“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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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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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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I am a complete stranger to the world of blogging but from what I have heard it could benefit my thinking as Director of the 21st Century Learning Initiative, by sharing my thoughts on an almost daily basis with colleagues around the world might lead to some useful dialogue.

Much of the time my thoughts will only be half formed as they will be a reaction to what I see and hear immediately around me.  Over time some of these will grow into fully-fledged ideas – they might result in a Paper or shape a lecture – while on other occasions there might well be somebody else who picks up the idea and runs with it.  I am writing from the security of my office in Bath, England where this morning the peace of this glorious old Georgian city is being disturbed by a massive flood, caused by snowmelt and exaggerated by some very heavy rain.  Floods are endemic to Bath as the Romans complained about 1,700 years ago.  They are simply trivial in comparison to an email that has just arrived on my desk from Helen Drennen, the Principal of Wesley College in Melbourne, describing the enormity of the bushfire tragedy and “the unfolding magnitude of the crisis which is going to take many years to overcome.  The enormity of the disaster is unparalleled in the Australian experience…”  It is both a small world, and a too large world; there is too much water in one place, and not enough somewhere else.

Like many others, my mind collects all these pieces and then tries to sort them out together – it is simply how we humans are.  We look for patterns and connections, always believing that he or she who can see the Big Picture most clearly will be better able to direct their lives accordingly.

Last evening I was busy extracting useful pieces of news from the last couple of weeks of The Guardian newspaper, and from the journal The Week.  All of these go into my very old-fashioned press cuttings file in the office.  Walking into that office this morning I tried, as is my wont, to see how I could turn some of these items into a single story;

• The report of how a North Tyneside school had developed a technique for covering an entire GCSE module (to the point where 80% of pupils got at least a grade ‘D’) in just 90 minutes – and a third of that was spent in playing baseball.
• A report from the Bill Gates Foundation in the States that teachers drawn from the top quartile of the ability range can improve the performance of a class by 10% in a year so concluding with the startling recommendation that “if the whole U.S. had top quartile teachers for 2 years we would illuminate the gap with Asia”.
• The proposal from the Liberal Democrats to reduce class size for 5-6 year olds to a maximum of 15.
• The report of the Children’s Society (U.K.) that only 9% of parents think their children are as happy as they had been as kids themselves.
• A study from the London Institute of Education that “Nursery care beats grandparents preparing children for attending school” (emphasis presumably on the word school).
• The National Accounts of Well Being Report which showed that English children have less trust in other people than children in any other country in Europe apart from Slovakia.
• The suggestion from Ed Balls, the Minister of Education that, “If the Ministry of Defence can take on apprentices, why can’t we have young people become apprentice teachers’ assistants?”
• And, coming on top of the economic chaos which the country is experiencing the news a month or so ago that one-third of all graduates over the last 9 years were not earning enough (little above the minimum national wage) to start paying back their student grants (averaging £20,000), and the announcement some weeks after that that half of this year’s graduates are unlikely to find a job – at least initially.

Out of this jumble of ideas, some apparently logical and others not so, can any connections be made between them and can I, or anyone else, suggest how to combine the best of these together?  If we believe that “life goes on”, and if we believe (for whatever philosophical or other reasons) that it is our duty to make enough sense of what is happening around us so that we can consciously, and responsibly, shape the future, then we have to find these connections and then “think big and act small”.

I guess (and this is dangerous in such an open space as a blog) that we have to search everything that is going on around us to look, as it were, for the ingredients that now need to be combined within a new recipe.  In other words we have to become professional “cooks” and provide youngsters in the future with a more appropriate up-bringing than that which is currently on offer.

Who out there is going to help me read the signs better?  As I begin to unpack this I look forward to reacting to the ideas of many other people.

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