Haiti is almost entirely populated by people whose ancestors were stolen from their homelands in Africa and sold into slavery to the sugar plantations of the Caribbean.  In last month’s National Geographic Magazine there was an article on a small group of hunter/gatherers still to be found around Lake Eyasi in Tanzania.  The Hadza are what anthropologists call a ‘relict’ population – an isolated group that has somehow survived socially and genetically unchanged over something like a hundred thousand years.  They still live as did all our ancestors for probably 99% of human time.  Their numbers have been draining away for centuries as individuals have married into other tribes and lost their naturally evolved survival skills that once enabled them to survive in some of the world’s least hospitable places.

Some of those Haitians fighting to survive carry Hadza blood in their veins but history – in the form of industrial farming operated by slaves – has all but obliterated the memories of their tribal behaviours that made them such great survivors.  The Hadza traditionally own no land, grow no crops, herd no cattle and build no houses; they have no concept of time and no thought of hoarding to protect crops for when they might be short of food.  Their lives are forever dependent on sharing.  In killing a large Wildebeest, an Antelope or Gazelle, the hunter and his immediate family share the meat with anyone else who is around.  Having no means of storing any excess that might see them through future ‘starving times’ the Hadza invest in goodwill – if you help me when I am down on my luck then surely you will help me if my luck changes?  And it nearly always works, providing no one breaks the rules.  In such societies there is no fighting over disputed food, and probably there is little chance for any one person to grow too fat.  It is a society dependent on trust.

I, too, visited the Hadza five years ago.  That visit made a deeper impression on me than anything that I read in the National Geographic which seemed too ‘politically correct’, for example I did not see the women overdressed in cheap western dresses, nor could I ‘smell’ the fear that grips you when, through the cotton walls of your tent, you hear a lion roaring close by in the dark.  At one stage I noted a half-hearted attempt to grow what looked like maze on a clearing near one of the huts, and I asked the elder what this meant.  His face immediately clouded as he explained that some visiting missionaries who tried to persuade some of the Hadza women to become settled agriculturalists.  Even though in most years there is insufficient grain to grow crops, the women had been given seeds and spades and encouraged to grow maze.  “This is foolish, for in most years the crops fail”, said the elder, “but the worst of planting crops is that when people do so and the crops flourish, those who planted them won’t share out the harvest with other people.  They say it is theirs because they planted it, and because the spirit of their ancestors let it grow.  What they don’t eat in one year they want to save for a bad harvest.  They become selfish and hold it back.  It is breaking our way of live.  We believe that what people find belongs to everybody.  Planting crops makes some people more powerful than others because they can bargain with things that had previously been owned by everyone.”

That moment five years ago was a truly thought-provoking time.  Anthropologists have long speculated that there was a shift from a communal sharing ethic, the root of social conventions for 98% of human history when all our ancestors were hunter/gatherers, to the time some ten thousand years ago when our ancestors started to settled down and stake out their own turf.

For too many generations the descendants of those hunter/gatherers have had no turf of their own, nor have they been able to build a society based on trust.  To see them fighting their way up that hill to get water shows just how broken human society could become.

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“Millions of Britons unable to cope with modern life,” the Young Foundation reported last week portraying Britain as a psychologically fragile society where increasing wealth is often accompanied by soaring levels of individual isolation and distrust.

What goes around, it seems comes around.  It was 14 years since Time Magazine published The Evolution of Despair, by Robert Wright, the rapidly rising star of the new discipline of evolutionary psychology.  Wright’s book on Darwin, Why We Are As We Are, attracted great attention.  As an evolutionary psychologist, he quoted the Unabomber – the man who, as his personal demonstration against the dehumanising aspects of modern life, conducted a seven-year bombing spree across America in the 1980s: “I attribute the social and psychological problems of modern society to the fact that society requires people to live under conditions radically different from those under which the human race evolved.”

