel diseased is the sense that the world is burning. There's many, many problems and I'm held back from helping until I graduate or something, right? Or maybe then, or maybe I have to get more complex skills. So I'm held back until I graduate from graduate school, actually. Or so the question of when do you get to participate in meaningful work? Work is a question we have to solve to solve the mental health crisis, especially as the news gets harder and harder to hear. There's all this complex stuff going on. You were like caging them into the schools. No, no, you can't go help. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. So that sense of—

that produces mental— that produces stress, you know, because you feel hopeless and helpless, right? If you actually can help, it makes you feel better. Even if there's a major problem looming, you feel like you have a sense of agency. Right, in that space.

Yeah, there are those studies that show— I can't, I'm not gonna be able to cite them, but basically one of the best things to do for depression is to go help, like, in a soup kitchen or in an elderly home.

Yeah, do service, right?

You think it would make you more depressed, but in fact, the, the act of giving and solving a problem that's right there, right in front of you, that needs to be solved, that only you can solve, and you're standing right there and you give the hungry person food, you just did something real in a way that school feels like a simulation, like you're always preparing to do something that's going to contribute. And that's unique to our modern schools because it used to be kids, as soon as you were ready, man, you're with us. The age, again, the precise aging thresholds are also unique to our society. There's a whole story about that, that we didn't know our precise chronological age until basically after the Civil War. Before that, it was much more loose. And then the bureaucracy begins to regulate human behavior in a very precise way as if all 18-year-olds are at the same level of maturity. Interesting. Yeah.

So it's my 18-year-old's birthday today, by the way. I just had a kid turn 18 at my house today. Happy birthday. Officially an adult.

That's a big day. I know. Amazing. Can I maybe go back a couple of steps just to the point you raised about the learning sciences? Because, because the other, one of the things I see is this kind of doubling down of like reaching for the learning sciences to justify the goal-directed very traditional. And I think that's, again, that's another reason why people are so excited about your work, Mary Helen, because there seems to be a lack of supportive learning science research that is easily translatable to the classroom. And what actually is filling the space is all the retrieval practice and the very, the very goal-directed— Concrete. It's all super concrete. Let's just say it. Exactly. Completely concrete. Yeah. It's none of the transcendent stuff. And I just, yeah, I just wondered what your reflections were on that.

I mean, I'm just gonna be really like a troublemaker here, but I mean, I think at this point, the way we talk about it, the whole notion of learning is a red herring. I don't talk about learning. Throw it out. I'm sick of thinking about learning because learning in our society, in the way we conceptualize it, is about semantic recall and procedural recall in a context. Learning is not the aim of school. Learning is the means. The aim of school is human development. It's developing the dispositions, the capacities to be able to engage in a complex systems level of social and cultural institutionalization in the world and to reify and create the kinds of structures and systems that we want and that we need given the changing circumstances. And so the thing is, learning is essential. It's absolutely essential. But it's essential because you need fodder to be able to develop around. Not because it is the endpoint, but we call learning the outcome, learning outcomes, and then we're done. That's what school's about. It's about producing learning outcomes, but it's not. The learning outcomes are just the sort of midway toward what you're really supposed to be working on, which is how did learning these things, how did engaging with thinking about these things develop you as a thinker, as a person, as a citizen? Those are the outcomes we should be caring about, but we think about them as on a separate track from the learning. There's the math and then there's There's the other stuff, the civic engagement, the non-cognitive, the whatever you want to call it, which is kind of ridiculous. It's like we've, you know, oh, we're worrying about what stuff to put in the horse's cart. And we forget there's a horse that has to pull the cart. We don't worry about the pulling. Who is the horse? Right? And how fast are they going to go? And under what circumstances? What are they going to shy at when they go through the woods? You know what I'm saying? It's about the horse. And of course the horse needs to be pulling something. If an empty cart isn't going to get you anywhere. But when we think about learning, I just think it's a red herring. And here's another way to think about it, which I need to write about this. I haven't done this yet. You know, if we think about it from a neuropsychological perspective, we know that, you know, in a very broad-based kind of way, memory is not one thing. It's a whole set of capacities that we have. So you can kind of think of human and actually animal memory as having a sort of a semantic system. So there's semantic memory, memory for facts, for things. For information. There's procedural memory. And of course, these things are not operating in isolation. They're intertwined with one another. Well, you know what to do with that information. You know how to solve a, you know, long division problem or whatever it is you're trying to do, right? So there's semantic and there's procedural. Schooling has focused, and the learning sciences in particular, have focused on almost exclusively semantic and procedural memory. But there's another kind of memory, which is the autobiographical an episodic system. And even in mice, it's the autobiographical memory of having been in this place before and felt a certain way because I was with my other mouse friend, right? That actually makes you able to organize the semantic and the procedural memory in a way that's adapted to that context. And we completely ignore that kind of memory in our learning sciences. Right? We've forgotten about the autobiographical. Now there is a huge movement back in the other direction, right, of people saying, yeah, but kids' cultural orientations and assets matter, the individual, you know, proclivities they bring to the space, the relational strengths, the interests they bring. All of those derive from this other kind of memory, which we know we're starting to understand is important, but we think of it as something extra or something, when in fact it is the hat stand that all the other stuff gets hung on. And we ignore it.

