Education into freedom
Aidan Ward and Philip Hellyer
I am 62 and I am battling to free myself. What threatens to chain me are conventional wisdoms, not to mention an array of prejudices, received opinions, and tribal beliefs.
Educating means, precisely, gaining this freedom. My education at 62 is more intense, broader, less in thrall than it has ever been. However, in our culture and our society this is not what education means. As a first cut, education means access to entitlement, or not. And that is bondage, not freedom.
Who feels freed by education? We know that elite students are snapped up by companies who will trash their lives, and that is viewed as success by students, by parents, by universities. That will do as an image of ignorance and servitude. There is an education industry with all the self-devouring appetites and contradictions that our industrial sectors have.
Why can’t we see any of this? Why is it so hard to reclaim the process of education so that it is indeed liberating? What is the significance of liberation in our conformist culture? I want to develop an extended scenario to show the depth of our ignorance, superstition, cravenness around a particular issue. I am begging you not to get tied up in knots about the correctness or otherwise of the scenario as I paint it. I want you to be able to feel what the struggle for freedom feels like when everything is stacked against it.
The image we have for that struggle is Paulo Freire working with slum kids in Brazil. For those children, language itself is known only as something people use to oppress them. They cannot use language because it belongs to their oppressors. Freire had to insist that for the kids, words meant whatever they chose them to mean, and only after that was well established could shared meanings and wider meanings find a place.[1] I want here the existential import of a situation where everything works to exclude. This is a darkness of ignorance and it is, of course, entirely a cultural artefact.
As an aside, deBono’s Handbook for the Positive Revolution was written in Portuguese for the much too stuffy Brazilian establishment, and the UK was next on his list of places that needed to get on with life!
What we need to be able to feel is that this is not about information or knowledge. It is no good saying to one of these kids that if they learn their lessons at school they will be able to get a job. They know better, they know deeper, they know that all that is a further colonisation of their lives. There is a beautiful extended picture of this in the (Booker shortlisted) novel Elmet by Fiona Mozley. This time in a modern English setting, kids who learn that they have to submit to whatever lying indignity is handed to them.
Am I serious? Really? Children in the UK, and not just the poorest, live in a cloud of ignorance, bondaged to an industrial system that will chew them up and spit them out? You bet I am. Only when we can feel the ignorance and fear will we be able to see what education can be. Only when we experience the hopelessness can we properly value a route to freedom. This is the most important thing in the world and we sell it down the river for lack of imagination. All real education brings out new humanity from which imagination can see the next steps.
We live in an intensely consumerist culture, so when we see a problem our first questions are what solutions are out there and how can we buy them. My sister was chief administrator at a seriously well-heeled small school. When the next in a stream of Russian oligarch’s wives appeared to ask how much she would need to pay for her child to attend, the answer that the school was full met with total incomprehension. But we are pursuing a question a hundred times more pressing than where to park a brat.
To reiterate: education truly is the gaining of freedom. It has astonishingly little to do with all of the other things that we label ‘education’. It has nothing to do with any particular stage of life.
Our scenario
Jane Jacobs published Dark Age Ahead in 2004, predicting the decline in public reason in the US! Maybe that’s a frame for us. She says
“five pillars of our culture that we depend on to stand firm,” which can be summarized as the nuclear family and community; quality in education; free thought in science; representational government and responsible taxes; and corporate and professional accountability.
We will see in the scenario how all five of these pillars are thoroughly undermined by dietary guidelines that Alice in Wonderland would recognise as suitably bizarre. Feel how you accept those guidelines as authoritative almost-common-sense, when in fact they are utter nonsense.
We are going to use health again. Life expectancy has started to turn down in the UK and this is the start of a much more pronounced turning point. Something that we are doing, maybe starting in pregnancy and ramping up during infancy and childhood, is causing us as adults to sicken and die. We don’t know what it is, though there are candidate theories, and actually almost nobody cares enough to imagine where we are going wrong. The professional expert view is literally “Let’s double down on what we are doing wrong”. That’s our start: the kids that we dote on are getting a seriously raw deal and we are ignorant of what we are doing to them.
