Changing Our Minds Chapter 3. Motivation – Stars, Stickers and Smiley Faces

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Changing Our Minds Chapter 3. Motivation – Stars, Stickers and Smiley Faces

Author: Naomi Fisher Publisher: London, UK: Robinson Publishing. Publish Date: 2021-2-4 Review Date: Status:💥

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Note: Being prepared for extrinsic motivation

In both cases, he was rewarded for doing an activity he enjoyed with the best of motives. The adults who came with ‘treasure’ thought they were making it more fun. The computer programme assumed that children needed to be rewarded in order to do maths. The result, however, was that he lost the original joy. He didn’t want to carry on. This seems like it doesn’t make sense. From a behavioural perspective, surely rewards are encouraging?

As far back as 1973, psychologists showed that when they rewarded children for doing an activity (drawing with felt-tip pens) which they already enjoyed, they were subsequently less motivated to do the same activity when compared with children who were never rewarded. This is only one out of many studies showing that rewards can undermine motivation. It’s been shown that rewards can reduce helpful behaviour in toddlers and reduce puzzle-playing in college students. In fact, it seems that a really good way to stop people from enjoying something is to reward them for doing it.

When scientists talk about working memory, and retention of information, and forgetting curves, they often forget that, in the real world, why you do something matters. In the memory lab, the participants are motivated enough by the £10 reward to stay attentive. But if you’re going to translate that to a classroom of unpaid children, you can’t afford to ignore motivation.

Schools tend to manage motivation with behavioural techniques. They often assume that children must first be extrinsically motivated and then, as time goes on, they will develop intrinsic motivation. They reward children for doing what they want, and punish them when they don’t comply. However, the finding that rewards can damage motivation means that this approach is doomed to failure over the long term. The more you try to motivate children with rewards, the less intrinsically motivated they will be. Which isn’t really what you want to achieve with education.

Intrinsic motivation is doing something because you really enjoy it. Not all rewards undermine intrinsic motivation. Verbal rewards don’t have the same effect as tangible rewards, so saying ‘Thank you’ isn’t damaging in the same way as giving children sweets for good behaviour. And unexpected rewards are less damaging than expected rewards. It seems that rewards which people experience as ‘controlling’ are those which affect intrinsic motivation. And that, of course, will depend on the child. One child may feel controlled while another simply feels encouraged.

Note: Organisms feel less stressed when they can control the rewards they can get than when those rewards are given to them for nothing

Self-Directed Learning – What Happens When We Don’t Make Children Learn?

As a society, we aren’t very good at envisioning how children learn if their time isn’t controlled by adults. We talk about how they would ‘run amok’, or have images of children running riot, as in Lord of the Flies. Many people simply can’t imagine what children would actually do if their day wasn’t structured by an adult. Our collective experience is so dominated by schooling that a childhood without it is essentially invisible. The very idea of an alternative brings up worries about neglect and not fulfilling potential.

For those of us who grew up in a country with universal schooling, school and childhood are inextricably intertwined. We can’t think of one without the other. It’s usual for children over the age of five to be referred to as ‘schoolchildren’ even when they aren’t actually at school. When a child goes to have swimming lessons, or joins a group like the Scouts, the first question asked after their name is usually their school year group. Out-of-school activities are divided up by school year, thus ensuring that it feels inevitable to children that they will only make friends with those in the same year as them.

Just how arbitrary these specific groupings are becomes clear when you move country. Suddenly being in Year 4 or 5 (as they are in the UK) is meaningless, because everyone else is in Standard 2 or 3 (South Africa), or ‘CP’ or ‘CM’ (as in France). The divisions are different, the class names are different – but the principle remains the same. ‘Year group’ seems stamped into children’s experience, like the words running through a stick of Brighton rock.

This all makes it hard for many of us to imagine what a child would be like without these identifiers. How would they learn if not in a classroom? We think of children who do not have the opportunity to learn or be educated, and we think that they would be better off in school. We think of the millions of illiterate children across the world, and this seems like proof that school is necessary.

Self-directed education is not the same as just not going to school. Children need an environment of opportunities; they cannot learn if they don’t have those chances. They need available adults who have time to spend with them – not teaching them, but talking and helping them follow their interests. If the adults around them do not have particular skills (like literacy and numeracy), the children will not be able to acquire them. They will learn the languages which surround them, and skills which they need in their community, but they need access to new experiences if they are to learn more than that.

