Why Education Needs More Delight

“The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper”

– W.B. Yeats

Not all schools teach you that mathematics can be drawn, that history can be told as story, or that science can come alive through observation and narrative. I attended a Waldorf school, and its philosophy has shaped how I teach and learn to this day. What was peculiar about Waldorf, and remains striking to me now, was the way imagination and artistry were woven into every subject. Mathematics might be explored through drawings, history through storytelling, and science through narrative and direct experience. Music, handwork, and movement were treated as essential as reading and writing. It was an education that approached learning as a living, breathing process rather than a checklist of outcomes.

My experience at Waldorf remained a constant, leaving a lasting imprint on how I think about education. However, in adulthood, as a college professor, I quickly discovered that education is measured almost entirely by outcomes. Students are acutely aware that their performance may determine the course of their lives. Add to this the financial burden of university, and you get a toxic brew that leaves little space for daydreaming, experimentation, surprise, or … delight.

The Case for Delight

Cognitive science shows that emotions shape attention, encoding, and long-term memory. Studies find that positive emotional states (e.g., optimism, joy) are associated with better long-term memory. In educational contexts, that implies learning experiences infused with delight or curiosity are not only more engaging in the moment but also more likely to be retained. Complementing this, work on optimism bias shows that people encode and preserve desirable feedback more than undesirable feedback, with the gap widening after 24 hours, evidence that valence affects both online encoding and offline consolidation. In other words, people are more likely to hold on to feedback that feels good and let go of what feels bad, and this effect actually becomes stronger with time. (Zhang et al., 2024; Yao, Lin, & Hu, 2021).

When learning offers moments of curiosity, autonomy, and “I want to see what happens next,” students are more willing to invest time, push through difficulty, and return to the task the next day. Enjoyment doesn’t trivialize rigor; it powers it.

In line with this, a longitudinal study of 3,880 secondary students found that individual interest (enjoying the subject) prospectively predicted higher academic effort across math, German, and English, even after accounting for prior effort. The study also showed that interest and conscientiousness can balance each other out: being highly interested can make up for being less conscientious, and vice versa, which highlights that enjoying the learning process helps people stick with it over time. (Rieger et al., 2022).

Delight isn’t just fun: it’s foundational for creative growth. Play-based learning shows that classrooms which emphasize choice, wonder, and delight lead students to engage more deeply with tasks, experiment with new ideas, and take intellectual risks. Play-infused learning settings consistently report higher levels of creativity, problem-solving, and divergent thinking, particularly when students feel safe trying unfamiliar strategies (Dean & Wenner, 2025). 

In early childhood education, risk-taking in play has been shown to teach children how to handle failure, and, in the process, to build confidence, resilience, and a spirit of innovation. But today’s rising trend of helicopter parenting often clashes with this developmental need. Helicopter parents tend to overprotect, intervene early, and limit opportunities for children to face small failures, which research shows undermines creativity and resilience. (Wang et al., 2023) Over-protective parenting correlates negatively with general creativity, while resilience mediates the effect, meaning when kids are overprotected, they have fewer chances to build that inner strength and imaginative problem-solving. (Wang et al., 2023)  In contrast, children who are allowed to experiment, make mistakes, and fix them become more innovative, curious, and mentally agile.

Where Delight Shows Up

Design studios are not spaces for perfection, but for possibility. In studio settings, iteration and open-ended prompts give students the space to rework and experiment. Instead of being rewarded for polished outcomes, students are encouraged to show progress, share “half-formed” ideas, and learn in dialogue with each other. Recent research on Design for Iteration (DFI) strategies show that students in studio-based education engage more deeply when they can test their ideas openly, face ambiguity, and adjust based on feedback rather than being judged only on final deliverables (Ryan, 2025). This iterative rhythm makes room for surprise, play, and delight, elements that often vanish in outcome-driven classrooms but remain essential for creativity.

Hands-on labs and workshops heighten the sense of delight because the act of making is always a little unpredictable. These spaces invite tactile play: tools, materials, and technologies push back, fail, or surprise us in ways that fuel imagination. A workshop on digital fabrication, for instance, might produce a mis-cut shape on a laser cutter or CNC milling machine that sparks a new design idea, or a coding glitch that unexpectedly points toward a new creative direction. The joy lies not only in making something work but also in breaking it, in discovering through error and improvisation that possibility often hides inside mistakes.

I once taught a Rhino class where I dutifully paraded students through the different views of an object: top, side, left, right, so they might appreciate an object from all angles. One student, however, took an obstinate fancy to the top, or two-dimensional view alone. Not only that, he insisted on wielding the sketch function, which, as any CAD instructor will tell you, is about as useful for precision modelling as a teacup in a thunderstorm. I tried  reasoning, even pleading, but he pressed on with a stubbornness worthy of a mule. And although his final project emerged not as a piece of CAD engineering at all, but as a painting rendered entirely in Rhino, it was, frankly, the best work of the end-of-semester show, and to the surprise of both myself and the class, proof that sometimes the “wrong” way reveals the most delightful(!) result.

