Learning in a Way that Actually Matters: Why Standardized Testing Contributed to the Metacrisis – and How to Fix It with Theo Dawson & Zak Stein | RR 25

Everybody can come out of schooling with a good mind and with trust and with human skills and all of those kinds of things that we need to be able to live well in the world. This is about, I've built the skills that I need to be able to solve these problems and I know it. Whereas I think what we're doing to our kids right now is we're depriving them of the opportunity to feel that they have competence in almost everything. If we can find a way to make sure that everybody has the opportunity to grow optimally into the best human that they can possibly be, that's for our main chance lives. You're listening to The Great Simplification. I'm Nate Hagens. On this show we describe how energy, the economy, the environment and human behavior all fit together and what it might mean for our future. By sharing insights from global thinkers we hope to inform and inspire more humans to play emergent roles in the coming Great Simplification. Today I'm pleased to be joined by learning and development researcher Dr. Theo Dawson alongside a returning guest and friend of mine, Dr. Zach Stein. Together we explore how the core skills needed to navigate today's crises are being stifled by our modern education and testing systems and what alternatives might help young people engage in a better way of learning. Dr. Theo Dawson is the founder and executive director of Lektika, a non-profit organization that develops and administers evidence-based developmental assessments and builds knowledge about learning and its role in the future of society. She received her master's and PhD from the University of California at Berkeley and is published widely in the field of cognitive development psychology. Dr. Zach Stein is a philosopher of education as well as a co-founder of Lektika. He is also the co-founder of the Center for World Philosophy and Religion, the Civilization Research Institute and the Concelion's Project. He's the author of dozens of published papers and two books including Education in a Time Between Worlds. Zach received his Doctor of Education from Harvard University. In this episode, Zach and Theo break down where our modern education systems have gone wrong over the last century and how this has contributed to today's global crises. They especially focus on the use of standardized testing to over-prioritize narrow boundary skill sets and memorization, which ultimately dampens the brain's ability to learn and think critically. Instead, Theo and Zach propose an alternative method of developmental measurement, one which emphasizes mental complexity, coherence and collaboration. Ultimately, hoping that cultivating these traits will make us more capable of solving our present challenges as well as handling whatever we may face in the future. With that, please welcome Dr. Theo Dawson and Dr. Zach Stein. Welcome, Theo and Zach. Nice to be here. Yeah. We've both spent decades researching how to best help children learn and develop, especially studying the role of measurement in education, including three decades of your work, Theo, culminating in the recent completion of a new framework on how to measure mental development. We're going to dig into the details of all that later in this episode. Given world events, just to start with the Middle East War, today is Wednesday, March 25th, when we're recording this, that's kind of on everyone's minds. No matter how it resolves, I think our world has changed. On top of everything else going on in the world, I want to ask each of you to start by articulating why is it so important that we now have different and new ways of educating young humans in the world now unfolding ahead of us? Good question. The idea to pursue the path that I pursued began at a time of crisis as well. I think for most of my adult life, I've held the conviction that if humanity itself wants to develop, that our primary focus needs to be on the development of our children. If we don't offer our children environments in which their minds can develop in a healthy way in which they can thrive as human animals, in which they can learn how to be with other humans and work with other humans well, that we just don't stand a chance. Particularly in times of crisis, I think that these kinds of crises arise out of our human fears and out of our doubts and out of our pain. If we can find a way to make sure that everybody has the opportunity to grow optimally into the best human that they can possibly be, that's where our main chance lies. The first part of my career was working with Theo with the same mentality that education is primary and it was actually working in these problems that I discovered, the problem of civilization collapse. I mean, Theo, you and I talked about it because you could see how if you broke the educational system, there would be such a profound confusion and such a profound spreading like wildfire, a type of contagion. And so wars often break out from confusion, from misunderstanding, from all kinds of things that could have been avoided had the precursor, had the upstream educational experiences of the key individuals involved and the key populations involved just been completely different. And so in a sense, the war is shocking but not surprising because of the state of education in America for the past 20, 30 years and this isn't even taking a stance on the war saying people are not equipped to understand what's occurring in the world. The world, the global, the measurement system we're talking about is a measurement of hierarchical complexity. So that's about how much complexity can you really manage? Like you were exposed to an overwhelming amount, how much can you really metabolize and we're ill-equipped to deal with just the sheer complexity, just the sheer number of ongoing, just understanding the Ukraine situation alone, let alone the Middle East plus Africa, you know, Africa plus China exists. And so the immensity of it requires a fundamentally different approach to education that allows us to develop into our full reflective capacity to be able to act meaningfully rather than just out of confusion and trauma. And anger and frustration and I think one of the things that we saw back in the day and we're talking the turn of the last century now was that the educational programs that were coming in and the form of assessments that were coming in were going to be absolutely destructive of the human mind because they were not taking into account human differences. They were built around the supposition that fairness and education was to have all five-year-olds learn the same stuff as all other five-year-olds. We talked about that so much back in the day. Like how could you think that putting a system in place that is a level playing field if you're expecting all children to be the same, it's outrageous? I know a lot of your work, Theo, on your new framework is about measurement. Let me segue with this. Yesterday I did a podcast with Ian McGilchrist and one of the things he pointed out is once all the beautiful things in the human experience like love and sex and money and friendship and all the things, once they're labeled and measured, they lose their beauty of their original sense. Can you explain why measurement is so important and why measurement has been misused in our educational system so far? First of all, I'd argue that we haven't been doing measurement yet. What we've been doing is something called testing. It's not the same thing because when you're doing measurement, measurement is independent of any particular kind of aim or objective. It's contentless. It's something that affords more possibilities rather than fewer possibilities. And it's something that can be used to create fairness in the world. Just so I understand, there's a difference between testing and measurement. And we've been doing testing but not measurement. But not measurement, yes. It's important to get that in most sciences, measurement is a very specific thing where they're succeeding with doing measurement. In psychology, things are very vexed. And the problem has been that many psychologists believe they're doing measurement when they're just doing testing as Theo is suggesting. So for example, a ruler has univariant