Growing Up is Optional

What you model about learning matters more than anything you teach.

The author at a museum exhibit design conference. Growing up, it turns out, really is optional.

I want to talk about something most educators believe in theory but struggle to practice.

Play.

Not because the concept is complicated, but because somewhere along the way, schools decided it belonged only to recess, kindergarten, and the last few minutes of Friday afternoon after the real learning was done. The moment a student crossed into "serious" academic territory, play was supposed to stay behind.

I've spent a long time thinking about why that assumption is wrong, and more importantly, what it costs us.

Here's where I land: the most engaging, transformative, and rigorous learning environments I've ever studied share one quality. They feel like play even when the work is hard. Disney's Imagineers work extraordinarily long hours on extraordinarily difficult problems. What drives them isn't a performance review. It's curiosity, ownership, and the belief that what they're building actually matters. Walk through one of their finished environments and you feel the difference between work done to meet a standard and work done with genuine investment.

Schools can create that same condition. Most of them just don't, because they've confused two things that are not the same: engagement and entertainment.

Entertainment holds attention. Engagement builds something. Social media is entertaining. So are casinos. Neither one produces growth. When schools add flexible seating, themed rooms, digital games, and the occasional makerspace without changing the underlying nature of the learning experience, they've redesigned the packaging. The product inside is the same. Students may be more comfortable. They're not necessarily more transformed.

What I call Imagineering Education is the practice of designing learning experiences the way the Imagineers design theme environments: with intention, with story, with emotional investment, and with the learner's experience at the center of every decision. That practice is playful by nature. It asks students to explore, to build, to test ideas against reality, to fail and try again, and to care about the outcome. It asks the same of teachers.

And that's where play gets interesting, because genuine play is not the absence of rigor. It is one of the conditions that makes rigor possible.

Think about what happens when a student is genuinely invested in solving a problem. Their tolerance for difficulty goes up. They persist through frustration because the frustration is pointed at something they actually want to figure out. They ask better questions. They collaborate more honestly. They produce work with real craftsmanship because the work belongs to them. Students don't avoid struggle. They avoid meaningless struggle. Change the meaning, and you change what they're willing to endure to get there.

That's what play does. It creates emotional investment. It lowers the fear of failure enough for genuine exploration to happen. And in an environment where exploration is possible, learning goes deeper than any worksheet can reach.

I've watched it happen. When we created the the exhibit, Walking through Time with Indiana Jones at Roper Mountain Science Center, we weren't thinking about play in any formal sense. We were thinking about the story being told, the spaces designed to support it, and the experiences that guests would have as the progressed through the exhibit. We wanted visitors to feel something, to discover something, to leave knowing more than they arrived knowing because they had moved through a designed encounter with ideas. Two thousand people came through that experience. It remains the largest single event in our center's history. The learning wasn't incidental to the experience. The experience was the learning.

That's the model I keep returning to when I talk to educators about what school could be.

Here's the honest challenge for principals, teachers, and superintendents: most of us have been conditioned out of our own playfulness. Years of pacing guides, accountability pressure, meetings, and the relentless urgency of covering content can gradually shift a person from designer to manager. You stop asking "What experience am I creating for students?" and start asking "How do I get through this unit?" I understand how that happens. The pressures are real. But the cost is significant, because you cannot design environments of curiosity while modeling only compliance and predictability.

The qualities we most want to develop in students, imagination, adaptability, creative problem-solving, the courage to try something that might not work, are qualities we have to keep alive in ourselves first. Walt Disney put it simply: it's kind of fun to do the impossible. He didn't mean the impossible is easy. He meant that when work connects to imagination and genuine purpose, the difficulty becomes part of the appeal.

That principle belongs in every classroom, every school, and every leadership culture in education.

The world our students are entering will not reward the ability to recall and reproduce information. Artificial intelligence does that faster than any human being ever will. What it cannot replicate fully is imagination, empathy, the capacity to connect ideas across domains, and the willingness to build something that has never existed before. Those are human capacities. And they develop most naturally in environments where learners feel safe enough to explore, invested enough to persist, and free enough to play.

Building those environments is a design challenge. It asks us to think carefully about the experiences we're creating, the stories we're telling, the spaces we're inhabiting, and the relationships we're building with the people in our care.

That work doesn't begin with a program or a room redesign. It begins with people, specifically with educators willing to rediscover what it feels like to be genuinely curious about something, to take a risk in front of their students, to approach learning as a designer rather than a manager.

Walt Disney once said, "Growing old is mandatory, growing up is optional." He wasn't talking about schools, but he could have been. Because the version of "growing up" that too many schools model for students is the slow surrender of curiosity, the acceptance of predictability, and the belief that wonder is something you eventually outgrow. The best educators I've ever known never made that trade. They stayed genuinely interested in ideas, genuinely willing to try something that might not work, and genuinely alive to the possibility that today's lesson could become something students carry for the rest of their lives.

That's the challenge I'd put to every principal, teacher, and superintendent reading this. Not to add play to your schedule, but to refuse to grow up in the way that kills it. Stay curious. Take risks. Design experiences worth having. Your students are watching what you model far more closely than they're listening to what you say.

Play isn't about lowering the bar. It's about raising the stakes in a way that makes students want to clear them.

That's a school worth building.