Heads, hands or hearts?

A pedagogy of wholeness part three

Welcome to the third and final part in the series on a pedagogy of wholeness. We have looked at work and how didactic teaching is at odds with cross-cultural and evolutionary perspectives on how children learn best. Providing children time and access to a teacher, an expert giver of facts, is an anomaly. Children need access to productive adults who they can observe and imitate.

We then turned to my reflections on education and my time spent in the corridor outside maths after being kicked out of class. We asked about the gifts we are born with and touched on gifts of the head and the heart and how school prioritises the head over the heart. I’d finally like to turn to the hands, and look at how school doesn’t fully encompass the head even as it prioritises it over the hands.

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Do slow worms hibernate or brumate?

He was only eleven. He came to visit our learning community last week for an hour and talked wildly about learning and his desires for knowledge. He asked questions about learning, about how he could meet his needs and quench his burning thirst for knowledge with us if he was to join us. He talked wildly about the head and how he loved to fill his up with knowledge to the brim of his skull. You would have thought that he would have got on fine at school within a system where heads being filled with knowledge is the aim of the game.

He talked about pedagogy and theories of learning and motivation. If you wandered in to the conversation at this point then that could have been a clue. But he is not unusual. It is quite common for children to come to us from school, clearly so interested in knowledge and yet so uninterested by mainstream education. Equally passionate about very specific subjects that they know in great detail and the systemic, political and pedagogical flaws of the education system they have been through.

He spoke with a fervour about lizards and reptiles and slow worms and taught me a word I had never heard before - brumation - and what it means. That again is not unusual. Visiting children like him often come with passions that are very refined and knowledge around them extremely cavernous that learning from them is a regular occurrence. Children like him remind us that the head is primed for knowledge and information, a thirsty Oktoberfest tankard for dipping in the pool of knowledge at the whim of the owner, yet try, as schools do, to fill someone else’s up for them and you will find yourself holding a Pythagorean cup.

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If you meet enough self-directed young people you will know that the capacity that each mind has for holding knowledge is deep, and the breadth and variety in which different people approach the world is incredible. And it makes you wonder what capacity for learning is being squandered by the necessity for standardisation that the mainstream education system requires. And then you remember that it is not about gifts, not about meeting children where they are excited, not about play, but really just about hard work and capitalism.

Carol Black highlights this in her astounding essay Science/Fiction on the debates within education on different learning styles. She demonstrates that not only do different learning styles exist but that the debunkers claims are not related to the science, but claims that pertain to power.

The power to other and the power to maintain the status quo, which in education amounts to the same thing.

That income and attainment are so tightly coupled and always have been should lead us to this conclusion fairly safely.

Photo by Sin on Unsplash

Let us now return to that corridor outside that mathematics classroom. When I got expelled from sixth form the reason that I rebelled so outwardly after finishing the work is because there was at least the notion of a promise of responsibility and autonomy that was not forthcoming. In Year 9, however, that false promise was not a factor, but the same initial conditions provided the problems. Though I enjoyed maths the work was too easy and boring. This was a head that was not getting the right attention.

My father is a retired primary school headteacher and obviously discussions around education come up in our house frequently. He told me that I loved learning at primary school but within six weeks of starting secondary school the fire in my eyes had gone out and he could see that I was disillusioned with learning. Passion replaced with pessimism. Classroom replaced with corridor.

What does it mean to be free? What does it mean to be interested?

As more and more studies on the benefits of psychedelic drugs in a variety of medical interventions are conducted, and the idea of banned psychedelic drugs being made legal for medical purposes slowly starts to become more and more recognised as having potential value, the more arguments that take it further and argue for straight up legalisation of drugs on grounds of cognitive liberty are advanced.

Put simply cognitive liberty argues for freedom from interference and freedom for self-determination.

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With reference to psychedelics the argument follows that you should be granted the rights to alter your own consciousness as you see fit, but more broadly it is the freedom to alter your mental processes in any way you wish, through psychedelics or otherwise.

