From Teen Forum to AI: The Education Question I Have Been Asking Since High School

Author’s note: This article reflects my own professional and personal perspective. It discusses the work of researchers and organizations including Arizona State University, the USC Institute for Creative Technologies, RAND, DARPA, the National Association of Social Workers, and the U.S. Department of Education, as well as named individuals. None of these institutions or individuals endorses, sponsors, or is affiliated with me, Your Digital Storytelling Project, or its services. Their research and published contributions are described here for scholarly and educational purposes only.

Rediscovering the Question

I recently rediscovered an ABC Teen Forum broadcast that I participated in when I was still in high school.

Watching it now is strange in the best possible way.

It is an artifact of another period of my life: old friends, old clothes, old ideas about what the future might look like. But beneath the period details is a conversation that still feels current.

The subject was education.

Without realizing it at the time, I was already asking questions that would eventually follow me into media psychology, filmmaking, emerging technology, and social work.

This was not footage I encountered later as a researcher. I was one of the high-school students participating in the ABC broadcast, and these were questions I was raising publicly while I was still a teenager.

Archival excerpt: Terry Goddard discussing education, technology, and video games at ASU on ABC Teen Forum.

What does it mean to learn something? What can a test measure? What might students understand if they were given opportunities to experience, participate, create, and reflect?

Those questions were present in my teenage comments. They are still present in my work today.

What I Was Saying as a High-School Student

In the program, I argued that education depended too heavily on one-time tests. I questioned whether a single examination could provide a comprehensive evaluation of what a student understood or was capable of doing.

I argued for paying closer attention to how students performed in the classroom over time.

I also proposed something more experiential: restructure high school so that students spent the first three years developing an academic foundation, then used part of the fourth year to shadow professionals and encounter the world of work directly.

Looking back, I do not assume that every detail of my teenage proposal was perfect. What surprises me is that the underlying question has remained recognizable.

I have continued to wonder what becomes possible when education includes experience, participation, creation, and reflection, not only the reproduction of information on a test.

That does not mean tests are useless. It means that a test is one form of evidence, not necessarily a complete picture of a person’s understanding, judgment, curiosity, or capacity to work with others.

That question eventually followed me into media psychology.

Terry Goddard, Phoenix, and ASU

Another section of the broadcast is especially striking to me now because it makes the historical throughline easier to see. Terry Goddard served as Mayor of Phoenix from January 2, 1984 to February 16, 1990, and his public biography also confirms that he later served as Attorney General of Arizona from 2003 to 2011. The remarks I discuss here come from the broadcast itself. (Central Arizona Project biography)

In the footage, Goddard argues that the school year is still shaped by an agrarian calendar and says we should take advantage of all available time. He points to international competition in which students in other countries attend school around 220 days a year and are “extremely well prepared for the international economy.”

He also talks about using teaching talent and facilities more effectively through “mentorships” and “special classes,” while allowing schools to be more flexible so long as they “produce an educated product at the end.”

That emphasis continues when he argues for less top-down administration. He says he is much less concerned about required reports and more concerned that schools “produce well-rounded and stimulated students at the end of the process.”

His central phrase is “a total learning environment,” achieved “by breaking down the divisions between math and science and English and history,” so that students understand those disciplines as working together in “a creative living environment” and in a professional one.

He also makes a practical observation that still feels true. People often discover one skill they like and neglect the rest, then later find out in the world of work that “you need it all.”

From there, he turns toward experiential learning. He says schools should work more creatively with employers so students know what opportunities exist and can stay motivated, and so employers can reach into the classroom and assist programs directly. He also says schooling should not be a solitary occupation. He wanted students to work with other people’s talents on an exercise, and he wanted that kind of collaboration stimulated in Arizona high schools.

Then he turns to technology, and this is the point that especially caught my attention. He calls computers “underutilized.” In his words, the hardware is beginning to arrive, but instruction still seems stratified in the same basic time period, while “computers allow us to change the whole time dimension of teaching.”

He then makes a specific observation about Arizona State University: “I was very excited at ASU to see some of the video games and they are video games that have now been worked into the curriculum so that you have the excitement of a challenging game as you’re learning at every step.” He describes interactive, team-oriented learning in which students are taking quizzes and moving through a learning process, rather than “just manipulating little figures.”

That matters for this article because it creates a visible historical thread from experiential learning to interactive learning to the much later questions I am asking now.