“We at times get the feeling that modern life isn’t what we were designed for,” wrote Wright.  The human mind – our emotions, our wants, our needs – evolved in a very different environment to that of today.  Earlier Freud in his Civilisation and its Discontent had argued that contemporary ways of life had become an oppressive force “that thwarts basic animal urges such as lust and aggression, transmuting them into psychopathology.”  Wright turned that argument on its head, by showing that from an evolutionary perspective, “the larger threat to mental health maybe the way that civilisation itself thwarts civility.”

This stimulated a seismic shift in thinking about social issues.  There is, Wright wrote, a gentler side to human nature and it is this which seems to be increasingly the victim of repression; “The problem with modern life is less that we are over-socialised,” he wrote, but that we are under-socialised – or that too little of our ‘social’ contact is social in the natural, intimate sense of the word.”

Evolutionary psychology has started to sketch the contours of the human mind as shaped by natural selection (which Darwin had hinted at 150 years earlier).  Wright and his colleagues have explored “mismatch theory” which shows how various maladies result from the conflict between modern lifestyles and that ‘ancestral environment’, which shaped our deepest instincts, and thought processes.  He noted that the rates of depression amongst the Amish of Pennsylvania were one-fifth of those in nearby Baltimore, while in New Guinea researchers couldn’t even find a trace of depression.   In the world we have come-from our ancestors lived such interconnected lives (living within each other’s pockets) that of necessity they had to be good at getting along with each other.  Consequently, we humans have inherited a vast and varied portfolio of social skills.  While our ancestors could not have survived alone ,15 years ago a quarter of households in America comprised a single person.

In the typical hunter/gatherer world mothers could reconcile a home life with a work life fairly gracefully, and in a richly social context.  When they gathered food, their children stayed either with them or with aunts, uncles, grandparents, cousins or lifelong friends.  When they were back at the village, childcare was a mostly public task – extensively social, even communal.  The isolated mother of today burdened with bored, small children, is not a scene that has parallels in pre-industrial societies.

Wright notes that Betty Friedan’s book The Feminine Mystique grew out of her conversation with a suburban mother in 1959 who spoke “with quiet desperation” about the anger and despair that came to be called “the problem with no name,” and which a doctor dubbed “the housewife’s syndrome.”  Suburbanisation has exposed modern mothers struggling to rear their children on their own to levels of depression that previous generations never experienced, and it was this which fuelled the feminist agenda.  Wright says all this more persuasively than the Young Report with all its statistics; the problem with modern life is that too little of our social contact is actually social in the intimate sense of the word.

See Chapters Six, Eight and Nine of Overschooled but Undereducated

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Some years ago I wrote a short Paper on the relationship of education to democracy.  It read: “To send your child to the local school, or decide to go private, is a question that splits families apart.  It raises a fundamental question – is education primarily for private gain, or for the public good.  Although we rarely see it in these terms, isn’t this actually a question about our faith in democracy?”

“I’ve never thought of it like that,” said a experienced journalist some weeks ago.  “As far as I’m concerned I just want what is best for my child.”  Which sounds so very obviously right, could anybody ever challenge it?  But there is a problem; within any closed society what may be best for one may create a problem for the others.

When I compared my life experience with that of the journalist I realised how different it had been.  I grew up in post-war Britain as it struggled to clear the bomb sites and build a welfare state.  The message of my schooling was that the more privileged you were, the greater the obligation on me to assist the less well off.  Of my closest friends at school two became scientists, one a doctor but most became teachers.  The journalist, being 25 years younger than me, had been born into a world which was already pretty comfortable, but where fewer more able Sixth Formers thought of becoming teachers.
Teaching geography in the early 1960s taught me as much about the world as it taught me about youngsters and so, within seven years, I moved from the intellectually challenging, but comfortable, post of teacher at a grammar school to the administrative and philosophically challenging post of headmaster of a comprehensive school.  In the late ‘60s and early ‘70s both Labour and Conservatives supported comprehensive education.  In the spirit of the time my generation (and that meant many of the parents of pupils in the school) had a great faith in democracy for, after all, had not the war been fought about the superiority of democracy over totalitarianism?.  We also had a deep faith in what is called social capital – those nebulous and largely invisible sets of relationships that hold families and communities together.

