Ryan Clinesmith Montalvo

Phillips Academy Andover

Crisis of Experience, Triumph of Achievement

 Abstract

Drawing on personal experience and educational research, the author contends that children possess innate curiosity and motivation but disengage when learning lacks relevance or fails to connect with their interests. The piece highlights the transformative potential of inquiry-based approaches, such as Structured Word Inquiry, and critiques the deficit mindset that treats students as empty vessels. Instead, the article advocates for educational models that nurture individual purpose, passion, and interdisciplinary exploration. The article calls for a shift from industrial-era specialization toward pluralistic, student-driven learning, emphasizing the importance of purpose and meaning in education. It concludes by envisioning a future where technology enables more personalized instruction, freeing up time for teachers to act as mentors and for students to engage deeply in experiences that foster lifelong learning and human flourishing.

Keywords: Structured Word Inquiry, Experiential Learning, Primary and Secondary Learning, Pluralistic Learning, Mastery learning

The Magic and Joy of Schools

Schools are magical places. Full of the undeniable and unstoppable capacities of children. The joy I find in schools is hereditary. Stemming from generations of educators, heads of school, school starters, and a great grandfather that founded a music festival for students in Clay Center Kansas that is still running today. Over one hundred years later. The hereditary joy I find in the magic of formative discovery has, most recently, driven me to pursue work and learning at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and the Tang Institute at Phillips Academy Andover. My work in schools is driven by a deep commitment to helping children pursue their passions. In my experience, students are predominantly curious, fun loving, and widely brilliant versions of the adults they become.

The Challenge

When, in schools, students are disinterested or unable to learn, I have found it’s either because what’s being taught is not meaningful or because the answer to “why does this work this way” has not been adequately explained. As a schoolteacher and administrator many of the students I’ve worked with have struggled to learn to read. Many of these students learn on their own after some time, others like me, don’t take to reading until ten, twelve, or even later. This, in my mind, is more than ok. These students are in good company, the likes of Einstein and many creative writers did not read until after ten. Almost always, what I observe among “late” readers is that it’s not so much that they can’t, or don’t, have the capacity to read, it’s more that word rules are not appropriately explained. Said in a different way, they have no intrinsic motivation to read.

Structured Word Inquiry

I have found that when students are engaged by teaching practices like Structured Word Inquiry (designed by Peter Bowers and John Kirby), suddenly the five different reasons for a silent “e” in a word are illuminated. The brilliant student is then more willing to accept the silent “e” and engage in reading with more purpose and less frustration. Not frustrated by the response “well it’s just that way”.

Clinesmith Montalvo

Or, through similar inquiry, the etymology of a word can be traced back to an ancient castle, formative chemistry lab, or discovery of electricity, and the word itself opens into a narrative or story as vast as a novel. Creating lifelong relationships with just one word can surpass in many instances a whole unit of study on the Catcher in the Rye. Leaving a student motivated to read more—across disciplines.

In essence, Structured Word Inquiry is an experiential process. An investigation of the very foundation of language. Repeatedly, parents that report “she’s an A student but just isn’t interested in reading or following a character arc”, will later find their student nose deep in a graphic novel or the Oxford Dictionary of Etymology. Quite simply, that precocious fifth grade child that is successfully social, a straight A student, but just doesn’t read, will start reading if they are shown how to explore the true foundations and mechanisms of the English language.

Experiential Learning: Pros and Cons

Of course, curriculum in schools, especially in the early years, do not allow for the time or pay for the expertise that would be required to deploy a Structured Word Inquiry approach. Predominantly because, when done well, it requires one on one instruction that adapts to a student’s interests. In contrast, contemporary schools are largely oriented toward group instruction that teaches to the classrooms’ average Zone of Proximal Development. Furthermore, etymology is complex, and I have met few linguists, English PhDs, and for that matter master’s in education, that want to spend their years in the K-5 classroom. The reasons for the professional composition of early childhood education are the subject of another article, but an important structural component to the lack of experiential learning in schools.