Luckily, a few researchers have looked closely into how children learn when they are not taught. They identify patterns which are repeated as children make discoveries and share their learning with others. They all describe the intensely social nature of learning, how children are driven by curiosity to learn, and that by providing the right environment for this curiosity, learning can flow.

First, a word about language.

‘Self-directed education’, by my definition, is an education where the learner retains control of what they are learning. They are free to choose what they learn, and they are free to stop when they have learnt enough. They retain their control over what they do. Autonomy makes for efficient learning and high-quality motivation, which is why it is a crucial part of self-directed education,

In self-directed education, it is who holds the control that matters, not the content or style of what the learner is doing. If the learner chooses what to do, then it’s self-directed. If a teacher chooses, and the learner can’t say ‘no’, then it won’t be self-directed. If an adult and child choose together, then it could be self-directed, depending on whether the child is able to express their preferences freely or not – and whether the adult is able to listen.

This means that you can’t necessarily tell from the outside whether learning is self-directed. A self-directed learner can choose to follow a formal class and can stop when they have had enough. If they are being made to take the same class because someone else thinks they should, and they are pressured to continue when they want to stop, then it won’t be self-directed.

Self-directed education is therefore somewhat of an umbrella term which encompasses a wide range of educational options. Home-educating families often describe themselves as ‘unschoolers’, a term coined by the educator and author John Holt, writing in the 1960s. ‘Unschooling’ means home education without following an imposed curriculum. Unschooling families will follow their child’s interests, and parents are usually closely involved in their children’s education, seeing themselves as facilitators. A few families call themselves ‘life learners’, which is essentially the same thing, but without the reference to ‘school’. Unschooling is often something of a family identity, as it usually involves having a parent available full-time, at least until the children are teenagers.

Some educators talk about ‘natural learning’, by which they mean learning from the environment around you without instruction. This is about pedagogy rather than autonomy. It is possible for what adults perceive as natural learning to be forced and restrictive. This happens when adults deliberately limit their environment and do not allow children access to tools of the culture that they would enjoy and could learn from. The most common form of this is when families or schools ban all technology use by children and, instead, prioritise outside play or interaction with nature, saying that this is more natural. This type of education cannot be truly self-directed if children are not able fully to explore their interests and only some interests are valued. The person in control is still the adult.

Another distinction which is sometimes made is between ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ education. Formal education is typically used to describe what happens at school – teacher-led lessons which follow a structured curriculum. Informal education is often used to talk about learning which goes on outside the school environment; it is more spontaneous and is usually more child-centred, but can include things like trips to museums, activity camps or workshops. Again, this distinction is not always important in self-directed education, because a child may choose to follow a formal course in order to learn something specific, and some children may, in fact, prefer more structured learning.

Schools and learning communities can also foster self-directed education, and they take a variety of approaches. Most self-directed schools also have some form of self-governance, and so they go by the name ‘democratic schools’. Sudbury-model democratic schools typically avoid all adult-led activities, preferring instead to create a free-flowing space within which children can generate ideas. Schools such as Summerhill and Sands School in Devon offer lessons which are optional. The Hadera-model schools in Israel are the largest democratic schools in the world and they often have various streams which offer varying degrees of structure.

Sugata Mitra, living and working in India in the 1990s, had no trouble imagining what happens when children don’t go to school. He could see it all around him. Millions of children in India were not going to school and, of those who did go, many of them received a low-quality education. They were lacking in opportunities. Mitra wanted to harness technology to enable children to learn, even when they were far from a school.

So he sunk a computer into a wall near his office in New Delhi, India. The computer had online access and was designed to be accessible to children rather than adults (they put the computers low down the wall so adults would have to stoop to use them). Within a few moments, the children came. Within hours, with no instruction at all, they were surfing the Internet. Within six months, hundreds of local children had learnt how to use the computers, including sending and receiving emails, using programmes and games, and simple troubleshooting. They had also developed a language of their own to describe what they saw on screen.

