Why Is Neuroscience Not in Classrooms?

When I taught third and fourth grade, I wanted to find resources so I could teach my students about the brain. The more I looked, the less I found. There were plenty of worksheets about parts of the brain, but nothing that explained how kids could use that knowledge to understand themselves. 

In an attempt to problem solve, I’d call my dad, who is a neuroscientist, and ask him to explain something like neuroplasticity or the prefrontal cortex. I’d take notes and then translate his explanations into language my students could understand. 

Each time I would teach a lesson about the brain, it became more clear that these lessons had to go beyond the four walls of my classrooms. The questions my students would ask often went beyond what I could answer in the moment, but I was learning alongside them. That curiosity is what stayed with me. Kids wanted to understand themselves. They wanted to know how their brains worked. And I wanted to know why a subject so central to who we are wasn’t already part of their science education. 

Fast forward a few years through graduate school at Columbia, where I studied Neuroscience and Education and focused my thesis on its inclusion in the K–6 classroom, the picture has become clearer, though not in black and white. The reason neuroscience isn’t in classrooms is complex, multifaceted, and intertwined with how education standards evolve. What I share here is the perspective I’ve pieced together from my research, with the hope that it highlights both the challenges and the opportunities for bringing neuroscience into classrooms. 

Discussions about how science should be taught and measured go back well over a century. By the late 1800s, educators and stakeholders were debating questions that still echo today. Should science be taught through memorization or inquiry? Should we measure learning through standardized tests or through exploration and curiosity? 

The first real push for standards-based reform came in the 1980s. The goal was to ensure that all students received an education strong enough to help them think critically and participate fully in a democratic society. This movement emerged during a time when the United States was facing declining test scores and growing economic competition from other countries. The idea was that clearer, shared standards could help raise the bar for all students. Between 1995 and 2000, the number of states with official science standards rose from 23 to 46. 

By 2010, some of those standards were nearly two decades old. States came together again, this time to modernize science education for a rapidly changing world. The National Research Council (NRC) led the first step by creating A Framework for K–12 Science Education, a document that outlined what students should know and how they should learn it. The Framework emphasized scientific literacy, appreciation for science, and preparation for future careers. From there, the NRC partnered with the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA), the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and Achieve to develop what we now know as the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). Today, twenty states have adopted NGSS directly, and 44 states follow the framework more loosely. 

This is where the neuroscience timeline starts to matter. 

Science standards started taking shape in the 1980s, right around the time neuroscience was developing as a field. The brain was often described as a “black box”, something we knew was powerful but didn’t yet understand. The first academic department dedicated solely to neuroscience wasn’t founded until 1964 at the University of California, Irvine and the Society for Neuroscience followed in 1969. In other words, when early science frameworks were being written, neuroscience was still new - too new to find its way into education standards. 

When the Framework for K–12 Science Education was written in 2011, the committee once again chose not to include neuroscience or other social sciences. They explained: 

“The primary reason is that these subjects are not currently part of what is considered the K–12 science curriculum. To include them here would speak to a major reorganization of K–12 schooling, which would go far beyond the committee’s charge and, indeed, the professional expertise of the committee.” 

In simpler terms, neuroscience wasn’t included before, and the people writing the framework didn’t have the expertise or the authority to change that. And because the system builds on what came before, what’s left out tends to stay out. 

It is now the year 2026, about 60 years since the field of neuroscience began gaining traction, and nearly 20 years since the NGSS process began. Our understanding of the brain has expanded faster than anyone could have imagined, yet the standards guiding what children learn about science haven’t been updated to reflect that growth. Meanwhile, science achievement in the U.S. remains a concern: only 31% of eighth graders are proficient in science (U.S. Department of Education, 2024), and national scores have fallen back to where they were in 2009, the first year the test was given. 

In an era defined by rapid scientific advancement and rising mental health challenges, our educational standards haven’t kept pace. Just as science education was revisited and revitalized in 2010 after years of stagnation, it’s time to recognize that understanding the brain is part of understanding the world, and to bring neuroscience into the classroom.

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