Global University of Life

School said it is pivoting away from letter-grading system to ‘curb the mental health crisis’ among college students

The American university is in crisis. Neither the public, the students, nor even the faculty believe in a system that was once the envy of the world.

The lack of faith in universities is striking. According to Gallup, the portion of Americans who were “confident” in American higher education dropped from 57 percent to 42 percent between 2015 and 2025. Moreover, only 35 percent of US adults now say that college is “very important,” down from 70 percent in 2013. A poll by Pew likewise found that “7 in 10 Americans now say U.S. higher education is going in the wrong direction.”

There are various sources of this discontent. First, the labor structure of universities has been transformed from one defined by stable employment to one defined by gig work. Then there are the millions of former students who are struggling to pay back the debt they incurred while attending college or graduate school. Finally, universities have become key sites in our never-ending culture war, which has made campuses hostile places for faculty and students, with the general public increasingly viewing them with suspicion.

Into this breach steps Lee C. Bollinger, a former president of Columbia University and the lawyer renowned for winning Grutter v. Bollinger, the 2003 Supreme Court case that upheld the affirmative-action admissions policy of the University of Michigan Law School until the court declared affirmative action illegal in 2023. Bollinger understands that US universities are in serious trouble, and his new book, University: A Reckoning, is his attempt to save them. But while the book contains numerous compelling ideas, it is limited by its author’s faith in a liberal center that no longer exists. Read more from Daniel Bessner: https://www.thenation.com/article/society/american-university-crisis-bollinger/

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The highest form of intelligence, according to some researchers, isn't logic, speed, or memory.

It's metacognition, the ability to think about your own thinking.

Metacognition is the brain watching itself. When you "notice yourself thinking," the spotlight turns inward.
You stop being inside the thought. You start examining it.

Neuroscientists have found that during this kind of self-observation, a region in the anterior prefrontal cortex becomes more active.

In plain terms: you have a neural system specifically designed for self-observation. Your brain can study its own code in real time.

A practical example: simple emotion labeling. Saying "I'm anxious" or "I'm angry" changes what the brain is doing. Not metaphorically. Literally.

Research from UCLA suggests that labeling an emotion engages regulatory regions in the prefrontal cortex and dampens activity in the amygdala, the brain's alarm system.

Naming your inner state shifts brain activity.
Awareness itself can alter the pattern.

While metacognition is the ability to think about your own thinking, memory reconsolidation is the ability to recall and edit your own memories.

When you recall an event, the memory becomes temporarily malleable.
For a short window, new context or emotional meaning can be added.
You're not erasing the past.
You're updating how it's stored and remembered.

That is metacognition applied to past experiences.

This is the exact reason reason why some forms of therapy work.
It changes the meaning attached to remembered experience.
The memory stays. The grip it has on you loosens.

Put it together and the picture is striking:
→ You can observe your own thinking.
→ Naming a feeling shifts your brain.
→ Recalling a memory makes it editable.

You are not stuck with your default reactions. You have leverage on them, if you notice them.

So the next time you catch yourself saying:
"Wait, why did I react like that?"
That moment is not trivial.
It's metacognition at work.
And it's often the first step in rewriting what you do next.

We spend our lives inside our thoughts. That single move, noticing instead of reacting, is the difference between living on autopilot and living on purpose.

Your brain is already equipped for it. All you have to do is use it.

Fleming, S. M., & Dolan, R. J. (2012). The neural basis of metacognitive ability. *Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (1594), 1338-1349.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3318765/

Lieberman, M. D., Eisenberger, N. I., Crockett, M. J., Tom, S. M., Pfeifer, J. H., & Way, B. M. (2007). Putting feelings into words: Affect labeling disrupts amygdala activity in response to affective stimuli, 421-428.
https://sanlab.psych.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/31/2015/05/Lieberman_AL-2007.pdf

Nader, K., Schafe, G. E., & LeDoux, J. E. (2000). Fear memories require protein synthesis in the amygdala for reconsolidation after retrieval. (6797), 722-726.
https://www.nature.com/articles/35021052

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Imagine a world where your brain a biological organ designed for hunting, gathering, and navigating the physical world performs a miracle every single second. It takes a series of meaningless ink squiggles on a page or light patterns on a screen and, in a fraction of a second, unlocks profound ideas, histories, and emotions. How does a circuit evolved for recognizing predators suddenly become a gateway to Shakespeare or quantum mechanics? Stanislas Dehaene’s *Reading in the Brain* is the ultimate "owner's manual" for the most important piece of technology you will ever own: your mind. If you have ever wondered why some people struggle to read, why our eyes jump the way they do, or how we managed to "hack" our own evolution to create literature, this book is a revelation. It is a masterclass in neuroscience that transforms the mundane act of reading into the breathtaking biological feat that it truly is. Seven Lessons from Reading in the Brain

