The biggest clue comes from video games.
You’re dropped onto a screen with almost nothing on it. You can move around. You fall into pits for no apparent reason. There are objects, but you don’t know what they do. No instructions. No map. No feedback. No way to tell if you’re making progress or just going in circles.
E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Atari 2600 (1982). Source: ABC News Australia
That’s what a broken learning environment feels like for your child.
Unfortunately, a lot of the school experience has nothing to do with the way we naturally learn. And because of that, your child is blocked from meaningful engagement.
What your child needs from their learning environment.
| What your child needs | What happens in a broken system |
|---|---|
| A defined problem space. Your child can see what matters, what to do, and what to ignore. | No defined job. Your child has no way to tell what’s important, what they’re supposed to know, or to what extent. |
| Dynamic participation. Your child is an active participant in the learning process, not a passive recipient. They interact with the material, check their understanding, and get clarification as they go. | One-way communication. Your child is taught at. Very little opportunity to interact or get clarification. No way to hold onto partial understanding long enough for it to solidify. |
| Immediate feedback. Your child tries, sees what happens, adjusts. They always know where they stand. | The first feedback is a grade. Delivered long after it could have helped. |
| Sequenced complexity. Material builds from familiarity. Easy entry points, gradual demystification, managed cognitive load. | No entry point. Your child is confronted with material that isn’t connected to anything they already understand. There’s no bridge from what they know to what they’re looking at. |
| Genuine engagement. Your child is choosing to be there. The experience pulls them in. | Compulsory. No room for your child’s own relationship to the material. |
| The perception of possibility. Your child doesn’t have to get it right away. Keep going and they’ll crack it. | No path through confusion. Your child has no discernible way from not understanding to understanding. |
When there’s no defined problem space, your child doesn’t know what they’re supposed to learn, how deeply, or where to start. Some try to memorize everything. Others see no entry point and don’t engage at all.
The brain cannot hold onto what it can’t make sense of. Partial understanding, without the opportunity to build on it, is lost. Without scaffolding, new information has nothing to attach to. Without feedback, your child can’t tell whether they’re learning or just going through the motions. So the information washes over them and nothing encodes.
When complexity isn’t sequenced, overload hits almost immediately. They either get it right away or they’re never going to get it — because there is no mechanism for getting it later. Every week builds on understanding that never had a chance to take hold.
Without the perception of possibility, their nervous system registers school as a threat. The prefrontal cortex — the part of the brain that tolerates not understanding something yet — cannot come online. Your child isn’t choosing not to focus. That part of their brain is offline.
They could ask for help. But they’re blocked by the feeling that they should already know this. Or that they should have asked weeks ago.
Your child — intelligent, capable, someone who solves complex problems for hours in the right environment — is locked into a system that often makes it neurologically impossible for them to learn. So they “get by” without really learning.
When the environment tells your child this is workable — that there is a way in, a way through, and that confusion is part of the process — their nervous system stands down. The prefrontal cortex comes online. They can think, plan, and tolerate not understanding something yet. That is the prerequisite for everything that follows.
When the problem space is defined, your child can see what matters and what to do. It is now possible to take meaningful action.
When scaffolding is there, each concept lands before the next one arrives. Working memory isn’t overwhelmed because the load is managed. The limitation that showed up on the assessment — the one everyone treats as a ceiling — functionally disappears.
When feedback is immediate, your child doesn’t have to guess. They try, they see what happened, they adjust. When complexity is sequenced, information connects to what they already know. It stores. It builds. It’s retrievable when they need it next.
Your child can tolerate not knowing yet. Difficulty becomes a puzzle to solve. They don’t have to get it right away. They know that if they keep going, they’ll crack it.
That is the actual condition of learning. And your child has been locked out of it.