Making Children Smarter
Or...can we please stop making them dumber?
I’m not enthused about writing another article critical of education, so I almost turned off my computer.
Then I read a few posts this morning on LinkedIn and Substack, and felt the fire again.
So, here’s my new lede: Oh my God, can adults please get it in gear!
Myself and Phil Alcock, my Co-Founder and partner at PBL Future Labs, have been doing our best to help schools design/redesign environments and processes that advance student learning (and happiness) in an AI world.
We’re far from alone. A cadre of leading educators globally continue to innovate, offer edge-thinking solutions to deep-seated problems in schooling, and even question the foundation of the current system of learning.
The deep threat of AI to conventional schooling provides high octane fuel for this conversation. But in fact, there has never been a shortage of solutions. Review the literature of the last 75 years or so, and you’ll find a nearly infinite set of ideas that—if ever implemented—would have aimed education in a different direction, mostly toward more freedom, experiential learning, social-emotional health, and balance between academic mastery and whole child growth.
But an opposite trend, mostly post-pandemic, has taken precedence—to limit freedom in schools, demand compliance, and reward a mix of retention and low level critical thinking backed by standardized testing, explicit instruction, and scripted curriculum delivered by highly ‘trained’ teachers.
One article this morning on this topic was enough to send me back to the computer. It described the recent decree of the U.K. Minister of Education. “No inquiry allowed in classrooms,” he said. When I read that, I thought: Good luck to my British colleagues.
It’s no mystery why so many leaders in education have concluded that a rigid approach to learning is effective. First, standardization is the norm. Schools, especially in America, were built for standardization of the workforce. That design was reinforced by early ideas about intelligence (including idiot and moron as legitimate scientific terms for sort and select) which placed the highest value on IQ, rational thinking, and academic degrees.
Cognitive psychology from the 1960’s and present neuroscience has cemented the model. A flow chart of the brain describes the location of memory and affect, the bottleneck of working memory in the cortex, and the prefrontal suite where executive decisions are made. It’s just a matter of plugging in more information.
All this backs up the present system: More information makes you smarter. More retention indicates mastery. More mastery indicates the brain has gotten the workout and productive struggle it needs to meet the learning goals for life.
The brain learns, as one child development expert proclaimed on LinkedIn this morning.
My response: What about people?
I’ll say something that will irritate many educators: Most teachers understand very little about the brain, and virtually never question how the mind arises from a cluster of biochemical networks in the brain. Many continue to accept the false analogy of brain as a muscle. That’s why ‘productive struggle’ is debated. How else can you get a workout unless you bench press a textbook every day?
It’s a view that flow charts reinforce: A simplistic diagram of a mysterious organ and warm, dark, wet environment housing 86 billion neurons with trillions of synapses that network with each other, connect to the whole body, and interact with fluctuations and stimuli from relationships, challenge, trauma, and the joyful or negative surround of daily life.
I don’t expect teachers to be neuroscientists. But they are expected to know children. And that knowledge shows up in a strange way: Most teachers I’ve worked with accept the cognitive model but don’t fully embrace it.
There’s a reason: Every day they see streaks of wildness in their students, or neurodiverse minds with odd tendencies, or behaviors bordering much more on irrationality than reasoning.
And that’s what I suggest: Let’s rewild students.
That may sound radical but consider an odd fact: Psychologists have given up on defining intelligence or tracking down a mythical gene that determines IQ. Instead, they use a behavioral guideline: Intelligence is successful behavior in the environment.
If you’re reading the headlines on extreme temperatures in Europe, earthquakes in California, Venezuela, and Japan, or rising global sea temperatures, you get a forecast of what that environment may look like when students enter adulthood in a few short years.
That’s just a slice of the future. The next ten or twenty years will be chaos. That’s simply in the cards, a natural result of society’s futuristic jump, curent misalignment, and past mistakes. Required expressions of intelligence will include resiliency, adaptability, perserverance, critical awareness, problem solving, and kindness—along with the ability to think.
That’s what standardized education excludes. And the adult world will pay a steep price if it continues to limit young people’s ability and capacity to cope with change, respond intelligently to problems, and tap inner resources as well as information sources.
So, right now, I believe education faces an uncomfortable crossroads on two fronts. The most apparent is AI, which offers tools of empowerment that, if used as a thought partner, free students from rote learning and offer more space for thinking and inquiry. It’s a tool for freedom.
For schools intent on controlling learning and beholden to old methods, those are fighting words. But that’s only one battle. I expect AI will spur deep debate and a long overdue dive into human intelligence, which I wrote about in my last post, Why AI Will Force Us to Rethink Intelligence.