kind of, it's divided into things that are exactly the same size. If I pick up the ruler and I move it to a piece of wood or I move it to my foot or I move it to a slinky or I move it to a cat, the ruler stays exactly the same. And I know that because I can see it. And it's a simple physical measurement system. That type of thing doesn't really exist in most of what is done in educational psychology and testing. What you have is a different type of process. So for example, the IQ test is an example of that. It is more like a statistical artifact than like a thing that detects a truly invariant property of nature. So there's been this question, what does it mean to do measurement in psychology? It's a question of psychometrics. And some people have decided, well, it's arbitrary. It's really only just the statistical artifact thing. So they're not realists. They don't think the mind works like other parts of nature work where there are invariant properties that can just be measured like temperature. Right? Other psychologists who are realists, which would be the neo-Peschians, I would argue, say no, no, no, there's a way that the mind is. You can measure the mind, but not all parts of it, but there are parts of it that you can isolate. And this construct of hierarchical complexity is one of those where you can measure it. You can create a thing that's univariant that you can take and you can move it around and apply it in different contexts and you can prove that it stays the same. And so then that's the psychometric part for you can talk more about. But theoretically, you imagine an apple, right? You're running an apple orchard and you're like, okay, let's test the apple. You bite the apple and you chew it. You're like, oh, this apple is sweeter than that apple. That's a test. It's not crazy to do that with your apples. But if you're a scientist, you would do something completely different. You could literally do dozens of tests that would be actual measurements of the qualities of the apple. Right? And so that difference between a kind of an assessment, which is getting at something and a scientific measurement instrument, which can demonstrate its own properties of being measurement like is too lacking in psychology. There's very few places where this is done. And where it is done, it is often done in a way that isn't useful educationally. That's actually damaging education. It's implemented in ways where students and teachers don't benefit, but decision makers do. I want to get to your current work or your lifelong work on this question, Theo. But maybe we look historically first, especially in the 20th century. Can you share what did testing and measurement look like and what role did it play in our broader education system and future employment for the then children, eventual adults? And maybe you could distinguish if this is a U.S. phenomenon or a global phenomenon. Well, I'm going to speak from my personal experience because I grew up in the 20th century and was part of the educational system. And at that time, we were doing something called progressive education in which students went through this process called streaming, where if you were a bright child academically oriented, you would get into one group. And if you are a child who was more interested in building houses and cars, you would be in another group. And so I benefited hugely from that arrangement because I got to be around other kids that were like me, who had similar interests, who were all able to be participants in the material and classroom and understanding what we were learning. And it was fun to be in those kinds of classrooms. And we did get tested every year or every two years. We would take these tests that were offered by the, I mean, everybody in the country took them and you would go into the office of the counselor and the counselor would say, oh, look, you did really well on this assessment. That's cool. You could do whatever you want to do when you grow up. I remember. Yeah. I mean, it was just information. It was just information. And in the classroom, we had grades and lots of teachers' comments on our work. And we wrote a lot. And I think kids don't have much of an opportunity to write now because there's so much focus on learning specific material that there's just not enough time to just be interacting and writing and doing projects. So that was blasted at the turn of the century by this new no child left behind idea because when you tested the kids that came out of that system, we weren't happy with the test scores. But the test scores were on tests that weren't testing the things that we were actually learning or the things that mattered because what does matter in an education? You come out of it competent, right? You come out of it with skills. You come out of it prepared for adulthood. You come out of it with the ability to work well with others. Those are all things that nobody was measuring. And nobody has really been able to measure effectively ever. And so we didn't get good scores on multiple choice tests. So what? But that was used to change the whole educational system. That and a few other things that happened at the turn of the century, such as the move toward accountability testing in schools so that schools were put to the test. If your kids can do well enough in these tests, you get to stay at school. We're going to take away your funding if the kids don't do well enough on these tests. It turned into there was also an initiative for everybody to go to college because you're not going to be a success in life if you don't go to college because somebody saw a statistic that said there was a relationship between going to college and making money. Is this 100,000 educators somehow convene and vote on how all this happens? Or is this Politburo of 12 people that made all these decisions that you just said? When you say we did this, who was it that made those decisions for all of the United States children? It was a political decision that was made by the federal government. I think it was about that time that we founded the educational... Testing service. If you look at the history of educational testing in particular. Oh my gosh, when I think of the acronym ETS, my blood pressure goes up a little bit. I must have something in my amygdala when I was 12, when I see those letters. Yeah, exactly. Well, and the guy who started that, one of the first president of that was also one of the key figures in the Manhattan Project. One of the presidents of Harvard. What? Yeah. James, Brian Cohn, I think was his name, or Conan Bryan, I forget which one because I'm dyslexic. But so the educational testing service was part of the military industrial establishment that had first repurposed the IQ testing to do the World War I, World War II, Army, Alpha and Beta, which were the first massive industrial scale standardized tests, which was an adaptation of Benet's IQ test, which basically took a million incoming recruits and sorted them by intelligence, ostensibly. Now, very complicated what actually happened there, but the ETS just turned that into something we used to measure all the high school kids to change college applications. And that happened because of Sputnik. So you have to get Sputnik, right? You have to understand that the push from the standardized testing complex and the change of the curriculum Theo was talking about, which kind of did away from the progressive schools, came from threat of Soviet Union and scientific arms race. And so the notion was we could find every schoolboy in Iowa who never would have found their way to Harvard, never would have found their way up into all the research apparatus that supports our state and military. Have we not created the IQ test and have we not created the SAT, which found this brilliant kid and so it goes from an aristocracy to a meritocracy. But even if that were true and the testing was completely accurate, it's a little bit like an idiot's savant filter. You're filtering for intelligence, that narrow boundary thing and all the other things that we might need to develop or to compete with the Soviets or whatever are not measured. Yeah, 100%. Mental development was not a concern. It was genius that they were looking for, particular kind of genius. And it worked, by the way. I mean, like if you look at the history of the