Yeah, yeah. And yes, schools like— schools ignore it, but advertising doesn't.

Oh yeah, that's right, it's all about triggering certain identity affiliations, right?

So pop culture doesn't. And so while school's not handling it, the adolescents are getting it, usually from, again, the digital, you know, looking at their phone. And, and another place where they're not looking at mechanism, but they're certainly doing a science of behavior control, is precisely in the— the social media.

Absolutely, they're doing what works.

They know what works to get people to do stuff. And the video game industry is another case where they're beating the schools. They're far ahead of the schools in terms of just pure amount of money spent on getting people to learn skills. And it's the skill of the video game, basically. The zone of proximal development and reward systems, and they're doing all that in a kind of Skinnerian fashion, but they are investing more money. But the identity manipulation is more fundamental, and that's basically what social media is designed to do. And some of this issue in particular is one of the places where the kind of the design features of the modern school in particular have broken down, because we separated church and state, which means to a certain extent we weren't supposed to tell that kid what the meaning of his life was and like what his soul was about. So we kind of separated that, and that was fine when you had strong religion at home and when you had the emerging civil religion. Because then for a while we could tell you you're an American and it's good to be American. It's great to be American, you know, civil religion. So the school could kind of inform your identity. But now with a more fully postmodern culture, it's not actually clear what the school tells you when you start asking, "Who am I? What is a good life? What does it mean to not misspend my life? What do I give my energy to?" Is it America that you give your energy to? A lot of people wouldn't be happy with that answer. Is it the corporation you're going to work for in the future? Is it, you know, Jesus? Like, what is it? And so there's this kind of absence at the center of culture, which is a collapse of value at the center of culture. And this is what's sometimes called the meaning crisis, where it was a great innovation after the Thirty Years' War to separate church and state. Like, let's do that, guys, and let's not use the schools to indoctrinate religiously. But now we're in a place where adolescents are asking very profound questions about their own identity. And the schools can't answer them. And they're getting answers from superhero movies and pop songs and advertising campaigns and sports stars and other things. So the question of how to kind of both reinform the sciences of education but also solve this broader question, which is in a kind of very late-stage capitalist, post-industrial, postmodern situation, what are those answers to those questions? Where do we get them? Do we look back to religion? Do we try to find some new secularist religion that we take our— which is what you see in some of the social movements, where they put something in the place of a religious idol, whether it's mindfulness, whatever it is.

Mindfulness, whatever it is.

Yeah. Whatever it is. So there's that sense of the idolatry due to the collapse of what would be infinite. And so, yeah, these are some of the deeper things I worry about, and I don't know answers. But I do know that another sign of civilizational collapse is sometimes called political Gnosticism. And the Gnostics were, of course, a philosophical sect that believed the whole world was evil. And so the political Gnostic is a position that believes absolute cynicism about the political world and that there's kind of nothing worth saving. And so this is spreading, a kind of political Gnosticism, a kind of radical skepticism about the value of civilization itself and about some of the ideals, let's say, of the Enlightenment and of democracy. And all of those things require that throttling between those two systems you were describing, right? There's a deep capacity that we're losing at the level of our neurological organization. I think of McGilchrist, who I've spoken to as well, about just how hard it is to actually reflect. Like, you know, often when exciting young people come to me, the main thing I challenge them with is like, sit down and read a book for 3 hours. And you can get up and go to the bathroom and stuff, stuff, but then come back and just focus for that long on one book, which is something I used to— I miss doing that. I wish I could actually find the time to do that. But it was so important to have that reflective ability and to be able to sit there with very long-form attention.

