The Hungry Spirit: New Thinking for a New World Page 19
Interpersonal Intelligence – the ability to get things done with and through others. Sometimes called social intelligence, or elevated to leadership skills, this intelligence is crucial to success and survival at work.
Musical Intelligence – easy to recognize, whether in opera singers, pianists or pop groups, this intelligence seems pleasingly unrelated to age, which means that it is an important route to success experiences for the young.
The list could, and no doubt will, continue, because there may well be other categories of intelligence. The precise names of the various intelligences are not important. What matters is the message behind the list: that these many and varied intelligences or abilities are all resources that we can use to contribute to the world, to earn a living and to make a difference. It cannot be proved beyond doubt, but it is a reasonable assumption that everyone starts off endowed to some degree with at least one of these intelligences. Nor is it obvious, looking at people in later life, that any particular set of intelligences is more important than any other. Any one of them can be developed to be the basis of self-respect, a successful life and useful work.
It should be the first duty of a school for life to help the young person build up an ‘intelligence profile’, then to encourage him or her to develop the preferred set of those intelligences, and to work out how best to employ them. This will provide the basis for that self-confidence without which little learning can occur. The development of the other intelligences can come later. A narrow focus on the first three intelligences in this list runs the risk of labelling as stupid those who do not shine in those particular intelligences but who have undoubted capacities in the other areas. That is to cheat them of a life.
The delivery of these first two propositions might seem very teacher intensive, focusing as they do on the unique qualities of each individual. But perhaps our teacher/student ratios are the wrong way round. Instead of focusing on individuals in the early years of life, we provide the attention when they really should not need it at all. Thus we have thirty pupils or more to a teacher in a primary school, but ten or fewer in higher education. These numbers ought to be reversed, in which case we would need, theoretically, no more teachers in total, and they would probably cost less.
Sir Christopher Ball, the Director of Learning at the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce in London, has a neat formula for these ratios – take the age of the pupil and multiply by two. Five-year-olds would then get one teacher for every ten pupils, while twenty-year-olds at university would have one teacher for every forty students, but by then they should be independent learners. There obviously can’t be a straight swap of professors for primary teachers, so an initial investment will be needed at the primary end while we stretch the ratios at the university level. That stretch is going to happen anyway as the numbers attending university continue to rise, probably without any accompanying rise in resources.
On the campus of Tufts University in the USA you will find the Eliot-Pearson Preschool and Project Spectrum, a curriculum that deliberately sets out to cultivate a wide range of intelligences. It was inspired by the work of Howard Gardner. Daniel Goleman watched four-year-old Judy there. To the casual observer she was a shy, withdrawn kid, not joining in the action at playtime, always on the margin of activities. Yet when Judy’s teacher asked her to match each boy and girl with their favourite playmates, Judy did so with complete accuracy. She had a perfect social map of her class and a level of perceptiveness unusual for any four-year-old. It was a skill which might allow her to blossom into a star later on in life, in people sensitive fields such as diplomacy, marketing or management. In a more traditional school such a talent would have been ignored, and Judy classified as socially inadequate. Her self-respect would have been dented, possibly for life.
3.Life is a marathon, not a horse race.
In a horse race only the first three count. The rest are also-rans. In a marathon everyone who completes the course is a winner. While some run faster than others and some compete with others up at the front, most of the runners are running against themselves, seeking to better the standards which they set themselves. Life is more like a marathon for most of us. We choose which races to enter, and what pace to run at, seeking, most of the time, to better ourselves. There is ultimately no winning and losing, only the taking part, and the getting better.
Compulsory tests at 7, 11, 14, and 16, as in Britain, turn education into a horse race, not a marathon, because the scores, however objective they are intended to be, inevitably label the young person as below or above average. Comparative grading at set ages turns education into a sorting device, not a development process. Although some may respond creatively to the news that they are below average in some aspect of their work, most young people turn away immediately to find some other area where they might have better luck, preferably one outside the remit of their school.
If we ran our driving tests in this way, with compulsory once-only tests on everyone’s seventeenth birthday, passing only those who were average or above, we should undoubtedly have safer roads with better and fewer drivers, but we would have disenfranchised, for life, nearly half the population. Yet that is what we are doing with our school examinations. This is immoral in a democratic society, because it deprives late developers of the chance of a proper selfishness.
The odd thing is that we already have a model of graded examinations in Britain which is highly regarded, one with high standards but almost universal pass rates. I refer to the system of music examinations which pupils take only when their teacher estimates that they have a good chance of passing. These examinations are not age dependent – you take them when you are ready for them. They are the appropriate examinations for a marathon as opposed to a horse race and replicate the sort of hurdles that people will encounter later in life, leaping them when they are ready for them.
