Children Are Paying for Our Abstraction

We built systems optimized for speed, scale, and symbolic exchange — and then we handed them to children. This essay argues that the cost is not appearing in intelligence or academic performance but in something harder to measure: the capacity for integration. The ability to stay present in a body, tolerate discomfort, and develop a self through direct encounter with reality. Drawing on thirty years of teaching children through movement and the experience of raising children inside one of Massachusetts' lowest-performing districts, this is an argument that what we are witnessing is not failure — it is precise adaptation to environments built for scale rather than for becoming human.