This was the start of a series of experiments by Mitra and colleagues, termed ‘Hole in a Wall’, due to the ATM-like nature of the computers. They installed their computer kiosks in locations all over India. Thousands of children became computer literate, and similar kiosks were installed in Cambodia, South Africa and Egypt. Mitra found that children could learn how to use a computer independently of their educational level, literacy, socioeconomic status, intelligence, or any of the other factors which usually affect educational performance.

Mitra termed this ‘minimally invasive education’ (MIE), and over many experiments observed the learning process. This started with a discovery, usually accidental, which was observed by other children. These observers would repeat the discovery themselves and, in that process, they would make more discoveries. They would start to create a vocabulary to describe what was going on, and this would help them to generalise. They would discuss their findings with each other and share knowledge. At some point, no further discoveries would be made, and the children would repeat what they already knew. Then, another discovery would occur, either by accident or through new information introduced by a passing adult or child. This would start off a new cycle of learning. And round they would go again.

The research group identified that in order for this process to happen, certain conditions had to be met. The computer had to be outside, in a safe and public location. Many of the computers were in school playgrounds and were specially designed to survive life outside in India, all year round. Perhaps counterintuitively, sharing the computer was also crucial. The group of children was the medium within which exploration and discovery happened. The social context meant that each child did not have to discover everything by themselves, and the discussions between children led to new learning. Mitra also says that the computer use should not be supervised by an adult, and the kiosks were made clearly for children and not adults. Lastly, the computers and the Internet connection had to be reliable.

Mitra has showed that children can learn other subjects using technology, without teachers. He has found that Tamil-speaking children from a remote village could learn biotechnology from an outdoor computer, even when all the information was in English. Their scores on a test of biotechnology rose from 0 at the start to 30 per cent, comparable to scores at a local state school where the children were taught biotechnology. They added in a friendly and encouraging adult who knew nothing about biotechnology and found that the children’s test scores rose to 50 per cent —equivalent to a control group who were fluent English speakers in a private school in Delhi. Other studies have found that children can improve their own pronunciation of English when given voice recognition software to play with. The software doesn’t recognise their heavily accented English and so they adjust their speech to become more comprehensible.

Mitra moved to the UK and started testing his theories on children there. He went to Gateshead and worked with teachers to set up Self-Organised Learning Environments (SOLE) in primary schools. The basic idea was that several groups of children each shared a computer with an Internet connection. They were given GCSE-level questions to answer together (these were much harder than they would normally be attempting, as they were still at primary school). They were allowed to move around, to chat and to look at other groups. They were able to answer most of the questions. Two months later, they were tested in a typical exam situation, alone and without a computer. They still knew the answers. Some of them even did better than they had the first time round.

The connections between the children were a crucial part of the learning process that Mitra describes. The self-organisation he observed wasn’t in each individual child, it was between children. Learning was shared. There was no competition and no expectation that they worked on their own. No instruction, no expert teacher and no curriculum. The Hole in the Wall experiments were so far away from what happens in a typical school as to be almost unrecognisable as education. And yet the children learnt, and retained what they learnt.

This wouldn’t surprise Harriet Pattison. Now a lecturer in Early Childhood Studies at Liverpool Hope University, she started off her career in education by home-educating her own children. Intrigued by what she observed, she decided to do an Open University course, hoping for insights into how they were learning about the world. When we talked, she explained how disappointed she was.

‘There were so many things that stood out to me about the way my children behaved and the kind of things that they did. Things like their creativity, their imagination, their resourcefulness – the absorption that they had in the things that they did, the kinds of associations they made. And those things, they just didn’t come up in the theories at all. I was thinking, where are they, what happened to them?’

Luckily for Pattison, the tutor on her OU course was Alan Thomas. Thomas is a developmental psychologist, currently a visiting lecturer at UCL Institute of Education, and with a strong interest in informal learning. As he explained to me, his interest started with wondering what went on when children were learning one-to-one.

‘Everyone seemed to go into the magical ground between the teacher and the learner – the one-to-one if you like. And you don’t get one-to-one at school. The only way you can get that is in home education. So that’s what took me towards home education, to look at the one-to-one teaching to learning as I thought. [And then] I had my epiphany moment and discovered that lots of children weren’t being taught at all. So, I thought, wow, this is amazing, and that’s how I started my research.’