Tim Brighouse, the Director of Education in Birmingham, calls these examinations ‘Just-in-Time Examinations’. A young person should always have something to aim at, but something attainable, something retakeable, something which he or she can hold up as a mark of their achievement, irrespective of age. Adult life is not as ageist as schools are, where the month of one’s birthday can be of crucial importance. These kinds of Just-In-Time hurdles ought to be part of the ambience in a proper school for life.
4. Knowing ‘what’ is not as important as knowing ‘where’, ‘how’ and ‘why’.
Implicit in my education was the assumption that the objective of education and training was to fill my mind with as much information as possible, so that it would be there when I needed it. Of course, I forgot most of it. In life and in work, we learn things when we need them, not before we need them. Knowledge, for most people, has a very short sell-by date. Unless it is used very quickly it goes off. That is why it is very difficult to learn a foreign language in absentia, as it were. If the new words and phrases do not get used within days, they evaporate.
Knowledge, these days, is readily available, whether it be contained in books and manuals, on CD-ROMS or in cyberspace, or in other people’s experience. The trick is not to try to transfer it all to one’s own brain, but to know where to find it, how to access it and what to do with it when you have it. We need early practice in doing this. As part of their role as practice grounds for life, schools ought not to be force-feeding their students, but teaching them how to feed themselves. Original thought, I sometimes console myself, often goes with a bad memory. An overstuffed brain has less need to work things out for itself.
This changes the role of the teacher. Instead of being the sole repository of knowledge, which has traditionally been the source of their authority, teachers will have to be prepared to encourage their students to search for facts and theories in the depths of the Internet, often ending up knowing more about something than the teacher. The realization that one can outgun the expert is exciting in itself for any young person, something that a self-confident
teacher should take pleasure in. The real job of the teacher is to set the task which requires the search for the knowledge, to help the individual or the group to seek it out, and to demonstrate how the knowledge can be used. The Maori language, I was told, uses the same word for teaching and learning. Perhaps they know something that we have forgotten.
Some starting skills are needed by all students, of course. A facility with Words, Numbers and Emotions are essential. We may not need to write, or even to type, in a future where we will talk into a computer and watch the words being spelled out in any language we choose, on the screen, but we will have to read, speak, preferably in more than one language, and be able to answer a telephone. In a digital world, where much information will come in the form of numbers, it is crucial that we are all at ease with those numbers from an early stage, and can understand how numbers relate to each other. More importantly, we need to learn how to manage our emotions, in Daniel Goleman’s sense of the word, to develop self-awareness, self-control, empathy and the arts of listening, resolving conflicts, and cooperation. And, crucially, we need to have learned how to learn, and to enjoy the process. Schools that kill that enjoyment can damage our life chances.
Those who have the appropriate native intelligences will have an easier start, but a good school can do a lot to develop these skills and abilities in all its students, starting at a very early age. Self Science, for instance, is a core curriculum subject at one San Francisco school, tailored to helping the young students understand their feelings and how they impact on other people. In a downtown school in New Haven the Social Competence Program tries to do the same for a student body that is mostly black and Hispanic. If, however, the students can learn social competence and the other skills by using them in their normal classes while working on a task which they find fun and interesting, then the learning will be less likely to ‘go off’.
In this respect, we should remember the arts, particularly the performing arts. Theatre, dance and music allow young people to experiment with their emotions in a safe context. Besides, they make learning fun. I watched a young drama teacher at work in a primary school in the middle of one of the townships in South Africa. She had been asked to demonstrate the teaching of English, their second language, through drama. She gave those six year-old children a range of roles in a street market and asked them to improvise, to act out their roles, using only English, asking her if they needed to know a particular word. There were forty small children in that class. I watched carefully and everyone spoke, often many at once, as is the nature of street markets. At the end of the hour-long class all the children spontaneously applauded.
The energy and enthusiasm in that classroom were infectious. The only people who missed out on the enthusiasm were the regular teachers watching the demonstration. At first these teachers tried to make the children keep quiet because noise always interfered with learning, as they thought. When they realized how much the children were learning from the role playing the teachers became nervous. The change from the traditional ways of the classroom was too threatening to the way they saw themselves.
5. School should be like work, and vice versa.
Visiting a range of schools some years back, I would often start by asking how many people worked there. I always got a response in the tens – ten or twenty, maybe, or seventy, if it was a large school. The teachers always left out the children in their counting. The children, I came to realize, were not seen as workers, but as the products of these human factories, taken in as raw material, processed, inspected and graded, before being placed on the market.
