Human behaviour fascinates us as much today as it did the philosophers of old.  Yet it is only recently that scientists have begun to unravel just why it is that we think as we do – and why that thinking can go badly wrong.  Drawing together the research from the bio-medical, cognitive and social sciences (something made possible within the past 20 years through functional MRI scans at one level, and theoretical studies in complexity and systems thinking at the other) it is becoming possible to detect the ‘grain’ to the individual human brain.

The structure of our brains today, rather like a cross section through the trunk of an ancient tree, are much conditioned by adaptations made in the distant past to changing environmental factors.  For example having been walking upright for some 2.5 million years human spines are still not quite adapted to being vertical (consequently we suffer from bad back problems), and we each still have an appendix though a shift in human diet a hundred thousand years or more ago should have made this organ redundant many generations back.

The survival of the human species depends on good thinking, rather than strong muscles.  It is on the ability of each new generation to learn as much as it can from its ancestors, and then to go on beyond the limitations of its parents’ thinking, that our species’ survival depends.  Just as dissecting the bone structure, muscles and nerve systems of a leopard’s legs explain why it is such a splendid hunter, so the new brain-imaging technologies make it possible to appreciate how humans have emerged to be the planet’s pre-eminent learning species.

Philosophers caught glimpses of this long ago: “I learnt most not from those who taught me but from those who talked with me,” reflected St Augustine 1,500 years ago acknowledging the interdependence of mental and emotional development.  A thousand years before that Confucius had said,

“Tell me, and I hear

Show me, and I understand

Let me do, and I learn.”

The medieval craft tradition in England required craftsmen to induct their young apprentices – be they lawyers, silversmiths, clerics or linen workers – into the ‘know-how’ of their craft.  This represented a structured progression (in a Confucian sense) from ‘telling’, to ‘showing’, then to ‘doing’ so that the apprentice could eventually demonstrate that Jack was now as good as his master.  Such apprenticeship was a mechanism by which youths could model themselves on socially approved adults and provided safe passage from childhood to adulthood in psychological, social and economic ways.”

Apprenticeship was an education for an intelligent way of life; it was a context-rich way of learning that integrated thinking and doing, theory and practice at every stage.  It was ‘hands-on’, and it was as much about the contribution that needed to be made to the common good as it was to the success of the individual.  Through constant interaction with practitioners, this enabled adolescents to learn how to become functional adults in home, community and the workplace, and do wisely and responsibly whatever it was that they would eventually have to do.  In contrast today’s classroom instruction involves an enormous amount of ‘telling’, a much smaller amount of ‘showing’, and in most instances very little ‘doing.’  In comparison to apprenticeship, classroom practices are essentially a cheap, but not very efficient, way of learning.

An Apprenticeship Model of Learning (AML) has now to apply the same principles, but in the context of modern communities.

AML is based on the understanding that, over vast periods of time, the guiding principle of our distant ancestors that empowered them to make enough good decisions to survive long enough to procreate which has, over countless generations, made us the planet’s pre-eminent learning species.  Over that vast period of time the ‘guiding principle’ of those distant ancestors (if evolutionary processes can accurately be described as such a term) has given young people the ability to select, out of a number of potential strategies, those which would be the most appropriate to solving particular tasks.  To do that children need to have learned a range of skills, and to have the ability to survey their future alternatives with a mixture of emotional and intellectual skills.

AML involves frontloading the system by providing generous resources to the youngest children so that their education can start a dynamic process whereby they are given such a mastery of a range of skills in their early years that they are progressively weaned of their de­pendence on teachers and institutions.

AML would seek to strengthen the role of the family and the community as the starting place for the apprenticeship model of learning so as to integrate young people fully into the life of a community so giving them the confidence to manage their own learning, collaborating with others as appropriate and using a range of resources and learning situations.

AML has to train teachers to so understand children’s instinctive needs that, like their col­leagues in Finland, they combine a fine subject knowledge with the wisdom to draw upon this as appropriate to take a child – as in apprenticeship – to the next level of understanding. While quality education is everything to do with teachers it is constrained by inappropriate structures of schooling.

In England that means ending the split between primary and secondary schools (and between two different ways of thinking about education); it means a revolution in teacher education, and a rebirth of the historic partnership on which a balanced edu­cation has to depend – on the interdependence of the home, the community and the school. Only when this is done will there be sufficient thoughtful, knowledgeable members of the community to restore the control of the educational process to democratically elected local representatives.

