The Environment Teaches First
Why Csikszentmihalyi Still Has More to Teach Schools Than Most Education Reform Flow is not an individual trait. It is an environmental achievement. For decades, education has been trying to improve learners. We have introduced new curricula, technologies, new assessments, new behaviour plans, and countless strategies designed to make students more resilient, more motivated, more engaged, and more successful. These efforts are not without value. Yet they often begin with the same assumption: if learning is not happening, the learner is where the intervention belongs. What if we have been looking in the wrong place? One of the most influential psychologists of the twentieth century quietly pointed us toward a different question. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi did not spend his career studying intelligence. He studied the conditions under which people become completely absorbed in meaningful activity. His research on Flow has been widely applied to sport, business, creativity, and educ...