Amazing. So I wanted to say, just to reflect, one of the reasons I introduced you, Mary Helen, to John Verveke was exactly what you were talking there about. The different types of memory, because he's talking about that really actively. And, and, you know, to Zach's point about kind of putting something in the place of a, a religion that's not a religion is, you know, part of what he's building and talking about. But the other thing I wanted to mention was Zach, your work with Lectica and with Theo and with hierarchical complexity, because as we maybe think a bit more practically about schools now with all these big thoughts and big ideas, one of the leverage points potentially is the way that we assess learning or human development, etc. And maybe I'd just love it if you could talk a little bit about that work with Theo and what hierarchical complexity is, and then more importantly, how you've designed assessments around it, because I think that's quite a tangible and practical thing that would be really useful.

Yeah, and it's relevant. I, I caught between the lines of what Mary Helen was describing when she thanked Curt for that distinction between the kind of concrete and the transcendent, which I'm coupling to the relation between representations and abstractions. Yes, of course.

I'm just not going to talk about it like that because—

Exactly. No, of course. Why would you? And so there's this common lineage of neo-Piagetian thinking, and the Lectural Assessment was about finding a very accurate and precise way to make those distinctions between the more concrete and the more abstract, the more complex, hierarchically complex. And so insofar as we wanted a school system that would promote that kind of reflection, We would want the ability of both teachers and curriculum materials to be able to be responsive to that. And so it's a tricky thing because, as I said, diminishing returns on investment and complexity. One of the things we did in the schools was start to measure way too much stuff and start to pin way too much to measurement. So the first thing I'd say is, in response to your question, is one of the kind of principles of Lectica is that we do embedded formative assessment. Which means we don't do high-risk, one-time standardized assessment in school context. You want to make the assessment part of the ongoing conversation between the teacher, the student, and what's being learned so that it kind of disappears into the curriculum materials. And then you want to make an assessment that empowers the teacher and student with the language of evaluation that they're working with. So instead of like giving them some abstract number out of black box which says you're bad or good and doesn't explain how you can get better or worse or kind of what that really means. The goal of the assessments are to not obfuscate what's going on, to precisely say, like, you understand these things and there's this other set of things that you could come to learn that are slightly more abstract and integrate these lower-level things. So the precision of it and the introduction of the kind of what we call learning sequences as opposed to levels or stages guiding people through learning sequences to the extent where the teachers get to know how a learning sequence works and then you don't even need a standardized assessment because the teacher can observe and speak with the student and be able to guide through the learning sequence. So there's a non-invasiveness that's key. And many of the things that are wrong with our current system have to do with the misuse of measurement, misplaced concreteness, hypertrophying, focusing on optimizing one measure at the expense of all the externalities that that creates, like in all kinds of fields. So in education, I think we want to measure as little as possible, assess a lot, but assessment's different. Assessment is conversational and going on all the time. If you're a teacher, you're constantly kind of like seeing where everybody is. But the kind of standardized sense of a very clear measurement thing, I think, is we should never have really done that the way that we did it at industrial scale. First with the IQ tests and then with the SAT and then with No Child Left Behind, that was a mistake because we were treating human beings as if they were subject to the commodity form. Another place where Kurt was so central was like, no, everyone's unique. There's uniqueness, there's radical individual difference. And so if that's the case, then you can't, like a bludgeon, try to make these nicely shaped commodity products out of the school system. That's what the measurements were initially attempted to do. So the other thing about the electrical assessment is that there's enough moving pieces that the assessment can like help the student and teacher see the unique individual differences rather than the assessment occluding the individual differences. So you can use measures to get rid of error, like, oh, the measure helps me see everything that's the same, but you can also use measures to show me how different everything is. And so it's a slight frame shift where we're saying, no, use this to reveal individual differences. As opposed to occlude them. And again, that's a general thing. It would be great if we did it with measures. So it's like, okay, GDP, that's a great measure, but that's one measure. You can drive your GDP with a whole bunch of bad stuff or you can drive your GDP with good stuff. And so that notion of, okay, what does the measure reveal as opposed to what it hides, that there's a constant dialectic in all measurement. So we're trying to couple the application of the measurement to kind of tracking the things that it might exclude. Which again wasn't done with IQ or SAT, where those numbers became just like, they became part of the identity of the student. Like, "Oh, I'm a person with this SAT score," which is like importing a language of self-understanding from psychometrics, which isn't even psychology. Like, it's one thing to import Freudian theory or something, but to import psychometrics as the language you use to describe your identity, we've just handed these kids a paucity of languages of self-description. So that's a little bit of the way that we're thinking about it. And yeah, nothing will change until the way that we do assessment changes in the schools. Very, very important point.

