Are Schools Harming our Young People? A Conversation with Dr Naomi Fisher

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

There's no feedback system from psychologists for mental health generally. It's like the side effects of the school system are invisible because they are all happening somewhere else. This is feedback on the system. And what if we saw children's behavior, children's difficulties with attendance, young people's mental distress? What if we saw all of that as actually feedback on their lives and on their context?

Hi everyone, welcome back to the podcast. My name is Tim Logan and the podcast is produced by Good Impact Labs. A huge part of the shifts we want to see in schools and in education more broadly is more agency, choice-making, and self-direction for young people. There's an increasingly compelling story, I think, about why this is important for our young people as well as for the kinds of challenges we're facing as communities and as a broader society. Sometimes what isn't highlighted is the impact of our young people not having those things. So this week I'm joined by renowned clinical psychologist and educator Dr. Naomi Fisher. Naomi is a clinical psychologist, author, and trainer. She specializes in trauma, autism, and alternative ways to learn. She has extensive experience both in her own professional practice and in education organizations. Naomi's also worked with the NHS, Metropolitan Police, and many other third sector organizations in the UK and globally. Naomi is the author of several books on psychology, mental health, and alternative education, including Changing Our Minds: How Children Can Take Control Control of Their Own Learning, When the Naughty Step Makes Things Worse, and most recently, The Teenager's Guide to Burnout. You can find links to much more of Naomi's work in the show notes.

Thank you so much, Naomi, for joining me on the podcast. Really a great pleasure to have you.

Thank you for inviting me.

Exciting. So, I mean, you've done a huge amount of amazing work, and I, I also often see you putting out some quite provocative writings out into the ether on social media channels and getting lots of people's backs up about the damage that schools do to young people, which is always very entertaining and insightful. So no, it's so much to talk to you about and ask you about. Maybe just to kind of get started and maybe in some of your earlier work, mm-hmm, where it all weaves through all of it, I'm sure. But just maybe starting around this idea of self-direction, something I think a lot about.

Yeah.

And the work that we do. Just thinking about this idea of more agency for young people, more self-direction for young people, why do you feel that that's such an important aspect that we need to do more of, bring more of into schools and education systems?

Well, I mean, partly I think that because the psychological research is pretty clear that when humans can make choices about what they do, or when they feel that they've got some autonomy over their decisions, their relationship to what they're doing is different. So they feel basically more inclined to do things that they know they can choose, and that effect— and that they can also choose not to do. And I think that's something which we kind of ignore at our peril in education, because I think if you meet young children, they are generally very self-directed in the sense that they generally, they have strong interests, they follow those interests, they interrogate the world is the way I see it. They're out there sticking their hands in things and asking questions and making experiments and exploring they are, they're driven by this, I want to know, I want to participate, I want to be part of this world. And then I think unfortunately a lot of what we do to them in the school system is we take that away from them because we say, yes, we know you'd like to do this, but actually we know better. We think you should be doing this instead. We think you should be doing phonics now, or we think you should be sitting still and listening now. We don't think that the things you think are so interesting are as interesting. And when they're young children, It feels right for adults to do that because the things that young children choose to do are often things that adults see as inherently trivial or even a waste of time. Right. Or, you know, they're just playing in the mud or they're just doing this kind of thing. And isn't it, wouldn't it be more useful for them to be doing productive things like learning to read and write? And of course children do need to learn those skills, but I think we do something quite profound when we shift that locus of control out of the child and say instead learning is something that is done to you rather than learning is something that you actively do. And as they go through the school system, that continues. And in fact, it progressively carries on so that generally the youngest children are actually the ones who have most choice, most agency, most potential for self-direction. By the time they get to 14 or 15, there's almost nothing. Often you're just doing what you're told. And I don't think that's a good preparation for life, because actually when we get out of the end of the school system or out of the end of academic education, what really makes the difference between someone who's able to lead a successful life or not is someone who's able to think, okay, what do I want to do? How am I going to do it? How am I going to achieve it? Those are the skills which young people need. And I think when we turn them into passive recipients of education, we don't give them a chance to practice all those skills. And I think those skills are really important to practice during childhood and adolescence. It's like what I see the point of self-direction is, is that we're kind of nurturing that spark that those little children have and saying, how can we help you keep that kind of energetic, I want to do this, I want to know, so that when you are in your 20s, you're able to apply to. I'd really like to know how to code something, and I'd really like to know how to speak Spanish. I'd really like to know about Russian history, and I'm going to go out and do it. And I do see that with young people who've had that kind of nurtured. I do see that in their teens and their 20s, they do bring that kind of enthusiasm of early childhood to a whole world out there, and it's amazing to see.