From the child’s perspective, not only are they being put at risk, but the great wall of adults-who-know-better are wrong: the doctor, the teacher, the parent, the judge, the social worker, you name them. The severe disturbances of childhood: autistic spectrum disorders, attention deficit disorders, anorexia, anxiety, and depression belong in this story. But even the most basic cycle of high and then low blood sugar and the behaviours that go with it are a place to ground our imagination. There are biological systems at work here (including their mental aspects) but what the child does gets classified first as behaviour: behaviour that often does not suit the adults in the social system.
Many things have changed since I was a child that could generate a hell for today’s children. We are going to focus on food because it is such a practical way in. Let me re-iterate: we have to understand how we are destroying the world of children if we are to understand what education IS.
Let’s have a first pass at the starting point of education here. I think pointing to Dark Ages elsewhere is like projection: it is a Dark Age here and now which means we cannot see in front of our noses. Freire says words MUST first mean whatever the child wants them to mean. The dietary equivalent of language is that the infant or child’s body has its own knowledge of what works for it. Instead of “do you like that?”, the training ground of the food consumer, the implied question is more “are you sharper now?”, “are you better able to understand what food you need?”. And we can feel for this by thinking of the wall-to-wall health messages around breakfast cereals and how a child is supposed to feel if all of them turn out to be bad news for him or her. What the adults “know” is that people have always eaten cereals for breakfast.[2] Education has to allow such “knowledge” to come into view, critically. Kids themselves must generate a new language about what they experience.
Addiction. In trials with mice, sugar is more addictive than cocaine: mice will give up their cocaine addiction for a sugar addiction. The blood sugar cycle already mentioned is the fuel for an addiction cycle: it doesn’t have to be sugar per se, it can be any refined carbohydrate that rushes into the bloodstream. Nora Bateson and the IBI have shown in their research paper that the ADHD drugs that are prescribed in school, often very young, progress and spread to an unbelievably pervasive drug addiction rate in US colleges. It’s a guess, but I think what we feed kids is a kind of training for all these addictions of young people. WE trash THEIR lives.
One of the insights from thinking about addiction is that it must infect and infest the young peoples’ relationships with their parents and other adults. When kids get fat we try to restrict what they eat, force more exercise on them, or just collude. Which is as nothing to the dramas that can ensue when illegal drugs come on the scene. So we set up an internal compulsion for kids and then oppose it: what is that about? Talk about a Dark Age. Kids must be able to understand just how exploitative and addictive their environment is when it is mediated by the people who love them and have a duty of care towards them. Education anyone? Just say no to cornflakes? By the way, there are babies being born who are already insulin resistant. Crack babies with a different habit.
Given everything we know, why are there no investigations into whether kids are addicted to sugar and refined carbohydrates, and at what ages? Why? Do we think such addiction is not capable of destroying young lives?
Fats, saturated fats, are the very stuff of life. It may have escaped you but human breast milk is incredibly rich in saturated fats. And there may be a reason for that. Cholesterol that we have demonised because of some historical technical mistakes in analysis (that we refuse to correct!) is absolutely vital to the brain, especially the developing brain. It is THE transport system taking fats as fuel around the body and repairing problems. The more the better, seriously.
Because we messed up understanding that it is high levels of blood glucose that cause an inflammatory response in our bodies and the laying down of fat, when we get fat we try to consume less fat. In fact, it is still standard dietary advice from people with no credentials or evidence and lots of power. Dark Ages. Because we have a ‘whole food’ culture now that says low fat is better, is high value, is wall-to-wall in every supermarket, how are kids expected to choose the food they need against all that pressure?[3]
This is the knock-on effect. You get sugar-and-carbs addicted and it will eventually make you fat. Then you will starve your brain because fat is not good. Doctors think that obesity causes other conditions when it is only a correlation from a common cause. Dark Ages. What we want to take away here is that the standard childhood scenario befuddles the brain and the mind. Might that be an issue for real education? For liberation into being an effective person with real choices?