Yeah, keep in mind too, one of the things I really like about the kinds of assessment that Isaac and Theo have been designing is that they're process-oriented. They're growth trajectories. They're not endpoints or even stage points, right? Like, so you might meet this, you know, might get to this level of understanding something, but then it's also, it's a dynamic thing. That, that means that you can now deconstruct and reconstruct, right, up to that point, right? And it may be a glimmer of the point that's more complex, right? And you're moving around in there in accordance with context and with, you know, the changing dynamics of the demands of the situation. And, and so it's a much more process-oriented and dynamic developmental way of thinking about what people are coming to know and be able to do.

Completely agree. And in fact, that variability of being able to move between the abstract and the concrete—

That's what counts. It's not staying abstract all the time. You never get anything done.

Exactly. And in the context of those moral judgments, to be able to both feel the concrete empathy and go to the broader concerns about the social system and how one could help. So that move between them, very misunderstood by developmentalists and other places where "Jess really nailed it." Most developmentists are like, "Just run up, move as fast as you can up the thing." And Curt's like, "Whoa, no, don't do that." Yeah.

And then once you're up there, you're always up there, right?

Exactly. Always, all the time. Even when you're first waking up and when you're making breakfast, like all the time, you're optimal performance. In every context. Yeah. So, yeah. So, we're, in a sense, it's like, you know, it couldn't have been some other way. We couldn't have built better school systems before we knew some of the things that we know now about human development. And as bad as what I I say about the schools is they did solve a very important problem at the time when they were created. So this question about a very new social form that handles what schools now handle, it'll look a little bit like a school, but it won't look like the schools that we've known, and it will integrate digital in a very fundamental way. So that's going to happen. This is my prophetic prediction that schools as we know them are going to end, and we're going to get these hybrid emergent things, and that will be probably coupled to very significant transformations in the economic system. So things like basic income and automation are also going to change the landscape.

We're already seeing it in some sectors, right? The schools I was visiting all day on Wednesday, you know, it's exactly that, for better or for worse. And some of it I think it doesn't work very well, um, but they're trying, they're trying.

Yeah. One of the things that the concerns I have is around the kind of the danger of what you were saying, Zach, about actually some things just is better to leave implicit. We don't need to measure everything. And the kind of surveillance capitalism coming in from over here that it's going to suddenly Like, yeah, great. We want to be looking at human development. So we want to be looking at empathy and compassion development and all these things. And suddenly you've got these like wired up smart classrooms where they're gathering data all the time on blink rates and, and, you know, alignment between physiology.

What's the point is the thing. What's your goal? You have to think what is the goal of that? Certainty. Certainty. I mean, about what? Right? About what? About who blinked when? Or about something bigger than that? You know?

No, it's very complex. And as much as I say we shouldn't measure things, the default trajectory of the tech development is towards more measurement. We're going to get very ubiquitous sensor networks that are coupled to the internet. We already have those. We'll get biometric sensors. People already love that stuff. People love to self-measure, basically. And there's weird correlations. Again, another study I can't place, but correlations between the availability of bathroom scales and incidences of anorexia. And basically this gets created where you see the number and then you modulate to the single measure.

Yeah, you're micromanaging yourself in this kind of externally oriented way.

