Education What is it good for
[Music]
i was once introduced to a maasai ranger
at the entrance to nairobi national park
why
because i was also a ranger but i was
based in scotland
he looked at me and he shook his head
how could i possibly be a ranger
but i was but i didn’t have his rifle
for poachers
but i did once have to stop four men on
a sunday morning killing crows in my
park
being a ranger made me change my life
i changed my thinking about education
and learning and that changed my life
i had been good at education after all
i’d been in it 18 years
i’d been to school obviously
phd but it was while i was training to
be a ranger that i began to reassess
what i thought learning was
one of the things that we had to do in
our range of training was do a module
on how to work with small children
primary aged children in the outdoors
so my friend elsa and i designed an
activity
and then we meant to meet our young boys
it turned out to be
uh we called them the gang of six in
their primary school the day before
and we had a lovely talk with them they
were very sweet and then the last
question was
miss will we be abseiling tomorrow
well our heart sank there was no
rock face there was not even a boulder
and also we didn’t know how to abseil
so elsewhat and i went back and
redesigned the program because we knew
we needed to do something
much more adventurous and challenging
for these boys
their next day came and they they turned
up and
we had done a rope blindfold trail for
them
and the rope was strung between trees
and
they started this rope walk was really
quite challenging
they had to crawl underneath fallen tree
stumps
through stinging nettle patches through
mud
through brush until they got to the end
of the rope
we then took the rope away took their
blindfolds off
and said right boys you now have to go
and find that
route back that trail using your other
senses
and they did with a bit of help so we
said to them okay
this means that now you are initiated
into
being wildlife and woodland ranges
and that means you get to wear this
elastic band around your head
and here’s a pigeon feather as well
there are lots of pigeons in the woods
they were thrilled on the walk back to
the center
they were singing songs that they
thought were appropriate to what we had
just been doing
as we got to the center one of them said
miss could we get some
paper and pencils and i said but the
program’s over
and they said no we just want to write
it down so for 45 minutes they wrote
they drew
one boy wrote a poem the next day
the headmaster turned up to give us
feedback on what had happened
and he looked at ellsworth and i and he
said are you
two trained teachers and we said no
and he said well i’ll give you a job
tomorrow and we looked at him
and he said you don’t know who those
boys were do you
your gang of six and we said no
he said well they are the worst boys in
my school there are
always in my office um they truant they
misbehave in class
everything you can think of that they do
and the teachers don’t know how to
control them
well this had not been el smith and i
that our experience
and then there’s ewan ewen who was small
for his age he was 10
came with his entire class to the park
and within minutes ewan was leading the
program
because it turned out that ewan
knew that park inside out it was his
playground
he knew where the deer slept he knew
where the badgers went for their evening
drinks
he knew all the tracks and trails and
signs of wildlife
and everything that happened in
different seasons so
29 of his classmates his teacher and i
followed him
his teacher turned to me and said he’s
not like this in school
and i said well why not and she said
well he doesn’t participate i can’t get
a peep out of him
and i’m really worried about his
academic ability
it was years later that i came across
the theory of multiple intelligences by
howard gardner and it turns out that
euan probably
had the multiple intelligence of
naturalist the same as charles darwin
but for me he had two other skills
he had shown great leadership we
followed him
and he was a great communicator we were
spellbound by his stories
and then there was shona shona was six
delightful
and it was a summer afternoon summer
camp and we’d spent a lovely hour
crawling through the meadow finding
all sorts of animal trails and and
different plants
and at the end of that we went back to
the center and she decided that what she
wanted to do
was draw a map of a meadow
as though she was a bird flying over the
meadow
she could do most things but didn’t know
what a tree looked like so i helped her
my mum was visiting and my mom was a
head teacher of a first school
and she turned to me and said um she’s
not supposed to be able to do that anne
and i said why not she said well she’s
six at six they are not supposed to have
yet the concept of being able to see the
world from a bird’s eye view
and understanding what that looks like
on a map
well this got me thinking we’d had
these experiences and maybe the models
and the assumptions that we were making
about
children and young people and how they
learn
maybe they weren’t always correct in
certain situations
and what began for me was a lifelong
journey and exploration of learning
the brain and how to do the best
learning
i began traveling the world and and when
you travel the world the best thing you
can get as a job is a teacher especially
a maths teacher
um but i was also teaching geography
and one of the things that i’d obviously
been doing as a ranger had been learning
in the environment and we had also been
doing learning
about the environment but i had been
doing that in a way
that meant games and fun and all sorts
of great activities but in
classrooms i was going to have to do
learning through
and that meant creating the atmosphere
that helped the best learning to happen
but i began to also then to do this i
had to explore some of those models and
assumptions that people made
and my favorite one which seems to be
all too prevalent
maybe even today is the empty brain
model
and it goes like this four five six year
old
goes to school for the first time
teacher unzips their skull
opens it up and for the rest of their
school career
information and all sorts of stuff gets
poured in
and at the end of their career it gets
closed up and apparently
they’re off ready for the world
i didn’t quite believe this
and it turns out that neuroscientists
don’t really believe this either
so recently neural scientists have begun
to realize that actually we have been
assuming
that our brains have evolved to think
and it turns out that’s not true our
brains have evolved
to predict and tell our bodies
what to do it’s a survival thing
so if you get some information in
your brain predicts what to do tells
your body how to do that
if another bit of information comes in
and