Right now, I’ll focus on a more acute argument: If education continues its march to standardization and narrow band thinking, it will make students dumber, not smarter. In fact, they won’t be smart enough for their world.
Here’s the good news. It’s possible to take action on both fronts at once using a simple approach: Stop thinking of young people as cognitive machines and start exploring a model of intelligence more in line with the reality of today, with the future they face, and with power of AI as a thought partner rather than a competitor.
If education can make that shift (and I believe it’s inevitable), we will see young people wildly capable of designing their future. And if we do our job right, it will be different than we imagined.
But that requires unwinding some deeply embedded ideas. How do we do that?
How do ‘unlimit’ intelligence? Start by ‘unlimiting’ ourselves.
I suggest independent thinking as a first step for teachers. Be honest. Based on your experience and knowledge, what do you believe about intelligence? What is your personal experience with growth? What do you see in yourself and others that suggest a deeper well of intelligence?
Then, be bold and ask: Shouldn’t education support your experience? Engage colleagues. Examine the supremacy of the brain. Question the assumptions of neuroscience.
I don’t make this suggestion lightly. But much of what is considered accepted fact is based on unexamined assumptions best gauged against intuition as well as research. Throughout global society, human experience is causing people to question authority. It’s time in education to take the same approach.
And beyond the deep dive, everyday you can choose to help students naturally access the holistic intelligence bestowed by Nature on humans. It’s time to trust, not restrict.
Here’s what helps surface and anchor the talents in young people they will need for their future:
Convey kindness and non-judgment in your relationships. Expressing our intelligence is a much more of a collective act than we realize. Judgment kills expression and creativity—that’s known. The field of the heart senses emotions—that’s also confirmed. Social neuroscience shows that the brain responds to the surrounding world. So why not use a method far more powerful than the threat of a test? It’s called connect and respect. As AI builds out it’s exponential powers, the deeper into humans teachers will need to go. You become the thought partner along with the technology.
Put challenge and problem-solving first. AI is going to force this conversation in society, but educators can get ahead of the crowd. Intelligence naturally occurs in response to meaningful challenge. It may have started with the mastadons (or learning to tie your shoes without a knot) but the present phase is about rising to the challenge of making a safer, more joyful world, reestablishing a positive relationship with Nature, building equitable societies, and eliminating pain points in communities. Set free to innovate, youth will perform—and they will excel with less curriculum, not more.
Honor choice as an innate human value. A staple of PBL is ‘voice and choice’ and the current emphasis on student agency reinforces that principle. But no teacher allows or gives agency; it’s an inherent feature of human intelligence. Rather than see this principle as a nice thing to do for students, understand that choice activates purpose. Purpose drives humans forward. Making forward progress requires problem solving. Problem solving relies on critical thinking. That sequence elicits more than productive struggle; it’s productive joy, which should remind all of us of an ancestral truth: The root of joy and genius is the same.
Design assignments with expanded intelligence in mind. Do you have a Four C’s poster on your classroom walls, with colorful images of student collaborating and communicating? Take it down. Posters don’t work. Instead, reshape your assignments to include an authentic bias. Even in the most traditional lessons, can you help students identify why they’re learning. How will it expand their repetoire of skills? Then go back to the intentions of the poster: Are you putting them in Learning Teams and giving them space and time to add depth and meaning to the assignment? I understand the objection here: We have curriculum to cover. Here’s my answer: Coverage does not prepare children for their future. AI will handle that.
Assess for process, growth, and progress. AI is rapidly forcing new assessment practices. But you’re not looking for evidence of cheating. Your looking for signs of growth in intelligence. This means more milestones, opportunity for reflection, and space for the uneven spurts and blocks that naturally occur as awareness and realization grows organically. That term organic is going to reappear in education as the artificial stress created by end of unit exams comes under more scrutiny. Exams may measure retention, but they don’t capture intelligence. That’s a problem.
Operationalizing these ideas isn’t easy. Phil and I know that. But we’re seeing great signs of progress among teachers in schools we work with, using a blend of individual conversations, facilitated Innovation Hubs, Learning Teams, Learning Missions, and training in AI methods and PBL philosophy.
If you’ld like to join us or learn more about PBL Future Labs products and services, contact Thom Markham at thom@pblfuturelabs.com or Phil Alcock at phil@pblfuturelabs.com. Visit the website at www.pblfuturelabs.com.
And please spread the word on AI, PBL, and intelligence!