Psychology versus Industrial Schooling and Hard Work! This is the most important criticism, and it has come about only recently. What used to be understood instinctively (but was ignored as unscientific) is now revealed to us through rapidly increasing discoveries in how the brain works, as well as advances in evolutionary and cognitive psychology. These are discoveries which the advertising industry has seized on very rapidly indeed, and commercial training is reflecting it too. Not so industrial schooling, which appears to be still in the year 1850 or so in terms of its learning theory. We need now to look at the way the brain learns, what motivates it and what turns it off. This has profound implications for how we approach learning for young people.

Myth Number One

If you tell a child something, and they are able to repeat it back on paper, it means they have learnt something. This is the essence of much of our testing, and it works on the principle that learning is something that is done to you. Nothing could be further from the truth. Learning is only ever the product of thinking. A good teacher will make you think – but so will a striking experience, an interesting conversation, or a painful failure. Humans learn by doing things. Confucius, the Chinese philosopher, is reputed to have said: ‘ If you tell me something, I will soon forget it. Show me how, and I will remember. But let me try it for myself – then I will really understand!’

If you think of all the things you are capable of or skilled at doing, from organising a party to tying a shoe lace to driving a car, there are very few things you have not learnt except by just doing them – and watching others or taking advice at the same time. How many of the facts you learnt at school can you still recall? The brain never remembers isolated facts, it only remembers ideas, or facts that fit into a context that means something. Humans are sense making creatures, who are designed to learn by matching what they see and experience to what they know. If you don’t agree, try now memorising ten random and meaningless figures or sets of letters, and see how you get on.

Myth Number Two

Knowledge learnt at school can be stored up, and reapplied years later. Is this your experience? Most of us remember very little of the scattering of knowledge that took years to pump in. What we gained was much more ways of thinking, knowing how to set about doing things, from solving problems to analysing information, from writing something pleasing to spotting when people are not telling the truth, from singing a harmony to working in a team. If we were lucky, we learnt that life and being active in it can be a joyful business. If the Minister for Education were to sit all his childhood exams again, I wonder what he would score?

Myth Number Three

Learning is ‘work’, and is done at school.
It is somehow assumed that children turn their brains on when they come to school, and switch off when they leave. The reverse may well be true. If only 20% of a child’s waking hours are spent in school, what is the significance of the other 80%? We have to face up to the fact that learning can happen at any time, and that a child’s total waking experience will shape his or her mind. Furthermore, it will not happen under conditions of either stress, unhappiness or low confidence, a fact that MRI brain scanning has proved quite graphically. Forcing children to learn is almost a contradiction in terms. All we can hope to do is make the conditions right for thinking, and provide an environment that is encouraging rather than threatening.

Myth Number Four

Competition is a good thing for everybody. Some people relish competition, others don’t. What we now know is that there are many different kinds of intelligence, and at least seven different learning styles; the point here is that as soon as you generalise (as schools have to), teaching a class in a particular way, or emphasising a certain kind of task, there is no longer a level playing field. As many may be turned off as turned on. Part of the answer to the riddle of the successful person who was ‘never any good at school’ is to be found here.

A further consequence of the obsession with connecting learning and schooling is that we miss the significance of vast areas of child development. We should aim to base our approach to education on sound evidence about how humans develop. We say that people need to know much more about the importance of looking after babies and toddlers properly: it is no exaggeration to say that they are the most important group of citizens in this city!

More articles by Tim Baddeley