More adventures in epistemology and not-education
School makes you stupid
Here’s a school story that has stuck with me. The mother of a friend of our children, let’s call her C, had a son who was hard to handle. He took after his dad who was a bit of a roughneck engineer, fiercely independent and dismissive of management. The boy, let’s call him J, was small of stature with a rat’s tail haircut and an attitude. At a parent’s evening the teacher complained to C that J knew absolutely nothing. When C tested this proposition with J at home, it appeared to the contrary that J knew pretty much everything he was supposed to. When C asked J why he could not answer questions at school he explained that the teacher knew he knew all the answers and was only asking to annoy him. I am guessing that this was an accurate version of events. Neither was J innocent when explaining to his class that he had a cock called Trevor! Also entirely true and literal.
When we carve up the world but distinguishing and naming things, we determine what that world will be like and what sort of distinctions we may make next. When we forget that we are in a language game and think that the things we have so named are in the world we get into a tangle. In this story we have distinguished for instance the boy J and some school mandated knowledge. There arises inevitably a question in that world about whether the school has transferred the knowledge to J’s head, or not. And we can see it is a troublesome question: it is a question that causes strife.
There are other ways of distinguishing things in this world. Bortoft for instance asks us to notice that the teaching moment and the learning moment are necessarily one and the same. No teaching has happened if no learning has happened. If we follow that line of interest and distinction we are led to ask about the nature of the relationship between the teacher and J and his mother C. What is being learnt by whom, and how do we know? In this entirely different epistemology we do not get the strife and our “knowledge” allows us to make further interesting distinctions.
We can, with considerable difficulty struggling against the way our language works, perform an infinite number of redistinguishing steps, and if we experiment we find that, although it is difficult, the ones that use “doing” language forms like “teaching” and “learning” allow us to make more progress understanding the world and making further useful distinctions without getting, as they say, our knickers in a twist.
Now let me see if I can get another story straight. It is decidedly multilingual. My youngest son and his partner L are living in Slovakia while L teaches German in a Slovak school on a Goethe Institute scheme. She was talking with the class about the German word for uncle. Now apparently in Slovak there is a strong and important distinction between my mother’s brother and my mother’s sister’s husband. Got it? One is a blood relative and the other is not. In English and German we don’t make that distinction and in Slovak they do. So the story goes that the Slovak Teacher upbraided L in front of the class for telling them something in her native German that could not possibly be true! And L was suitably embarrassed and angry at the sheer stupidity and arrogance of the Slovak teacher.
That anger and uncomprehension are a sign that we have forgotten that we are not talking about the world but about the things we distinguish in the world. The past-master at redrawing worlds with different distinctions is Ursula Le Guin in her sci-fi novels. I find them spell-binding.
School makes you stupid
It just does, no matter what claims are made. We have friends, not close, husband and wife retired teachers, in fact a headteacher, well thought of. Nice people with a lively family and into literature and classical music. I think the husband must have a biology degree from discussions about the history of genetics. So this guy has had cancer and is painfully thin. However, instead of questioning where he is with his health he doubles down on conventional advice and the biology he learned 50 years ago. The right answers. That is tough to be around.
School teaches you that there is a description of the world out there that you must learn. I am sure everyone remembers the physics experiments where you work back from the required answer to generate experimental results that fit. I can recall a schoolfriend tumbling to the geography teacher having given us one textbook to study but “teaching” out of another. We just copied passages out of the other textbook to fulfil homework assignments.
And every year there are problems with exam questions. Sticking with geography: “What is hard water?” “Ice”. Is the question ambiguous? Is the candidate taking the piss? What marks can be given or taken away? The question setters have a way of dividing up and understanding the world that they no longer understand as their own. The syllabus creators too. What is the status of people who do it differently? In general they are not even recognised as legitimate. Since everyone can in the limit see what is going on, school makes you stupid. It makes you give the conventional response and stops you thinking.
Let me draw a different distinction. In an unschool (the classic description is in Free to Learn by Peter Gray, or look up Sudbury Valley) the kids follow their interests and instincts with no syllabus input. There are staff to be consulted, but no pre-ordained teaching. Or the Reggio Emilia school system which was started by parents in bombed out northern Italy after the war, similarly pulls all its exploratory studies from the children. I have seen this at Madely Nursery School with 2 and 3 year olds. The distinction I am drawing is that in these environments the staff are simply endless fascinated by what the kids bring forth. And the children are people in ways our schools cannot even imagine. In fact the Reggio approach has an iconic poem called The Hundred Languages of Schoolchildren, which I commend to you.
