Learning Motivation

But if I were to ask you a similar question: "What percentage of the population do you think is capable of truly mastering calculus, or understanding organic chemistry, or...or being able to contribute to ..to cancer research?" A lot of you might say, "Well, with a great education system, maybe 20, 30 percent." But what if that estimate is just based on your own experience in a non-mastery framework, your own experience with yourself or observing your peers, where you're being pushed at this set pace through classes, accumulating all these gaps? Even when you got that the a ... 95 percent, what was that five percent you missed? And it keeps accumulating - all the way you get to an advanced class, all of a sudden you hit a wall and say, "I'm not meant to be a cancer researcher; not meant to be a physicist; not meant to be a mathematician." I suspect that that actually is the case, but if you were allowed to be operating in a mastery framework, if you were allowed to really take agency over your learning, and when you get something wrong, embrace it - view that failure as a moment of learning - that number of, of, the percent that could really master calculus or understand organic chemistry, is actually a lot closer to 100 percent. And this isn't even just a "nice to have." I think it's a social imperative.