post war higher education system in America and the way the money coupled to places like UC Berkeley and Harvard and MIT and the way they found the brightest minds, I mean, we won quote unquote the Cold War and dominated the scientific arms races. And in part that was because we were optimizing for a very, very narrow type of thing and rewarding it very, very, very heavily and that thing got shaped and morphed quite a bit. And it didn't get down into the K-12 educational system right away. It was more something that was happening at the level of getting into college. So the progressive education here continued right up to the beginning of the 20th century. And then no child left behind. That was the focus of my dissertation, which was again a massive federal intervention over the stage rights to mandate a certain type of standardized testing and tie it to school accountability, which means punishing schools that do bad on tests, rewarding schools that do good on tests, which set up an incentive structure to gain the test. And the largest cheating scandal probably in history occurred in Atlanta under the no child left behind mandates where from the superintendent down, there was systematic cheating across the entire district because of the nature of the incentive structures that had been put in place. It's very well documented. So that was the atmosphere in which Theo and I were working. So among the other problems with what you just said is the focus switched from educating and preparing young humans for successful adulthood to getting funding and prioritizing the school itself rather than the students. I think that we were doing a bit better at that, but I think that the formal educational system in the United States has always primarily been designed to serve employers. The children themselves, of course, if you've got great teachers, the children themselves are going to get some of that kind of nourishment from being in an environment created by a wonderful teacher. But when these big decisions are made, it feels like the children just don't matter at all. I mean, none of those things that you talk about, Zach, say the important thing is the health of the children and the wellness of the children and the growth of the children. So how did those changes, the no child left behind changes as well as the emphasis on standardized testing in the United States, actually affect the children's mental development? Do we have evidence on that? I have quite a bit of evidence. The first hard evidence that we found was when we were doing a very large literacy project with Harvard back in the teens, where we were looking at the literacy development of children in public schools all up and down the Eastern Seaboard. So there were thousands and thousands of students involved. And we created an assessment for that program that was just looking at their reflective judgment, their ability to think through complex problems with no correct answers, which is very different from what they were being educated for. And we were scoring those for their hierarchical complexity and scoring them for how clear the arguments were that the students were making, because we wanted to look at the health of the mind that was producing the responses. And what we discovered through that particular project was that children who had a high clarity in their performances were much more likely to continue growing on a steeper trajectory over time than those who had low clarity. How do you define clarity? And so what we used was a set of rubrics that we created that looked at various aspects of the way that they were making their arguments. But primarily what's really underlying this is that their arguments hang together, that the sentences relate to one another, that you can see that there's real meaning being conveyed. And what we found in this population was that the vast majority of the students didn't seem to be able to convey clear meaning. And so what we did was we looked at the relationship between the clarity scores that the students received the first time they took an assessment. And all of these students had taken assessments multiple times over a period of a few years. And we looked at the relationship between that first clarity score and how much they grew over time. And what we found was that the majority of children in that sample, it was predicted that they would probably stop growing completely in grade nine. Mentally. Mentally. Because they'd been so messed up. Their brains had been so messed up by the high levels of memorizing and the lack of ever being able to understand anything that they were learning. Because that's what you have to get was that these were kids, many of them, who would do fairly well on a traditional multiple choice test or a vocabulary test or a test that didn't push them to be reflective and use complex language skills. So they had the vocabulary menu of them. And it was actually the vocabulary that was destabilizing their ability to make coherent arguments. And then the long run outcome of that was overall less growth because you have no stable foundation to kind of build higher order knowledge on. What percentage of the United States educational system is still this, what you just described? Things have gotten a little bit better, but we still have a very, very strong focus on content on very particular content chosen by people who want those employees. So there was a real big push for science and science instruction, a real big push for math and a real big push for literacy. And many other things have kind of dropped out of the curriculum because they weren't tested in the same way that these other things were. So we got good employees and stunted humans? We got terrible employees because we stunted the humans. Employers are complaining like crazy about the difficulty people have thinking. Yeah. And with the 2010s, you also had the introduction of social media and ubiquitous cell phones among the youth. Right? So there was this perfect storm. So Jonathan Heights work, right? So he's shown basically, if you do global mental health surveys in the past, like through the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, you almost don't look at the kids because the kids are basically healthy. It's the adults, the adults who are mentally unwell. Now you look at global mental health statistics and the kids are more depressed, anxious than the adults. This is a complete flip from all the history of the global testing here and it starts to flip around 2010. It starts to flip right around the time when we're starting to see kind of both the ubiquity of the cell phone and the kind of end game of the standardized testing and curriculum complex that have been put in place. And when you say kids under 18 or under 18? Under 18. But you're also seeing in five-year-old, six-year-olds, eight-year-olds, bipolar disorder, depression, anxiety, you're getting suicides in 10-year-olds. Like there are big statistics in suicides at kids around that was unheard of, like completely totally rare and strange for there to be a suicide at that age. Now it is a thing. So you think it's a combination of social media, maybe now AI, and the actual testing way that we educate. I mean, they spend 40 hours a week in school when they're kids. Yeah, so it was that perfect storm. And there's other factors too. In fact, the question is how to explain that drop in mental health. Now we have AI coming in, no research behind it, no genuine questions about whether it's going to be good for us or not. And it's trying to take over the system, which is really just about making money. It's not about anybody really caring about the children, as far as I can tell. So given your expertise on education and testing and measurement, can you speculate how some people using AI for tutoring and maybe not even going to school or college because they can learn everything on Clawed or ChatGPT, what forcings will that cause generally? I don't think we know what's going to happen. But what I do know is that human beings evolved as a, we're basically, we're animals, we're human animals, we're evolved animals who have these very special minds. But the way that we, our brains are designed to learn is through practice and experience and engagement with other people in the physical and social world. And every moment that