The ‘classrooms’ of stone age times were messy, unpredictable, challenging places where youngsters needed a multiplicity of skills and attitudes if they were to survive. Sitting still and being instructed is not what the brains of today’s pupils have evolved to expect. Children need more freedom, more experience of reality than even the best teachers in a classroom can provide.

“I’ve been convinced for some time”, writes Keir Bloomer of the Scottish Qualifications Agency, “ that the dysfunctionality of the secondary school and the inappropriateness of many of its goals are major causes of youth alienation and all of the social problems which that brings. Modern western society seems to be uniquely incapable of turning the energy and enthusiasm of adolescents to constructive purpose”. (Slide 8) It takes a man of the stature of Bill Gates to state this unequivocally; “High schools are obsolete… by that I mean that, even when they are working exactly as designed (they) cannot teach our kids what they need to know today” (Slide 9), he told a conference of State Governors in America in February 2005.

It seems that the brains of the youngest members of the Learning Species can too easily be trivialised, not inspired, by the classroom – and that is as obvious in Toronto as it is in York, in Melbourne as it is in London or Manchester.

So, what do we know about our species that might help us understand human learning better? (Slide 10) We do know that we separated from the Great Apes some seven million years ago. We share nearly ninety-nine percent of our genes with the chimpanzees, so we obviously have a very long common ancestry. Consider for a moment the bright, darting eyes of a six-week-old baby, following every movement that you make. “What’s going on inside there?” (Slide 11). And well you should, for some seventy or so years later those darting eyes, symptomatic of a lively curiosity, may well become a twenty-first century Einstein. Now compare that with the lack of contrast between a baby chimpanzee and a grand old great grandfather of a chimpanzee. Something amazing goes on inside the human brain that is not happening to our nearest cousin.

Science tells us that all mammals apart from ourselves give birth to their young when their brains are some ninety-five percent structurally complete. But not humans. From the time, several hundred thousand years ago, when we first started to use our brains really well, and then began to talk, our brains started to grow larger. That put pressure on our skulls, and as they started to get bigger they could no longer get down the woman’s birth canal. Over time an evolutionary compromise emerged. Humans give birth to their young when their brains are only forty percent fully formed. It is not until the child is three years old that it catches up with other mammals.

Consequently at birth humans are terrifyingly vulnerable. But evolution is nothing if not imaginative and, in the case of our brains, compensatory. Pushed out into the world long before their time human babies have to learn from the environment much more than do other animals, whose behaviour is marvellously conditioned by instincts developed within the mother’s womb. (Slide 12) Within that amazing forty percent brain we humans are born with lies, the neurological equivalent of a shelf full of D.I.Y. Guides built up over aeons of time by the trial and error experience of our ancestors. As with all such guides it’s up to the individual as to whether they are used or not… and if not used they simply wither away. Consider how natural it is for a child of three or four to learn its native language, but how hard you found learning French, or Spanish, at the age of fourteen or fifteen.

To us humans nurture is as significant as nature (Slide 13) – the two are intrinsically interconnected. That is why we humans are born incredibly curious – we can’t stop asking questions, and our answers significantly shape the details of the brain that we actually create in our early years. The more exciting and interactive the environment, the better brain we build, and can then use. Herein is the essence of what we know shapes education in the early primary years.

Until very recently, in fact right through to the present day for most people, it was thought the child’s brain had stabilized into an adult form by the age of twelve, shortly thereafter to be racked by the sexual hormones which (as well as producing interesting bulges and outcrops of hair) can cause chaos to a growing person’s emotions. In the latter part of the twentieth century schools were encouraged to take on an ever more custodial role simply to stop adolescents literally, and metaphorically, harming themselves. Adolescents, it was theorised, needed more of what had apparently been good for younger children. They needed to be taught more. The more they kicked against this – as very many of us did years ago, and even more still do today – society either blamed the adolescents for being unreasonable, or the teachers for not being “good enough”. (Slide 14)

Two apparently distinct areas of research in the last few years cast adolescence in a very different light. Now that functional MRI scans are more freely available some research programmes have been developed to study, on a sequential long-term basis, the adolescent brain. The early results have amazed the researchers. Starting at about the age of twelve there is a sudden proliferation of synapses in the prefrontal cortex, followed by extensive systematic pruning of existing synapses going on for as much as the next ten years. (Slide 15) Adolescence may not terminate until the age of twenty-two or twenty-three. These changes rival early childhood as a critical period of development. With some of the earlier connections made in the first years of life being suddenly fractured there appears to be a biologically controlled, apparently involuntary, forcing apart of the child/parent relationship, particularly by an excessive appetite for adventure, a predilection for risks and a desire for novelty and thrills, that often lead to outrageous and reckless behaviour. “The teenage brain, far from being ready-made, undergoes a period of surprisingly complex crucial development”, wrote Barbara Strauch in 2003, suggesting that the adolescent brain is “crazy by design”. Adolescents seem biologically compelled to become weird. (Slide 16)

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