Thomas started to look at informal learning in home-educated children. He carried out in-depth interviews with a hundred families, half in Australia and half in the UK. Thomas’s own preconceptions were challenged as he listened to these families.

‘Lots of parents would start off quite formally. They’d take the children out of school, they’d think, “We have to start,” and then the children would educate them. They would resist teaching. So, what I thought was magical was that these parents who were beginning to question mainstream education, they were like their own scientists, they were going with what worked. And what worked for them was nothing like what worked in schools.’

Thomas called what he observed ‘the informal curriculum’. ‘The informal curriculum is the world around you. And you just pick it up. I’ve reflected since then, it’s not magical picking up. I often wonder if there’s more teaching in informal education than there is in formal education, but it’s more at the direction of the child. Parents have things around; they have books, so in a sense there’s a lot of subtle passing on of knowledge and information and if a child isn’t interested, you stop. There’s absolutely no point [in continuing]. In a classroom, you have to continue but, at home, if someone is not listening to you and their eyes are glazed, there’s no point.’

It’s an important difference between informal learning and formal learning at school. Teachers have to carry on with their plan, doing what they can to keep the class engaged. Outside the classroom, when the child stops being interested, they move on.

I wonder whether this will mean that a child only has a fragmented and incomplete knowledge of the world, because their learning is often in small snippets, rather than in structured lessons. Thomas doesn’t think so.

‘What’s formal is in the child’s head. They construct it in their own way. I think I wrote once that curriculum logic and psychological logic do not equate. A curriculum is constructed by adults, thinking about children, but the children construct the knowledge in their own way.’

An analogy might be a puzzle. Children collect pieces of a puzzle and put them together, forming their own view of the world. A structured curriculum presents a puzzle which is already completed, and the teacher tries to communicate this to the child. In informal learning, the children make their own puzzle and often find their own pieces. So each completed puzzle will be different, and it can be taken apart and redone if a new piece arrives that doesn’t fit.

This doesn’t make for neatly done puzzles, as Thomas told me.

‘Informal education is messy. Like early childhood is messy, but they all come through it. By the time they are five, they are talking, they have picked up knowledge without being directly taught by schoolteachers. But [for schooled children] that comes to an end when you’re five.’

Thomas tells me that he thinks the idea that we can transmit a fully formed understanding of a subject to children via teaching is far from proven. The teaching is just hot air unless a change takes place in the mind of the child.

In this way, we could think of all learning as self-directed, because we can never control what another person actually learns. Even children in school, being taught a standardised curriculum, will all emerge with a different understanding of the subject and different skill levels. Figure 4.1 below illustrates this. Jo, Poppy and Isaac are classmates, all apparently learning how to add fractions. Their teacher is delivering a carefully prepared lesson. Each child’s experience of that lesson is very different.

Figure 4.1 – Formal learning of fractions

From this perspective, control over children’s learning is largely an illusion. You simply can’t control what is going on in someone else’s head, no matter how hard you try.

Figure 4.2 – Informal learning about fractions

Informal learning, by contrast, doesn’t rely on an adult reliably transmitting information to multiple children. The child, rather than the teacher, is at the centre of the process and thus they can pull in information from wherever it comes.

Of course, the implications of this are frightening for many adults. If we can’t control what a child learns, then how will they learn things we think are vital, like reading?

After finishing her OU courses, Harriet Pattison decided to investigate this question, looking at how informally educated children learnt to read. She explained to me what she discovered.

‘The main finding was that there were no hard and fast rules about learning to read. There is no essential core to this thing. There is no one thing, or two things, or three things that have to happen for reading to be accomplished … it’s an incredibly diverse, plastic kind of process.’

Pattison asked 311 home-educating families to tell her how their children learnt to read. She described the responses as like opening the floodgates. Parents wrote pages and pages. What they wrote was challenging to mainstream ideas about reading acquisition.

‘One of the most interesting things was that people who did clearly live in a highly literate environment read to their children and did lots of things which would probably count as literacy activities with their children; their children might not learn to read until they were in their early teens. So just exactly what this environment does, I didn’t think was clear. It’s very much pushed into the mainstream thinking that you’ve got to read to your children every night, and you’ve got to have this very concerted cultivation, and there were families that were doing that, and yet their children didn’t start reading early and some started a lot later.’