I also want to keep the fact-check line clear. The footage is a primary source for what Goddard said and observed in the broadcast, including his ASU remark. What remains unverified is whether ASU formally operated a video-games-in-the-curriculum program in the 1980s as an institutional matter beyond his own description. The ASU material I could verify documents substantial computer-education work during that period, including educational technology and teacher-preparation initiatives associated with Gary G. Bitter. His curriculum vitae lists the 1988 Microcomputer Infusion Project and other efforts involving computer literacy and technology integration. (ASU profile and curriculum vitae)

Goddard also stresses local control. Arizona’s schools, he says, are governed by local school boards and control belongs at the grassroots level. A governor can lead by example and set a standard for innovation, but “we have to depend upon leadership not dictate.” He praises local school boards for their ability to innovate, experiment, and pursue excellence in their own way if they have adequate resources.

There is a personal symmetry here that I could not have anticipated as a teenager. I participated in an ABC discussion about the future of education in which Terry Goddard described educational video games he had encountered at Arizona State University. Decades later, I am an ASU MSW student, and the relationship among experiential learning, media, technology, human behavior, and social systems has become a central focus of my academic and professional work.

From Film to Interactive Experience

I became a media psychologist and developed Film/Video-Based Therapy™, my named framework for examining the relationship among film, video, storytelling, psychology, and qualified professional practice.

Dr. Cohen is not a clinical psychologist and does not provide psychological services.

My interest has never been that a camera, film, game, or virtual environment automatically becomes therapy. The medium itself is not the therapist. Relationship, consent, safety, collaboration, context, and professional responsibility remain essential.

What stayed with me from the Teen Forum footage was the educational question underneath the format question. If learning can be experiential, collaborative, and reflective, then different media do not just deliver information. They position a participant differently in relation to a decision.

Film can let us observe a decision.

Virtual reality can let us experience a situation.

A game can require us to make a decision.

Artificial intelligence might, under carefully considered conditions, help us examine how we made it.

That last possibility is an area of inquiry, not an established result, not a tested intervention, and not a product I am presenting here.

I am interested in whether an interactive system could ask questions such as:

• What principle were you applying?
• What information did you have at the time?
• What information were you missing?
• Who was affected by your decision?
• Would you apply the same rule if the identities of the people involved were reversed?
• What happens when two legitimate obligations conflict?
• Would you make the same decision again?

I find that possibility more compelling than assigning someone a simple “good” or “bad” score. The question would be whether an experience could create room to examine reasoning itself.

Whether it would do so effectively, ethically, or fairly remains open. Those are research questions I am proposing, not results, and they would require design research, testing, safeguards, accessibility review, and ethical oversight.

Chris Harz and Serious Games

This question also connects directly with work published within my own Film/Video-Based Therapy scholarship. Christopher R. Harz contributed Chapter 4, “Creating Videogames for Psychotherapy,” to Film/Video-Based Therapy and Trauma: Research and Practice. His chapter placed videogames directly inside the book’s broader exploration of trauma, media, psychotherapy, and emerging technology.

Harz’s professional materials describe work across educational technology, serious games, military simulation, and virtual environments. Harz Associates International lists consulting areas including VR/XR applications, educational videogames, game-based learning, military training and war games, and trauma and burnout therapy, with experience spanning the RAND Corporation, the U.S. Department of Defense and DARPA, and first responders. A 2010 speaker profile describes him as a systems analyst at RAND who worked on early interactive war games, and notes his Ed.D. in educational technology and MBA from Pepperdine University. He describes his role in the DARPA SIMNET project as that of a project manager and team leader; I present that as his account of his own contribution. (Harz Associates International and 2010 H+ Summit speaker profile)

Serious games are generally understood as games designed for purposes beyond entertainment, including education, training, and other applied settings.

What interests me about this lineage is not the claim that games automatically teach or transform people. It is the possibility that interactive environments can give people a place to rehearse difficult situations, encounter consequences, and consider alternatives.

That is a possibility worth examining carefully, especially when the subject matter involves conflict, trauma, military service, education, or public responsibility.

Skip Rizzo, VR, and the Veteran Connection

The same volume begins with a foreword by Albert “Skip” Rizzo, who has conducted extensive research on the development and evaluation of clinical and training applications of virtual reality. Rizzo later wrote a foreword to my 2026 Routledge volume, Post-Traumatic Growth and Film/Video-Based Therapy: Cultivating Resilience Through Storytelling and Media Psychology, as well. The connection between serious games, VR, trauma, and Film/Video-Based Therapy is therefore not something I am constructing retrospectively for this article; it is already reflected in the published architecture of the books themselves.

