By using the life story of Peter Puget to illustrate the relationship of prepubescent learning to the nature of the adolescent brain, I may have lost interest of those readers with no affinity with the Pacific Northwest.  The significance of the map-making skills of that twenty-two year old might have been lost on those who have never seen the beauty of Mount Baker, or stood on the shores of the Olympic Peninsula.  Just as Australians don’t know of Peter Puget, neither do Canadians or Americans know of Lachlan Macquarie, now widely recognised by Australians as “the father” of their country.

Lachlan Macquarie was born two years later than Peter Puget on the small island of Ulva just off Mull on the West Coast of Scotland.  Although Lachlan’s father was the clan chief the Macquaries, a poor and tiny clan living, as did all other Highlanders, in cottages made of dry-stone walls and thatched with reeds.  They were, nevertheless, a fiercely tough and resilient people.  The young Lachlan had as good a ‘Mark Twain’ kind of childhood as had Peter Puget but his father, like Puget’s father, fell on hard times when the boy was coming up to fourteen.  The Macquaries went bankrupt.  Lachlan made his way to Edinburgh where he enlisted in the army and went into the 84^th Regiment of Foot and fought in the American War of Independence.

Losing that war England no longer had a place to send convicts, and was forced to find an alternative.  In 1784 the “First Fleet” sailed for Australia to establish the colony of New South Wales based on one of the world’s finest natural harbours – now known as Sydney.  The early years of the colony were chaotic; the fifth Governor, William Bligh (of the ill-famed HMS Bounty) was particularly cruel and ineffective.  Twenty years after its establishment, a state of anarchy prevailed.

Then, into Sydney Harbour in June 1814, sailed Lachlan Macquarie, appointed by the British government as the new Governor.  Since his early days fighting in America, Macquarie had been promoted to Captain in 1789, Major in 1801 becoming Lieutenant Colonel of the 73^rd Regiment of Foot in 1805.  With an extraordinary mixture of firmness and a fine appreciation of human nature, always linked to a sense of good order and discipline, Macquarie turned the chaotic colony into the beginning of a self-respecting settlement which, by the time he retired in 1821, was already home to an expanding population of both free settlers, and pardoned convicts.  He expanded the frontiers of the colony, and sent expeditions into different parts of the continent.  Contemporaries and historians alike have been amazed at Macquarie’s achievements.

Years later Macquarie was asked how it was that he, a man from such a tiny insignificant island in the shadow of the great mountain mass of Ben More on Mull, could have developed such phenomenal powers of leadership.  just before he died he wrote,

“If you are born on a mere speck of land in the middle of the ocean you quickly discover how things work, and why people do as they do.  Learn that lesson well, and you are equipped to become a citizen of the world.”

What a magnificent expectation – to become “a citizen of the world”!  Following my lecture last week on Salt Spring Island in British Columbia, this will now hang on the walls of the Gulf Island’s Secondary School.

Surely it should also hang on the walls of every British primary school for that surely is what education has to be all about?  As then, so now, the strongest of the next generation will be the ones who have been allowed the most challenge, and given the strongest support, when young.  They are the ones who, like Peter Puget, Lachlan Macquarie and England’s Horatio Nelson, will grow up strong, thoughtful and – most importantly – be able to turn ideas into actions.

See multiple references to Adolescence in Overschooled but Undereducated

Related posts:

1. Dr Jonathan Long, Principal, United World College of India
2. Ruining the Future Our Problem-plagued World as a Reflection of how Schooling Limits Reality-Based Learning
3. Battery Hens or Free Range Chickens What Kind of Education for What Kind of World?

It wasn’t Michelangelo who said that – although it might have been for he was always at pains to select the particular block of stone which would best enable him to draw out of its structure that which he had in his mind’s eye to sculpt – it was the prophet Isaiah (Chapter 51) who drove home his point by saying “(and think) of the quarry from which you were dug.”  Just as Michelangelo couldn’t have created his David out of any old piece of granite, so the people of Israel knew as well as today’s industrial chemist that the clay extracted from one quarry might be excellent for the production of fine china, exclusive paper or toothpaste, but would be useless for forming firebricks, floor tiles or as an additive to paint.

While every one of the six billion people on the face of the earth comes from a single species, the culture into which we are born creates a kaleidoscope of tribes and nations that think, and act, in significantly different ways.  Since E.O. Wilson’s seminal treatise On Human Nature was published in 1978 scientists have come to accept that our species is as it is partly as a result of deep-seated instinctive behaviours built up over the millennia, transmitted through genes, and then refined in each generation by its immediate nurture.  In Isaiah’s terms it all depends from which part of the quarry you were hewn; just as both York and Bath stone were laid down millions of years ago in the Jurassic Sea, micro-processes in that same sequence produced stone tough enough to provide pavements, while stone in another quarry is soft enough to build houses and carve fabulous gargoyles.

David Cameron appeared to impress the party faithful when he said that Gove’s ideas were drawn from Sweden, American and Canada.  As someone involved with education all my working life I have travelled widely and found the study of other systems of education fascinating… not in what they had enabled me to bring back in my rucksack as nuggets of perfection but how they have acted as mirrors to help me question, ever more sharply, what we do in England.  In 1969 I had the opportunity to sit in the back of a secondary classroom in New Hampshire.  I was most impressed by the pupils’ enthusiasm, but was confused, from my grammar school background, by the total informality of the discipline.  “You must understand”, the Professor of Education who was showing me around said, “there is a subtle difference between what we Americans think is our job in education, and what I picked up when studying at Oxford about what you English think education is about.  It seems to me that you have a preconceived idea of the perfect youngster and do all in your power to shape kids appropriately.  We Americans are uncertain about the future.  We are still a frontier people – we think it is our job to help every youngster to so ‘sharpen his axe’ that he or she will be able to cut their way through whatever concrete jungle they may face.  Our job is to build up rugged individuals, while you seem determined to cut children down to size.”

As a young teacher that impressed me greatly.  But it seems as if Gove and Gibb have been searching for another kind of answer.  They start with questions of governance, not with questions about how children learn.  Never was this clearer than with the publication last week of the massive Cambridge Primary Review.  While Labour simply dismissed the Review as being out of date, Nick Gibb used its criticism of an over-centralised curriculum to make a political attack on Labour, and then dismissed out of hand any suggestion that formal schooling should not start until six because that offended Conservative doctrinaire thinking.

So, in 2009, instead of acknowledging that the reason Finland and the other Scandinavian countries are at the top of the OECD achievement tables is a result of their pedagogic insights, David Cameron attributes it to free-market principles that have led the Swedes (with their very materialistic view of life) to open up schools to be run for profit.  Cameron then sited Canada, by that he must mean the Province of Alberta as Canada has no uniform system of education that is so rich from its oil revenues that it has abolished income tax as an example of free enterprise.  Shopping around for other examples of changed governance, he turned to the United States.  This is very strange for America rejoices in its local federal responsibilities (the kinds of local autonomy which both Labour and Conservative have done their best to destroy in England) and which shamefully partners England at the bottom of the UNICEF Well-being of Children Report of two and a half years ago, and urges the English to adopt the Charter School Movement.

No, the English don’t have to go overseas to find magic bullets.  They have to take the time to understand their own system better, and be humble enough to realise that international studies in neurology, evolution and cognitive science can help even the English to unpack the relationship of what we are born with, and how our historic culture has shaped the grain of our brains.

Is that really too much for politicians to think about?

See Parts 9 and 10 of the Briefing Paper

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