Exactly. And so yeah, they're going to have measures proliferate, and many of them already, like Facebook, TikTok, these places build psychometric profiles based on your behavior and then customize what they deliver to you. And so that's, I think, already problematic. We're reaching a state with what's called generative AI where you'll be able to couple the curative AI, which we already have, with the generative AI, both of them customized to your psychological profile. So that's when it starts to get bad because this thing will be able to create very convincing text, very convincing video, images without a human prompting it, just based on what it thinks you want. And so you end up with an inexorably persuasive and incredibly charismatic endless conversation partner customized to you. So if the phone didn't already kind of break schools, these things are going to. And the only way out is, I believe, well, I think we should regulate the technology. I think honestly that basically if you are below 18, you should have a very limited set of things that you can have access to technologically. I think we're going to learn that lesson possibly soon with this thing. But the curation and creation coupled means that it's an endlessly fascinating, perfectly made for your limbic system set of experiences. So we may cross that threshold. Again, I think the only way out of that is to do the richer embodied experience that is always more fascinating than anything the computer could generate. And I'm hoping that remains true. But if you really create those contexts where you're listening to the elders tell stories and you're putting your own story in the context of what the elder is telling you, where you have a teenager who's teaching you how to play a new sport in a park. If we can actually create real human experience and make that possible, you could get some resistance to the rapidity of the uptake of these new technologies. But yeah, so those are a little bit more of my reflections on how AI is going to change.

But because as you said, the digital's embedded in the new concept of what school could be, but it's the digital that's bringing humans back towards humans rather than, rather than further into this virtual world.

Yes, it's true. It's a tool. You can use it in many kinds of ways. I mean, like, because of these digital communication forms, my kids can call their grandparents who live on the other side of the country and see each other and have something that's much better than a conversation that they could have had on the phone that I would have when I was their age, right? Because you can actually have more interaction when it's not possible to be there together. I mean, it's too bad we can't be together, but Right? So there's lots of great ways you can use these tools. But when you step on the fast-moving train of letting them pull you through what they have curated for you, you are in for something that, you know, is gonna— is controlling your life, right? It's controlling who you are and how you feel and sucking you into that. I mean, I don't think it's an accident that the, the schools in these Silicon Valley communities where the parents worked on the early iterations of these technologies They sign contracts, the kids sign contracts saying I'm not going to use any of it so that nobody has to worry about being left out because when you come to this school we all agree nobody's going to have it.

Exactly. Yeah, that's how I think it should be. I think they're incredibly powerful technologies. I don't think we understand the effects that they're going to have. And, um, and we don't.

We can make some guesses, but knowing how the brain develops, knowing the nature of sociality, you know, and the profound sort of expecting of social input that the brain comes with as a source of information for how to grow itself. You know, this isn't just metaphor. It's like we, you know, our genes, like the Human Genome Project revealed this, right? It's like you read the two Nature papers that bookend the Human Genome Project. The first one says like, we're going to, you know, list out all the genes that are, that make up this one human. And we're going to have, it's this huge international effort and we're going to have this new insight into health and disease and aging and, you know, all this stuff. And then the next paper basically says, We're done already, right? I mean, it's like human beings have about as many genes as a goldfish. And we have fewer genes than like rice plants, right? And many kinds of plants. It's like, we realize like, duh, our genes are not instructions. They're contingency plans. You know what I mean? They're, they're basically a set of contingency plans, you know, given a certain kind of social world and a certain kind of emotional experience, morph in this way, adapt like this, grow yourself like that, because that's what's going to fit you in.

Yeah, that feedback loop between the technology and the human is one of the things that defines civilization. And we're moving towards exponential technologies in the domain of AI. And so it's very unpredictable what the future ends up looking like. Yeah, so I'll spare the AI doomsday scenarios.

But it's better because you both are working in this space with the ideas that you're coming out with. So I mean, I'm going to wrap it up there just in interest of your time. I just want to say thank you firstly for taking the time. I love the fact that you know each other somewhat already and now reconnecting again because your ideas are so powerful and so important. So thank you so much. Thank you. Amazing. Have a great day. Okay, great. Cheers. Bye-bye. Bye. We hope you've enjoyed this episode.

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