Skip Rizzo is a clinical psychologist and the Director for Medical Virtual Reality at ICT. His documented research includes virtual reality systems related to clinical assessment, treatment, rehabilitation, resilience, PTSD, and clinician training, as well as artificially intelligent virtual patients that clinicians use to practice challenging interviews and diagnostic assessments. (USC ICT profile)

ICT describes BRAVEMIND as an interactive VR exposure therapy system used in clinical and research contexts involving combat-related PTSD. ICT also describes STRIVE, or Stress Resilience in Virtual Environments, as a pre-deployment training system using immersive scenarios to explore emotional coping skills and stress-resilience training. (BRAVEMIND and STRIVE)

Neither those research programs nor the published contributions I described above imply institutional endorsement by USC, ICT, RAND, or any other organization. They are, however, part of the published scholarly history of my own Film/Video-Based Therapy work.

What I continue to ask is broader: Could immersive systems be used not only to revisit difficult situations or prepare for stress, but also to let people practice decisions before encountering analogous real-world circumstances?

That is an open question. It requires research, ethical review, qualified professionals where appropriate, and attention to the people who might be excluded or harmed by poorly designed systems.

Social Work Adds Another Layer

My current MSW training gives me a framework that I did not have when I was the high-school student appearing on television.

That is where the throughline changes again. Once the question moves from media and immersive systems to institutions, access, and consequences, social work adds another framework that I now find indispensable.

Social work asks us to consider people and environments together. The person-in-environment perspective connects individual experience with family, community, institutional, economic, and policy conditions.

I think about that through three broad levels:

• Micro: individuals, relationships, choices, coping, strengths, and immediate needs.
• Mezzo: families, groups, schools, workplaces, agencies, and communities.
• Macro: policies, institutions, economics, law, access, and larger social structures.

The National Association of Social Workers’ tradition emphasizes this dual focus on individual well-being in a social context and the environmental forces that shape problems in living. (NASW Press overview)

A student may be struggling personally while also facing an inaccessible university process. A family may be under stress while confronting housing insecurity. A person may be making a difficult decision while navigating rules created by an organization or government agency.

The problem does not necessarily exist only inside the individual.

That layered perspective changes how I think about AI. I do not want to ask only, “How can this system help one person?” I also want to ask: Who designed it? Who has access? Who is excluded? How is an institution using it? What incentives shape it? What happens when an individual cannot solve a structural problem alone?

Advocacy Is Not the Same as Indoctrination

This also explains why I believe advocacy has a legitimate place in social work.

If the micro, mezzo, and macro levels matter, then advocacy cannot be dismissed as irrelevant to education.

Advocacy does not require telling a client which political ideology to adopt. It can mean recognizing that individual problems may be produced or intensified by systems, then helping people understand, navigate, or change those systems.

That distinction matters when thinking about AI in education.

If an educational system presents one approved answer to every moral question, it risks becoming a mechanism of conformity. If it invites students to examine competing obligations, missing information, consequences, and institutional conditions, it may create a different kind of learning environment.

I emphasize “may.” I am not claiming that games or AI produce better reasoning. I am describing a question I am interested in exploring.

Why This Matters in Education Right Now

These questions also arise during a period of major federal change in education and student aid.

The U.S. Department of Education announced plans in 2025 to reduce its workforce by close to half. A later review by the Department’s Office of Inspector General documented a different figure: between January 20 and March 31, 2025, the Department reduced staffing by at least 1,579 employees from an original workforce of 3,902 — approximately 40 percent. That total included 1,227 reduction-in-force separations and at least 352 voluntary separations across 16 of the Department’s 17 offices. (Office of Inspector General review) These figures were current as of September 2026.

The Department continued administering statutory responsibilities, while its reports described the changes as part of a broader effort to reduce and right-size the Department. Supporters describe the direction in terms of efficiency, accountability, and returning more authority to states and families. Critics and affected communities have raised questions about institutional capacity, oversight, civil-rights enforcement, and access.

I am not predicting the outcome. I am interested in what the policy shift makes visible.

Federal student lending has also changed. Federal Student Aid guidance describes the elimination of new Grad PLUS borrowing for most graduate and professional students beginning July 1, 2026, subject to a limited exception for certain students already enrolled in the same program with a qualifying prior Direct Loan. The guidance also describes new limits, including a $20,500 annual and $100,000 aggregate limit for many graduate students, a $50,000 annual and $200,000 aggregate limit for professional students, and a separate $257,500 lifetime maximum for eligible federal student loans. (Federal Student Aid loan-limit guidance) These loan limits were current as of September 2026.

These rules affect individuals, universities, and larger systems differently.