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Humans have evolved over millions of years to become the planet’s preeminent learning species.  It is our brains that give us our superiority, not our muscles.  We do best those things which we have worked out for ourselves.  We are suspicious of those who tell us what to do for fear that this might suit their interest more than our own.

Much of the country’s present social and economic distress results from an overdose of prescription.  Too much telling us how to think, as if we can’t think for ourselves, destroys our humanity and eventually weakens our confidence.

There is a subtle difference between managing organic and inorganic processes.  The efficiency of an inorganic process, such as a production line in a factory, is similar to measuring an athlete’s effectiveness in putting the shot.  The athlete bends down, picks up the shot, weighs it and carefully calculates the angle and velocity needed to land it in the previously defined spot.  The more skilful the shot-putter the greater the accuracy.

Managing an organic process like a school, hospital or even parliament itself, is like picking up a pigeon rather than a lead shot.  The skilful shot-putter does all the right calculations but, half way into its trajectory, the pigeon decides to flap its wings and go somewhere else.  The shot-putter is given one more chance.  Fearing relegation if he misses a second time, he decides to tie the pigeon’s wings and legs together.  His pitch is as good as the first time, and the pigeon lands exactly where he was told to put it.  He gets full marks for accuracy.  But the pigeon was killed on impact as it had no way of de-accelerating.  Just doing what someone else tells you to do – “because it will get you good marks” – may well destroy your ability to do the sensible thing.

We humans have infinitely bigger and more complex brains than pigeons.  Constrained to follow an over-prescriptive curriculum kills a pupil’s creativity while telling a newly qualified teacher that there is only one way to teach causes the most creative of young teachers to flee the profession… and it’s all because we are thinking beings.

See “No smoke without fire” in Executive Summary of Briefing Paper

Related posts:

1. Cognitive Apprenticeship: Making Thinking Visible
2. Review: Master and Apprentice: Reuniting Thinking with Doing by John Abbott

It’s high summer. The days are long, often warm and frequently hot. Thoughts turn to holidays, the chance to relax and meander through a part of the country you don’t know well. You look forward to simply going where the mood takes you.

Which, of course, is what our ancestors back in the distant centuries did all the time. It was not until 1828 (the first steam locomotive) that anyone could go faster than a racehorse. Most people, most of the time, walked at about 2 1.2 or 3 miles per hour. At walking speed you notice things that are hidden to a driver of a car; you hear sounds, smell scents, and watch the ‘gaite’ of other travellers in case of trouble. Our brains have evolved over millions of years to monitor, control and protect our identities within the limitations of our fragile bodies as we move from point A to point B by way of any interesting diversions that attract our attention. To meander is the balanced state of mind and body. Meandering, be it in the country or a shopping mall is simply what humans do well.

A meander is a geographical term describing the wide, sweeping, gentle banks in the lower course of a river. They are features that make you wonder why, given the very obvious energy of the river in its upper stages as it tumbles over waterfalls and cuts through gorges in its rush to the sea that it suddenly seems to lose its energy.

Water never flows in a straight line. It’s all to do with what is called ‘helicoidal flow.’ Imagine for a moment in a laboratory constructing a long, straight channel across a bed of sand and then letting water flow in at one end. Stand back and watch. The water, rather than flowing smoothly, quickly becomes turbulent. It is all to do with friction. The water in contact with either bank, or along the bottom of the channel, is held back by friction and can’t go as fast as the water in the middle of the channel. Drop a piece of paper near to one bank and see how it is remorselessly pulled into the centre by the faster moving water and then caught up in an ebbing current and deposited on the other side. The water actually moves like a corkscrew, and by taking particles from one bank and mixing them up with other bits they get deposited on the other side. As the river reaches the flat ground near the sea it uses all its energy to create those beautiful, sinuous meanders… made up of an apparent chaotic muddle of bits and pieces drawn from many sources.

That is what helicoidal thinking is all about. Contrary to the best expectations of endless education systems learning is never linear, it is much more like the meandering river, shaped by helicoidal flow. Reflect on that. When you are gentle meandering and going where the mood takes you, you will frequently find that you solve mental problems which, while sitting uncomfortably at your desk, you just couldn’t work out. Get out there and start meandering. It’s good for the brain.

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