She found that many of the children started reading much later than age seven, and this did not seem to indicate any underlying difficulty, because when they did start, they quickly caught up. But here, too, she emphasised how even when parents decided to intervene, this was unlikely to be a systematic, long-term intervention – and that this didn’t seem to matter. The children still learnt to read.

‘There were lots of incidences of parents saying, “I wanted them to learn informally but nothing was happening, and they were eight or nine, so I thought we’ve got to intervene now.” Typically, what would happen would be that they’d made some kind of intervention, they’d say to the child, “We’re going to do this thing.” They’d get materials together, get some resources and say, “This is how we’re going to tackle it.” And then they’d say [to me], “We gave it up, because we were arguing, we weren’t enjoying it.” They’d give it up, and then maybe a varied time period later, maybe a couple of years later, the child would start reading. And that was quite a typical story.’

Another interesting group were the children who were specifically taken out of school because they had not learnt to read, and this was causing them difficulties with their progress at school.

‘There was one girl who came out of school aged eight and her parents were told she was in the bottom 3 per cent of the country. She’d been labelled with all sorts of dyslexia and ADHD. Her parents said she was so paranoid about reading they couldn’t go anywhere near it, they couldn’t sit and read with her.

‘So they did other things with her, followed her education in other ways, and she started reading by herself aged fourteen. She is highly dyslexic, she counts herself as highly dyslexic, but she went on to college and reads novels for pleasure. I was very, very struck by this. There were three stories in the research like that and I was very struck by them because, in our education system, if you’re in the bottom 3 per cent of reading aged eight, you don’t go on to college, you don’t go on to read novels for pleasure.’

Pattison’s research is striking. Not only did she find that many assumptions about learning to read did not hold outside of school, but she also found that perhaps school practices create problems where none need to exist. A late-reading child at school will generally be diagnosed with a learning disability. A late-reading child outside school might simply learn a bit later with no lasting effects, rather in the way that learning to walk at age eight months or eighteen months makes no difference at all to later walking ability. School learning relies on reading, but self-directed education does not. The wider scope of learning methods means that non-reading children can learn from audiobooks, videos, conversations, games and day-to-day experiences, without missing out because they can’t yet read.

On the other side of the Atlantic, another psychologist was puzzling over how children learnt without being taught. Like Alan Thomas, Peter Gray, Research Professor in Psychology at Boston College, hadn’t planned to spend his career researching alternatives to school. He explained to me how it happened.

‘I was brought into it when my own son was rebelling at school. I was doing a very different type of research at the time. He clearly wasn’t going to adapt to school. He was refusing to follow the rules in school, and it was clear he needed something else. He made that very clear.’

The something else that Gray found was Sudbury Valley School (SVS) in Massachusetts, a democratic self-directed school.

As mentioned in Chapter 1, SVS has no scheduled lessons; children are free to do what they like, as long as it doesn’t intrude upon the freedom of others or break the school rules, which are made and enforced by the students and staff together.

Gray, a successful product of the traditional school system himself, was concerned about his son’s future. In order to reassure himself, as he told me when we talked, he carried out a survey of graduates.

‘That convinced me that I didn’t have to worry, that they were doing fine out there in the world. But it also intrigued me, because here they are, they’re not doing much that looks like school and yet they are going on to live successful lives. They are going on to higher education if they choose to do so. How is it that they are becoming educated? What’s actually happening with them? Looks like they are just playing and goofing around and doing what you would expect kids to do and yet they are becoming educated.’

Whereas the children that Thomas and Pattison studied were home-educated, and thus had an adult close at hand most of the time, the children at SVS were in a group environment. Therefore, they might be said to be even more ‘untaught’ than the home-educated children, who were frequently in conversation with their parents and often on the receiving end of a lot of informal teaching.

Perhaps because of this, Gray’s research focused less on the process between children and adults, and more on what it is in the children which enables them to educate themselves. Gray suggests that children have biological drives which enable them to educate themselves when in an adequately equipped environment. He traces this back to human evolution, arguing that children in hunter-gatherer societies were able to educate themselves through unstructured play and that the innate nature of human children is unchanged from this time.

