To enter into the thoughts and viewpoint of someone else: to share and communicate. To  have openness and imagination and respect for the other. To move from self to a more global and balanced view of reality. This is education.

The traditional school system is based on a model of external control: fixed subject hours, presence sheets, evaluation, and assessment which maintains a teacher-imposed, performance-based structure held in place by the extrinsic motivation of reward and punishment. It imposes how, when and what a student learns: limited and controlled content is delivered from a teacher to a captive audience. Yet, there is an enormous amount of  research that show that learning is neither linear nor sequential and the paradigm we apply hinders, rather than helps, learning:

“Student development is multidimensional rather than sequential, and prerequisite leanings cannot be conceptualized as neatly packaged units of skills or knowledge”. (Sadler, 1989)

As DK Holland (2011) writes “The goal of any prison is to maintain control”; school is not about education as I understand it: that is to develop autonomous free-thinking, questioning individuals, but rather about a Foucauldian process of normalization (Foucault, 1979) brought about through power and control mechanisms. The aim is to socialize individuals to accept their place within an existing system and to uphold the status quo. It is for this reason the unequivocal finding of research done over the last hundred years including 900 studies (Johnson and Johnson, 2000) has never been truly instigated within the school system.

I come back to my painting of Icarus: my Icarus is not allowed to fly; the wings of his imagination and possibility are firmly tethered to a system of power and control. As a teacher I watch what well-intentioned systems can do to the fledgling potentials before me; enthusiasm and originality dampened to acceptance and conformity. This image is about my frustration.

I want to help students become autonomous, creative and freethinking. I seek their active involvement, not their passive acceptance and yet I find that we put in place more and more systems of control and limitation: the focus is not on efficient learning but on controlled presence and grades. Given the right environment these things become irrelevant: one of my classes spent two weeks of their holiday finishing a project, after all the grades had been handed in, because they wanted to.

Instead of spending our time trying to fix content and the order of learning we should be thinking about setting up dynamic, cooperative environments that tap in to the students’ own motivation and learning patterns.

As John Dewey wrote, there is no game without rules and removal of control does not mean removal of structure. Freedom is the freedom to think, not to fall into another form of external manipulation and control because of a lack of intellectual tools to order and judge information. The rules arise out of mutual respect of a group working together and the structure comes from the providing tools and methods of working and dealing with information.

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HOLLAND, D.K. (2011) Blow Up the Design School!, Communication Arts May/June issue

Johnson, D.W., Johnson, R.T., Stanne, M.B.: (2000) Cooperative Learning Methods: A Meta-Analysis, University of Minnesota

Sadler, D.R. (1989). ‘Formative assessment and the design of instructional systems’, Instructional Science 18(2), 119-141.

“We all observe the world through our own window. A window is a viewpoint over a horizon, a framework, a piece of glass that is always tinted to some extent, and it has its orientations and its limitations.” (Tariq Ramadan). Real creativity arises from being able to see not only a situation, but ourselves looking at the problem and to move outside this perspective. It is the imagination to look differently: to create new associations and metaphors and the flexibility to explore new paths. It means stopping being afraid: being comfortable with ourselves and without fixed boundaries. It means being able to laugh and play allowing the space for the intuition of the right brain to surface.

It means being comfortable with the idea that there isn’t a right answer; something school does not encourage since it rewards you for giving “the right answer” and punishes you for taking risks and falling down. Yet how can one learn without doing this? “Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes.” (Scott Adams)

As G.E. Miller wrote: “We say we want sensitive, thoughtful, analytic, independent scholars, then we treat them like Belgian geese being stuffed for pâté de foie gras. We reward them for compliance, rather than independence; for giving the answers we have taught them rather than for challenging the conclusions we have reached”

“Problems cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them.”  Albert Einstein

However, the computer encourages distraction and information is presented without hierarchy or qualitative discrimination. Student’s become easily distracted and lost within this world and are easily subject to manipulation by advertising and various interest groups. On one hand they reject teacher control, on the other they seek guidance and direction within the confusion of communications. It is a point of crisis at which, historically, extremist political interests often gain control because they offer simplistic solutions in face of extreme insecurity of complexity. We are therefore at a point when we require citizens capable of clear, analytical thinking, communication and collaborative skills and transdisciplinary, wide perspectives. The problems that we face require creativity, autonomy and a capacity for life-long learning. It is therefore the apposite moment to apply the principles of collaborative learning, shown to be extremely effective in higher achievement, caring, supporting relations and psychological health (Johnson and Johnson, 2000).