we spend not doing those things is a moment when we're not getting the benefit of what our brains and bodies are built to do. We're subtracting from the opportunity for that person to become the fully realized human being they can be. I know Zach knows my work pretty well, Theo, you don't as much, but I'm looking at energy depletion and the depletion of the stability of our biosphere and the depletion of trust in geopolitics. But I didn't really think about it that our young, healthy humans are also a resource that is in depletion. And it's a major, major resource that we need for the future, for better futures for the planet and the biosphere. And we need to see them as individual, valuable beings and support their development as individual, valuable beings. And some of the things that really bother me about the way people are reacting to the current situation are people who are coming along with just other new ways will manipulate them into being what we want them to be. So there's this big movement. They're going to become, we're going to teach them how to all be systems thinkers so they'll be able to solve the big problems of the world or we're going to convince them all that they have to save the world. That's going to be their role. And that is just a continuation of the same thing we've been doing all along. We do need some people to do those things, but not all people for sure. If we focus on the children and we help each one of them to develop to their full potential, we're going to get all that. Yeah, I see. Regardless of where they're going to end up landing in the hierarchy of scores, everybody can come out of schooling with a good mind and with trust and with human skills and all of those kinds of things that we need to be able to live well in the world. Is it partially because humans are so diverse and complex and there's, I'm guessing, 80 to 100 million sub-18 year olds in the United States or something like that, that the way that we test them now is just because we can't manage the complexity. So we had to come up with something. I mean, is there a way to standardize what you're describing that it could apply to all 50 states and the educational systems there? I like the fashion that I heard there. There is people who make tests and they're not evil. They just, I do feel compassion for them too because they are also trying to do something that they think is good. But I don't think that there's enough attention paid to the child at the end of the assessment. And in most cases with assessment, I think that's the problem. So by being able to create a content independent, non-deterministic, real measure that treats everybody the same. Everybody gets a fairness regardless of what they're interested in or where they're growing, you know, where they're growing well. And we are creating a system that allows us to follow that child and rather than us trying to indoctrinate that child. It sounds to me, and I'm certainly no expert on this, that this done right would require more teachers than we currently have relative to the same amount of students. Or is that not correct? I don't think so because there are several schools around the world right now that are doing these kinds of things for children without needing more teachers. I think that the tools that one of the reasons I'm creating, I've created this tool is because I want to make it so that more teachers can have the information about where a kid's at so that they've got this other little piece that's helping them to understand where the child's at so that they can build that skill of trying to provide for that child with that child needs in that particular moment in time. And we've pushed teachers away from that because now we're just trying, they're just trying desperately to get their kids to pass the test because that's what's good for the kids these days or that's how we think about it. But if you're provided with an opportunity to work with a tool that's constantly supporting you and trying to support that child, I think it takes a lot of the load off of the teacher actually in the end. And so I think they will be drawn to something if we make the right kind of thing for them to work with, they will be drawn to something that's going to help them to do that and to see it become more personalized for those children. So we have a scoring system that's this unit dimensional system now that is been thoroughly tested and is now completely standardized. And is also in its kind of it's got an interesting way that it's prescriptive in the sense that the scores, the scores that we give are based upon the way that a well developing brain is likely to show up. But what Zach said earlier that with Sputnik and the competition and we did develop the IQ to do all those things that was like in our national interest. What is in our national or global interest now that we need citizens of the world and the whole biophysical geopolitical future is going to be different. So it's not about having a culture in which everybody grows up and we're trying to get everybody to be systems thinkers. We're creating a diverse, a very, we're going to take that diversity that we started with. And we're going to keep a lot of that diversity because diversity is really important and complex. And we're going to be able to make systems and we're going to optimize the skills that those kids have so that they're going to be coming into the world with the basic skills they need to participate in society plus their own thing, their own skills that they have developed and their healthy minds. As an aside, I'm a systems thinker, but I certainly wasn't back in the day. I don't think I became a systems thinker until I was in my 40s because I started studying digital topics and I studied them for enough time that I eventually saw that they were interrelated. So, Zach, what do you want to add here? There's this question about the ideal measurement system would be one that would actually empower the student, empower the teacher. And then this leaves us in a very fundamental question about design of educational technologies, which are, are we designing educational technologies to make the teachers more like experts, make them more like people who make really complex, considered judgments under conditions of uncertainty like you would with your surgeon or a lawyer or something like that? Or are we making technologies that de-skill the teachers towards a path of replacing them under a model of educational technology is supposed to replace the teacher rather than professionalize and make the teacher like an expert with special forms of knowledge. And so, CIO's tool and one of the most exciting things is it could give us a science of education where the teachers are citizen scientists, where the students are scientists about their own learning rather than have these tests be these radical impositions on the whole system right down to the pedagogy, giving kids ulcers, putting them at high stakes competitions against one another rather than on a growth mindset in relationship to themselves and as part of a system where there's all of this knowledge being generated. So, it's really as Theo was saying, she hesitated to use the word paradigm, but it is a paradigm shift in the nature of thinking about how educational science and measurement could be done. If we change the how educational science is done, don't we first have to change what the explicit goal of education is? Not if you've got a good Trojan horse. Please tell me more. This has been such an uphill battle because of course along with No Child Left Behind, most people who share my pedagogy decided they absolutely hated all kinds of testing and measurement, period. So, we have been struggling for years continuing to do this work believing that if we can get measurement right, we're going to be able to win, you know, we're going to be able to win people back to considering measurement as something of value in education. By the way, let me just interject there. Is there evidence on the type of schools that don't do testing and how those young humans turn out later versus schools that do do testing? And no, because the schools that don't do testing won't let their kids be tested and so they're not getting measured and so we can't compare them. That makes sense. And I've had that problem for 30 years. 