The observations that Gray did at Sudbury Valley School led him to develop a particular interest in play. In his view, the dramatic decline in the amount of time children have available for free play, combined with increasingly high pressure at school, accounts for the high increases in childhood anxiety and depression which we are seeing in Western cultures.

Peter Gray explained to me the innate drives with which he felt children become educated.

‘Curiosity – that’s a no-brainer. You can’t look at little children without realising how curious they are. Right from newborn on, they are exploring the world around them. Before they can move, they are exploring the world with their eyes, looking at new things more than old things. As soon as they can move, they are getting into everything because they want to see what they can do with it, what happens. Squeeze it or drop it, that’s curiosity. They come into the world biologically designed to explore the world around them.’

This then interacts with the playfulness of children, and the way in which children use play to practise the skills of their culture.

‘Once you start to look seriously at play, you realise that in every culture, children play at the skills that are important to their culture. So, hunter-gatherer kids play with bows and arrows, they play with digging sticks and fire and building dug-out canoes, and music. In our culture, of course, there are so many different things that we do that children play in many different ways but almost all children want to play with computers today. No surprise, right? You cannot exist in this culture without realising that that is the most important tool we’ve got. So children are just drawn in play to whatever they see. I think they are biologically predisposed to look around [and ask themselves], what is that people do in this culture? What is it that everybody does? What is it that I’m going to have to learn?’

He sees play as the way in which children can also develop emotion-regulation skills, through putting themselves at risk and developing their confidence. And the two things – curiosity and play – work together in tandem, as Gray sees it.

‘Curiosity is how you learn answers to the questions that you have about the world, and play is how you develop skills.’

Then, crucially, he adds sociability, by which he also means the desire to learn from other people and to understand what is in their minds. Figure 4.3 shows this theory in schematic form. He sees sociability as a magnifier of learning – because the child no longer has to rely on their own curiosity and playfulness, they can also learn from the learning of others. As he says, this means that when one child discovers something, the other children in the group can all learn that, too, without having to make the discovery separately for themselves. This is what moves human learning beyond trial and error.

‘This is what makes culture possible; the accumulation of culture. Every generation is paying attention to what the previous generation is doing … They also naturally share knowledge with their friends, so one child’s discovery becomes the discovery of the whole cohort.’

Figure 4.3 – Peter Gray’s theory of the innate drives which enable self-directed education

Alongside play, curiosity and sociability, Gray also considers the ability to plan things, which he calls ‘planfulness’, as innate and important. There’s something else, too, a quality which has not traditionally been valued by educationalists – ‘wilfulness’.

‘So, wilfulness, that’s the early understanding of the child – not cognitive understanding but a gut-level understanding – that I have to be independent. I have to practise being my own person. I am dependent on all these people, I need to learn from all these people, I need to make connections with all these people. But, ultimately, I have to make my own decisions.’

Gray’s central argument is that we can best harness these innate drives that all children possess through providing an environment within which they can educate themselves. This is in contrast to the approach of traditional school, which works to control and sometimes to squash these impulses. Think of how some schools limit interactions between students as they walk from class to class. There’s a chance right there for a child to explain something to another child and for new learning to occur. It doesn’t happen because, at these schools, learning is what happens when you listen to the teacher.

He makes the point that a child is always their own person, with their own interests. ‘Because the truth of the matter, and evolutionary psychologists are very aware of this, is that even the parents’ interests are not the same as the child’s interests. There are often conflicts. So the child who would just obey is not going to be the child who is going to be successful.’

So what is needed for self-directed education to work? These sets of research come from different countries and cultures, and from very different starting points. They all observed children learning without formal teaching – street children in India, home-educated children in Australia and the UK, and democratically schooled children in the USA. Yet there are similarities in the process that they observe.

For all of them, connections with other people are vital. Children cannot learn in isolation.

Note: Dude this is just blatantly false. There are plenty of people who in many instances prefer to work alone and learn just fine

The other essential element is space for the child to explore. Whether that is created by placing a computer outside, away from adult eyes, or by a self-directed learning community, a child needs to have opportunities to try out new things, to discover and ask questions without fear of judgement. The environment needs opportunities. For the Indian children, access to a computer meant that they did not need teachers; for the home-educated children, access to a parent ready to answer questions and discuss things with them provided a similar opportunity to explore.