Yeah, no, I mean, I completely agree. It's like very profound. And there's a 'yes, but' in there that often, you know, isn't there? Like, there's a reaction from the adults in the room of like, 'Yes, but— that's nice, but—' And as you say, there's a kind of belittling of the playing in the mud, that it's just this thing. And, yeah, and one of the things I'm interested in, in a way, what you've just articulated is a really powerful story of— that many people have historically articulated about why we need more child-centered, world-centered, progressive education, whatever you want to call it. Yeah. But I'm also interested with your expertise as a clinical psychologist, also kind of maybe flip it slightly and say, what are the consequences of not having that? So, you know, as you've articulated, there's, there's a whole bunch of amazing, curious humans, self-directed humans that we would love to see out in the world. And they're questioning and they're inquiring, they're autodidacts that, you know, they're just inspiring people to be around, right? Yeah. And I, you know, I would aspire to be one of those kinds of people because it feels really, really generative and really important. But the flip side of that, of not having that, as you say, of kind of being somehow conditioned out of this taking seriously of your own questions that you're holding or your own curiosities about the world. Yeah. What are the negative consequences of not having that?

So I think the number one consequence is that, is it gonna be on the test? Which we see in our teenagers, where learning has become something that you do because you want to pass that test, and that is it. That's the only reason. So teachers are so often frustrated with this, you know, they go to a lot of effort to produce something interesting, and all the teenagers say is, is it going to be on the test? If not, really, why are we bothering? And I think, you know, educators often feel really frustrated with young people when they say that, but I just think those young people have really sussed out what they're being taught. They have really learned that actually, in this world that we've created for them, the education system, it doesn't count unless it's on the test, right? So why bother if it isn't? And I think that's the kind of milder end of it. And I think I certainly acquired that, and I'd say most teenagers acquire that sense going through this conventional school system. But then I think further along the spectrum, for some young people, it leads to this kind of profound sense in their teens of just disconnection with themselves, but also disconnection with learning, a sense of kind of— they lose touch with their curiosity, they lose touch with what am I actually interested in. So I will sometimes meet teenagers, or I'll meet the parents of those teenagers, and they'll say, my teenager's just completely flat, they're just going through the motions. And actually there's been some research in the UK which shown a remarkably high proportion of 15 to 16 year olds would say, I just see school as something I've got to get through. And if you think about yourself as an adult and think about what it's like when you're at a job where you've just got to get through it, it has a profound sense on your sense of well-being, on your sense of who you are in the world, on your hope for the future. And I think it's more so for young people because they have less agency. So an adult in a terrible job can at least think, right, hopefully they can think, I'm going to plan to get out of this. I can quit this job if I need to. Maybe I need to change my career. Maybe I need to They've got all sorts of kind of sources of hope. For young people, particularly at age, say, 11 or 12, they're looking at their future and they're going, "Oh my goodness, I've got another 6 or 7 years of this with no hope of anything different, because actually, even if I say this school is the problem rather than the education system, it's just gonna be another school that I'm gonna get sent to, and it's probably gonna be quite similar." And I do see very hopeless teenagers, because the other part of being a teenager who's kind of really flat and who's really disillusioned with school and education is it spreads to everything, so they can become disillusioned with doing everything. But also, you're told as a teenager that if you don't do well at school, you will not do well at life. So you're told essentially your whole future depends on this period between, you know, 14 and 18 when we take all these intense exams. If you screw this up, they're told, you are going to screw life up. So they are in this terrible dilemma of, this really feels terrible for me, but if I don't do well at it, the whole rest of my life is going to be a disaster. And I can see how would that not cause high levels of mental distress, right? I just think it's, it's not really possible for it not to. So I think, so I think that's what I see as well as a mental health professional. I see teenagers grappling with this real difficulty is that I've been told this thing that I find profoundly boring, profoundly disconnecting, is my only hope for the rest of my life.