30 years of not being able to show off the schools that are doing a good job because the parents will not let the schools test their children. Here's a real dumb question and I don't, I mean, you don't need to divulge anything overly personal or anything, but can each of you dropped in a room of 12 year olds or 14 year olds or what have you and spending time with these young humans, can you tell like, yeah, this person is demonstrating clarity and has had some really good education or not? We did a lot of interviewing in the past. Yeah. So, we learned. So, you know. Oh, we know. Yeah. I'm largely driven by what I've learned through those kinds of engagements and just, you know, teachers who you come in to do research in the school who say, okay, our biggest problem, if you could help us with this, it's the most important thing. Why are the kids coming into my classroom like I didn't learn anything last year? And we've got the answer now, you know, because they didn't learn anything last year. They memorized some stuff that they forgot. Oh my gosh. And is this some, I know you're focused on the US, but is this kind of a global thing or not as much? It's become more global because the United States kind of exported a lot of this and the international testing phenomenon has actually caused a lot of countries to adopt our curriculum. So, I was just talking to someone today who was talking about building her curriculum and around our curriculum standards. And I was like, no, don't do it. But yeah, it's, I think it's global. I think I'm hearing people from all around the world complaining about some of the same things that we're struggling with here. Well, I know in countries like Korea, like even parents commit suicide if their kids didn't get good enough scores to get into the best college. I mean, it's really standardized testing and intense. That's right. So how would your new framework or new measurement, how would that change the goals of teaching and educational development? Well, there are, there are a few components. There's three really critical components to the system that we've created. So we've embedded our measure into a system. The measure is inside the system and it's doing its measurements periodically. The system itself is not really focused on the measurement piece. The system itself is a, is a kind of journal. It's a kind of reflective journaling space where students once a week will reflect on what they've, they're learning and be built and learn and be making connections between different things that they've learned, responding to prompts that have either been created by the teacher or part of the system or that are part of the system. And these prompts can be on any subject. It doesn't matter. You could, when one week it could be a math question, like, can you explain multiplication? How does it work? It could be the next day it could be talk about, right, talk about what it's like to be a good person. What was it, what makes a good person? And other times it might be these two people have different perspectives on this thing. Can you explain those two? Can you understand those perspectives and can you suggest some way they might be able to resolve them? Or it could be about a historical thing or something in that they're reading in literature. And any subject matter, the point of these questions is that they get the kids to think, make connections, deal with controversy, and do that on a regular basis. So at least once a week, not for a long period of time, 15, 20 minutes. And this has become part of what all students do everywhere. And then the most important piece of this is the third part, which is the collaborative part, where groups of students are put into cohorts and they reflect upon each other's reflections with one another. Kind of like warm data, maybe. Oh, it's very warm. And the teachers also can come in and make their comments. But the students in the classroom working in these cohorts together, the cohorts can be put together and taken apart and redesigned in different groups. And get that that doesn't feel like you're being tested. And no sense that you're being tested. The testing piece is really just that you get to see a graph that shows that you're growing with no score on it. It just shows that you're growing and every other kids looks like they're growing. And so you can't come. You're not competing with one another in any way around this assessment. But the teacher gets to see all of this going on with the students and also gets a dashboard that shows where each student actually is and can use that information to help figure out how to help each particular student, help design really cool cohorts. They're going to be really supportive for certain students. We have a today, the thing that I that I finally discovered today. You're going to love this. Zach is that we have almost a point five correlation between our old clarity scores that we did in the research previously and that we've been continuing to do and our fit statistics for the scoring system. So now we can say with confidence that we're going to the teachers are going to be able to diagnose that a child is struggling and they're not learning well right now and help that student to get back on track. And the getting back on track involves not speeding them up but slowing down. I've heard that like three times in the past week in different circumstances. Can you explain what you mean by that by not speeding up but slowing down? People have given me that advice like right now in my life. So I just wonder what you mean by that. What I mean by that is that what we are usual response to kids that are struggling is to try to get them a tutor so they learn it faster. So they're going to catch up with the other students. We've got this idea of everybody catching up because we've got this weird idea of everybody's same and if those kids just work hard enough they could all catch up with one another which is just total nonsense. So what you do with a student who's struggling they're showing it but the way you see it is that they're starting to memorize and you can see it in the fit statistics. And once you start to memorize you're no longer really learning you're just trying to try your hardest to get a good score on the test. Survive. Yeah. To survive. Yeah. And so what you need to do with a child who's showing that pattern is back up and go and figure out where they stopped learning and help them to build their mind from that place. So in our prep for this and our previous conversation I understand that there's something in these protocols that you're developing specifically related to embodied understanding. Can you explain what that is and how it relates to the goals? I mean essentially it's learning through practice. So when you are learning through action in the physical or social world what you're learning is not just an intellectual thing. It's not just the stuff but it's all of the connections to all of you that is caused by engaging with the material that you're engaging with. So I don't know if you've, have you heard about the connectome? No. This is my most, the most wonderful area of research in the brain sciences where they're literally mapping all the neurons in the brain and looking at how they're connected to one another. And what they're learning is that the more connections there are across different parts of the brain the more capable people are in a wide range of areas. So what we're trying to do is a kind of education and I've been trying to do this before I ever heard of that connectome because it came out of the Piagetian research as a concept originally. But what we're trying to do is we're trying to ensure that kids are learning in rich engagements so that they're not just connecting a science concept with another science concept that's closely related. But they're connecting the science concept to a physical experience, a social experience, an emotional experience. And this is a kind of constant ongoing process of networking the mind and, and of course the body's involved when you're actually engaged in engagement as well that produces those kinds of connectomes that they're showing are more and more effective. So what this means is that let's just say that somebody is apex of their development turns out to be somewhere in level 10, which is