Unlimited access to learning material and the capacity to create groups through social media should enable new learning environments that free students from the dominance of school. However, by itself the computer tends to isolate people (according to psychologist Deborah Tannen, more than 90% of human communication is non verbal). Young students do not have in place the tools of self-discipline to avoid constant distraction while on the computer (the worlds of work and play become one), nor have they developed the qualitative judgement to choose between the material they are presented with. There is also the requirement of perspective to judge what it is important to learn.

Thus presential, social interaction is necessary for learning. Putting people in group does not automatically lead to collaborative learning: so group and interactive skills have to be taught. Creativity and the perspective to deal with complex problems and the relationship between ourselves and our thinking needs various processes, including moments of absorption and research, along with periods of reflection and moments of distance and detachment. The addictive power of computer immersion and the dominant directivity of the tools can kill creativity. Thus a distinction needs to be made between computer and non-computer time and understanding developed of the power and limitation of the computer and how it affects human thinking and reality.

Further, clear definition must be made of fundamental, essential skills and techniques beyond the attraction and diversion of market-led constant change and renewal.

As Johnson and Johnson (2000) write, “The truly committed cooperative learning group is probably the most productive tool humans have”, guided by a clear perspective of the essential human tools we need to acquire and the understanding that answers are something that we seek together and are not absolutes imposed from the outside: based on a true respect for others, this model could revolutionize our schools and create the citizens of the future that are capable of addressing the enormous crises that we face (see Gilding, 2011).

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FOUCAULT, M. (1979) Discipline and Punish, Penguin

GILDING, P (2011) The Great Disruption: How humankind can thrive in the 21st Century Royal Society of Arts Lecture: http://www.thersa.org/rss/rsa-audio/

HOLLAND, D.K. (2011) Blow Up the Design School!, Communication Arts May/June issue

JOHNSON, D.W., JOHNSON, R.T., STANNE, M.B.: (2000) Cooperative Learning Methods: A Meta-Analysis, University of Minnesota

WU, T. (2011) The Rise and Fall of Information Empires, Royal Society of Arts Lecture: http://www.thersa.org/rss/rsa-audio/

My idea is rather to provide driving lessons and a map: explain the topography and the various routes available and to help them when they get lost. To provide a structure.

The process of learning, as Postman wrote is not linear:

“Certainly, anyone who has worked with children in an inquiry environment knows what a delightful, fitful, episodic, explosive collage of simultaneous ‘happenings’ learning is.  If the learning process must be visualized, perhaps it is most authentically represented in a Jackson Pollock canvas- a canvas whose colours increase in intensity as intellectual power grows (for learning is exponentially cumulative).”

-It is a messy, human process based on a series of approximations and  human contact and exchange. The process has to be adopted for each individual, each class and each day: they have a German test in the next class? I do not have all their attention and bullying them is not going to help their learning or the test. Expectation influences perception and one cannot understand something which one cannot relate to the experience and reference one has. Students don’t necessarily learn what I teach or fail to learn that which is not taught.

Never-the-less, all political discourses around education seem to be centred around the organisation, control and standardization of process and procedure rather than the creation of the human, supporting and encouraging environment that nourishes and encourages learning and confidence (of both student and teacher).

This dialectic seems difficult to address since the perceptions of the organisers are not those of the teachers: it is reasonable to wish to define and assess what is learnt, the content of courses and the efficacy of the process. Yet when the focus is too concentrated on structure the very nature of learning begins to be lost; it is not linear and it is not a simple, left brain process (which is what most testing assesses). Again Postman:

“From all this, you must not conclude that there is no logic to the learning process.  There is. But it is best described as a ‘psycho-logic’, whose rules sequences, spirals and splotches are established by living, squirming, questioning, perceiving, fearing, loving, above all, languaging nervous systems.”

We live with the heritage of the Modernist experiment. The error of this experiment was to remove solutions from human experience and behaviour into an idea of abstract perfection detached from reality. What McGilchrist sees in terms of left brain dominance.