Opposing forces
The misplaced beliefs and wrong advice put forward in our society by various authorities who should know better, are underpinned as ever by commercial pressure. Briefly, we have a food industry that profits from our addictions, and that loves to sell “healthy” products that address but don’t disturb our addictions. They fund and populate advice-generating bodies. We have a pharmaceutical industry that needs us to be sick in order to sell their products. If half the population were diabetic (not a silly prophecy) they would love it. I have experienced their push. And we have agribusiness whose model is monocultures when what we need is variety. So it suits them to proclaim whole grain health and ecstatic battery chickens.
(There is a juicy side story in Australasia, where the whole dietary advice industry and indeed cereal manufacturers and a vertically integrated cabal, is populated by Seventh Day Adventists who don’t believe in evolution! Dietary advice arrived in someone’s vision, literally! The standard nutrition textbook somehow omits to even mention meat! Dark Ages on steroids)
The heart of the opposition seems to be a Stalinist health industry, who probably can’t afford to admit a mistake of this magnitude, that is killing people on an industrial scale. Very approximately, if you put forward a new idea with its evidence they say the evidence isn’t yet conclusive (and refuse to fund research that would make it conclusive): if you say that existing policy and advice doesn’t have any evidential backing (or the evidence has been disproved) they say they have to act because of the scale of the public health crisis. If you say they are causing the public health crisis you never work again.
This opposition is only what we are describing: the forces that hold ignorance and stupidity in place. The forces that have to be put in their place for liberation to occur. The sources of the very false consciousness consensus that we are literally forced to put up with. If you were accused of witchcraft in the 17thC, what would it take to educate yourself?
If we check out Jane Jacobs’ five pillars here:
1. Family life is radically undermined by the conflicts that addictive cycles introduce, from sugar addiction in very early childhood to a range of addictions including social media and prescription medication through to illegal drugs.
2. Quality in education. Education as we know it fails to even locate the child correctly in this oppression and exploitation, casually adding to the bind children are in. Education which thinks knowledge is in the head and that the body doesn’t know.
3. Free thought in science. The people who have resisted the tide of wrong advice have been persecuted, prosecuted, banned, vilified. The very opposite of a scientific process. And it is impossible to get research funds to show existing approaches to diet are wrong
4. Representational government. I suspect that no government is going to call out the medical professions on their failure to protect the populations they nominally serve. There has been some limited democratic movement in the US food guidelines.
5. Professional accountability. There may yet be a slew of legal prosecutions of senior people in the medical hierarchy but for the time being they are inaccessible and unaccountable.
The point of describing our era as a new Dark Age is that the routes to improving a situation are closed off in a way that hermetically seals the situation. Dark means essentially no sources of light.
Routes to freedom?
If you taste merely with your tongue, for example, then a doughnut may taste great — that’s precisely what it has been engineered to do by people who live in their heads. If you taste it and allow the whole of your body’s intelligence to be present to the experience, the doughnut might go uneaten. Philip Shepherd
The very body intelligence we need to fight our way out of the bind our culture creates around decent food is itself not recognised by our culture. Or put the other way round we are trained into not recognising our body intelligence because that renders us maximally exploitable, and able to be seduced into addictions. Tobacco, sugar, oil: the stuff of empire and slavery old and new.
That is, inarguably, I think, the primary lesson that the classroom, the curriculum, and the institution of lower education, have been designed to instil. We are teaching our children that it’s better to think with a portion of their beings than to think with the whole of their beings. Philip Shepherd
As Philip Shepherd describes so clearly, if we did not denigrate our bodies[4] and think that our heads are the source of wisdom we could not be caught in this trap. There are cultures that do otherwise with radically different results. Many other cultures think with their hearts and their guts when it matters. We need to understand that we are not separate beings the way our culture insists and the way our neoliberal exploiters and despoilers need us to be.
Let me return to my own recent education to comment. Among my kids there are athletes, dancers and musicians. In different ways, these disciplines are whole in a way that means school is always flawed. The engagement of a skater with a big audience in a championship cannot be mediated by anything that can be taught school-style: in fact almost everything “school” detracts. I can still feel myself being undermined and destabilised by my school career even though I largely ignored it. My son having the sheer confidence to compose and conduct at the top level contains the same insight, and notice this is the children educating the father. Athletes are among the champions of proper low carbohydrate diets simply because it means so much to them and it shows in their results. Inner intelligence. Steve Redgrave, meanwhile, became diabetic by using carb-loading for his rowing.
