"We have got to work on keeping these children engaged with the world"
About this Quote
Grandin’s line lands like a quiet alarm: engagement isn’t a nice-to-have enrichment activity; it’s a civic and developmental survival skill. The phrasing matters. “We have got to” carries urgency without melodrama, the tone of someone who has watched too many kids slip into polite isolation while adults debate pedagogy in the abstract. It’s an educator’s imperative, not a motivational poster.
The key move is the object: “the world,” not “school,” “curriculum,” or “achievement.” Grandin is pushing past the narrow metrics that dominate childhood now - grades, test scores, screen-time quotas, behavior charts - toward a broader concern: whether children feel oriented toward reality, other people, and meaningful work. The subtext is that modern life is optimized for disengagement. Devices offer frictionless entertainment; institutions offer compliance-friendly routines; anxiety (adult and child) encourages retreat. In that ecosystem, “engaged” becomes an active verb, something engineered through environments, expectations, and hands-on encounters, not coaxed out by lectures.
Context sharpens it further. Grandin, as an influential autistic thinker and educator, has long emphasized concrete experience: sensory-rich learning, practical tasks, real feedback from the physical world. So “keeping” children engaged hints at maintenance, not a one-time spark. It’s about building habits of attention and participation sturdy enough to withstand distraction, overprotection, and social drift.
The intent isn’t nostalgic (“go outside more”) so much as preventative: if kids lose their grip on the world early, adulthood becomes a series of brittle interactions with systems they don’t understand and communities they don’t feel part of. Engagement, here, is a form of belonging.
The key move is the object: “the world,” not “school,” “curriculum,” or “achievement.” Grandin is pushing past the narrow metrics that dominate childhood now - grades, test scores, screen-time quotas, behavior charts - toward a broader concern: whether children feel oriented toward reality, other people, and meaningful work. The subtext is that modern life is optimized for disengagement. Devices offer frictionless entertainment; institutions offer compliance-friendly routines; anxiety (adult and child) encourages retreat. In that ecosystem, “engaged” becomes an active verb, something engineered through environments, expectations, and hands-on encounters, not coaxed out by lectures.
Context sharpens it further. Grandin, as an influential autistic thinker and educator, has long emphasized concrete experience: sensory-rich learning, practical tasks, real feedback from the physical world. So “keeping” children engaged hints at maintenance, not a one-time spark. It’s about building habits of attention and participation sturdy enough to withstand distraction, overprotection, and social drift.
The intent isn’t nostalgic (“go outside more”) so much as preventative: if kids lose their grip on the world early, adulthood becomes a series of brittle interactions with systems they don’t understand and communities they don’t feel part of. Engagement, here, is a form of belonging.
Quote Details
| Topic | Teaching |
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