Alternative Editorial: Foundations for Agency
By AUK Co-initiator, Indra Adnan
Week 14 of the lock-down and feeling especially for the school kids today. The newspapers are full of the bad news that this time is a disaster for them. No doubt it’s very confusing to find yourself mostly at home, without a clear plan. Even if you were always rebelling against the old one, being without a plan at all is probably much worse.
Especially knowing that you’ve lost all the old compensations for being in the strict educational regimes – namely being with friends. Working stuff out with them, sharing your thoughts and feelings, laughing: even sometimes crying in a group can be better than crying alone. Not always – but it’s good to have the choice.
Maybe, in 5 years, maybe even shorter, we’ll be able to look back at this time and frame it as a positive thing. A time when everyone took stock of themselves and began to think a little more deeply about life and the state of the world. Yet there is no guarantee that we will be looking from a point of advantage by that time: we may well be looking with regret that we wasted the moment and lost a window of opportunity we can’t easily get back.
The goals of education
A/UK co-initiator Pat Kane recently wrote a column for the Scottish newspaper The National, about the difficult task of trying to find your equilibrium in the battle between safety and risk. He said:
Our default, evolved setting tends towards a need to restore balance. The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio often talks about humans’ (indeed every organism’s) craving for “homeostasis”. This is our deep drive to return ourselves to a healthy equilibrium, after life inflicts its inevitable injuries and unsettlements.
Yet we’re not pack animals; we’re itchy, imaginative humans. Any new continuities, after Covid, will be constructed and designed among ourselves. We crave balance, but then we also need to create and flourish. So what will “new normal” will we make?
I’ve been thinking about all this in the context of schools and COVID. And specifically, the announcement the other day from Nicola Sturgeon and John Sweeney, about the “blended learning” plans for the Scottish schools restart in August.
Zoom out to a biological level, and of course learning itself is one of the unique ways that humans maintain homeostasis. Education is the way we skill ourselves, in order to cope with the complexity and unpredictability of our fellow creatures.
Damasio actually prefers the lesser-known term, “homeodynamic”. Humans don’t just retreat to the safety barriers to deal with threats, but always leave themselves some extra zones—and energy—to explore things, to be curious. Teachers and teaching, learning and learners, thrive in this zone.
In this light, I was struck the other day by how much the eviction of children from their schools was returning them to something like the primeval scenes of human education.
Like hunter-gatherer communities, they’re physically located in the hearth and home (with a back garden, if they’re lucky). They may be living with parents that combine doing their own work, and teaching them (maybe even teaching them about the work they’re doing). And they have more time to idle and play, to self-direct their activities, to let new interests emerge from boredom…
What might they be watching and learning from right now that we are not present to help them process and translate? And when we begin to think that way, haven’t we been remiss all along for not equipping them to manage the vast confusing virtual world that’s been live on a screen in their bedroom for over 20 years?
New ways of working appearing in the public space. Image courtesy of Sabra Williams
For many of us adults watching the events of the last fourteen weeks unfold, what is happening now is a priceless education – one that we ourselves were deprived of as we were growing up. For example, understanding not just what a pandemic is, but how it arrives from one part of the world into another: a lesson that has huge bearing on many of our industries from agriculture to tourism to the meat and veg on our plates.
Or understanding about crime through the role and function of prisons and criminal justice in our society, linked to how and why racism continues to exist well beyond the social self-image of our developed nations.
Or maybe understanding about what agency deeply is (who learnt about that at school?) What other capacity for action did we value than subscribing to the idea that getting your exams and going to university would get you a job, allowing you to be secure and fulfilled? It’s a myth about agency that must be challenged now. As Greta Thunberg’s School Strike demonstrated, millions of children and their families know it hasn’t worked out for us as a society. Our planet is burning due to ignorance and lack of agency—despite high grades. This is the reason that Uffe Elbaek originally set up Kaos Pilots 25 years ago as a young adults leadership programme, to equip them for the ‘ real future’ coming down the line.
While there are always headlines about the ways that kids spend their time on line watching films (sometimes porn), playing games, or emoting on social media, there are less about how much energy there is for learning stuff that they’re interested in.
From make-up classes and cooking, to how to set up your own YouTube channel. More interesting maybe, is that even when they are going to game sites, there are more kids watching other kids play than playing themselves. Children are natural learners. And are brains are designed for trance-like downloading of information at super-high speed.
Where does mental health come from?
But in this moment of high drama, when there is so much disruption and fear, how can we equip them better? We want them to be steady interpreters of information that they might discuss thoughtfully with each other or the siblings and parents around them. More pointedly, how can we prevent the mental health issues that much of our media is headlining, arising from the lack of ability to understand and process these unfamiliar times?
