The Concept of the Master Learner

ASU President Michael M. Crow explores the transformative concept of the “master learner”—an individual capable of continuously learning, adapting, and applying knowledge across disciplines and industries. Crow underscores the unmatched complexity of the human brain and calls for a shift away from training people for fixed roles, toward cultivating learners who can navigate evolving technologies, fields, and challenges. At Arizona State University, this vision drives efforts to build a post-disciplinary learning environment that blends general education, interdisciplinarity, and real-world problem-solving. Crow argues that higher education must empower students not just with degrees, but with the cognitive tools to become lifelong, adaptable thinkers capable of engaging with everything from quantum science to public policy. A must-watch for educators, innovators, and anyone reimagining the future of learning.

To your audience, you know, if you go to your Google type in, "what's the most complicated object in the known universe?" You're going to be shocked by the answer. So I'll let you do that. Now you're shocked. It says the human brain. It is the most complicated object. It's more complicated than the stars, the star systems, the galaxies, the galaxy clusters, the galaxy cluster clusters, or the universe itself. That is, it's mathematically more complicated. Because with that, the brain, the mind, we can conceptualize the universe.

The universe can't conceptualize us. We can conceptualize the universe. We're all endowed with this thing. And what we have to figure out how to do is to stop producing people who are trained to do X or Y only. What we need to focus on is, the development of learners and in this case, at our level, master learners. And so everyone is a learner. But a master learner would be a person capable of learning anything. So your degree was in economics, but somehow you learned semiconductor, silicon chip chemistry. You can do that. You know, you may not be able to be the researcher that builds the new, you know, chip design, but you certainly can know what a chip is.

If someone says to you, well, we're really moving down the path of whole new ways of microelectronics when we get into quantum biology and quantum electronics, you should be able to turn to your systems, understand what quantum means, what a quantum system is, how it might work.

So our job at the university is not to produce every person where our job is, but to find a way to create mechanisms by which people can become master learners.

Part of that relative to master learning is you have to have the foundation, what we call our general education. And then what we've tried to create here is a mechanism for you to take in many, many trends or interdisciplinarity. So discipline is chemistry. Interdisciplinary is chemistry and medicine transdisciplinary is with chemical knowledge you're solving all kinds of other problems. And post disciplinary is you're just smart and you're solving all kinds of problems. We need to be able to create an environment where all of that is going on at the same time, and the disciplinary structures are not the dominant mechanism by which people learn.