1. The "Neuronal Recycling" Hypothesis. Our brains were not naturally selected to read; reading is a human invention only a few thousand years old, far too recent for evolution to have hardwired a specific "reading area." Instead, Dehaene explains the concept of "neuronal recycling," where cultural inventions like reading piggyback on pre-existing brain circuits. Specifically, the visual system repurposed a region originally evolved for recognizing shapes, edges, and objects in our environment—the "ventral visual stream"—and retrained it to recognize the specific contours and patterns of letters. Reading is essentially a biological hijack of our visual evolution.

2. The Letterbox Area (Visual Word Form Area). Deep within the left hemisphere of the brain, specifically in the fusiform gyrus, lies a precise cluster of neurons that serves as the brain’s "letterbox." This area, known as the Visual Word Form Area (VWFA), is dedicated to recognizing letters and strings of letters regardless of font, size, or case. Once the brain identifies a shape as a character, it funnels the information here, where it is instantly categorized. The discovery of this area demonstrates that our brain doesn't see "words" as wholes initially, but as specialized patterns that we have trained our visual system to prioritize.

3. The Myth of the "Whole Word" Approach. For decades, educators debated whether children should be taught via "phonics" (sounding out letters) or "whole language" (recognizing word shapes). Dehaene’s research puts this to rest: the brain is physically incapable of reading by "photographing" the whole word. Because our visual acuity is only sharp at the very center of our gaze (the fovea), we must move our eyes across a word. The brain systematically decomposes every word into its constituent letters and sounds. The most efficient way to teach reading is to align with this biological reality, which favors a decoding-based, phonics-heavy approach.

4. The Essential Role of Phonics. The brain’s reading circuit is hardwired to connect visual input (letters) with auditory output (phonemes). When we read, we are essentially "listening" with our eyes. The brain bridges the visual cortex with the auditory language centers of the brain. If you skip the step of learning the correspondence between letters and sounds, the brain cannot efficiently "bootstrap" the reading process. The mastery of grapheme-phoneme correspondence is the biological foundation upon which all reading fluency is built; without it, the visual cortex has no way to interface with the language centers.

5. The "Invariance" of Recognition. A fascinating aspect of our reading ability is "positional and case invariance." Whether you see a letter as A, a, or a, your brain recognizes it as the same entity. This is an incredible feat of computation. The brain performs a hierarchical analysis, starting from simple lines and curves, moving to letters, then to clusters, and finally to whole words. As the signal travels deeper into the cortex, it becomes increasingly "abstracted" from the physical look of the ink, allowing us to read different fonts and handwritings without having to re-learn the alphabet every time.

6. Dyslexia as a Biological Constraint. Dehaene demystifies dyslexia, presenting it not as a lack of intelligence or effort, but as a specific, measurable difficulty in the neural circuitry connecting the visual areas to the auditory/phonological areas. In many dyslexic brains, the communication between the visual representation of a letter and the sound it represents is sluggish or poorly synchronized. By understanding this, we move away from blaming the learner and toward providing targeted, multisensory interventions that help the brain strengthen those specific, underdeveloped pathways.

7. Reading Changes the Brain’s Architecture. Literacy is not a passive skill; it is a transformative event for the brain. Extensive studies show that learning to read actually increases the density of white matter (the brain’s communication cables) and physically changes the way the brain responds to spoken language. Literacy creates a permanent, structural cross-talk between vision and language that did not exist in the illiterate brain. By becoming a reader, you are literally sculpting your own biology, improving your brain's ability to handle complex cognitive tasks far beyond the mere act of reading.

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Not every top-performing student is gifted.

Not every gifted student gets top grades.

And not every creative thinker fits the traditional classroom.

These are different strengths not different levels of intelligence.

A simple way to think about it:

• High achievers master what they're taught.
• Gifted learners question, connect, and understand deeply.
• Creative thinkers imagine what doesn't exist yet.

Education works best when it recognizes all three.

The goal shouldn't be to make every student the same.

It should be to help every student reach their potential.

Which do you think today's education system rewards the most: achievement, giftedness, or creativity?