In my time as a school governor – not my own child’s school – I was constantly inspired by the energy of the pupils outside of the classroom. If you walked through the hallways, or in the fields, there was always desire for connection, for play, for showing off. In the classrooms it was more mixed: some shone, some hid. The best teachers could achieve whole-classroom, shared learning—but even they felt compromised about the outcomes. Were they going to slow for some, too fast for others?
That diversity was reflected in the outcomes for the children but not always predictably: some of the ‘quick learners’ achieved less than the ‘slower ones’ as they got older. There was generally an easy correlation between those that got into trouble – both in and out of school - and broader failure in exams.
But as often as not, it was the lack of emotional intelligence of the school as of the pupil that would create the conditions for failure. I remember a poignant moment when the Head of the 6th form decided to pin up a table in the corridor which depicted (with photos) every pupil and where they were in the race to the top. He imagined it to be motivating as it included not only current results, but indicators of how these results could improve if certain ongoing targets were met.
As a psychotherapist I feared a backlash: the unintended consequences of imposing stark hierarchies in otherwise organic communities. I asked for it to be taken down, but was required to interview a number of the pupils first to provide evidence that it was demotivating. As expected, the higher achieving interviewees found it motivating: they could see the competition and were going for it. They saw their lower achieving peers as lazy. The lowest achieving didn’t want to chat: that, in itself, should have been enough evidence. But some of the lower achievers ‘with promise’ helped me articulate how subtly destructive the whole exercise was.
The group of three began by describing themselves as lazy – it seemed the best way that they could ‘agree’ with the consensus. No skin off their noses apparently. But they wanted to talk loads. That was the first clue: when disadvantaged children internalise the prevailing narrative in order to be part of the in-group: confrontation would be dangerous. However, I knew there was more to tell.
One, let’s call her Dee, described how when she got to 6th form she suddenly ‘got it’ that her fooling around was stopping her learn. She talked about all the ‘rewards’ she got out of making people think, challenging the teachers, having an identity in the class: but knew she had to give that up if she wanted to get the exams. She needed to focus.
Yet this delicate, self-motivating process for Dee was spiked, when she (and the whole school) saw her visibly positioned near the bottom of the chart: it pulled the rug from underneath her feet. A sign to everyone that speaking up was ‘for losers’. What could she do but agree with such a public judgement? But what until then had been her own personally-directed story of ‘growing up’ – a slow maturing of which she was proud – was suddenly rendered as a serious loss of status for her. She had been shamed among her peers: the worst thing.
So the achievement charts didn’t help: like a self-fulfilling prophecy, all three performed poorly. Dee herself became angry and had to be cautioned more than once.
Inner strength?
My conclusion over my whole time as a governor was that the most important education young people are looking for is the one they are not getting: understanding emotional needs and developing emotional capacities. Without the ability to manage yourself internally, you can’t begin to get results externally – you’re always chasing the emotional need. When we talk about agency, this is the starting point.
What we give our attention to shapes our minds
The staff at my school were all up for introducing a training scheme arising from the Human Givens framework. Here we used games and chat to explore the nine ‘given’ emotional needs – those understood by neurologists and evolutionary biologists to provide the ways for us to connect with our environment and help us flourish. Our psycho-social needs for status, belonging, attention, meaning and purpose, privacy, intimacy, autonomy and achievement drive us constantly: through getting them met, we become a capable member of society.
Unless we learn how these givens can be met , we will be instrumentalised by others (advertisers, politicians, technologists) who offer promises of fulfilment. The good news is that alongside given needs, we also have given capacities – including imagination, the ability to know and remember, a dreaming brain, rationality – that help us get those needs met on our own. But we need to be introduced to them first and given space to nurture them.
It may not surprise you that once the teachers themselves had been introduced to this schema they felt they needed to spend much more time with it. They realised that they themselves had not understood how much they had stigmatised the kids that craved attention, status etc. Or even how they were also not owning their own emotional needs, but rather living in a world where consumerism was doing much of the job; addicting them in the process.
They never had the time to take these insights further. While children are offered Personal, Social, Health, Economic (PSHE) and teachers adopt Antony Seldon’s ‘character building’ cultures in school (all helpful steps on the path to their doing well in a meritocratic society) we are still well short of equipping children for the challenges of today.
Imagine if they – we - were all the agents of our own homeostasis and homeodynamism, as Damasio describes? Would literacy about our deeply evolved emotional lives equip us to watch the news and notice what it’s doing to us? To dream of different futures without being swept away by those who make seductive promises? To listen to others with a more complex understanding of why they want what they want or behave the way they do, without judgement?
But especially with the children in mind: how can we now, in this tumultuous time, equip them emotionally, engender in them the grounds of agency so that they can look forward to the future? Not because they will have an “easy time”—but because they will be capable of it.