To people of my way of thinking education, social capital and democracy are all part of the same piece.  It is why we thought that to send any child of ours to a ‘socially segregated’ independent school weakened the kind of society we thought it was our responsibility to build.  Democracy can’t flourish unless each new generation is well-nurtured in the affairs of the mind, and appropriately inducted into the responsibilities of adulthood and the maintenance of the common good.  To me important as school was, it was only one of the key three components of a child’s life – home, community and life in school.

Important as is the education of our own children, so inevitably has to be the education of everyone else’s children.  As John Donne expressed it so eloquently in the 17th century: “No man is an island, entire of itself.  Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind.”  It is why that great democrat John Milton 20 years later wrote “I call a complete and generous education that which fits a man to perform justly, skilfully and magnanimously all the offices both public and private, of peace and war.”

Until the English believe that in their public life as well as their private affairs, democracy really does matter, and matters for every man-Jack, they will never understand why every child matters.  Woe to British democracy if we continue to ignore such an ages-old reality.

See Action Ten of the Briefing Paper and
Chapters 8 and 9 of Overschooled but Undereducated

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I’m certain that Margaret Thatcher meant well when she questioned, in that article in Women’s Own in 1987, whether there is such a thing as society.  But it’s a comment that, twisted ever so slightly, has come to haunt social and political policy.  The comment was made as Thatcher rounded on all those whose gut reaction, whenever they come across a problem, was to expect government to sort it out for them.  “Sort it out for yourself,” we can still hear Thatcher saying, “and if necessary get your friends to help.”  It is a sentiment with which I largely agree, and its why I see the purpose of education as being to strengthen young people so as to stand up to the vagaries of life.  Yet I also believe, as I’m sure Thatcher did, that there are moments for all of us when our own shoulders are not strong enough, and we need someone else to lean upon.  Someone else is, I believe, almost always preferable to some organisation.

If I’m going to lean on somebody else’s shoulders, then I need to be strong enough for other people to lean on me when they can’t cope.  It’s what the Bible commands its adherents to do, “Love they neighbour as thyself.”  That is a tough injunction when your neighbour is cantankerous, smelly, or in any other way unpleasant.  Thatcher was not the first politician (and certainly won’t be the last) to use the Bible to justify her political creed – like her, of course, I agree that the Good Samaritan could not have been as generous as he was if he had had no money himself, but that was not the essence of the problem.

Most unfortunately Thatcher got carried away in that article when she tried to reduce it to simplicity: “There is no such thing as society, there are individual men and women, and there are families.”  It was those 17 words that caught the media’s attention.  Few heard the next part of the sentence which said “no government can do anything except through people.”  This is a sentiment I heartily endorse because it is what the individual does without having first to be told to do so by somebody else which gives a community strength.  Now, although the public thought Thatcher said “community”, she actually said “society.”  This, together with the way she ended that sentence by saying “and people look to themselves first” which has done so much damage.  It has given birth to the age of the individual.

Twenty-two years later when I, an early enthusiast for Margaret Thatcher, exalt educationalists to realise that a balanced education is like an old-fashioned stool with three legs that can achieve balance on any surface – the legs being the home,  the community, and in the school.  It is the home in which people grow emotionally; it is the community from which they gain inspiration, and it is from the school that they develop their mental and intellectual skills.  That sense of a balanced education took a massive knock when people at large convince themselves that they no longer had to worry about community.  That reduced the stable three-legged stool to a precarious two legs.  “Ah, but families have largely disintegrated in my part of the world, so that takes out another leg.”  This leaves youngsters even more precariously balanced on a single leg.

That is why policy makers have tried to convince themselves that schools can do it all.  Which, I would argue, always was, and always will be, an impossible task.