Experiential learning is hard. It’s time consuming for a teacher. The goal in such a curriculum is to create purpose among students. Every student’s purpose, of course, is different. Catering to each could create twelve, fifteen, twenty different project-based experiences that don’t just engage the roots of words but might engage experts outside of school. In my experience with independent schools, I agree with what Ron Berger, a long-time educator and staff member of EL Education, says about the way teachers get young people to learn. “There are three ways of trying to win the young. There is persuasion, there is compulsion, and there is attraction,” (Yeager, 211).

Grades, College Admissions, and the Limits of Compulsion

What I see in schools is compulsion and persuasion through two main mechanism, grades and college admissions. The independent school complex has become very good at helping students achieve the later, college admissions. However, these models are predominately unattractive to students. Grades are often inflated and vary from teacher to teacher. Creating in “…most schools…no consistency about what’s included in a grade or what’s left out, even among teachers teaching the same subject in the same school to students in the same grade at the same level,” (The Problem with Grading, Hough). Concepts, in maths particularly, are taken out of context and never applied to experiences that make the theories and algorithms practical. Where a mentor may help a mentee relate to a subject, teachers often worry more about the right answer rather than the right fit for a learner. The core question is, “Does an A mean a student has truly mastered that history lesson?” (Hough), in the same way the silent “e” isn’t silent “just because”. Schools have adopted a black and white representation of the human experience. Some will theorize it’s because of the cut and dry requirements that industrialization forced on the development of a workforce.

Intrinsic Motivation vs. Compulsory Learning

I think the nineteenth century archetype of school is part of the problem, and I think that education largely views children from a deficit mindset. Individuals to be molded, rather than individuals discovering how they think. What is important to a student is directly connected to how they think, who they are, and their passion for learning. Admittedly, to accept my argument one must agree that children are intrinsically motivated to learn. For example, a developmental psychologist may tell you that all mammals are predetermined to acquire the social behaviors necessary for their species through play-based learning with their peers and kin. This frame of thinking is widely accepted and set forth brilliantly by the likes of Dr. Peter Gray (Gray, Freedom to Learn).

Educators, on the other hand, may argue that there are two types of learning: primary and secondary learning. Primary learning is the thing that individuals do without instruction, the skills and behaviors that one can acquire just by being human. Secondary learning constitutes the things too difficult to learn on your own without instruction, concepts foreign to the state of being human. While in premise I agree with the idea of secondary and primary learning, I do not think that secondary learning exists separately from primary learning.

The Role of Purpose

In my experience, if the innate joy essential to primary learning is not intentionally designed into the secondary learning process or curricula, students will not retain subject area knowledge or persist in perusing the subject after a course is complete. Certainly, students that learn through persuasive or compulsory methods will not take what they learned into a lifelong learning practice. For example, Berger explains,

If you tell kids to study World War II history because it’s important to their lives someday, or because it’s on a test, the kids who are people pleasers will do it, but the kids who don’t care will say, No way. However, if you tell the kids that they’re going to interview a WWII veteran in three weeks, and this person has never been interviewed before, and you’ll be able to honor them by being the first to uncover their stories, then there is an incredible pressure to learn— and the threat of an awful shame if you fail to honor the veteran because you were unprepared. That’s powerful. Kids will read and read, they’ll ask for feedback, they’ll work in groups, they’ll do the grueling work, not because its interesting but because its meaningful. Its immediate gratification, but for a sense of self-respect and accomplishment, not candy or points (Yeager 211).

I do think that Berger’s example is somewhat coercive. Students should never be shamed into learning in any situation. However, the essence of the example rings true. In that meaning will motivate anyone, young or old, to learn a subject. When the child investigates a word they don’t know and finds out that the root of the word comes from early settler encounters with bears, and if that student has a fascination with bears, they’re unlikely to forget the word: the principles of the word, the word sounds, rules, and so forth. They’re likely to remember how to pronounce, comprehend, and use the word over a lifetime. Leaving the child not only with a long-lasting positive relationship with grammar, but an experience with independent research, etymology, history, and self-directed curiosity, which can be transferred across subject areas.

The Case for Renewing Subject-Based Learning

The subject area approach to learning in schools ought to be renewed in favor of an approach that fosters individual meaning. In our rapidly changing global society, an individual can learn anything on their computer, through a variety of exemplary asynchronous courses, or directly from experts in the field of interest. If a child is personally motivated to learn a subject, they will voluntarily seek out the secondary learning required to attain knowledge of, and skill in, that subject.