Yeah. And I mean, I've heard you speak powerfully about the fact that the blunt instrument of the extrinsic motivation of like you know, you arrive in year 7 or grade 6 or where, you know, at middle school, high school, and they're saying these are the most important years of your life. And don't, you know, again, this is no judgment on teachers, but this is like, it's an invitation to motivation, like to motivate those young people to like be here, be together, take it seriously, which I get. But as you say, a lot of what it does is heaps on just tons and tons of pressure. And then as you have written in your most recent book, but powerfully talk about, those young people who really feel that they cannot cope for whatever reason in that are then put in this deeply existential crisis of, well, if I can't survive in that system, I really can't, I've tried and I really can't, what do I do now? Because I've been told that this, my life success is hinging on my success in this thing. It's, yeah, it's deeply problematic, right?

It is. And it's strange 'cause there's something particularly about this teenage period as well where we are all really worried about them falling behind and not doing things at the right stage of everybody else. And actually again, in adulthood, If as an adult you're like, you know what, I really need a break from life for a while, I'm going to take a sabbatical, or I'm going to go traveling for 6 months, or I'm going to just have a bit of time off, that's okay, you know. No one's going to say, oh no, you're 27, what's going to happen when you're 28? You're going to be about a year behind. But if you're 15 and you say that, everybody panics. And it's— and the teenagers as well, because they also feel you've got to be on this treadmill of doing these things at the right age, and if you don't do them, life falls apart, right? And I'm— we talked a bit about before we started recording about my story, but one part of story is that I was also a teenager for whom school was really terrible. So I also— I had literally had this kind of crisis myself. So I attended international schools in different periods of my life, but at the age of about 13 and a half, we came back to the UK and I went to a large comprehensive school. And I found it a profoundly alienating experience, actually, I'd say is the right word. I just felt completely like I didn't belong there. I felt like what we were being taught absolutely had no interest to me at all. And I had been at my previous this school, I had been high achieving, engaged, curious. Really, I loved school, actually. So I had this massive switch of going to this other school, and very quickly it starts to make me feel ill. And I think lots of teenagers have this, where you actually show your symptoms of stress through illness. So I had— my throat would swell up, I'd have headaches, I'd feel ill. And I started to find it more and more difficult to go to school. And I can remember thinking I don't understand what's going on here because it's just a school. Everybody else seems to be okay. It's just a school, but it just feels awful being here. And I felt totally trapped. I felt like there's— where is this? Where do I go with this? There's no route to life really if you profoundly feel this disconnection at school, because a well-functioning young person is a school-attending young person, isn't it?

Right, exactly.

Think of what that means to be a well-functioning young person. Exactly.

Absolutely. And it's, it's what the very ideologically driven adverts from government tell their young people. Oh my goodness, they're everywhere.

Yes, I feel so glad that that wasn't around actually when I was that age, because I think I would have just found that utterly mortifying and shaming.

Right, exactly, shaming. Exactly. I mean, all these alienation, shame. I mean, it's just such a—

punishment. Yeah, fixed penalties for parents, threats of fines. You know, the whole thing is about you should be in school. If you are not, then you're getting it long, basically.

Yeah. And maybe curious if you've reflected on what the difference was between the previous school you were in, or the previous context, because I like— I don't believe it's just a school, it's like a whole contextual set of conditions. Yeah. Previously to the one then you moved. I mean, I guess you must have reflected on that to some extent.

I think that the school— I mean, the, the international school that I was at was quite a lot smaller than the, the comprehensive school, which was a, you know, 9-form entry. I think we were 2 or 3 forms in a year. We were a very, very diverse group. We were, you know, children from literally all over the world there for many different reasons. And I think there was an energy about that. There was a kind of, you know, people had a purpose. If there was a life center person— but also I think we had quite inspiring teachers. And I think it was partly because the teachers had also really chosen to be there. You know, nobody ends up at an international school in Congo by mistake, usually. So they wanted to be there and they wanted to inspire us. And I think they also had this sense that perhaps because we were, you know, we were third culture kids, we were in a sort of bubble of our own, we didn't have all the cultural context that we would have had in our home countries. And so they made an effort to provide all of those things. So there were plays going on, and we were putting on things, and there were musicals, and there was— it was just a kind of feeling of, this is a community in which things are happening, and there's a community where I was seen and I felt valued there as a person. And then I went to school in the UK. And I mean, just at the most basic level, suddenly we all had to wear identical school uniform. We didn't have school uniform in my previous school. So I was like, I felt almost anonymized. Everything was kind of wiped out of me, like my individuality, who I was, no longer mattered in the same way. What mattered is being part of this very large group and just playing your part in that group. But I think also the group that I went into was much more uniform in terms of their ethnicity, their everything. They were a more uniform group. They'd lived in this area for their whole lives. They'd been to the same schools for their whole lives. There was very little diversity of thought, of everything. And they just didn't— I didn't know what to make of them, and they didn't know what to make of me. And I just remember the teachers perceiving me as a problem. And I didn't— had never had that experience before, you know. I'd been kind of like— my previous school perceived me as as somebody who had value and who had something to offer. And now suddenly I was the problem. It was kind of, can't you just fit in? Can't you just behave like everybody else? And I was like, no, I can't. And I don't know why that is. Yeah. And nobody was really able to help with that.