• Micro: What does the change mean for one student trying to remain enrolled?
• Mezzo: How does a university explain and administer the new rules?
• Macro: What federal policy determines who can finance graduate education and under what conditions?

Education policy is therefore a vivid example of person-in-environment thinking. A student’s decision cannot always be separated from the institution, the financial-aid system, and the policy environment.

Could Games Help Us Practice Moral Reasoning?

This brings me back to games, but now through everything that comes between the Teen Forum footage and the present: experiential learning, serious games, immersive systems, and the person-in-environment framework.

I am increasingly interested in whether interactive media could provide a setting in which students explore moral reasoning, not political conformity, not a morality meter, and not a system that tells students which answer they are required to choose.

I am asking whether a scenario might allow a student to make a decision, encounter a consequence, receive new information, and consider the situation from another person’s perspective.

An AI system might, in theory, ask the learner to explain the reasoning behind the choice:

• What responsibility belonged to the individual?
• What responsibility belonged to the organization?
• Was a policy contributing to the problem?
• Would the reasoning remain consistent if the identities changed?
• What would happen if one condition in the environment changed?

I am not claiming that this approach improves learning or moral reasoning. No such outcome should be assumed from the possibility alone. These are research questions I am proposing rather than results, and they would require design research, testing, safeguards, accessibility review, and ethical oversight.

The micro, mezzo, and macro levels could become part of the inquiry. A student might initially see a problem as an individual failure. The scenario might then reveal a family dynamic, an institutional barrier, or a policy constraint.

The educational question would not be, “What answer must you choose?”

It might be, “What did you overlook before deciding that you understood the problem?”

That is the possibility I want to keep open.

Coming Full Circle at ASU

Rediscovering the Teen Forum footage affected me because it made the past feel less like a finished chapter and more like an unfinished question.

As a high-school student, I was already questioning whether tests adequately measured learning. I was arguing for more attention to classroom performance, experience, participation, and contact with the world of work.

In that same broadcast, Terry Goddard was arguing for a “total learning environment,” more flexible use of time and talent, closer relationships between schools and employers, less bureaucratic fixation on reports, more collaboration, and better use of computers. He also described what he said he saw at ASU: video games worked into curriculum so that the excitement of a challenging game could accompany learning at every step. I now understand that his observation in the footage is established as his observation, while the broader institutional claim about an ASU video-games-in-curriculum program in the 1980s still requires independent verification. The documented history I could verify remains ASU’s computer-education and teacher-preparation work, including the 1988 Microcomputer Infusion Project.

That is the throughline I now see more clearly. The question moved from experiential learning to serious games. From there it moved into my own development of Film/Video-Based Therapy™ as a framework for thinking about media, storytelling, psychology, and professional practice without confusing the medium with the therapist. It continued through the serious-games chapter Christopher R. Harz contributed to Film/Video-Based Therapy and Trauma: Research and Practice. It expanded through the forewords Albert “Skip” Rizzo wrote for that volume and for my 2026 Routledge book, alongside his documented immersive and VR research at USC ICT. It now extends into my interest in AI-guided reflection as an open research question, not a proven result. And social work gives me another way to examine the same problem through micro, mezzo, and macro conditions, including the policy and institutional environments that shape what education can become.

The technology is radically different.

The educational question may not be.

How do we move from teaching people to repeat an answer toward creating environments in which they can experience, decide, reflect, understand consequences, and try again?

I do not know whether AI, immersive storytelling, and games will answer that question. I do know that they should not be treated as neutral tools, automatic solutions, or substitutes for human judgment.

Perhaps the next generation of education will not simply ask AI to give students answers.

Perhaps it will ask whether technology can help learners become more careful about the questions that should come before an answer.

This article discusses the work of Arizona State University, the USC Institute for Creative Technologies, RAND, DARPA, the National Association of Social Workers, and the U.S. Department of Education, as well as named individuals. None of these institutions or individuals endorses, sponsors, or is affiliated with me, Your Digital Storytelling Project, or its services.

Dr. Cohen is not a clinical psychologist and does not provide psychological services.

The clinical systems described in this article — including BRAVEMIND and STRIVE — are delivered by licensed professionals in clinical and research settings and are unrelated to Tell Your Story coaching, which is educational and nonclinical.

Tell Your Story coaching remains creative education and Jungian-informed coaching — not psychotherapy, diagnosis, treatment, crisis intervention, or a substitute for professional clinical care. It does not promise clinical or mental-health outcomes.

For questions about storytelling, education, and technology, visit contact Your Digital Storytelling Project.