You can't blame the youth (Part 2)

Timothy Bailey, GUEST COLUMNIST

There are major challenges in the area of teacher preparation, as too many teachers tend to operate at the basic clerical level rather than at the level of the intellectual, who they are supposed to be of course. Some are quite smug in presenting students with copious notes rather than leading them to the fountain of true learning.

Many principals, too, are comfortable in being mundane and spending more time operating like prison warders; fund-raisers, school toilet plumbers or canteen accountants rather than spending quality time challenging young minds and empowering the youth. One is not suggesting that these are not very important job functions in an interconnected community, but the workload of the principal is far too complex and delicate to be encumbered with that level of day-to-day activity.

The effective principal, operating in this milieu, must also be fearless, as it is designed for him to spend more time attending cul-de-sac, penny-farthing meetings and conferences than remaining on the campus to inform deep-rooted change in the hearts and minds of students and in the culture of the school. It is that job he is employed to do and for which he is being paid by tax payers. Governments and major decision-makers must understand that students do not need more years in school, but, rather, a review of the school and curriculum and more quality time with teachers and principals.

natural autodidacts

Many youngsters are natural autodidacts and succeed despite the school that continues to devalue and disregard their intelligence. John Abbott and Heather MacTaggart, in their book Overschooled but Undereducated, posited that 80 per cent of what is now known about the human brain was discovered within the last 20 years through the development of the functional MRI scan and the groundbreaking achievements of Gerald Edelman, a Nobel Prize winner, for his work on the human immune system. Edelman's work, now known as neural Darwinism, has revolutionised the understanding of how youth behave and human beings learn.

This new knowledge has helped to smash countless myths which have influenced our civilisation for centuries. For example, the very first book written in English on the 'Theory of Education' was by one Roger Ascham, in 1570. Ascham was the private tutor to Queen Elizabeth, and among the many things he said, and which influenced teaching up to contemporary time, was that, "in the attainment of wisdom, learning from a book or from a teacher, is 20 times as effective as learning from experience". Even today, some teachers feel that field trips and educational tours are a waste of time, irrespective of their objectives and how well they are planned. Youth who got their education and training by way of communities of practice (CoP), or, as we sometimes say, go-to-trade or on-the-job training are often not as highly regarded as those who went through regular schools, irrespective of the competencies learned in the end.

There is still a strong school of thought that believes learning is something that schools and teachers do to you, and good quality instruction is of greater importance than encouraging students to think things out for themselves. The mind of a child, the proponents believe, is like putty to be shaped by well-trained teachers. The shadow of this outdated thinking is, unfortunately, still with us and has robbed and paralysed millions around the world of vital creative energy, imaginative power, earned respectability in various fields, and the drive to invent and discover.

adolescent's brain

Abbott et al, on the other hand, drawing their conclusion from a wide cross section of disciplines e.g., anthropology, biology, genetics, cognitive science, biochemistry, neurology, concluded that the brain of the adolescent goes through a complete reorganisation between 11 and 12 years of age. This change creates all sorts of biological, biochemical, biosocial and major neurological disorientation in the life of the adolescent. Until recently, but before the work mentioned above, scientist believed that at the age of 11 to 12 years old, the human brain was fully formed and that the turmoil of adolescent could be explained by the growth of the sex hormones. It is this, they claimed, that has turned the previously well-behaved and responsible youngster into the often bored, loud and intractable aberration he or she has become.

The groundbreaking work demonstrates that many of the changes that took place in the adolescent's brain are of a different kind. It shows that the brain of the teenager "is not finished", but "remains a teeming ball of possibilities, raw material which is widely exuberant and waiting to be synaptically shaped". The work contends that at the adolescent stage of development, the changes in the brain are so profound that they rival early childhood as a critical period of development of the human person.

The human brain is only 40 per cent developed at birth and the remaining 60 per cent is developed according to the activities to which the individual is exposed. "The outside world is the brain's food - the richer the diet (experience by the child through sound, vision, smell, touch and taste), the more rapidly the brain develops." In other words, rich and diverse experiences make up the greater part of the human brain.

The work went on to demonstrate how MRI scans made during the early stages of adolescence show that many of the neural connections that have been carefully crafted by interactions between child, parents and teachers in the first 10 to 12 years of life, and which had earlier enabled the child to behave in perfectly predictable ways, are suddenly fractured. "Between 0.75 and 1.5 per cent of what had once been firmly connected parts of the neural system seemed to be mysteriously torn asunder during each year from 11 to 12 years of age. Brain scans show that many of these dendrites are literally floating amid the white matter of the brain, apparently looking for new connections." This adds a new appreciation to human behaviour and a new look at curriculum design and pedagogy. "Some of the most interesting changes," the authors found, "occur in the pre-frontal lobes (directly behind the forehead), those parts of the brain which play critical roles in memory, impulse control, decision-making, planning and other higher-level cognitive functions."

What I find most revealing, if not frightening, is that the frontal lobe circuits in the brain which are exercised are strengthened, while those not used are weeded out. In a world where the emphasis of school, that places responsibility for exercising the minds of youth, is on swotting, obedience, malleability for easy control and corralling, it seems tragic. We lose the section of our brain which we don't use. We lose it if we don't use it. Had our hunting and gathering ancestors been so narrow and small in their appreciation of the capacity of one another, perhaps our species would have long joined the rank of the dodo. But we are the children of travellers from ancient lands, we are problem-solvers, we can fight or flee. In what mode are the youth?

natural learners

We cannot continue to assault them and take their intelligence for granted. Human beings are natural learners. Children and adolescents are hungry to learn, to glean knowledge and skills so as to make their contribution and find themselves in the world, but the way in which our schools are structured, and what we teach and how we teach, seem to retard rather than promote. It is with little surprise that countless studies have confirmed that the number one motivating factor influencing students' attendance at school is to meet with their friends.

There is conclusive evidence to show that the institution we have created called school is at a stage in history where it is not working. One is not advocating that the baby be thrown out with the bath water, but the time has come for us to stop failing and blaming the youth, and to begin to take a serious, clinical and scientific look at how, where and what we teach in preparing our offspring to succeed us.

Timothy Bailey is an educator and a social anthropologist. He is CEO of The Caribbean Child Publishers and edits the magazine 'Educating the Caribbean Child; Reshaping the World'. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and caribedumag@yahoo.com.