the most common place for adults to perform in our society. They're, they're great level 10s. They're, you know, they can become extremely good at what they do. They can build great expertise and virtuosity and whatever career path that they're on as long as they're not dealing with having to deal with multiple systems all at the same time or something like that. So you've got, and you know, they're perfectly capable of doing intelligent voting. It's difficult to manipulate them because they've got a good brain. They're more likely to make good decisions and they've got this other magic sauce that you get from through all of that practice. And that is what we call an earned sense of competence. Because when you learn through practice, one of the main things that you learn is if I try hard enough, I'm going to get there. I want this thing. And if I try hard enough, I'm going to get there. It's not like the whole self-esteem thing, right? Where you just sing songs and then you become a better self-esteem. This is about, I've built the skills that I need to be able to solve these problems and I know it. And so you give them a problem and, and they're, they're excited about taking on any challenge. Whereas I think what we're doing to our kids right now is we're depriving them of the opportunity to feel that they have competence in almost everything. And we haven't, and they haven't built the skills for, for building competence and, and charting their own path towards something. My understanding is that your organization, Lectica, you have, well, you've dedicated your career towards creating what you believe is the ideal measurement system. That could make all this happen and change, which you call the computerized electrical assessment system. So can you explain what facets of human development this system measures and, and how, how do we measure? The thing that it measures is called hierarchical complexity. You can think of it as measuring the, the development of meaning in a general sense toward more and more complex understandings and meanings over time. That's one way to think about it. You can also just think about it as a purely mathematical thing. Like the way that it, the way that the system works is purely mathematical. It's matching growth trajectories to people's performances. So that's another way to think about it. But I think just thinking of it as increasing complexities, the simplest and easiest way to think about it. And I assume there's a six year old version of that and a 14 year old version of that. There's a, we have measurements from first speech. Okay. So we can study the development of babies speech. And presumably at each of the different age groups, the higher that this complexity is the better ultimate correlation with being a fully fledged capable adult human. No. So there's multiple different levels at which you can be a quite capable and useful human. And we need a whole lot of variety in that respect because there's roles for everybody, but not if we're not, you know, including variety, wherever you land, you know, wherever you end up falling in that, in the, in the complexity arena. You have a good mind, a skilled mind. You've got an sense of competence. You've got a strong sense of yourself as a learner. You've got basic fun. You've got fundamental skills that you need to engage with others. So you've got all of these attributes that you're bringing to whatever it is that you do. And those people who are the fast growers and have got the minds that can go further are building all the skills they're going to need to learn for the rest of their lives. And they're going to go out into the world and they're going to learn regardless of the context that they're in because they're going to make the context for themselves because they know how to learn. They've got all of that experience learning. So they've built learning skills that will take them as far as they want to go. So Theo, if there are educators listening to this and they would like to try this out on their students, whether they're in grade school or high school or whatever, is there a way that this can actually be used now in tandem with traditional methods? Absolutely. And we're really, really eager to pair up with schools that have pedagogies that are aligned with ours in particular because we want to finally give them an opportunity to be able to show off the success of those programs. It will help all children everywhere if we're able to really show off what those programs are doing for children. And all they need to do is just contact us. There's a contact us link on our website and we respond quickly. And I'd love to chat with anybody who has ideas about working with our tools. Cognitive complexity is an important vector here, but as Theo is saying, it's not the main event here. The main event is something more like coherence and capacity for future learning rather than it is just sheer mental complexity. So we need people to be able to handle complex problems, but as I like to say, the more complex thinker you are, the more complex and significant mistake you can make. So it's very important to have a really good mind if you're a complex thinker. It's not the case as in a lot of developmental theory that the thing is just keep growing up the ladder and things get better and better. It's actually not the case. It's better to be a coherent thinker at a lower level than an incoherent thinker at a higher level from the perspective of generating karma. If you want to think about it that way, you can make a lot of complicated mistakes. What is your hope with this tool, Theo, to run side by side our current educational testing system to replace it, to be a voluntary add-on for certain teachers? What do you hope to do with this? All of the above. I think we're investigating various ways of getting into the system right now and trying to figure out how we're going to fund some of those initial entrees. So that work is ongoing. But ultimately I want every single child in the world who have this tool that we've been making, which we call MindLog. MindLog. I want every child to have that in their lives. And it is designed in such a way that it will change the teachers. The teachers will change. And they'll just change organically through the use and the seeing their students in these new ways. And they'll also hopefully be given the opportunity to have more freedom so that they can develop the skills that they need to be the really grand teachers and not just people who are trying to teach to a specific curriculum. So with or without this tool, how might teachers, our society, people listening to this conversation shift the way that we're teaching now to foster more mental complexity in young adults? And children? Well, fostering more mental health in adults. More coherent minds, healthier, healthier minds. I think now that we have a metric that can measure mental growth and health, then we can say these schools are doing it. These schools are not doing it. How do you measure mental growth and how is mental growth different than mental health? So we're calling the mental growth part the complexity part. Okay, got it. And mental health is right now mental health in our system is the clarity part. It's the mind is developing well enough to seem to be clear thinkers. So one part is complexity and the other is clarity. And then there's the third part, which is not about our measurement. It's not about the measurement at all. It's about providing kids with the opportunity to build skills for working well with others through the collaborative piece. What evidence or experience can you demonstrate or share? What are the benefits of individual young humans who develop a high level of mental complexity, both in the way they experience the world and eventually what they're able to contribute to society? I think that at every level of complexity, there are different kinds of things that people are going to be able to contribute. So the watchmaker, the builder, the designer, there are so many roles in society for people to hold. The superintendent, the person who greets you and parks your car. All of the roles that we play will be able to fulfill those roles in a better way. Do we need to have a new economic system or a new cultural aspiration in order for us to make massive changes in how we