Deprogramming Education: Returning to the Makers of Music and the Dreamers of Dreams
Installment 3: How We Lost Learning Along the Way
"We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams." - Arthur O'Shaughnessy
When my student wrote "Please lord let me do actual art" and another found relief simply in having a friend to sit with, they were expressing something profound about learning that we've forgotten. Their authentic desires… for creativity, belonging, and meaningful expression… mirror exactly what we see in the first six years of human life, before formal education trains these natural patterns out of them.
The disconnect I witnessed in my classroom between institutional transformation concerns and student reality reveals more than just different perspectives. It points to a fundamental concept that most discussions about AI in education completely miss: There is the difference between learning and information gathering.
This becomes strikingly apparent when we observe how humans naturally learn before we teach them not to.
The Original Learners
Consider what happens in the first six years of human life, before children enter the formal education system in developed countries.
A three-year-old encounters a butterfly for the first time. They don't ask, "How much do I need to know about butterflies to get a good grade?" They ask, "Why does it have those colors?" "Where is it going?" "Can I touch it?" Their curiosity is intrinsic, boundless, and deeply connected to their sense of wonder about the world.
That same child builds towers with blocks, not to demonstrate mastery of architectural principles, but because they're compelled to create, to see what's possible, to test the boundaries of balance and gravity. When the tower falls, they don't see failure - they see information. They immediately start building again, incorporating what they've learned.
They tell stories that blend reality and imagination because they're not trying to reproduce information accurately - they're trying to make sense of experience, to create meaning from the chaos of input that surrounds them daily.
This is learning in its purest form:
Meaning-making through authentic curiosity
Identity formation through creative exploration
Pattern recognition through play and experimentation
Wisdom development through story and relationship
Creative synthesis driven by internal motivation
Then something happens. We send them to school.
The Great Substitution
Somewhere around age six, we begin a systematic process of replacing natural learning with something entirely different: information gathering and performance for external validation.
The butterfly becomes a lesson about lepidoptera classification. The block-building becomes a structured activity with predetermined learning objectives. The storytelling becomes creative writing assignments with rubrics for evaluation.
We don't do this with malicious intent. We do it because we believe that education requires structure, that learning must be measurable, that knowledge can be efficiently delivered through curriculum and assessment. We've built entire systems around the premise that education is fundamentally about transferring information from teachers to students.
Our systematic substitution of information gathering for authentic learning experiences has created students who optimize for data reproduction rather than meaning-making. We've confused information delivery with learning for so long that we've forgotten what learning actually is.
My student asking "How much do I need to write to get a good grade?" isn't revealing laziness or lack of motivation. They're revealing the success of our system - we've trained them to optimize for information performance rather than engage in actual learning.
When students spend twelve years being rewarded for reproducing information rather than creating meaning, when they learn that the goal is to figure out "what the teacher wants" rather than exploring what they're genuinely curious about, when they discover that original thinking is often penalized while conformity is rewarded - we shouldn't be surprised that they struggle with authentic engagement.
We've accidentally taught them that learning is something done TO them rather than something they DO.
The AI Revolution: Not What We Think
Educational institutions approach AI integration by asking: "How can we use AI to make our current educational approaches more efficient?" This protects established structures rather than examining what AI reveals about learning itself.
This is like asking how we can use automobiles to breed faster horses.
The real question is: "What happens to education when information gathering becomes effortless and instantaneous?"
Because that's what AI represents - the complete liberation from information scarcity. When students can access any fact, generate any explanation, research any topic, or translate any language in seconds, what exactly are we teaching them when we focus on information acquisition?
The answer is uncomfortable: we're teaching them skills that are rapidly becoming obsolete while neglecting the capabilities that make them uniquely human.
But here's what our systematic substitution of information gathering for authentic learning experiences reveals: AI doesn't threaten real learning - it exposes what real learning has always been.
The Return to Natural Learning
In my technical theatre classroom, something beautiful is happening. Students are using AI not to avoid learning, but to amplify their natural learning patterns.
When my student used AI to help construct her response about a story that changed her perspective, she wasn't being lazy. She was doing exactly what humans do naturally: using available tools to express complex ideas more clearly. Just like a four-year-old uses crayons, blocks, or stories to make sense of their world.
When students research lighting design with AI partnership, they're not learning less - they're learning more deeply because they can focus on the creative and interpretive work rather than getting stuck in information gathering.
They're returning to the essential questions that drive natural learning:
"What story are we trying to tell?"
"How do these design choices serve the narrative?"
"What happens if we try something completely different?"
"How do all these elements work together to create meaning?"
These aren't information-gathering questions. These are meaning-making questions. Creation questions. The same kinds of questions that three-year-old asked about the butterfly.