The connection with the previous section is this. In child-led enquiry (which if you think you have seen it please look again) the distinctions the child makes are always valid. How could they not be? And because of high levels of respect between children, modelled on staff, it is always clear that there are other possibilities. This is real education: different fascinating people understanding the world in different ways, motivated by wonder. When I was at Madely a two-year-old looking at a spider asked “Do spiders have ears?” another responded “If they don’t have ears how do they get about?”. The school, by the way, has a mix of middle class kids, whose parents have understood that it is brilliant, and deprived working class kids from what is an old mining village.
Here is the ticklish bit. You are probably asking what happens to kids with a real education in our stupid world. I am just going to hint at an answer tangentially. My elder son is a distinguished musician — composer and conductor. He spent his school career expressing himself musically, for example writing a musical based on Alice in Wonderland when he was 12. When it came to doing the International Baccalaureate exams he wanted his grades and I can remember him spending some few hours with a mathematically literate older sister, going through the syllabus to make sure he could pick up the marks. He got a grade 7, top marks. When we accept that school is about the world, we struggle. When we treat it as an arbitrary system, we just need to be able to think. His musical reputation now is being able to conduct the most fiendish modern music.
Patterns and discernment
Here’s a problem I have. My wife teaches in a junior school. Why is it a problem? At one level it is just a matter of me walking the school-makes-you-stupid line without being rude to my wife. At another level, school makes my wife literally stupid sometimes, and because it makes the senior management stupid as well, there are some pretty crass hoops to jump through. I do my best to help without being made stupid too. Without mentioning Ofsted, who are meta-stupid: they don’t know that the teaching moment is also the learning moment.
You can imagine when I returned home from Madely all inspired by my visit and report to my wife what I have seen. “That is what we do” she says. And there it is a perfect nutshell. If you don’t know how to make alternative distinctions in what is, you cannot see or hear. Or you can only see or hear what you have been told exists. Which is where all our worst fears about school really being about social conditioning live. School as we know it was invented by the Prussians to make sure that the men in their army were sufficiently alike to be commandable.
I wouldn’t want you to run away with the idea that because I am tuned to discern stupidity I think I am smart. That doesn’t follow at all. Rather it takes a thief to catch a thief. One of the reasons it is difficult to be smart is that it is not an individual activity. To act in the world we generally need to act socially (the entirely fictional modern heroes of Silicon Valley are our projection here, never trust anyone who admires Steve Jobs), and acting socially means an ability to conceive the world together. Organisations are far more stupid even than individuals for this reason. School education makes you stupid AND schools as institutions make you stupid: just think for how long you were confined in institutions that couldn’t think for themselves. My own school history involved moving regions at 10 which gave me an insight at least subconsciously that school could not be taken at face value. And my other son got a similar break by running the technology side of the school theatre so that a succession of staff came to him for help and advice.
To be smart in the way that Hubert Dreyfus says is the pinnacle of human achievement, we need to be incredibly flexible in our thinking: skilful coping in arbitrary and novel contexts. If we have been taught how to make sense of the world we will have a repertoire of one way, and very limited resources for rethinking. Our ability to discern patterns of behaviour will be limited. If we study the San people in the Kalahari, their repertoire of ways of understanding their environment is vast compared to ours, giving them powers that we think are magical or mystical. School makes you stupid and when you are stupid you can’t discern the patterns of behaviour you might otherwise pay attention to. You don’t know, and cannot know, what you are missing.
Real changes in behaviour are rooted in real changes in how we see the world, and they are largely subconscious. Being intellectually convinced of climate change doesn’t change us, as we have seen. We still buy overprices houses next to the sea which is about to invade them, because that is a nice place to live. So the rigidity we have been given by our “education” and are still given by our mandatory “Continuing Professional Development” will kill us. Our conscious, left-sided, classifying mind thinks it doesn’t need to be surprised by the way the world actually works. We defend what we believe to be true in a thoroughly neurotic way, trying to make it true.
Stability leads to instability. The more stable things become and the longer things are stable, the more unstable they will be when the crisis hits. Hyman Minsky
So if we manage to stabilise the world we think in, in our as-if-detached way, the more thoroughly we will be blown out of the water when we are forced to recreate our world. Truly King Canute is more with us now than for many centuries. We had a go at a crisis ten years ago and we flunked it so comprehensively. We flunked it because we could not get a sufficient body of people to reimagine a world that was less broken.
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool. Richard Phillips Feynman
Despite ambitions to inculcate independent thinking in pupils, a moment’s thought indicates what a nonsense that is.
For this reason, the more subjected and less able to dream of freedom that they are, the less able will concrete human beings be to face their challenges. The more of a sombering present there is, one in which the future is drowned, the less hope there will be for the oppressed and the more peace there will be for the oppressors. Thus, education in the service of domination cannot cause critical and dialectic thinking: rather it stimulates naïve thinking about the world. Paulo Freire