I mean, really powerful. And so, I mean, so many layers to it, right? I guess there are so many layers to it. And then, you know, there's another question that comes up is a layer around privilege and, you know, the ability to choose to be in a school in the Congo or, you know, for whatever reason, I don't know the context, but, but, you know, there is a, there's a question there around, you know, the ability to make choices about life. But I, I also really hear what you're saying about this idea of energy and social energy around, you know, the diversity brings a level of energy and whatever that means, but curiosity or buzz, vibe, whatever words you want to put on it. But there is, I really feel that strongly. There's something very, living in a culture that's not mine in France, I also feel that here. There's a sense of like, oh wow, that's interesting. I'm curious about that. And maybe I'm here because I have that disposition. I'm not sure. It's chicken and egg, but at the same time, there is an energy around that. That I think it's harder to somehow manufacture, as you say, in a more kind of monocultural context, in a comprehensive school in suburban England or wherever, right? Absolutely.

Yeah, no, I agree. I have exactly the same. When I lived— I lived in France for a couple of years and I had that same feeling of, wow, there's an energy here. Just with like— that's that kind of friction between your own culture and the culture you're living in immediately generates questions and interest, doesn't it? Whereas when that's not there, and you don't notice when it's not there. Well, actually, I do because I grew up in different countries, but I think people aren't often aware of that until they experience it somewhere else. And you have to live in the place. It's not enough to go on holiday. You have to live there for a while and speak language ideally so that you pick up on the different cultural nuances. But I just wanted to pick up on something you said about privilege of the ability to make choices around life, because I'm sometimes told when I talk about self-direction and agency, oh well, that's all very well for privileged kids, but you know, other kids just need to learn that they've got to do what they're told, basically, which I actually find a really troubling statement. Yeah, me too, because I, I find it's— I'm not exactly sure what the term for it is, but it's like saying, well, these children are going to spend their working life being told what to do, which in a— is pretty deterministic anyway, but so we better make them sure they spend their childhoods being told what to do as well. Whereas I would actually say, if you're going to spend your adult life in a job which maybe you don't find that inspiring, and maybe you are going to spend a lot of your time just having to do what you're told, isn't more of a reason to spend your childhood, which is maybe the only period in your life where you're not going to have to have your whole choices dictated by the need to earn a living? Why not make that time a time when you can really explore your interests? And so you can develop that. And then if you do, as an adult, end up doing a job that actually you'd really rather not do and it's pretty tedious, you have had that experience of being able to make choices for yourself, which may then mean you do that in the evenings or you do that at the weekends. It's almost like we're saying we need to to deaden these children. And I just find that profoundly, profoundly distressing idea. Yeah.

I again completely agree because they, they also makes me think of something you said early on about this kind of almost utilitarian or instrumental, like, well, they have to learn maths, they have to learn literacy and numeracy. Yeah. So we can't have them playing in the mud or we can't have them exploring because we have to learn these things. How early do you bring that in is a, is a question and a value judgment. Of course, there's a pragmatism to the fact that there are systems you have to interact with, and it's useful to have some certain core literacies. Absolutely. 100%. Mm-hmm. But for me, there's also this bigger thing of this utilitarian instrumental logic that then pervades everything. That it's like, it's a deficit model somehow of like, if you're not doing this, you're not— You're doing nothing. You're doing nothing. Right. Exactly. Because the only way to succeed is this very linear, causal utilitarian flow from these certain skills and competencies that we want you to have in order to then create success and thriving. And it's such a reductive logic that I feel we are all trapped in to an extent, particularly in weird countries, right? More Western industrialized countries. There is, I think it's a very pervasive mechanistic logic, reductive logic that, I mean, I've, I've explored on the podcast a lot in different forms. Around systems and complexity and all sorts of things. But it does feel really important that we trap— to your point, you know, we're trying to deaden our young people because we're preparing them for a dead system that is mechanistic and is industrial. Like, how depressing is that? Absolutely.