See Action 4 of Briefing Paper

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Even in Canary Wharf wealthy bankers hang evocative paintings of the countryside without realising how life is being sucked out of small rural communities.  As a family we once cycled through that part of Lincolnshire where a string of spring-line settlements mark the junction of the well-drained limestone soils with the rich peaty loams.  Each of these ancient settlements – Dunston, Sopwick, Ashby de la Launde and Digby – has its church and market square.  These have been home to generations of farmers from at least the time of the Danish Invasion.  I was shocked to find that what had once been proud and cohesive communities had most obviously had the stuffing knocked out of them by the success of agro-business.  Many of the farmyards had been turned into self-storage units; the church yards were (after a thousand years) ill cared for; a village store had been turned into a video store, and a village hall into a furniture store.  A large paper sign read “Save our Schools.”

All that was more than fifteen years ago.  It’s got worse.  According to the National Housing Federation 62 small village schools were closed between 2004 and 2008, with a further 200 estimated to close in the next five years.

It is ironic that while ever more upwardly mobile families pine to live in villages so that their children can attend such small schools (two miles from my office one of the most popular primary schools is in the village of Swainswick with just 62 pupils), these are the very people who, with the ample cash resources from the sale of their London homes, have priced the locals out of the property market.  In far too many instances English villages are mothballed for ten months of the year in preparation for transitory summer visitors.  Others have become semi-cheap dormitories within a car ride of a town.  Village shops, petrol stations, pubs and churches are closing in record numbers and “if schools close, community in many rural areas (areas which provided the space and challenge to yesterday’s Huckleberry Finns) would be wiped out,” reported the Housing Federation.

Who is to blame?  It’s not us, a spokesman for the Department for Children, Schools and Families said disclaiming any responsibility (01/09/09) for, “rural schools are central to the village life of communities, which is why we had made it a statutory requirement for Councils to presume that rural schools should stay open.”  Which sounds fine but, given nobody’s overall responsibility for the maintenance of strong communities, it is often that same Department that forces the closure of small schools strictly on financial criteria.

Small is indeed beautiful, but that is only the beginning of why small is important.  Learning to survive in small, highly-interdependent communities, is the best possible education for ultimately living in much larger communities – it is rather like a stack of Russian dolls, each nesting in the one above.  Calling his 1960’s critique of modern life “Small is Beautiful,” Fritz Schumacher gave it its explosive subtitle; “economics as if people mattered.”  That is why vibrant rural communities are essential to our national life – they are where children grow strong.

See Actions 3 and 4 of the Briefing Paper

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1. Janet Lawley, Fellow

All we wanted was a chocolate cake.  But in one of the old pottery towns of Staffordshire that meant getting into a car and driving several miles through a lifeless urban landscape of derelict factories and boarded-up shops.  The supermarket, when we reached it, was huge and resembled the departure lounge of a decaying international airport; outside in the rain endless cars searched for parking places, while inside the crowd pushing down the endless aisle offering hundreds of varieties of virtually the same food, resembled a bad-tempered football crowd.

Acne-spotted youths and older men, who still look like the tired factory workers they had been five years before, stacked the shelves with little enthusiasm and total disregard for customers’ questions.  While posters advertised job seekers allowance and retraining courses at the local college, shoppers mechanically stocked high their trolleys as if this were their only physical activity of the day.

“I don’t feel hungry anymore,” said my wife, “even for chocolate cake.”

I longed to be at home in Somerset.  Yet the same thing has happened even in Georgian Bath.  The death of the small shop, the disappearance of the baker, the butcher and the grocer.  The disappearance also of something I can just remember from my youth – the delivery boys with their bikes, and the fiercely independent local shopkeepers, derided long ago by Napoleon, and adored by Margaret Thatcher as she recalled her own father and her childhood living alongside the shop.  In 1909, a hundred years ago and the year my grandfather became 21, Bath had a population of 60,000 people, two-thirds of its present size.  Serving that population were 56 bakeries, 49 butchers, 56 dairies, 27 fishmongers, 93 greengrocers and 99 grocers.  Probably some 600 boys would have carried their produce in the ample baskets in the front of their bikes, while hundreds of apprentices would have learned to bake, to prepare meat and manage vegetables, not to mention those in engineering, book publishing and construction.