I find this argument compelling for psychedelics, but I find it raises interesting parallels to the lack of autonomy and agency in education that unschoolers perceive. John Holt, the ever astute thinker on young people, their rights and freedom, said,

Next to the right to life itself, the most fundamental of all human rights is the right to control our own minds and thoughts. That means the right to decide for ourselves how we will explore the world around us, think about our own and other persons’ experiences, and find and make the meaning of our own lives.

When Carol Black argues that learning styles exist and that those who claim otherwise are in essence engaging in cognitive imperialism, she is saying that an education system that focuses on a narrow set of cognitive skills and preferences is one that impedes on vast numbers of people’s cognitive liberty.

Success in school correlates with more school success, through a narrow band of verbal and analytical skills that are valued and measured in schools.  More school success correlates with access to the elite institutions and sites of economic and political power that require school success as a gatekeeper for entry. 

(Oh, yeah. And it correlates with family income.) 

To be free is to be autonomous, to be able to self-determine. Schools imposition of a curriculum predicated on a highly textual medium of delivery, with an explicit hierarchy of analytical subjects over artistic and creative subjects, with a lack of opportunity for movement is disabling for people who prefer not to learn that way. And that the curriculum is so rigid is a further affront to most people who see little value in the things that they are being forced to learn.

When my father said that six weeks in to secondary school I just lost interest he was right. I remember thinking that the ethos of secondary school was much different to primary school. That suddenly knowledge was no longer meant to be interesting in and of itself but valuable as a means to an end. Six weeks in I realised that I was no longer free to be interested, but come the start of sixth form I was still interested enough to be there. But what does it mean to be interested?

The first definition of interested is what education is meant to foster. That was what I had lost, the passion was gone replaced by pessisim; interest in that wild eyed passionate sense that talk of slow worms, hibernation and burmation can bring out of eleven year olds who find that particular part of natural science fascinating.

But I soldiered on because I understood the second definition applied to me and my future. I was not impartial because I was told and recognised that I had to have an interest in the education system, I couldn’t be impartial because I understood that how well I did in school would correlate with my later success in life. In simple terms I got that it mattered to my future but me being me, in response to this imposition, I simply put in the bare minimum amount of interest and involvement I could for the rest of my education.

I was lucky. My brain was wired analytical. I was good at maths and science. I enjoyed the out of context puzzles that school provided to a certain extent. Not enough, however, not to be asked to go out in the corridor and work my way through the textbook on my own.

Life in the corridor

It was not really a corridor, but a large skylight covered atrium that could house at least six children from any one of the four maths classrooms that surrounded it. Other classes removed children, but only here were they housed together, requested to be quiet but with no one keeping guard. When you got asked to leave English you were bouncing around the top of three flights of stairs, not pay attention in cookery classes and it was in the dark footwell of those stairs you sat. French and it was the large book cupboard/office.

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There was a period where I was so uninterested in the classroom that I actually preferred doing maths in the corridor with Oliver Cromwell, Joe Rogan and Steven Seagal

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and would often find an excuse to get kicked out.

As Freddie de Boer points out in Education doesn’t Work 2.0, education doesn’t work! Absolute gains are made year on year, but relative gains just don’t happen in education, the system sorts you early on and across the population at large you stay broadly in that position all the way through. Now whilst he doesn’t seem to have a solution this conundrum he spends time fairly convincingly debunking all of the many solutions that have been advocated for in state education over the years.

I believe education doesn’t work because it is not education, it is cognitive imperialism. Those early sortings that we become imprisoned in are simply signals of how aligned your preferential way of learning are to the dominant cognitive paradigm at an early age. Take reading for instance. Out of school reading happens any time between four and fourteen. In school if it isn’t happening proficiently by six or seven you will be sorted and condemned.

And these characters in the corridor had been condemned long ago. When I looked back at education all those years later and thought about my experiences I realised that my dad was right, that six weeks into secondary school my understanding of what interested in education meant had shifted from passion for knowledge to purpose for the labour market.

As I noted when talking about gifts of the heart it was my gifts that finally saw me asked to leave school, my stubborness and indifference to authority, but it was only that the gifts of the head I was given fitted so well with school that it took so long for that to happen. These friends of mine had been condemned earlier on because their gifts did not align and their shift of perception to having the bare amount of interest in school had happened much earlier, probably at primary school.