All teachers, I am sure, have experienced such an encounter with a student. The one in which a brighteyed learner comes to office hours, or stays after class, just to ask a burning question and find out where they can learn more about a topic. Learning has always been a lifelong endeavor for humans. However, the arbitrary boundaries that the global education system has put on the timeframe, subject areas, and demarcations of learning have become obsolete. If only because individuals in society will need to have the capacity for lifelong learning in the face of technologies’ rapid advancements. Whether to learn the technologies, or to use learning for its own sake to pursue individual passion in the face of automation.

The Future of Education: From Industrial Models to Individual Fulfillment

The future of education will consist of experiences that students voluntarily engage. In thirty years, education will look very different from how it does today. Maybe not in ten or twenty years; as Dr. Subra Suresh says, society often takes thirty years to adopt technological innovations (Suresh). However, in my lifetime, we will no longer need the type of schools we required during the first industrial revolution. The ones we have today. Nor will we need the early convents that trained future clergy, knights, or royals–the precursor to industrialized education. We will need schools that employ experts to lead courses for students that have opted in. We will need schools that focus on the child not the grade or college. Schools that focus on what fulfills an individual. If not just because people are happier when they can learn at their own pace through their passions, then because one day everything a human can do—so will our technologies. At that point we cannot train students for work, but for passion. Otherwise, on the one hand, we will have both a generation of people with maladaptive relationships with learning and corporations that will only hire individuals whose main talent is an ability to constantly learn the output of exponentially growing technologies. On the other hand, we will have the outsourcing of tasks humans do now to the point where humans will be left with an abundance of time to pursue anything we want to outside of work. In this utopia, or dystopia, the main human capacity will not be their professional life or skill, but their capacity to find meaning and purpose individually. Meaning driven learning, in my conception of learning, is the entire evolutionary design. The play, the serve and return, the moments of joy that make childhood fantasy a lifetime obsession with Gordian knots or Shakespeare.

Pluralistic Learning: Rediscovering Interdisciplinary Curiosity

The human imperative and responsibility of the current education ecosystem is to find a way back to the natural pluralism of learning. Pluralistic learning is the idea surfaced by the school leader Yaacov Hecht that poses learning is an intersectional endeavor (Hecht). One in which the study of English may lead to the study of Algebra and vice versa. This is not a new idea, certainly. The likes of Darwin engaged in such pluralistic learning. So too did Socrates. Darwin, however, composed his theory of evolution in the Galapagos, wrote it in his notebook, and left it there for three years. Darwin is a unique and quintessential example of pluralistic learning. He’d often switch from subject to subject, physics to literature, astronomy to biology. Deeply studying, for many years, one or two subjects before returning to a theory of another. Darwin’s approach to learning looks very similar to that of current tech billionaires. Perhaps the prime example is Bill Gates.

Conclusion: Embracing a Pluralistic and Experiential Future

Schools foster nothing like the entrepreneurial or Darwinian processes of learning that some of our greatest thinkers embrace and embraced. Nor is it to say that pluralistic learning is reserved for the brilliant polymath. Or that experiential and autonomous learning ought to be left to the schools serving gifted and talented students. Pluralistic learning is a human right. A natural state of being that the hyper specialized education system has lost and does not foster. Of course, schools changed in the nineteenth century because industrialization required hyper specialization. Today, that specialization is becoming less and less necessary. Ironically, because of the technological displacement of specialization. Nonetheless, if our goal is to help students find their passions and self-actualize into well-adjusted adults (and yes, keep up with broad global upheavals) then schools will need to change from a training ground of specialization to a training ground of purpose and meaning.