Delight’s Nemessis

Delight has many natural enemies, and contemporary education has cultivated them with alarming efficiency. Instead of curiosity, we get compliance. Instead of exploration, optimisation. The result is a culture where the spark of wonder is often extinguished before it has a chance to catch.Schools and universities are obsessed with efficiency: test scores, outcomes, benchmarks, optimisation. Students learn early that what matters is the measurable, not the meaningful. This mindset leaves little room for daydreaming, detours, or discovery … the very conditions where delight thrives.

Failure, too, is framed as something to avoid rather than as a natural part of learning. Yet experimentation without the possibility of failure isn’t experimentation at all. When students fear mistakes, they retreat into safe, predictable choices. True learning requires risk, resilience, and the occasional glorious flop.Technology, rather than serving as a gateway to exploration, is too often wielded as a mechanism of control. Learning management systems track clicks, proctoring software monitors eye movements, and tools that might otherwise enable play are reduced to instruments of discipline. The promise of delight is squandered.

The combined effect of these forces is stark: students who are more anxious, less creative, and less willing to take intellectual risks. In short, an education that measures everything, but misses what matters.

Design for Delight

If our education space is to rediscover delight, it has to be designed for it, quite literally. Curriculum must make room for play, exploration, and the messy loops of iteration. Students need time not only to deliver polished outcomes but to wander, rework, and experiment. This is not wasted effort; it is where the most original ideas take root.

The spaces in which learning happens matter just as much. Rooms that encourage movement, making, and display create a culture of visibility and exchange. When work-in-progress is pinned to walls or shared across tables, it invites dialogue, critique, and surprise. In fact, informal peer critique has been shown to build confidence and support experimentation, helping students feel safe to take risks and share ideas before they are fully formed (Gray, 2013). These are the conditions under which delight naturally flourishes.

Thoughtful integration of technology can also have a role to play. Rather than being deployed as a means of monitoring, it can become a catalyst for exploration: AI that generates new perspectives, collaborative platforms that connect ideas across distances, or tools that extend what students imagine possible.

Finally, community is the invisible architecture that sustains delight. When students feel safe to share half-formed ideas, when educators model curiosity rather than control, and when peers cheer experimentation instead of perfection, the culture shifts. Delight becomes not an exception but an expectation.

Against the Death of Curiosity

Childhood is for questions. Adulthood, we’re told, is for answers. We tend to believe curiosity has an expiry date. Yet recent studies challenge this: while trait curiosity generally declines with age, state curiosity, the kind sparked by specific interests or surprises, persists and sometimes even increases in older adults (Whatley et al., 2025; Sobczak et al., 2025).

If we can engineer rockets to land themselves and algorithms to mimic natural language, surely we can design education to keep curiosity alive across a lifetime. The real question is whether we are willing to put delight at the centre, or whether we will carry on treating it as frivolous, an afterthought, a luxury in a system obsessed with outcomes.

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Yao, Z., Lin, X., & Hu, X. (2021). Optimistic amnesia: How online and offline processing shape belief updating and memory biases in immediate and long-term optimism biases. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 16(5), 453–462. https://doi.org/10.1093/scan/nsab011

Rieger, S., Göllner, R., Spengler, M., Trautwein, U., Nagengast, B., & Roberts, B. W. (2022). The persistence of students’ academic effort: The unique and combined effects of conscientiousness and individual interest. Learning and Instruction, 80, 101613. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.learninstruc.2022.101613

Dean, S. N., & Wenner, J. A. (2025). Patterns and representation in play-based learning: A systematic meta-synthesis of empirical studies in K-13+ settings. Frontiers in Education, 10. https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2025.1557001 

Wang, Q., Chen, Z., & others. (2023). The effect of parenting practices on creativity: Mediating role of psychological resilience. Psychology Research and Behavior Management, 16, 4501-4514. https://doi.org/10.2147/PRBM.S436370 

Ryan, A., Morel, C., Goodman, J., Hermes, J., Abdur Rehman, M., Louche, C., Keranen, A., & Juntunen, M. (2025). Learning to learn differently: Studio-based education for responsible management. International Journal of Management in Education, 23, 101177. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijme.2025.101177

Gray, C. M. (2013). Informal peer critique and the negotiation of habitus in a design studio. LearnxDesign: The 2nd International Conference for Design Education Researchers, Oslo, Norway. https://dl.designresearchsociety.org/learnxdesign/learnxdesign2013/researchpapers/60

Whatley, M. C., Murayama, K., Sakaki, M., & Castel, A. D. (2025). Curiosity across the adult lifespan: Age-related differences in state and trait curiosity. PLOS One, 20(5), e0320600. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0320600 

Sobczak, A., et al. (2025). Curiosity and surprise differentially affect memory. Scientific Reports. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-14479-x