So what gifts did these friends of mine have?

One of them had their gifts lie clearly in their hands. When we were about eight we went into his garage unsupervised and he drilled us the hardest conkers we could find and then he went on to win every match in the playground. I hadn’t figured that though my conkers

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were really hard, his skill with the drill also gave him the right to the conkers that were ever so slightly harder. He built actual things with wood and metal in Design Technology whilst I just bent a piece of plastic into a trapezium shape and drilled a hole in the middle and called it an egg cup. And now his gifts are demonstrated further by the beautiful oak beam houses that he builds nowadays.

They weren’t the only one however. Another, a farmer’s son bussed in from some rural valley, would discuss cars, tractors, engines and how to fix them, tune them up and drive them around the farm. What they do now I do not know, however, I do know that when I went to study a mechanical engineering degree I did notice there were two types of engineers. The first engineers of the head, those analytical sorts who excelled at maths but wanted something a bit more applicable to study (that was me). And engineers of the hands, those who grew up playing LEGO, building stuff, drawing machines, maybe even playing with tractor engines. These engineers still had to have an A Level in mathematics or physics naturally, but by sorting children so early I wonder how many engineers of the hands we lose?

Adam Kay, a junior doctor and best selling author, says that we may be losing out on good doctors by our fixation on valuing people’s worth within such a particularly narrow band of cognitive preferences.

I honestly think that if you drop the grades to B’s rather than A’s you would get a better calibre of doctor. And also you get doctors from a broader spectrum of society… Being a doctor is not about calculating complex biological pathways, being a doctor is about communication.

But surely engineers and doctors need to be somewhat good at mathematics? Well, exhibit three is the guy who, due to his dyslexia had extra time in all our G.C.S.E exams. And due to the logistics of the particular hall we sat them in those few who were granted extra time took their exams on the stage with the rest of us on the floor facing towards them. I don’t know what grade he got in maths, but I do know that he fell asleep only halfway through and spent the majority of it snoring. What does it mean to be interested indeed.

However, he now runs the family business that has been in their family for generations on the high street. And I am sure that he is more than competent at the finances of running said small business. We have known since the publication of Street Mathematics and School Mathematics in 1993, coincidentally the year that him and I started school, that children can have wildly different abilities in mathematics based on context. If, as demonstrated in The Wire, it is meaningful to you, not stripped of all context, you will work out how to do it.

Erik Hoel is writing a really interesting series on aristocratic tutoring in the past as the preferential educational method for raising geniuses. He claims we don’t produce geniuses like we used to because we don’t have aristocratic tutoring. Whether or not that is true is beside the point here, but what has come up for me, as a mathematics teacher, is in the examples that he cites how old these geniuses were before they were deemed ready for mathematics.

But it was not like [John Stuart] Mill was being taught everything all at once—his father was very specific and focused. First Greek, then arithmetic and history, but little other subjects at first. Starting with languages was common in aristocratic tutoring, often under the tutelage of governesses, although sometimes, as with Mill, via parents or male tutors. Mathematics, it was thought, required a more developed mind to appreciate, but languages, history, and literature made for natural early subjects to focus on (note how different this is from modern school, which tries to scale up knowledge in all domains simultaneously).

What would a later exposure to mathematics have done for these friends of mine? Would we have engineers of the hands going on to study at University instead of sleeping through their end of school exams? Or is that question just enough case of cognitive imperialism?

Here we circle back to the start of the series and the correlation between education and work and capitalism. All three of these friends are Herefordshire born and bred going back generations and still live in the county. I’ve spoken about the virtues of knowing where your place is in the world before, knowing where and what home is to you. But this virtue is not one that school is interested in. The ethos of school is hard work and preparation for the world of work, for capitalism. And the implicit, sometimes even explicit, direction of travel it promotes in children is that of towards University, anything less is deemed a failure (a third of children every year are destined to be designated failures).