educate and teach our young humans? If we do, it's going to be a real problem. We're really working hard to make it possible for these changes to take place without an overhaul of the system. Because if you wait to overhaul the system, it's never going to happen. The system is going to change because of the education. The education change. And how might that happen? How might educating young people that an increasing percentage of them have clarity and complexity and collaboration with others 10, 20, 30 years down the road? How might that itself change the economic system? Well, they're going to care more about each other. That's a good thing. That's going to guide decisions that they make in their own lives. They're going to vote. They're going to be voters. They're going to be citizens who are voting. And they're going to be less vulnerable to manipulation. That's going to change things. Definitely going to change things. There's a lot of situation we're in right now that has to do with No Child Left Behind. So on the No Child Left Behind note, many educators are calling out that they feel more and more of their students have now developed some sort of a learned sense of helplessness where they get stuck in these cycles of feeling like they don't have the ability to overcome the challenges. So how could this system that Lectica is working on counteract that phenomenon? I think that's that sense of competence. Yeah, you mentioned that earlier. You know that real agency that all children can have that sense of agency in there. So it becomes a positive feedback in their learning. It's like, oh, I did this and I can do it again. And it gets you excited. It's just in a class the other day with a group of people who are learning this material. And, you know, they were saying, you know, you're always talking about how fun it is to learn in the virtuous cycle of learning and the dopamine opioid cycle. But learning doesn't have to be fun. Sometimes it's damn frustrating and drives me crazy. And I'm still find myself setting these goals that are like way beyond what I can do. And I just said, oh, yeah, you're a learner, holic. You're somebody who has an sense of competence. And so you're willing to be in pain for quite a while learning something new in order to get the end of it because you have an sense of competence. Interesting. And so you can embrace the pain just like a baby is learning to walk embraces the pain of falling and gets back up again and tries again. You know, I loved learning and I still do. When I was at the University of Wisconsin, I graduated with 180 credits and I only needed 120. I took way more classes than I needed because I really liked them in four years. So it probably makes sense that I'm a science podcaster now 40 years on. But so Zach, help help us set this in context of the conversation you and I often have on the broader metacrisis. Why is what Theo is working on in this conversation so far so relevant to the broader cultural challenges we face? There's a paper I wrote some time ago that was just called Education is the Metacrisis. Just pointing to the primacy of educational systems as a what's Machtenburg were called generative dynamic of all of these different types of outcomes which accumulated create the Metacrisis. So the idea that without addressing education and as you said Nate kind of like regenerative relationship to the next generation rather than a depleting or degrading the substrate that will take over. Right. This is so you think you can do degrade the soil. You can degrade the atmosphere. You can degrade the mining, all of that stuff. If you degrade the brains of the next generation, it doesn't matter. If you've if you've stopped degrading the other stuff and you've fixed a bunch of problems, but you haven't fixed this problem of systematic generational brain damage from advanced technology, then what have you really won? And so there's something more primal about this than anything else. And then if I think from your perspective about what should a civilizational superorganism be oriented to? Should it be oriented to the accumulation of abstract profit or should it be oriented to the regeneration of its most important substrates? Long ago, I think the first podcast we ever did, Nate, I suggested there's a flip here, which is that the whole civilization is about the next generation and its capacity rather than the whole civilization being about instrumentalizing that next generation to further the interests of this generation and the accumulation of abstract profit. And so a human-centric civilizational system, a human-centric, not in a negative anthropocentric sense, but in the sense of obviously the kids are our most precious resource. On top of the biosphere, and I would assume that ecology and those sorts of things would be part of the education process. It would have to be. Yeah, it would have to be. The web of life. I think it's inescapable. But if you save the biosphere and you don't save the kids, then there's this question of like, what have you? Yeah, exactly. Well, this is a necessary precursor towards humans moving from dominion to stewards on the planet, something like that. Yeah, I think that it's very clear that we're more likely to have the abundance to take on stewardship roles. And I think it does take abundance for that because you're not just protecting yourself and your family, right? You're much more likely to have that if you have had the opportunity to be close with other humans, engage with other humans, a great deal, learn with other humans. And collaborate with other humans. And you have that sense of your own competence and your own ability to be able to solve problems and deal with situations that are coming up. Those kinds of things are going to lead to that better kind of citizenship. So just diving a little deeper on that, let's setting aside the issues of planetary boundaries and war and financial polarization and technology. Set those aside for the moment. Can you imagine or paint a picture of 20, 30 years from now, a society of children raised and taught using these methods? What would that look like? That's a hard one. And I think what it would look like would be maybe democracy would survive for one thing. I think that this is critical for the survival of democracy. I think democracy is important. Not everybody agrees with me anymore. I'm finding more people that disagree with me about that than ever before. And if democracy is survived, there's a better chance that we're going to be taking care of one another. So I think that's a good thing. But I also think that there are going to be people who have, because they're coming into the world with that sense of competence, they're more likely to have the abundance to exercise stewardship, to be actually active in exercising stewardship. I think a lot of other things need to happen as well, though. I mean, we need to change our economy from one that requires us to consume like crazy in order for the economy to survive. It's a very strange thing that we have going on now where the economy is completely fighting against what we really need to be and do. So maybe they'd be more capable of helping to make that change, you know, switching from being consumers back to being citizens again. In my public talks and in my research, I point out that after basic needs are met, the best things in life are free. But I don't think a lot of people recognize that. And maybe if we had an education system with more clarity and complexity, and especially community and collaboration as opposed to just competing for test scores, that young people from the ground up grow up recognizing that after basic needs are met, most of the best things in life are free. And more energy and more money is good in context. But when you have very little, having more is huge. When you have a lot, having more isn't really that big a deal. And maybe they're able to embody that as they grow up, and then that changes things. I'm just asking. Oh, man, I know for sure that in my life, the period that I spent living off the grid taught me everything I needed to know about what you really need in life. Like what's really important, what's worthwhile. Because I was as happy doing that as I've been doing anything else in my life, you know. How long did you live off the grid? Well, my kids