it’s really not right with your
prediction your brain has two choices
one is it can just carry on with the
action rightly or wrongly
or it can take that information in and
reassess
and decide what to do with that new
information and maybe make a new
prediction and new actions
and that’s called learning but in order
to do that
you have to have something in your brain
that helps you
do the prediction you need experiences
you need knowledge you need data that is
going to tell you
what to do so you cannot be
empty-brained even if you make the wrong
choices
i began to take this learning that i’d
been doing
about learning and what i began to do
was actually teach teachers
and actually sometimes rangers and i was
mostly teaching
environmental education and this was in
canada
but i began to ask myself a question is
this it
is this all we have to do is good
teaching practice all there is
and then i came across education for
sustainability
or as i like to call it learning for
sustainability which means
learning for a sustainable and just
future
and it means how do we build resilience
in our young people
how do we help them understand all the
changes that are going to come
and how do we help them with what’s an
uncertain future
and we do this by doing a whole range of
things and
in particular we can do things like
critical thinking
you know asking the sorts of questions
like
is it always been that way who decides
how that happens
have they given you all the information
what have they left out
or what’s called systems thinking but it
helps people put together the whole
picture
of something so you might have some
information but how does that
fit with the natural and the human
systems
that we’re all part of or how do you
build
a sense of agency that young people feel
that they can do
something well we were doing it through
action learning
and it proved most effective by we i
meant wwf uk
because by that point i was working for
them
and wwf uk at that time were actually
held up as
some of the experts in learning for
sustainability
and it’s because of this that the
department of education invited me in to
tell them
all about education for sustainability
they were about to do their own
sustainable development action plan and
they wanted to know
how it fitted with teaching and learning
so i explained they got it
and then they asked so this thing anne
socially critical thinking
does that mean a student could question
the governance the government’s economic
model
i was shocked i said well yes i mean we
all can it’s democracy
and they said no no no we can’t do it
deliberately
and to this day they don’t do education
for sustainability
but i was on my own journey i was
working out how to do
learning for a just and sustainable
future and i began a charity 13 years
ago called seed
and we developed a lot of programs but
just recently we started to ask
ourselves again
some of these assumptions that we might
have been making
how are young children and young people
learning
what do they already know what do they
want to know
and what do they worry about so we began
the youth
listening project and over two years
we had 2 000 young people answer our
survey actually then the adults wanted
to do it as well
so we had 600 adults teachers educators
and the results were astounding when we
asked the young people where do you
learn about sustainability or the big
global issues
it turned out that they learn as much in
school as they learn
outside of school and they learn it
through
the internet they learn it through
social media tv
um david ashmore gets mentioned a lot
they learn all over
friends family they do their own
research
and then we ask them what do you want to
learn in school
and the majority of them said we want to
learn how to live sustainably
when we asked the same question of the
adults they said
oh the children need to learn about
climate change
just recently i’ve been in conversation
with caroline hickman
and she’s a psychotherapist and a
researcher at bath spa
university and like many of us she’s
starting to have conversations with
young people
and she’s been interviewing climate
change
activists young people who are activists
in climate change
and they’ve said to her yes we want to
learn a bit about climate change but
actually we want to learn how to build a
boat
because if sea level rises we might need
that
we want to learn how to grow food we
want to learn
how to help other people make change we
want to learn
how to speak to a politician
and we want to learn how to teach and
talk to our parents because we don’t
think they get it
so what can we do it doesn’t matter if
you’re a parent a grandparent an aunt or
an uncle or a teacher
you can have those important
conversations with young people
so breakfast mum
dad why do i have to go to school
now maybe you’ve been answering it’s the
law the government says so
i need to go to work but maybe you could
have a conversation about
the purpose of education what do people
think it is are there different ideas
about what it is
maybe you could say what education did
for you
and what it didn’t do for you
dinner mom dad why do i have to learn
this stuff
again you could say it’s in the national
curriculum or you could say
it’s in your test on friday or you could
have a conversation
about how that stuff fits with a bigger
picture
because as an adult you know that bigger
picture
and you might be able to help them with
that you might be able to draw
a mind map for example and a
conversation you are less likely to have
with them because we know
young people are worried about the
future of the planet and their own
future
but it could be a conversation you could
start
so instead of thinking about a negative
future can you think
together about an alternative preferable
future
what would be in it how would things
work how would they be connected
maybe you can draw that and then ask
yourselves what are the steps
that we need to take us to that point
to that preferable future what can you
do
what can i do what can we all do what
can the government do
to take those steps
and you are probably already taking
actions you’re probably recycling you
might be turning off lights
saving water but how about doing
something a little bit more challenging
as a family uh try it see if it works
have another go if it doesn’t work learn
from it
keep going because after all they say
that it takes a village to raise a child
and we need to be part of that village
so the purpose of education has to be
surely
that it’s about learning to care for
oneself
care for others near and far and to care
for the environment
that sustains us and is part of
us the world is changing
we need young people to be ready for
their future
and to shape it
after all that’s what education is good
for
thank you
[Music]
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