My favourite teacher I ever had was my French teacher Mr Robinson. I had him for all five years of secondary school and so I don’t know why this memory sticks out of all possible ones but it does. But one day, when talking about going on to further studies, on to university he said

some of you will obviously never leave Ledbury. Some of you will stay here because family is important to you, living where you grew up is important to you, and that is perfectly ok, in fact, if you feel that way then who is anyone else to tell you otherwise.

Maybe this stuck with me because this was the one rupture in the normal order of things. The normal order of ordering people based on their cognitive preferences, on the place they were academically in when they six or seven, on their parent’s socioeconomic background, and the normal message of saying that now we have ordered you can the ones at the the top keep working hard towards the riches that lie at the end of the road for you. For those are the only riches really worth having.

Cognitive imperialism is not primarily damaging because it sets up the successful to be successful at the expense of those it others, because there are many ways to deem and frame your life a success and many paths to those wide variety of successes later in life. Yes it is grossly unfair that future earnings are pretty much decided a few years into your education, but money is after all not a guarantee of happiness. No, cognitive imperialism is damaging because though success can be had building oak frame houses, running a small business and taking over your father’s farm it is a waste of childhood to not help people locate their gifts, but furthermore it is perverse and cruel to tell people they are failures because of those gifts.

We fail people every year who have different learning styles, different interests, who are following different timelines, whose gifts lie in not separating thinking from doing as Michael Crawford so eloquently argued as both valuable and undervalued, whose love of place is held in contempt, and even, or rather especially, those who come from different cultural backgrounds, and we fail them by telling them it is them that is the failure.

Obviously we need to change this. Obviously it is absurd that a third of every cohort fail their end of school exams and leave school with a piece of paper denouncing them as failures. The conclusion to the first part of this series is that adults teaching children is an anomaly in the ethnographic record and that children learn best by observing and imitating. This same literature recognises that plenty of cultures know that children are drawn to learning when they are ready, plenty of cultures know that it is their gifts that draw them towards their passions and their purposes. The conclusion of enabling children access to productive adults to observe and imitate is the freedom to find the adults who share the gifts that they do and the freedom to observe, interact and imitate with adults is the freedom to determine yourself how best to learn, the right to cognitive liberty.

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He’s eleven years old that boy we started with. Visiting us the week after October half term. That means he is six weeks into secondary school. That means his parents and him have realised that he has a choice: do I remain interested in learning or do I shift my interest towards playing the system of school. He spoke with a sparkle in his eyes and a fire in his belly and you could see his gifts exuding out of him.

But he has realised six weeks in that education has too narrow a focus on the head, and an even narrower understanding of how the head should be used, a myopic focus on a narrow band of knowledge that should be extruded through the ears called curriculum, and he can see that they will miss so much of who he is and what makes him sing. People are complicated beings: heads, hands and hearts. And they should be given the freedom to own who they are, the cognitive liberty to own how they learn, what they are interested in and the right to be the complicated being with the beautiful gifts they were born to be throughout the whole of their childhood. And in the way that only an eleven year can he told me that and I nodded along, smiling at his confidence and wisdom and crying inside for all those failures who have been lost along the way.

1. A Pythagorean cup is a joke cup that can’t be filled.

2. Freedom from interference is generally raised in response to various state sanctioned interventions in individuals consciousness, such as mandatory psychiatric treatment of homosexuals in the 1970’s. But more broadly it applies to any interference with an individual’s inner realm.

Freedom to self-determination is the freedom to alter and enhance your own consciousness. That may be through psychedelics, meditation, yoga, prayer or even the flow state.

You can see both of these freedoms at play in self-directed and consent-based education.

3. My favourite story from school was of a friend who when told to wait in the cupboard/office got forgotten about by the teacher over the lunch break and so in protest he ate the teacher’s packed lunch that was on the desk.

4. Names changed to protect their anonymity.

5. Conkers are the seeds of the horse chestnut tree that people used to tie to string and try and then take it in turns to swing at each other’s conkers with the aim being to smash each other’s apart first. Now health and safety gone mad has consigned the game to the bin, that and excessive playing of Fortnite by the youth, or something like that, or so the Daily Mail says.