It was a depressing thought, but it provoked me to think about what would happen if we treated the children as the real workers in an enlightened factory of creativity, with the teachers as the consultants and senior managers. Work would be organized around tasks to be done. Most of the work would be carried out in small teams or groups. There would be competition between groups but cooperation within them. The tasks would be as real as possible, but with opportunities for skill improvement and information gathering built into the timetable.
Accountability and responsibility would then become live concepts, with consequences, because it would be the students, as well as the teachers, who would have to live with those consequences. They would learn that if you turn up late for work, aren’t properly prepared, or are too tired to give of your best, it isn’t just yourself whom you are letting down, but the whole of your group. No one is an island, maybe, but you don’t believe it until you experience it.
Learning would then be seen to be the necessary ingredient for better performance on the tasks. The students would learn that it is a combination of different talents that makes things happen, and that the discovery and harnessing of these talents is critical. Older students would work with younger ones, for part of the time at least, and would have responsibilities appropriate to their relative seniority and competencies.
Our young son had the gift of an excellent treble voice. He joined a distinguished cathedral choir. Young boys like him were full working members of the choir and were treated as such. His performance in that choir was exemplary, while his work in the more traditional parts of the school syllabus was very patchy. I asked his choirmaster what the secret was – how did he get such good results where others failed? ‘It’s simple,’ he said. ‘What we do is work, what the others do is school. He takes work seriously because we take him seriously.’
Music of all sorts is one thing that young people often do as well as many adults. Their musical work, and it is work, requires discipline, practice and high standards. Project, Professionalism, Pride and Passion are all there when they are working on a performance. The audience, not their teachers or their parents, are their judges. It is not school. Work may never be as satisfying again, but the young performers have had a taste of what it might be. Their self-confidence will have benefited as well.
The proposition that schools should be more like work organizations could and should be taken further. Work organizations now concentrate their own resources on their ‘core task’, bringing in other specialities to do what they can do better. Schools have gone down this route only to the extent of contracting out the catering and the maintenance. They could go much further if they saw themselves, principally, as the designers and managers of a young person’s development, not as the only teachers. Schools can’t, and shouldn’t, do everything. Practical skills such as wordprocessing and computing, driving, first aid, languages, home management, money management and presentation skills, could all be done, on contract, by specialist bodies, leaving the teachers free to concentrate on the more general education and development of the child.
Technical skills are best learned, as in Germany, in the workplace, but this can be seen as an adjunct to the school and as part of education, to be monitored and arranged by the school. The work of society, and the values and norms of the world around us are also best learned by working in and with the surrounding community, on assignments and secondments arranged by the school. Turning the workplace into a school for youngsters is not always a solution welcomed by those who run the workplace, but they may come to realize that early education is better and cheaper than later remedial education. If the skills and attitudes needed for work are best learned at work, then the workplace will have to get involved, not as an ultimate destination, but as part of the learning process.
A better spread of responsibilities for schooling between work and school would allow the schools to concentrate on what they do best. Fewer core staff, better paid, achieving more is the formula for productivity in industry, realized by getting others to do what they do better and more efficiently. If schools adopted the same formula, they could pay teachers better and see them regain the esteem which has sometimes been lacking in the recent past, because they would be doing what they alone can do – designing the development programmes of their students. It was once said of the Education Act of 1944 that it was the greatest confidence t
rick ever played on the British parent, in that it suggested that schools would be responsible for the development of our children. That never was true, and never could be true, but it allowed everyone else to leave the task to the school. It is time to reverse the assumption and to give the actual school a smaller but crucial role in the education of our young.
There has always been a lot of learning going on in society, but most of it has happened outside school. We ought not to regret that, but we should capitalize on it.
6.Life is a journey, which starts at home.
I have argued that life, for most people, is a process of discovery – of who we are, what we can do, and, ultimately, why we exist and what we believe. It is a circular process, because when we discover what we are capable of and work out why we exist, it changes the way we see ourselves, which can send us off in new directions, discovering new capacities and new reasons for our existence. This spiralling journey is the true meaning of lifelong learning, and it remains, for those who pursue it, an endlessly fascinating experience, one which enriches not only the individual but all those around. Those who have tired of the journey, have tired of life. They come across as dull and boring, and can soon infect their friends and colleagues with their apathy.
The best way to learn how to travel is to start travelling, with experienced travellers to advise and help. The development of one’s emotional intelligence, followed by the discovery of one’s full intelligence profile, is the start of that journey, but even young people should be encouraged to take the next step – the exploration of belief about the purpose of life – because this will start them on the second round of the circle. The natural curiosity of the young is the only fuel needed, provided that it is not damped down. Learning how to learn is, in its essentials, a process of discovering, and then stretching, oneself.