Cultivating beautiful minds
What is a Beautiful Mind?
I’ve spent the last 30 years studying the development of the human mind. In the process, I’ve personally read, cataloged, and studied over 50,000 texts from people aged 5–18. These texts contain people’s thoughts on a wide variety of topics. Some of the texts reveal healthy, well-developed and curious minds — the minds of people who seem to care about themselves and others and demonstrate skills for thinking clearly and coherently regardless of their particular developmental level. On the other end of the spectrum are texts that contain more or less incoherent arguments with little evidence of care or skill.
When I read an incoherent text written by a clearly disaffected child whose communication and thinking skills are poor, it’s pretty clear that something has gone wrong. It’s not pretty, and it breaks my heart.
On the other hand, when I read a text that reveals a healthy, caring, well-developed mind, I feel like I’m in the presence of an almost sacred beauty — the beauty of human potential fulfilled—a beautiful mind.
BTW: I view mind as a dynamic property that emerges from activities of the whole person, in interaction with the physical and social world. A beautiful mind develops when these interactions provide adequate support for healthy development.
Over the years, I’ve come to believe that the legitimate role of education is to support the development of beautiful minds. Moreover, I believe that the future of humanity hangs in the balance.
Here is some of what I’ve learned about growing beautiful minds, one element at a time.
Let the children play!
Over 100 years ago, James Mark Baldwin and Jean Piaget recognized that learning and play were strongly intertwined. Piaget’s “Moral Development of the Child” is essentially about the crucial role of play in children’s development. Today, thanks to developmental neuroscience, we know that the brain’s built-in learning mechanism, the dopamine-opioid cycle, is the engine that drives learning, and that the behavior that fires this engine is essentially play.
Before we began using technology & media as babysitters, most middle-class children in the US spent at least a couple of hours each day engaged in free play. They played games invented by children, built things from found materials in the neighborhood, made up their own rules, and largely resolved their own disputes. The skills built during this kind of play created the foundation required for future development.
Pre-adolescent children who regularly spend time in self-structured, lightly supervised free play automatically learn the way the mind is designed to learn — through self-guided, feedback rich, and playful interactions with the physical and social world. Through these interactions, they build the necessary foundation for future mental growth — especially when it comes to math, physics, social skills, self-regulation, communication, and logical reasoning. When we try to speed up development by exchanging free-play time in the physical & social world for more regulated, passive, or sedentary activities, we prevent the optimal development of this foundation.
I recommend a golden oldie, John Holt’s, “Growing without Schooling” to anyone interested in learning through play. This is the book that got me interested way back in the mid 1970’s.
Prioritize learning skills
Today’s educational systems tend to treat learning as something that needs to be guided by teaching professionals. To serve the development of beautiful minds, we need to do some reframing. Instead of making children dependent on educators, we need to equip them with skills for driving their own learning. This means providing children with frequent opportunities to make their own learning choices and design their own learning activities.
Build social interaction into most learning activities
Skill-oriented curricula, in which most learning time (outside of readings) is spent either practicing skills in real-world contexts or building knowledge with teammates and facilitators provide an ideal context for collaborative learning. When learning is a collaborative venture, children — with gentle guidance from educators — build interpersonal skills that evolve over time and are easily generalized into other social contexts.
Stop trying to speed up learning!
We’re always educating the current generation FOR something — to fill particular jobs, to use particular tools, to get to college, to accumulate wealth, to make their parents proud, to be systems thinkers, to use academic language, to be first in the world on standardized tests, etc. Lately, there’s even a movement afoot to educate our children to save the world (from what WE’RE doing to it at this very moment)!
All of these objectives are not only ethically questionable, they also create a sense of urgency that results in repeated efforts to speed up learning.
The problem is, these efforts typically fail to accelerate learning. Moreover, there’s a large body of research showing that attempts to accelerate learning tend to slow or stall it.
These findings are buttressed by evidence from PISA showing that the decades-long international push to get every kid into college is associated with an average drop globally of 12 to 20 points on its international assessment. (The US shows flat growth, which is essentially no growth at all.)
It’s time to stop trying to accelerate learning and focus instead on supporting the development of beautiful minds — well-developed, caring, and healthy minds that are equipped with everything they need to build the skills required to meet life’s challenges, whatever they turn out to be.
Cancel grade-based curricula
Back in the late 1990’s, we goofed — big time. We bought the idea that the best way to create a level playing field for students, was to set clear and ambitious learning goals for each grade. Decision-makers argued that children in each grade would have an equal chance to achieve these goals. The problem was (and is) that children do not have an equal chance of meeting these goals, because children have diverse interests and talents, and grow at different rates. In fact, students in a single grade often span a 5–7 year developmental range. Practically speaking, this means that some children in a 5th-grade classroom may be performing at a 2nd grade level while others perform at an 8th-grade level. Only a small percentage, 15%–20%, are likely to be performing in the sweet spot for the new, more ambitious curriculum.
In other words, the minds of the vast majority of students would not be able to develop normally because the complexity level of curricular content was too far behind or ahead of their minds. The kids at the top would be bored silly and tend to disengage and/or become disaffected. The kids at the middle and bottom would try to memorize as much as they could, but never succeed in truly understanding what they were being taught. In both cases, we would not only be wasting precious learning time, we’d also be preventing students’ minds from developing optimally.
In essence, during the last 25 years we’ve been interfering with the normal development of children’s minds. To remedy this situation, we need to develop skill-based (practice-based) curricula that support children in building knowledge and skills at their own pace, and we need to jettison the idea that we all need to learn the same “stuff.” Diversity is just as important in the human species as it is in the natural world as a whole. A true level playing field is one that celebrates and leverages this diversity.
We’re not just talking about this problem. We’ve created a salable tool designed to help.
Summing up
In order to support the development of beautiful minds, we need to respect and honor the essentials of what it means to be human. We are highly intelligent social beings whose minds are best suited to learning through playful and interactive skill-building activities that ensure the embodiment of knowledge while preparing us to play well with others, drive our own learning, and adapt quickly to changing circumstances.
You may have noticed that I haven’t said much about the content of learning in this article—aside from advocating choice. This is because I believe that the specific content of curricula is secondary to the primary objective of developing good minds. When it comes to curricula, I believe that the basic skills and knowledge required for everyday life should come first, supporting breadth should come next, and the remaining specifics should be flexible with respect to both the learner and the times.