“The right hemisphere saw individuals where the left hemisphere saw categories; the right hemisphere realised the importance of what is intuitive and embodied, where the left hemisphere prioritised abstraction and rationality (here I distinguish mere ‘rationality’ from the all-important, and far more complex, ‘reason’, to which both hemispheres need to contribute). “

Most of the misunderstandings in the discussions on education come from this dialectic. I do not advocate formlessness and lack of structure, but a structure based on reason, not on abstract maps.

A map is not the terrain it represents; it has a certain schematic relation to that terrain and can express different aspects. It seems as if the left brain wishes to limit reality to its descriptions. Concentration on the language of the map distances from experience of the landscape. Industrialization and Modernism already restructured the environment to resemble the plan and covered it with man-made artefacts, so that many people have no contact with natural landscape. Digitalisation now removes our focus even further from direct experience and increases the focus on the map: the mental model of that experience. Men focus on screens, not on direct interaction with the physical world.

If consciousness and the mechanism of perception is a work in progress, this change of focus must have a fundamental affect on our perception of reality and our manipulation of it. The metaphors we use affect directly our perception and behaviour; as George Eliot wrote we treat children differently if we see them as plants to be nourished or blank slates to be written on. Human beings do not function like computers and the metaphor is an inappropriate one and learning is not a linear process of acquisition, yet I am afraid that we are beginning to view students in terms of programming!

I became a teacher because I believe that the only freedom that we have in life is the freedom to think for ourselves and I wanted to help people reach this freedom.

The Buddha said “Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense.”

School is a system: projects, tests, grades, within which what we are doing can be forgotten; you use your intelligence to survive: do what is necessary to survive the system and live your lives in the space around it, detached from the process.

I make life difficult for you because I want you to be completely involved in the process for you. We cannot learn unless we are engaged.

Ask yourself:

• What do I want to know?
• What do I need to know?
• What are my strengths?
• What are my weaknesses?
• What are the habits that I fall into that block my development?
• How do I perceive myself and how do I think other people perceive me?

Amusement and distraction do not lead to satisfaction. Satisfaction comes from the absorption and effort that lead to mastery.

During your schooling you have been labelled: intelligent, mediocre or stupid: gifted or useless. These are just labels, but labels that affect our performance: much research shows that students that are told that they are good do better that those who are told that they are poor (Robert Rosenthal): teachers told that some students are gifted behave differently to these students.

I begin to glimpse your narratives (this is, after all, supposed to be a narrative course!): the behaviours that you develop to deal with school and the world. Do you see them? You are, as my wife said, “socialized to accept the system: it’s a “norm”, can I reach you beyond that norm?

Fuck it, lets get passed this shit, stop playing our parts and learn something!

I can dominate this group: fence them in and refuse to let them run until they have learned to obey and walk in the way I wish.

I can tie them all together and lead them slowly along a path.

But, what I hope to do is gather their attention and use the energy of the heard to create a rhythm that heads them all towards a common goal and ride on their backs; only needing to nudge them occasionally back on to the path, pointing out landmarks to reach on the way to keep their enthusiasm.

Entering a class after the holidays, I found again all those elements that aren’t in my careful planning: the energy or inertia of a class: the expectations and the prejudgments. The powerful personalities and habits of each individual.

I also meet my own insecurity: I teach full time and I work in an area that is always evolving and changing. Do I know enough? Can I be convincing to students that have little perception of “wisdom and experience”?

There I saw that the point is not to teach, but to provide the environment where students can succeed. Harness and use their energy to advance as I imagined in my metaphor. If I can teach anything it is how to evaluate themselves and the information that they find and how to be clearer in their communication with themselves and others.

To teach that life is a journey, not a race!

On the other hand, without habits of application and concentration: precision and attention to detail, we cannot achieve excellence and these habits must be learnt.

We seek direction; we need support and boundaries to give definition to our lives.

Yet we also need freedom to be able to see outside of the box: develop our creativity and ourselves.

Teaching needs to understand this distinction: to be about guidance, not imposition. To offer the freedom and support to allow us to try without fear, the guidance to keep us from falling, the discipline to keep us going towards the satisfaction of mastery.

Our capitalist, consumer society encourages the values of newness, change, novelty and facile replacement, rather than enduring quality, reflection and consistency: ease rather than effort. A new experience is just click away!

We need to bring our students back to themselves, so that they can learn that “deliberate practice” and awareness lead to a more enduring satisfaction.