When we task students with information gathering driven by their authentic curiosity… like that three-year-old encountering the butterfly… and calibrate our teaching to engage them in their discoveries rather than lead them to information they weren't interested in to begin with, they are more likely to discover compelling angles to the information they find intriguing. This stands in stark contrast to the tasteless sanitization we've applied to content to make it digestible to the "lowest common denominator."
What Learning Actually Is
When AI handles the information gathering, students can focus on what learning has always really been about:
Synthesis over Collection: Instead of gathering facts about color theory, students explore how color choices create emotional responses in audiences. The information is available instantly; the learning is in understanding how to use it purposefully.
Application over Memorization: Students don't memorize safety protocols - they research, synthesize, and create training materials that will actually keep their peers safe. The learning is in the application, adaptation, and communication of principles.
Wisdom over Data: Students aren't collecting information about Greek theatre history - they're exploring how ancient stories speak to contemporary audiences and how technical choices can bridge that gap. The learning is in the wisdom to connect past and present meaningfully.
Creation over Reproduction: Instead of reproducing teacher-approved design concepts, students are generating original solutions to authentic creative challenges. The learning is in the creative process itself.
Identity Formation over Performance: Students aren't performing knowledge for grades - they're discovering who they are as creative collaborators, safety leaders, and artistic problem-solvers. The learning is becoming who they're meant to be.
This is what those first six years taught us about learning before we forgot: it's not about accumulating information. It's about making meaning, creating identity, and developing the capacity for wisdom, wonder, and authentic contribution to the world.
The Classroom Where Learning Lives
As we begin our fifth week, I'm watching students who have been trained for twelve years to perform for grades begin to remember what it feels like to learn for the joy of discovery. It's not happening overnight - the deprogramming is slow work. But it is happening.
But I'm also witnessing the deep resistance students have to abandoning familiar constraints. When I assigned an Antigone storyboard project, students had access to AI tools for creative exploration and complete freedom in their approach. Yet they defaulted to information delivery formats: one group created a slideshow with images but text telling the whole story, another shared a sequence of 30-40 images explaining what was happening in each frame.
They couldn't see that a storyboard could be a visual poem, an abstract interpretation of themes, or an experimental exploration of character psychology. Even with infinite creative possibilities available through AI partnership, they chose the safety of familiar academic formats. They were still asking "What does the teacher want?" instead of "What story do we want to tell about this story?"
This resistance reveals how thoroughly students have been conditioned to maintain the illusion of information scarcity even when given permission to explore authentic creativity. They perform their understanding of assignments rather than engaging with meaningful content, because twelve years of schooling has taught them that success means reproducing expected formats rather than creating authentic responses.
I've given these assignments back to the students who didn't dig into the design possibilities, asking them to explore what a storyboard could become when freed from traditional constraints. Next week, I'll discover whether explicit redirection toward creative freedom helps students embrace authentic engagement, or whether the performance paradigm runs too deep to easily overcome.
These moments show me that students are caught between two worlds - the performance paradigm they've mastered and the authentic engagement they're beginning to glimpse. The deprogramming process requires patience as students slowly learn to trust that authentic exploration is valued over academic performance, even when given tools that could enable remarkable creative freedom.
The Makers of Music and the Dreamers of Dreams
Arthur O'Shaughnessy's poem continues: "Wandering by lone sea-breakers, and sitting by desolate streams; World-losers and world-forsakers, on whom the pale moon gleams: Yet we are the movers and shakers of the world for ever, it seems."
This is what we're returning to in AI-enhanced education: the recognition that students are not empty vessels to be filled with information, but natural creators, meaning-makers, and world-shapers who have been temporarily convinced that learning means something else.
When we remove the artificial barriers of information scarcity and grade performance, students return to what they were born to do: make music from the raw materials of experience, dream dreams that reshape reality, and create meaning from the beautiful chaos of being human.
The paradigm shift isn't about using AI to make education more efficient. It's about using AI to remove everything that isn't actually learning, so students can return to the natural learning patterns that formal education accidentally trained out of them.
We're not just integrating technology into education. We're liberating education from the constraints that made it something other than learning in the first place.
And in that liberation, we rediscover what education was always meant to be: the support and amplification of human beings becoming more fully themselves through curiosity, creation, and authentic engagement with the world.
Next installment: "Choosing to Learn” What happens when students must consciously choose between the safety of familiar constraints and the uncertainty of authentic creativity?
James Hammer is Technical Theatre Director at The Oakridge School and holds certifications in Digital Learning Design and AI for Learning. This series documents his real-time implementation of AI-enhanced educational methodologies that prioritize human learning over information delivery.