And even then, you know, yeah, how depressing is that? I agree. But also, it's the focus on content, isn't it, over process. And I think as a clinical psychologist, I'm always thinking about How does this person make sense of what's happening to them, and how is that going to impact them further on? So in mental health, that would be where my whole take is. How are they making sense of what's happened in their life, and are there other ways that they could make sense of it which might enable them to, to do something differently, or to make a different decision for themselves, or to, to live in a different way that they would like to do? And yet with education, it's like— so the layer I would see that in education is how does the young person make sense of what's happening to them, but also How do they make sense of their relationship to learning? And I think when we start very early with young children saying, you know, you've got to sit down and do your phonics now, for example, we're doing that at a stage in their lives when they actually don't have the capacity to really think about the future and think, oh yeah, it would be useful to learn how to read a few years down the line. Right. So we're, we are imposing that on them completely because they don't yet have that capacity to think, I would like to be able to do this in the future. And I think when we do that, we again take away something really important, which is that connection between, I'm do— why am I doing this? I think if you ask lots of young children, they won't really know why they're doing a lot of things. I mean, they may repeat what adults have said to them, but if you actually dig a bit deeper, I don't think they will know why these things are really important yet. They won't know why they might, they're just doing it because they have to do it. Yeah. And we know as adults it's not great. I don't know if you have to do things where you just have to do things, and I don't have to do many things like that anymore, but it isn't a great way to live your life, is it?

Well, ironically, it's probably a sign of well-being and flourishing later in life if you have less of that, probably.

But you know, why do we create these environments for our children where we do exactly the opposite? Yeah. And I think it is something about really undervaluing the things that children naturally want to do. So, you know, we talk about children in such derogatory terms. There's always this you know, the kind of discovery stage of learning when their children are younger and they are looking at the world and exploring everything and getting into everything, but they're not sitting down and focusing, and they're not deliberately improving their skills, and they're not thinking, I want to be able to do this, so I better practice in this. And that's just a developmental stage of childhood. And yet, as you said, we frame it as a deficit or as an inadequacy. You know, young children can't concentrate, they can't do this. Yeah, they can't. It's because they're young children, and that's not actually a problem for your young child until adults come along and make it a problem. And I think we do a lot of harm by trying to impose this adult perspective on what they should be learning on children before they have had a chance to work out for themselves how they learn. And I think we don't trust children because I think obviously there are things that children need to learn that are really important for them to participate in society. But I do think that when you give children more of a chance to see those things for themselves and to see how important they are, they do see them. They, you know, slightly older children do start to see, yeah, it'd be really useful to be able to read. And once you've got that spark of, it would be really useful, I might like to do that, you've got your meaning and purpose. But you have to wait for that. And educators, parents don't like to wait. We like to kind of jump in there and think it'd be much better if we do it when they're 4, when actually they don't see the point.

Yeah, earlier is better because we don't want to get to the point where we regret the fact that we haven't done it earlier because now are they, you know, so this, this constant predicting of like, what are they going to need when, and we've got to get it in earlier to get to that point. So again, this, yeah, linear logic.

Yeah, this idea that we must do it, and that we— and no one ever really looks at the damage that is done by doing it early. I mean, actually, I know people do in education, but we tend to overestimate the benefits and underestimate the drawbacks. I think across education in general, actually with lots of interventions in generally, we tend to talk about all the positives and we not ask ourselves, are there negatives of this, and might there be benefits in not quite doing this? That's a harder thing to ask ourselves.

Yeah. But I would also say perhaps you get criticized publicly for focusing too much on the damage that it does, the negative, because, you know, the counter-argument would be, yes, but there are many people, many young people who do thrive in these very structured systems. They're clear, they're safe, they they know what they've got to do and they thrive in those environments. So I don't know, how, you know, how do you reflect on that?

