Not long ago, I found myself in a familiar and sacred space—a monthly gathering with a group of educators and school leaders I deeply respect. These are thoughtful people. Curious people. People who care about the future of children and the soul of education.

This time, our conversation centered on embodied education.

And if I’m honest, there was a quiet lament running beneath our words.

As artificial intelligence grows more powerful—capable of processing information, analyzing texts, even generating creative work—we kept circling back to a deeper, more unsettling question:

What, exactly, will students (and educators) need from education in the age of AI?

We didn’t talk about new standards, competencies, or curriculum frameworks.

Instead, we talked about what we’re craving—deep in our bones.

Because the truth is, none of us are longing for more content. More data. More information. We’re already drowning in it.

What we’re longing for is something far more fundamental.

We are longing to feel alive again.

We are longing for embodiment—in ourselves, in our communities, and in our sense of purpose and meaning.

We are longing to recenter ourselves and our work in what it means to be fully human.

And, for this to happen, education must move away from desks and rows and recenter itself around the fully embodied person

Embodied education starts with a simple but often forgotten truth:

Learning doesn’t just happen in the mind.

It happens through our whole humanity—our bodies, our emotions, our relationships, our stories, our lived experiences.

One of the great mistakes of the last century of schooling was the quiet separation of the mind from the rest of the person.

We elevated cognition and sidelined the heart, the hands, the body, and the relational self.

We placed students in rows. We asked them to sit still. We delivered content. And we measured how well they could give it back.

For over a hundred years, we’ve largely accepted this as “just the way school works.”

But research—and lived experience—tell a different story.

What students need most isn’t more information. It’s connection.

Connection to story.
Connection to meaning.
Connection to belonging.
Connection to one another.

We were never meant to be brains on sticks

We are complex, embodied beings—formed by our histories, cultures, relationships, and deeply held beliefs.

What binds us together is a shared longing: to love and be loved, to know and be known, to see and be seen.

Somewhere along the way, schooling forgot that.

What many of us are longing for now is a return—a re-centering of education around the embodied experience of being human together.

Nearly a century ago, John Dewey warned us about exactly this problem. In his seminal work Experience and Education (affiliate link), Dewey argued that not all experiences are educative and that some experiences can be mis-educative.

As Dewey explained, "Every experience enacted and undergone modifies the one who acts and undergoes while this modification affects, whether we wish it or not, the quality of subsequent experiences".

What happens to students in our schools doesn't just affect what they learn—it affects who they become and how they approach all future learning.

This is what Dewey called the principle of continuity of experience, which "both takes up something from those which have gone before and modifies in some way the quality of those which come after"

When we seat students in rows for hours, disconnected from their bodies and from each other, when we ask them to passively receive information rather than actively engage with ideas through physical experience—these are not neutral choices.

Dewey found that in traditional schools, the experiences had by teachers and students were often of the "wrong kind"—not absent, but defective.

The question Dewey posed remains urgent today: Are we creating educative experiences that expand students' capacity for future growth, or mis-educative experiences that close them down?

Embodied education seeks to put this continuity of experience to work, shaping the fullest, most robust human possible in each and every student

Embodiment is about how we live in the world.

It’s how we move, sense, feel, respond, and relate.

Dewey introduced the concept of interaction, recognizing the interplay between internal conditions (the learner's thoughts, feelings, capacities) and objective conditions (the physical and social environment).

Learning doesn't happen in a vacuum—it happens through the dynamic relationship between who we are and the world we're engaging with.

Research in cognitive science increasingly confirms what Dewey intuited: our thinking is grounded in physical experience, and we understand abstract concepts through metaphors drawn from bodily experience.

We "grasp" ideas, feel "pressure" from deadlines, and "navigate" complex problems.

Our bodies don’t just carry our brains—they actively shape how we understand.

But embodiment goes deeper than cognition.

It’s about presence.

It’s the hush that falls over a room when someone shares something vulnerable. It’s noticing your breath before responding. It’s sensing when someone is struggling before they ever say a word.

These embodied experiences don’t just shape what we know. They shape who we become.

If education is going to matter moving forward, it must be rooted in this deeply human ground.

As Dewey insisted, "The principle that development of experience comes about through interaction means that education is essentially a social process".

Learning happens in relationship. It happens in community. It happens through our bodies, our emotions, our connections with others.

When learning occurs in isolation, what is learned remains in a silo, un-integrated with the rest of life, and doesn't become an "educative experience" that can be subsequently built upon.

As we prepare students for a world where many cognitive tasks will be automated, we have to ask ourselves a braver question:

For what are we educating them in this brave new world?

Not just for careers. Not just for college. But for life as whole human beings.

In an AI-shaped world, embodied capacities become more valuable—not less.

Interpersonal attunement is deeply human work. Reading the room. Sensing emotion. Holding space for another person’s pain or joy. AI can analyze sentiment—but it cannot be present.

Presence and mindfulness are essential skills in an age of distraction. Being fully here—aware of breath, posture, emotion—is how we regulate ourselves, connect meaningfully, and experience purpose.

Community and belonging remain at the heart of flourishing. We grow in relationship. We become ourselves in relationship. The shared, embodied experience of learning together matters more than ever.

Dewey highlighted that the progressive educator's role is to consider the learning trajectories of each individual student, aiming to help pupils gradually broaden and deepen knowledge in useful domains.

This is harder work than traditional teaching because it requires us to think about how past, present, and future experiences align for each student.

This isn’t a rejection of technology or AI. It’s an invitation to be intentional about what we center.

Check out this example of what fully embodied math looks like from the Project on Embodied Education at MIT

Dewey wrote that "The educational system must move one way or another, either backward to the intellectual and moral standards of a pre-scientific age or forward to ever greater utilization of scientific method in the development of the possibilities of growing, expanding experience".

We stand at a similar crossroads today.

The question isn't whether to use AI or reject it.

The question is what we center in education.

Will we move backward, making students more like information processors, more isolated, more disconnected from their bodies and communities?

Or will we move forward, using new tools to create more time and space for the deeply human work of learning through embodied experience, in relationship, in community?

As fully embodied human beings, we do not merely process information.

We live in bodies that feel, move, connect, and create.

Our students will need fluency with AI tools—but even more, they will need a grounded sense of what it means to be human.

To belong.
To matter.
To be present.
To create.
To connect.

The schools that will truly serve the future won’t try to make children more like machines.

They will help them become more fully, courageously, and compassionately human.

So the question remains:

In the age of AI, how are we helping students develop not only sharp minds, but skilled hands, attuned senses, open hearts, and a deep sense of their own humanity?

This is the work that matters.

This is education worth fighting for.

This conversation about embodied education, about reclaiming the deeply human in our schools, is exactly the kind of work we explore together in the Flourishing School Leaders Cohort.

This isn't another professional development program focused on strategy frameworks or management techniques.

It's a community of school leaders who gather monthly to wrestle with the questions that matter most:

What does it mean to lead in ways that honor the full humanity of our students, our staff, and ourselves? How do we create schools where people—not just programs—flourish?

We meet to think deeply, to be present with one another, to share our struggles and our hopes, and to support each other in doing the hard, beautiful work of reimagining what education can be.

If this conversation resonates with you—if you're craving more depth, more connection, more meaning in your leadership work—I'd love to have you join us.

Resources for Further Exploration:

John Dewey's Experience and Education (1938—affiliate link) remains essential reading for educators grappling with questions of meaningful learning.

For practical applications, the MIT Project on Embodied Education offers free lesson plans, research summaries, and guidance on integrating movement into academic instruction across all grade levels and subject areas.