Schooling and Other Unnatural Acts: What History Can Tell Us About the 2eEducational Experience

If Stanford educational psychologist Sam Wineburg is right that historical thinking is a “unnatural act”—a set of cognitive moves that seemingly run against the grain of how human minds actually work—then modern schooling might deserve the same description (1). We tend to imagine that school, like breathing, is just something humans do. But the institution we send our kids to every morning is a surprisingly recent invention, built for a very specific kind of learner.

The School That History Built

Mass public schooling in the United States took its modern shape in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Reformers imported the age-graded classroom from Prussia—students sorted by birth year, moving in lockstep through a standardized sequence—as a practical solution to a new challenge: how to educate large numbers of children across a growing nation. Stanford historians of education David Tyack and Larry Cuban called the durable structures that emerged the “grammar of schooling.” This organizational logic has persisted across more than a century of reform. Bell schedules, graded cohorts, classroom layouts and expectations became so familiar they stopped looking like design choices. They became simply how we imagined what school meant (2).

That grammar works reasonably well for many students. For 2e learners, the fit is often harder.

Understanding why can change everything about how parents approach the situation.

My Own 2e Journey

I'm a historian, academic coach, and former high school teacher who works with 2e students. I'm also, I eventually learned, a 2e person myself.

I attended a gifted elementary program and made it through college largely on the strength of

what I could do on tests. But daily work was a different story. Homework felt detached from

purpose. Preparing in advance felt nearly impossible. My report cards used the same language

over and over: “talkative,” “disruptive,” “needs to apply himself.” What they were describing,

without the language to say so, was a kid whose curiosity and resistance to what felt like

arbitrary demands looked, from the institution’s vantage point, like defiance. The same qualities that would eventually lead me to become a historian and an academic and executive functioning coach were the ones school kept trying to correct.

I wasn’t diagnosed with ADHD until I was 22, headed to graduate school. By then I had built my

own systems without knowing that’s what I was doing. What I hadn’t yet found was a way to

reflect on what I actually needed and why, and to understand my own relationship to the

demands school kept making without explanation.

What changed things was a college professor who took an interest in me. Not in my affect in the classroom, but in me. She asked questions instead of issuing corrections. She created space for the kind of reflection that turns confusion into comprehension. That experience is what eventually drew me to teaching and later coaching.

What the Mismatch Actually Looks Like

The 2e students I work with are not struggling with something natural. They are navigating

something specific, constructed, and historically contingent. Schools were not only designed

around a specific learner profile that many of them don’t match, they’ve often attempted to sort students based on preconceived ideas about their future potential. The child who is reading three grade levels ahead and has difficulty juggling multiple different assignment formats or submission expectations is experiencing a structural problem, not a personal one. The report card that says she needs to “apply herself” is the grammar of schooling describing a mismatch as a deficit. But what school tends to read as disengagement or noncompliance is often something closer to intellectual integrity, a need for meaning that the everyday grammar of schooling often can’t answer.

The strength I recognize most in my students is also the one that schools have a tendency to

misread. Tests have legible stakes, a clear reason to prepare, a visible finish line, a consequence that makes sense. Students can still struggle under those favorable circumstances. Homework, preparation, the slow accumulation of daily work require internalizing an institutional logic that school assumes students will absorb naturally. Many do. 2e learners often don’t, not because they lack ability or motivation, but because the connection between effort and meaning hasn’t been made visible to them. That isn’t a character flaw. To me, it’s a demand for something better, and it’s exactly what good support systems can recognize and help provide for them.

The Takeaway

Your 2e child’s demand for meaning, for purpose, and for understanding why are exactly the

questions good teaching has always tried to answer. Schools today have more tools than ever for meeting the needs of students like yours, and teachers and administrators who understand 2e learners often find that designing for them makes learning better for everyone. The more parents understand what strengths their child actually brings, and how to interpret the grammar of schooling, the better equipped they are to participate in these conversations as partners rather than petitioners.

1 Sam Wineburg, Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the Past (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002).

2 Tyack and Cuban developed the concept of the “grammar of schooling” in Tinkering Toward Utopia: A Century of Public School Reform (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995). Cuban built on that idea in The Enduring Classroom: Teaching Then and Now (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2023).

About the Author

Maxwell J. Greenberg is a historian of American education and an academic and executive functioningcoach specializing in twice-exceptional learners. For more on his coaching, visit

www.maxwelljgreenberg.com or reach out directly at maxwelljgreenberg@gmail.com or at 415-340-2284.