Organizations like 2 Hour Learning and educators like Eric Mazur (Balkanski Professor of Physics and Applied Physics at Harvard University) are creating classroom and organizational structures that give students more time to work in groups and pursue their individual interests. Furthermore, with the advent of Ai and models like Specification Grading, it is easier now, more than ever, to achieve the two standard deviation increases in performance among students that Benjamin Bloom observed in his paper “The 2 Sigma Problem: The Search for Methods of Group Instruction as Effective as One-to-One Tutoring”. Within the context of Bloom’s research, MaKenzie Price and 2Hour Learning make evident that Ai tutoring during the school day can replace teacher led group instruction while achieving more learning with less daily instruction time. The technological tools at the disposal of schools today can allow students to learn more in a shorter period through one-to-one mastery-based learning. As demonstrated by 2 Hour Learning’s standardized test outputs (Price). The remaining time in schools can be dedicated to experience, meaning, purpose, wellbeing, and play. All of which will motivate a student to learn more during the period in which they are receiving direct instruction.

Admittedly, a reduction of direct instruction time in schools necessitates a reduction in the traditional notion of teacher and group instruction. A reduction in direct instruction would require a tectonic shift in the industrial teaching methods used predominantly in schools today. One may think, rightfully, what will happen to the teachers’ livelihoods? I am not advocating for a mass teacher lay off. However, adults that are no longer instructing a group can facilitate a school day by focusing deeply on student experiences (freed from the time-consuming, and impossible, challenge of having to teach groups of students that represent wide ranging Zones of Proximal Development). Teachers then become coaches, mentors, and advocates for an individual student’s flourishing in school, group, and self. This will require schools to acknowledge their crisis of experience and do away with their triumphs of achievement. Thereby engaging in the hard work of adapting to the tools now available to us that make mute the critique “we don’t have enough money to give one to one instruction to all students”. If we, as leaders of organizations, can accept the hard evidence of technology equipped one to one instruction and embrace robust experiential offerings, then we will be well prepared now, and in the future, to weather the ongoing technological revolution by reconstituting our schools as centers for human flourishing.

Key Words and Phrase

 Structured Word Inquiry: A teaching method that helps students understand the rules and history of words to improve reading and spelling.

Experiential Learning: Learning by doing through direct experience.

Primary Learning: Skills and knowledge people learn naturally, just by being human, without being taught.

Secondary Learning: Skills and knowledge that need to be taught because they are not learned naturally.

Pluralistic Learning: A way of learning that connects different subjects and ideas together, rather than keeping them separate.

Mastery-Based Learning: A way of learning where students keep practicing until they fully understand a topic.

Zone of Proximal Development: The range of tasks a learner can do with help but not yet alone.

Specification Grading: A grading system where students are graded based on meeting specific criteria or standards.

2 Sigma Problem: A term coined by educational psychologist Benjamin Bloom to describe his finding that students who receive one-to-one tutoring perform two standard deviations (or “2 sigma”) better than students who receive conventional group instruction. This means tutored students typically outperform 98% of those taught in a traditional classroom setting.

EL Education: A nonprofit educational model that emphasizes hands-on, real-world learning and character development through collaborative projects. It aims to make learning both academically rigorous and personally meaningful for students.

 2Hour Learning: An educational approach that uses AI-driven personalized tutoring to help students master academic content in just two hours per day. The rest of the school day is dedicated to activities that build life skills, interests, and character.

Works Cited

Bloom, Benjamin S. “The 2 Sigma Problem: The Search for Methods of Group Instruction as Effective as One-to-One Tutoring.” Educational Researcher, vol. 13, no. 6, June–July 1984, pp. 4– 16.

Gray, Peter. Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More SelfReliant, and Better Students for Life. Basic Books, 2013.

Hough, Lory. “The Problem with Grading.” Harvard Graduate School of Education, May 2023, www.gse.harvard.edu/ideas/ed–magazine/23/05/problem–grading.

Hecht, Yaacov. Democratic Education: A Beginning of a Story. Tel Aviv: Institute for Democratic Education, 1993.

Price, MaKenzie. “How AI is Revolutionizing Homeschooling: 2hr Learning with MacKenzie Price.” 2 Hour Learning, 16 July 2024, www.2hourlearning.com.

Yeager, David. 10 to 25: The Science of Motivating Young People: A Groundbreaking Approach to Leading the Next Generation–And Making Your Own Life Easier. Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster, 2024.

“How Deep Learning from Nature and Machines Matters for Our Future.” Villars Institute, villarsinstitute.org/posts/how-deep-learning-from-nature-and-machines-matters-for-our-future/. Accessed 7 Mar. 2025.