were growing up. Wow. Well, actually not for the whole time, but for a big chunk of the time when the kids are growing up. And not completely off the grid like you can do now. You can get completely off the grid now. Yeah. I did have friends who were really completely off the grid, but I didn't want to haul water. Yeah. But we led the simplest possible kind of life with no media and it was so ever. I didn't realize it was happening at the time, but there's so much pressure, especially on women in society, to look a certain way and be a certain way. And during that time, I wasn't exposed to any of that, none of it. When I came back into the world and saw my first advertisements, my self-image started to changing in. And I just thought, wow, okay, all of the stuff that's coming at us all the time, it's changing us all the time. Because I'm a grown-up and I've had this opportunity not to be like this. And as soon as I'm back in again, I can feel it starting to push at me. And do you think if we changed our education system that then adults would be more immune, less susceptible to advertising and peer pressure and those sort of things because they have that earned sense of competence and such? The kids that I know who've been educated in the way that we've been talking about are all much less drawn in by all of that stuff. Really? Much less. My grandkids, for example, they got their first computers at age 13 and in their teens. And they had radio at home, but they didn't have any television or other kinds of media or access. And they could occasionally use their phones. But they've got so many other things they like to do because they've been doing for themselves. Yeah, that's the other thing. Yeah, they're just not drawn in. They don't care. And it's really weird because we've got the reversal. Like I'm the techno junkie and my grandkids are the Luddites. So for those listeners who are resonating with your general vision for education, how can they get more involved and learn more about Lectica's mission? Well, they can go to Lectica's website and there's just tons of material there. So I would just go play and explore. And there's also a medium blog with my name on it where I discuss some of the details of the way that we think about learning. And we do offer courses for people who are interested in learning more. So we teach that micro V-calling. We teach a course that where we just teach people to micro V-call and build skill maps and write micro V-calls. It sounds boring, but it's actually quite fun. So what is your hope for all this? Like what is a home run for your life's work and this result in? A home run is that I think in my lifetime to see this way of thinking about education, permeating the educational system and having our tool be an important part of helping to make it happen. But I think it's going to be a long process. It's not going to be an overnight thing. People are going to very gradually really, this is really being introduced in a way that we're not pushing it on people. We're letting people get seduced into it. So it's kind of the midwives way. And my vision of the future, the teacher of the future is not just that they're the expert, but they're the midwife. That makes sense to me. Zach, do you have any closing thoughts or words? No, this has actually just been fascinating to speak a little and actually to hear you and Theo exchange. I think there's actually a couple of points where you guys could have kind of dug deeper. You know, the future of the economic system is a question mostly about the future of education. If I were to make an argument like that, the economics and education are intimately related. I've always understood economics fundamentally as a science of psychology because it's about human behavior. And so there's this deep question about how different the world would be if the education system was different from the perspective just of labor markets, job markets, energy usage, a whole bunch of things. So I think there's a lever, there's a lever here, there's an Archimedes lever that we're all looking for. What's the point of best intervention into systems to change future trajectory of systems? Measurement in education is one of those places where if you fundamentally change it, so many things propagate down the line from the nature of that change. I like that you're using all the gardening metaphors. Yeah. To stay with the gardening metaphor, before we have the full plants with the fruit, what are the seeds right now? Like what are the first steps to make this process more likely to be adopted? There's practical things that have to be done to get something out into the world. Strategically right now we're working on grant proposals and other kinds of things to get additional funding. And we also self-undersells with a for-profit that our nonprofit owns. So getting more work in the for-profit sector funding the work that we're doing for the children. So we're working on a bunch of fronts to try to get things moving. We're bringing in another person to lead the organization too because we're bringing in young people to take over for me. We don't want to make the mistake of what's here getting reified or finding that suddenly I'm gone and that nobody knows what to do. So we're working on doing the transition. And that's a big thing. The time capsules and the transition. I mean I probably was persuaded already but I do agree with you, Zach, that we can't ultimately change the economic system unless we change the education system. So thank you both for your lifelong observation and efforts on this front. And do you have any closing words? Theo, then Zach. Well, something has come into my mind that I would like to say and that is that we've really taken the measurement thing seriously. And so we don't want our ruler to be owned by anybody. We want it to be able to be shared with everyone. So we are going to, it's going to live in a trust and can only, it will only be able to be used to support development of human beings. And will not ever enrich an individual. So there's economic change. Yeah. Zach, we'll give you the closing word, my friend. I would just say this conversation. We touched on AI but we didn't really double click and go into AI. And I believe that this conversation is essential to that because what Theo was describing was an environment where writing and conversation and reflection that is human to human was technologically enabled. Where the experience of deepening with others in your complexity and your sanity and your clarity is helped by a technology. And so I just want to note that this, all of the movements of AI in school, we could have spent the whole time talking about the dangers of that. Instead, we've talked about something that would be a solution to that, which would give opportunities for kids to practice writing, practice reflecting, practice interacting, deepening complexity, deepening clarity. So I just want to note that this is a conversation about a technological, a technology, a technologically enabled future for education that's fundamentally positive where there's accumulated evidence over a century that this is a good thing to do rather than some completely irresponsible roll out of AI technology in schools for which there's no evidence. So I just want to kind of end on that point of that. It couldn't be more crucial to try to find a way to get people seduced into using these tools. Well, this conversation was a product of yours and mine, one and a half hour conversation on the problems with AI and education. And this was one of your suggestions. We have to talk to Theo Dawson and here we are. So thank you both for your time and your work and fingers crossed that we can make some change in this direction. Thank you for a great conversation. It's been really fun to be continued, my friends. If you'd like to learn more about this episode, please visit thegreatsimplification.com for references and show notes. From there, you can also join our Hilo community and subscribe to our Substack newsletter. This show is hosted by me, Nate Hagens, edited by No Troublemakers Media and produced by Misty Stinnett and Lizzie Siriani. Our production team also includes Leslie Batloots, Brady Hyen, Julia Maxwell, Gabriella Slayman and Grace Brunfield. Thank you for listening and we'll see you on the next episode.