It may sound totally counter intuitive but in being “crazy by design” it is possible to see that adolescence is actually a critical evolutionary adaptation which is essential to our species’ survival; an internal mechanism that prevents children from becoming mere clones of their parents. Adolescence appears to be a deep-seated biological adaptation that makes it essential for the young to go off, either to war, to hunt, to explore, to colonise, or to make love – in other words to prove themselves, so as to start a life of their own. As such it is adolescence that drives human development. It is adolescence which forces individuals in every generation to think beyond their own self-imposed limitations, and to exceed their parents’ aspirations. (Slide 17)

Keep all that in your mind, and now ponder something very different. In his 2002 book, “The Journey of Man”, Spencer Wells uses the findings of numerous genetics studies to plot out how our ancestors came to move out of east central Africa some sixty thousand years ago and, subsequently, to colonise the whole world. “Today”, states Wells, “we are in many ways the same Palaeolithic species that left Africa only two thousand generations ago (for there were no modern humans living outside Africa before that time)” (Slide 18). To cover such distances in such a short time – our ancestors reached India fifty thousand years ago, crossed the Bering Straits fifteen thousand years ago and reach Tierra del Fuego ten thousand years ago – each new generation of hunter/gatherers would have had to move on two or three miles beyond their parents’ territory. Generation after generation the young had to move away from the security of their parents’ encampment and campfire, have the nerve to go beyond the next mountain, or cross the next river. This was no task for the faint hearted. Only those who could do this lived to pass on their genes to the next generation. (Slide 19)

Sixty thousand years, a mere two thousand generations, would be quite long enough for the changes in the adolescent brain to become a permanent “adaptation” – a preferred way of doing things which, as with language acquisition in the first years of life, becomes part of the “grain of the brain”. One recent writer on human behaviour, Barry Bogin, of the University of Michigan, speculates that adolescence is the most recent of all the adaptations which scientists have so far come to understand. That would fit with the evidence from genetics and the human diaspora. Personally I would add another, though I know of no research programme that has so far explored this. Is it possible that such a recent adaptation is, as of now, only partially complete? Is it possible that not every member of the next generation has this adaptation fully developed? After all, some youngsters seem to have a moderately tranquil adolescence, but it’s normally those who do “go their own way” (what a telling phrase!) that become the successful adults years later. To learn to be a risk taker when young, it appears, gives you a greater sense of personal control when you are older. (Slide 20)

From the earliest of times the progression from dependent child to autonomous adult has been an issue of critical importance in all societies. Those neurological changes in the young brain as it transforms itself means that adolescents have evolved to be apprentice-like learners, not pupils sitting at desks and waiting instruction. Youngsters who are empowered as adolescents to take charge of their own futures will make better citizens for the future than did so many of their parents and their grandparents who have suffered from being overschooled but undereducated in their own generations. (Slide 21)

Look again at those adolescents in your classrooms. Do they really need ever more elaborate glass, steel and concrete “schools for the future” which look, and function, ever more like shopping malls? Rather, don’t they need the space to explore and the challenge to work things out for themselves; to take risks – to “prove themselves” while they still have the predisposition to be risk takers?

Consider again that hundred-year old disaster in English educational thought, namely that the education of secondary pupils is more important than those in their primary years. (Slide 22)That is how we still fund education – it’s where we put our money. It’s why classes of the youngest pupils are larger than those for seventeen and eighteen-year-olds.

It’s time to stop thinking of primary and secondary education as being separate entities, and to start being sceptical of accepting Key Stages as anything other than administrative constructs. Lump all their monies together and, if you’ve started to understand the message of this paper, work on the rough and ready formulae that in future class size should never be more than twice chronological age; classes of ten at the age of five, twelve at the age of six, twenty at the age of ten. (Slide 23)

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