- One of the fundamental misconceptions undergirding our education system is the idea that the purpose of school is to support learning outcomes. And learning outcomes are operationalized mainly around two things,
both to do with memory. One is memory for semantic
information, for facts, and the other is memory for procedures. But in the human brain,
there's a third kind of memory that is absolutely fundamental
to our growth and development and well-being, and that
is autobiographical memory. Autobiographical memory is The stories of who we
are and what we stand for and how we want the world to be. The sort of transcendent thinking that young people do forms
the kind of hat stand that all of the other learning
gets layered on top of. In essence, organizing the
way in which we call up our memories, the way in
which we enact our skills, the way in which we notice what needs to happen in different situations- those are the things that
really make us human, and those are the things
that we need to reorganize our educational experiences around. I'm Mary Helen Immordino-Yang. I'm a Professor of Education,
Psychology & Neuroscience at the University of Southern California, and I'm the director of CANDLE, which is the Center for Affective
Neuroscience Development, Learning, and Education. We've known for a long time that infants very quickly grow their brains in the first three years of life. We're now coming to appreciate that there's a second major
period of brain development that happens just before puberty and lasts all the way into the mid 20s. There's lots of work in
neurodevelopment showing that, for example, the kinds of
resources and environments that kids have, socioeconomic
status, for example, are affecting the ways
in which their brains are developing at the group level. Young people across
adolescence are needing healthy opportunities to contribute, to be part of communities, to
develop a sense of purpose. Those very fundamental
psychological capacities turn out to be driving the
development of their brains. So as we began to pull
apart and understand the neural correlates of
what we're now calling out of the things that we witness; to also
consider the historical or future possible implications,
the ethical implications, to become curious about
what alternative ways something could have happened,
to think about the ways that our perspectives are
related to our systems of beliefs and assumptions. So, I was really drawn
to try to understand how do young people
develop these capacities- what do they look like in
the brains of young people, and what might be some of the affordances of these capacities for thinking? So we designed an experiment: a five-year longitudinal
study in which I invited 65 young people between
the ages of 14 and 18, from low socioeconomic status,
high-crime neighborhoods, a range of ethnic backgrounds,
all kids who were passing their classes in school,
they all came from sort of stable family situations. Independently, I sat with
each kid for two hours and showed them a set of 40 documentaries that told the stories of real teenagers from all around the world, and then asked the kids, "How does this person's
story make you feel?" Then we moved the kids
into the MRI scanner where they watched, again,
a short clip of the story, and they just sit and
think about what the story means to them and push buttons to tell us how strongly emotionally engaged they are with thinking about that story. And then we had the kids
come back two years later and we scanned their brains again. And then we followed those young people into late adolescence, and then again as they were transitioning
to young adulthood. And what we were able to show,
which is quite extraordinary, is that the way in which
they were inclined to engage in transcendent thinking
about the meaning of the story predicted the physical
change in the growth of the white matter fiber
tracts of their brain over the subsequent two years. That brain growth that we observed predicted identity development
in late adolescence, which, in turn, predicted
young adult life satisfaction; that they like the person
whom they've become, that they enjoy and feel satisfied with the quality of their
close relationships, that their opportunities
at school or at work are what they always had
hoped for themselves, that those are really
what they wanna be doing with their life. These findings were not explained by IQ. They were not explained by ethnic group or gender or by socioeconomic status. They were explained by
the kind of disposition So you have to do the
exercise of actually using that thinking to grow your
brain, and then that growth in the brain over time
predicted identity development, and then that identity development predicted these young adult outcomes. So when we think about the current state of secondary education and we think about what adolescents need, it's fairly obvious that there is a fundamental mismatch. We want kids to start with
the small building blocks, to learn the little pieces and
start to put those together, but that is not how the human mind grows. The human mind grows
and develops by engaging with deep, powerful ideas,
and then working backward to inform the meaning that you're making. What our, and many people's, psychosocial and educational research is
showing is that supporting young people to respectfully, in a developmentally appropriate way, engage with the complexities
of the social and moral lives that they and others are living and that we are co-creating
together in our society is what is deeply, deeply motivating and purpose-generating in all people, but especially in young people. So when our educational system thinks of the learning process
as enabling a young person to think about the kind of
world that they live in, but also the kind of
world they want to create- that is good education.
