What I shall argue at the conference lunch is that our present form of education has become so dominated by the processes of simulated learning within structured schooling that we are in grave danger of producing an over-schooled but under-educated generation of youngsters. We are in danger, as I see it, of producing vast numbers of young people who can carry out brilliant analysis of a whole range of issues but who lack that very special quality of flow which biology has endowed each one of us with the potentiality for if… and it has to be a big “if”… we are allowed to have our own head in our teenage years, and learn to put into practice (including learning from the mistakes we will inevitably make) what previously were only someone else’s ideas put into our heads through instruction.

Remember that line of Confucius’s epigram? “Let me do, and I understand”. That’s what our young people desperately need. If our elementary education is as good as we think it is, then why do we hold on to our teenagers in secondary schools as if we didn’t trust them? If Peter Puget or Horatio Nelson could come back and sit in some of our classrooms as 13-year-olds I guess they would give us hell! They would be so full of questions, and so impatient to get on and do something, that it would be a tight call between them walking out on us, or we expelling them.

Come to think of it… didn’t something like that happen to Bill Gates?

May you never hear the names of Vancouver or Puget again without questioning your assumptions about adolescents!

PS:

Just before making a final check of this article the postman delivered another history of Peter Puget from a second-hand bookshop in Seattle. From this I learnt that Rear Admiral Sir Peter Puget lived the last few years of his life eighteen doors down from where I now live in this splendid terrace of Georgian houses. We were almost neighbours, given 180 years time difference. An extraordinary coincidence.

Bibliography

The Patrick O’Brien novels, and Master and Commander in particular.

Both Sides of the Coin; Reuniting thinking with doing, an as yet unpublished manuscript written by John Abbott.

The Kellogg Foundation Study of Predictors of Success in the State of Michigan, quoted at the Whitehouse Conference on Early Childhood Development in 1997.

Bowler, S and Gintes and Osborne The Determinants of Earnings Journal of Economic Literature, December 2001.

Coleman, E.C. Captain Vancouver 2000, Caedmon of Whitby.

Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly, Being Adolescent Basic Books 1984; Finding Flow Basic Books 1997; Becoming AdolescentBasic Books 2000.

Greenspan, S The Growth of the Mind 1997

Hart, Betty and Risley, Todd Meaningful Differences in the everyday experiences of Young American Children, 1995 and 2003, Paul Brookes Publishing Company.

Ridley, Matthew Nature via Nurture 2003.

Strauch, Barbara The Primal Teen 2003 Doubleday.

Wing, Robert C. Peter Puget 1979, Greybeard Publishing.

Vincent, Edgar Horatio Nelson; Love and Fame 2003, Yale University Press.

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