Strangely, it was my diagnosis as diabetic that lit the blue touchpaper under my education. I could no longer pretend that these medical types were making any sense at all. The contradictions are just too glaring. Bacon will kill you and olive oil is life-giving: and the fats are almost chemically identical. Utter balls. Eat mainly carbohydrates when your body can’t process them and the resultant processes will kill you in due course: what is this other than criminally bad advice? So my own poor secondary school, the kids’ extra-curricular careers, and the crass medical establishment, all give me a gift pointing in the same direction: bodily intelligence. Of course, at 62 that is a bit of a challenge! But it is liberation, believe me.
The picture painted in this blog is to try and allow ourselves to see what real education leading to liberation and freedom might be. To allow infants even, who are both wonderfully fragile and deeply robust, to believe in themselves against the weight of all the cultural baggage and oppression. I have grandkids, so I know the temptation, the cultural assumption, that I know better than they at two or three years old.[5] But that won’t do. It opens the door to their lives being trashed both mentally and physically (if such a distinction makes sense any more).
Paulo Freire was forcefully disciplined in insisting that words meant what slum kids said they meant. We cannot sweep this under the carpet. How are kids going to know how they feel about food and how it is going to be OK for them to insist with us? How else can they take control? I gather there are experiments where kids are just offered a wide range of food to pick and choose between. And they eat odd combinations, or ‘too much’ of a single item, but achieve a diet that balances over time. Unless sugar in on offer, whereupon their diet gets hopelessly off-balance, which we could describe as addiction. Even fruit now has been selectively bred to be too sweet for the human metabolism.
They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do. They fill you with the faults they had, And add some extra, just for you. Larkin
I can remember my old-style headteacher at school, a bit military and authoritarian. And as head boy I can remember a conversation with him about what pupils could be trusted to do. He said they would have to demonstrate this or that, and I asked who the teacher was in the picture he was painting. We have no choice but to trust and nurture the wholeness of burgeoning intelligence. Our current approach to knowing better has ushered in a desperately oppressive and destructive Dark Age that has reversed a century and a half of increasing life expectancy. Figure on that.
[1] This individual use of language, of understanding, is universal. Near-universal is the pretence that we understand what meaning is meant when someone uses a word, even though we lack the individual contextual and cultural blockchains that have wrapped and moulded the core and the nuances. Despite dictionaries and glossaries and jargon, the best we can do is to explore the shared intended meanings in the moment of conversation, and to let go of the notion of stability, that the meanings communicated will persist, rather than becoming just another transaction in each person’s blockchain of meaning.
[2] ‘Always’ is slippery, particularly for us short-lived humans. What I ate as a child, was encouraged to eat, still feels resoundingly normal and features in my ‘comfort foods’, if no longer in my everyday diet. Some of the first ‘knowledge’ I gained about nutrition still echoes. My mother taught us to read labels, to reject items which contained sugar (the plethora of –oses) in the first three ingredients. A wise rule of thumb, perhaps, but one implicitly rooted in a world of processed and packaged foods.
[3] The illusion of choice, where many options are only marginally better, if better at all. 60% whole wheat bread, anyone? There is an engineered insignificance to the choices we think we’re making.
[4] How often we see someone go for a run, headphones attached, with music or podcast or anything at all going into their ears, desperately distracting their minds from being able to listen to their bodies. I wonder how many injuries result, from the body-inattention, from unfeelingly following the advice of heart monitors, etc. In contrast, my colleague at Beeminder, Andy Brett, runs serious distances by feel, without instrumentation:
In training, I didn’t use any instrumentation — no GPS, no heart rate monitor, and no watch. During long runs, the objective was to run at “infinite-mile pace,” a pace that felt easy enough to continue indefinitely. The actual pace wasn’t important — how it felt was.
https://andybrett.com/know-thyself-without-instrumentation
[5] Speaking of mutual learning and real education from child to parent, check out Derek Sivers, Parenting : Who is it really for? « Nobody else can hang with us like this. Everyone else gets so bored. » https://sivers.org/pa