Now there are only two butchers within a mile of the city centre, there is no baker and only one greengrocer.  We do have four supermarkets which sell everything, and their in-store bakeries ensure a constant aroma of freshly baked bread… but all the ingredients come ready-mixed from central depot, and shelf stacking has replaced apprentices.  Middle-aged men driving vans have taken the place of the bicycle delivery boy, and almost every shop in the city is part of a national chain, whereas in 1909 nearly every shop was privately owned.

There is an old biblical expression that echoes down the years, “by their works ye shall know them.”  Adolescents now, as in 1909, 909, or even B.C.9, still crave to become themselves by being recognised for the quality and relevance of what they are able to do.  In society’s hurry to accumulate ever more wealth the adolescent’s need to have something worthwhile to do has been ignored in favour of the customer loading his or her shopping trolley ever higher.  This may well satisfy people in the short-term, but the real thrill of retail therapy is spending the money you know you deserved to have been paid.  Today’s shoppers don’t look that happy, do they?  And the adolescents… don’t they simply crave for something meaningful to help them make sense of their lives?

See Part Three of Briefing Paper, and Action 4

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It is almost exactly ten years to the day that I completed the writing of The Child is the Father of the Man; How Humans Learn and Why.  As a private publication – it came out under the imprint of Education 2000, the predecessor of The 21st Century Learning Initiative – it sold over 10,000 copies (I think we still have some 400-500 copies remaining).  The title people readily recognise was lifted from William Wordsworth’s poem because the story I wished to tell was about the interconnectivity of all of life’s experiences – so the apparent absurdity of the child being father of the man was delivered as a wake-up call to society at large that it is the totality of life’s experiences which combine to create a balanced education.

I wrote (page 204) “The increasing marginalisation of parents in the family in the raising of children contradicts the lessons we are now learning from evolutionary sciences.  Throughout human history family has been a foundation of group structure.  Among hunter/gathers labour is divided between men, the hunters, and women, the gathers.  The sexes thus form a cooperative unit.  However, cohesion exists not only within the core family (husband, wife, children) but also among members of the extended family (grandparents, siblings, cousins, uncles, aunts).  The extended family is important not just for mutual help but also for cultural cohesion and transmission to the next generation.”

It is within the context of a child’s earliest experiences that youngsters begin to understand how their life relates to the variety of other lives around them.  Now, ten years on, the book, A good Childhood issued by The Children’s Society earlier this month, does not talk about community.  It talks much about the importance of family values, about friends, about lifestyle, school, mental health and inequalities, but nothing about the rest of the people who live in your street, or who you rub shoulders with going to and from the workplace.  It seems that when I talk about a balanced education as being like a three-legged stool – home, school and community as the locations for emotional development, intellectual growth and inspiration – the community leg has just disappeared.  The walk to school in the morning or the bike ride with one’s friends, has been replaced by waiting for the school bus, and the injunction “don’t talk to strangers” introduced for all the right reasons means that a child’s world has been reduced to that which seems manageable and controllable by anxious adults.  Hyper-individualism, The Children’s Society reports, has increased dramatically – from 56% saying that most people could be trusted in 1959, to only 29% in 1999, thus a reduction of almost a half.  Then there is materialism; “other things being equal, the more a child is exposed to the media, the more materialistic she becomes; the worse she relates to her parents; and the worse her mental health”.

The more the role of the school increases the less time children have to enquire into, and experience, the life of other people around them.  Communities, it seems, are withering before our very eyes.  Ten years ago I wrote “For too long society has been content to assign to the schools more and more of what had earlier been seen as the direct personal responsibility of parents and the general nurturing to be found implicitly within strong communities.  However good the schools might be, they could not, and should not, raise children on their own.  Schools remain institutions, with institutional rules, procedures and norms.  However flexible, they cannot respond adequately to each child’s need”.  Then I went on optimistically, “Nor do they have to, if the community with its numerous niches of separate opportunities is aware of its critical role in helping young people shape their personal vision, and their own intrinsic goals.  This is the critical issue – the creation of child-friendly communities”.

Ten years on we seem to have forgotten so much of that.

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