What if We Learned Everything the Way We Learn to Walk?
Most of us learn to walk just fine. So why do our schools make learning everything else such an ordeal?
Sophie leans forward and pushes on the sand with her hands. For the briefest of moments, her chunky little thighs take her weight and she lifts her head but she’s got the balance all wrong and she tumbles backwards landing heavily on her bottom with a thud.
She has failed. But she’s not in the slightest bit upset. Instead, she laughs about it and turns to look at her mummy, who is laughing too. There is an incredible look in her mother’s eyes: wonder, love, joy and encouragement. Sophie loves that look.
Sophie tries again. This time she does terribly — she can’t lift her head properly and her hands slip. She face-plants right into the damp sand. It’s a disaster but for some reason now it’s even funnier. Sophie giggles again as she rolls around and sits up ready for another attempt. This is so much fun!
Why is she laughing? Doesn’t she realise that as a child of almost 18 months, she is now, in the words of the education system, ‘working below expected standard’? According to a World Health Organisation report, 50% of all babies worldwide have begun walking by the age of nine and a half months. Sophie isn’t even standing on her own yet. Does she have special needs? Perhaps she’s just lazy and hasn’t been putting the effort in. Should her parents send her to extra classes to get her walking sooner? Some evening tuition perhaps or some medication?
Of course not. As any parent who’s been through this realises, almost all babies learn to walk eventually. There are exceptions, of course, some children born with obvious developmental disorders will never walk but pretty much everyone else learns to do it and how soon they do it doesn’t make the slightest bit of difference to the rest of their lives.
One Swiss study tracked the development of hundreds of babies and children and discovered that a few babies learned to walk at as young as eight-and-a-half months whilst others were almost 20 months before they started walking. And how did this almost entire year of delay affect them as they grew up? It didn’t. Not at all. Not one of them. When they started walking independently was completely unrelated to their motor skills or their cognitive abilities later in life.
Most parents realise this and that’s why Sophie’s mum isn’t worried; instead she can just enjoy sharing this magical learning process with her daughter, safe in the knowledge that Sophie will get the hang of it eventually.
Compare that with how Sophie will learn when she goes to school. She was given as much time as she needed when she was learning to walk but now, at school, deadlines really matter. If she falls more than three or four months behind some arbitrarily set target in maths, reading, writing (sometimes even talking) she will be regarded by her teachers as failing. And once that happens she’s really in trouble. She may lose confidence and start to believe it’s too hard for her.
Children who are not making the grade in school may be given extra help in lessons, extra tuition, extra resources; if they’re really lucky they may get extra attention too, maybe even an extra adult to work with them. The one thing they are never really given is extra time.
Because it seems school isn’t just about learning things, it’s about learning things before everyone else moves on. It’s a race and you’ve got to keep up. While Sophie’s experience of learning to walk was characterised by fun, experimentation and encouragement, her experience at school is characterised by impatience.
Would it be such a bad thing if, just as we did when we were learning to walk, we took a bit more time over teaching and learning? If we didn’t insist on everyone learning so many different topics in maths at such an early age, for example, leaving some of it until the children were older and more of them were likely to understand it, we might find that while we learned fewer things, the things we did learn we learned better and we didn’t leave any children behind.
Perhaps then we wouldn’t have such a crisis in mental health among our young people and might also have a bit more time to do all the other learning we are always being told children should spend more time doing at school: financial literacy, discerning truth from lies, using social media and AI with safety and confidence, studying nature, learning to cook healthy food, first aid and so on.
One criticism of this approach is that children who do manage to master a skill, such as times tables, will get bored waiting for their peers to catch up. This is where we may have to be more innovative in designing our schools, making learning more personalised and allowing space for those children who have learned a new skill to enjoy applying it and helping their friends who are stuck; learning to collaborate a little more than compete. After all, when babies learn to walk, they don’t get bored with it, they just enjoy applying their new-found skill and then encourage their younger sibling to learn it too.
We might learn a lot from studying more closely the way we learn to walk. It is, after all, one of the last significant things many of us learn to do before our education system gets involved in our lives.
And it’s not just the extra time we allow it. Watch home videos of babies standing and walking for the first time and two things in particular stand out:
1) They fall over a lot. They are trying and failing constantly, which isn’t surprising considering how tricky standing up and walking can be. What is surprising is just how readily they get up again, without seeming to be at all disheartened by the experience of failing. In fact, they often find it funny. They are not only unconcerned by their failures, they are entertained by them. How might we maintain this attitude to our learning later in life?
2) Their efforts are celebrated and encouraged by everyone around them. If you are lucky enough to witness a baby taking their first steps, take a moment to take your eyes off the magic happening in front of you and look at the parents, grandparents, siblings and friends who are watching. I wonder if we ever really celebrate our children’s achievements with the same amount of genuine excitement, encouragement and love as we do when we watch them take their first steps. What if we could keep replicating that level of encouragement and joint celebration throughout their lives whenever they learn something new?
Maybe babies have something to teach the rest of us. Maybe they realise more than we do the importance of taking your time, laughing at your failures and encouraging others with genuine love and excitement. Maybe, just maybe, if we learned to do everything the way we learned to walk, learning itself might not seem as painful as it sometimes seems at school. Maybe instead it would feel easy, like … well … like a walk in the park.
John Triggs is a teacher and writer based in London.