Motivation is not a problem in this type of learning, because the child is free to start and stop when they want to. These researchers tell a story of children who are fully equipped from birth with the drives that they need to educate themselves, but who need the right opportunities and environment to do so. This sort of learning starts with discovery and multiplies when children can observe the discoveries of others.

This research also makes clear why self-directed education is not the same thing as simply leaving children alone. Peter Gray expanded on this.

‘In self-directed learning, children are going to learn what’s in their environment. So, if people aren’t reading, if they aren’t talking about intellectual ideas, if people aren’t speaking standard English, they’re not going to learn those skills. And you could argue that those skills aren’t so important but, if you believe that it’s important to rise up within the culture, then you do need to acquire the skills that allow you to do so. It helps to speak standard English; you need to be able to read and write and work with numbers, and so on. And if you’re growing up in a family where there’s not much of that going on, and there’s not much of that going on in your neighbourhood, then you’re not going to acquire those skills.’

Alan Thomas puts it differently. What he sees as vital is the relationship between parents and children, for parents will then create a learning environment for their children.

‘[You need] … just a love for your children. That sounds clichéd almost but, if you’ve got love, it means you’ve got their interests at heart. You want them to read, you want them to be articulate, to be confident, to relate well to other people. You want all those things. You’ve set their lives apart. There’s lots of teaching involved, without the children realising, and without the parents realising – setting up things, saying, “Do you think they might be interested?”’

Sugata Mitra suggests that schools need to shift their emphasis away from instruction towards enquiry to enable self-organised learning. He writes: ‘They [children] need a learning environment and a source of rich, big questions. Computers can give out answers, but they cannot, as yet, make questions.’

Mitra thinks that teachers need to pose the questions but, in my experience, children themselves are a wonderful source of questions, particularly when they have never been told that it’s time to focus on listening to a teacher instead of formulating their own thoughts. Their curiosity equips them with the ability to investigate the world through questions. When they can ask questions of each other, we would expect to see the social multiplying effect, resulting in them learning to ask better and more sophisticated questions.

When schools focus on following an academic programme of learning, they prevent children from learning in all the rich and varied ways available to them. They, in fact, deliberately attempt to limit children to only one form of learning. By doing this, we have no idea what other things those children are missing out on. The more controlling adults are over a child’s environment, the more we risk them not learning the skills they may need in adult life.

As Peter Gray explains, what makes children convenient for adults may not serve them well in later life. We’re not used to thinking about behaviour in terms of convenience; more typically we talk about ‘good’ or ‘bad’ behaviour. When we start to see all behaviour as communication, this makes no sense. ‘Bad behaviour’ is usually an expression of distress, while ‘good behaviour’ means compliance with adult expectations, which is generally far more convenient for the adults around the child. However, in the longer term, being focused on meeting the expectations of adults will not lead to that child developing an understanding of their own motivations and values.

Wilfulness, on the other hand, Gray considers to be an unexpected asset. ‘That wilfulness, if we think about it on the positive side, is a drive to take charge of my own life. That drive for me to be in charge of my own life is part of the key to self-directed education. I need to figure out what I need to learn … I need to work out what I want to do in this world … I need to figure out how to make my way in this world … Although I can listen to other people, I can’t depend on any other person, even my mother and father, to know better than me.’

From the outside, it can appear as if self-directed education requires little or no input from the adults around a child. This is because we are used to thinking that unless adults are controlling a child, we are doing nothing. We look for instruction, for teaching and work done, and when we don’t see it, we assume that there is nothing else happening. In fact, self-directed education takes place in the interaction between a child and their environment, and the role of the adult is to create or choose that environment. Much of the work involved in doing this is invisible and, if it goes well, the child themselves will have no idea how much work has gone into their education. Unlike at school, where the work of educating is clearly arduous ‘work’, the work of a self-directed facilitator could involve being available to play games, making sure there are interesting books available in the library, looking out for local events and arranging meet-ups with friends. All of these will contribute to a child living in an interesting environment, full of opportunities for learning.

🔮 The Cosmos

Changing Our Minds Chapter 3. Motivation – Stars, Stickers and Smiley Faces

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