Neil deGrasse Tyson said something that should make every educator uncomfortable:
“I’m going to blame the school because if I have you for six hours a day and you come out and you’d rather not be there, I have failed. You know what should be happening in school? I shouldn’t be loading you with textbooks that you memorize once for the exam. I should figure out a way to make you excited about everything you learn. So that at the end of the school day, you’re sad to walk out of school.
Now, oh, imagine the world that would be when you come out. That is just the beginning of the flame that will course within you for the rest of your life because you will spend much more time not in school than you ever did in school. If that’s where you are, you will never grow. The world will leave you behind and you’ll just be the grumpiest person on the porch saying, ‘Get off my lawn. What? What do these youngans know?’ I know because you are comfortable in your ignorance and you don’t even know your ignorance.”
Tyson is talkin about school, but what he is really describing is the predictable outcome of learning experiences that ignore how the human mind actually works. Students don’t disengage just because they “lack motivation.” They disengage because the structure around them makes learning harder than it needs to be.
Most educational content still treats information as something to be delivered rather than understood. It relies on dense texts, abstract concepts with no anchoring context, and assessments that reward short-term memorisation rather than comprehension. The system assumes students will stay motivated by default, even though everything about the experience quietly pushes in the opposite direction.
When learning is designed this way, students quickly learn that school is something to tolerate, not explore. Tyson calls this “comfortable ignorance,” but cognitively it’s much simpler: repeated friction leads to withdrawal. Not because learners don’t care, but because the experience tells them there’s no meaningful path forward.
And this is precisely why education is where cognitive design matters most. No other field demands such a delicate balance between new information, relevance, attention, memory, and motivation. Training modules don’t carry this load. Corporate communications don’t carry this load. Even behaviour-change campaigns don’t carry this load. Education does. Εvery single day, for every type of learner.
Good learning is not about more content. It is about structuring it in a way that gives the mind enough orientation to stay with it. Helping knowledge land instead of asking learners to chase it. Finally, it is about making space for curiosity, because curiosity is not a luxury. Ιt’s the mechanism that keeps attention alive long enough for understanding to form.
When Tyson imagines students leaving school “sad to walk out” he is describing what happens when learning is designed with the brain in mind. Not simplified. Not softened. Simply structured in a way that makes engagement almost unavoidable.
If a learner walks out of a classroom less interested than when they walked in, the failure isn’t theirs. And in education, where the cost of poor design accumulates across a lifetime, cognitive design isn’t optional. It’s the foundation.