Yes, so I think that partly the damage is sometimes invisible, and that's why I talk about it, because I think that particularly if a child stops going to school, for example, then we don't see the damage that that is doing. It's out of the system, and we often tend to see those who are most damaged by the system as it being their fault in some way. We tend to locate them as badly behaved, not motivated. We've got a whole set of derogatory terms to use for those who don't thrive in the school system, and none of them really provoke us to look back at the school system. They all focus our attention on the young person, however we're doing that. And I would also, I would put in mental health with that as well. I think we can— one of the things that drove me to start thinking about this area I was working in a London hospital with a whole set of referrals for young people. This was a neurodevelopmental clinic. And just thinking, I've just been asked to identify all the things that are wrong with these young people, and it's usually the things that are wrong in terms of not fitting them into the school system. And then I have to write these long reports and send it back, but there's never any opportunity for me to go, you know what, actually we're seeing a lot of children who are having trouble with this element of how you're running your school have you thought about doing that differently? There's no feedback system from psychologists for mental health generally. It's like the side effects of the school system are invisible because they are all happening somewhere else. You know, we're not seeing that. The school system doesn't see that as feedback, I suppose. That's part of what I was talking about. Like, this is feedback on the system. And what if we saw children's behavior, children's difficulties with attendance, young people's mental distress— what if we saw all of that as actually feedback on their and on their context, what would that then provoke us to do rather than what's happening at the moment, which is let's send them off to be referred to a clinic and see if we can fix them.

Fix the parts, right? I mean, not to be a broken record, but that requires a more systemic stance, right? Absolutely. To look systematically and systemically at the thing that's going on, not just say that that in silos we are fixing these different parts and then we put them back in. And I dunno, I dunno if you are, it makes me think of Helen Street. I've had Helen on the podcast a couple of times. I dunno if you're aware of her work. She focuses on contextual wellbeing. So the idea that actually the wellbeing exists as a function of the, the how healthy or well or flourishing the context is, right? Rather than, and that context could be the school, it could be across systems, but it is always trying to you not only look at the individuals in that system but also look at what is, yeah, the contextual health somehow.

Yeah, and I think we've got lots of markers in our school system in the UK certainly that the context isn't working for not just for young people but actually for teachers as well. Lots of the teachers are leaving the profession or going off sick because it's a highly stressed system, but we're locating all of that in the individual, which I think is a problem that we have in mental health. I think psychologists— this is a wider problem for psychologists, that the difficulties of society, of context, get individualized and put into somebody having individual mental health problems, and therefore they should be treated for that, which just depoliticizes the whole problem, I think. Yeah, it's fascinating.

I've got, I've got an issue now because I've got so many things I want to ask you about. But, but just maybe on that point about— because I really like your car and road road metaphor you use in the burnout book. And I think that seems— that feels like it speaks to that relationality between— well, maybe, yeah, if you want to describe that a little bit, that might be useful.

Yes, so you're right, that is exactly why we came up with that metaphor. So the metaphor is that a person is like a vehicle of whatever kind they are, but they're driving along a road, and the road is the environment and the vehicle is the person. And you've got that interaction between the person and the environment. So if the person's car, you know, it could be anything. But if it's like a Mini, then you're well suited to parking spaces in London or getting along nice tarmac roads. But if you— won't be so great if you've got to drive through the jungle. But if you're a Jeep or another kind of vehicle that's well adjusted to rough terrain, you're not actually so great in the middle of the city. Or, you know, if you're a tractor, you're not great on the motorways. There's all that sort of idea that you— people can be suited to different environments. And that the going along that road takes its toll on your vehicle or on you as a person. So if you're on a road that's really quite hard for you, like if you're in a school that you find really tough, you might be able to keep going for a while, but it's going to take wear and tear on you. It's going to be harder and harder for you to manage, and at a certain point you get to the point where you can't actually keep yourself on that road anymore, and then you come off the road. And that would be my metaphor for when you get to the point of, I can't do this anymore, may be burnout.

Yeah. And, and that's, I mean, that's from what I've understood, this book, your latest book, was really helping young people specifically understand some of those dynamics. Because obviously often we talk to the educators and the parents, but we're not always talking directly to the young people to help them understand some of those relational contextual dynamics that feel really important.

Yeah, that was the aim of that book. It was the, the— so that's The Teenager's Guide to Burnout. So it's a self-help book for teenagers, and the aim was to really say to the teenagers, maybe the problem isn't you, maybe it's the system you're in, and maybe the system doesn't work for you, and this might be the reasons why it doesn't work for you. It felt quite radical to write, has to be said, because I think there's often a kind of, you know, people want to put up a front. In fact, parents are told to do this, aren't they? If your child is struggling at school, you're told not to be negative about school to them. You're told to kind of keep it up, you know, isn't school important? And you can buy books for teenagers which are about about how school is really a great thing. And I know that I have met teenagers and their parents, and parents— the reason I rewrote this book was because parents asked us to. Parents said there's nothing out there for teenagers which says maybe the problem isn't you, and also there's nothing out there which presents a different perspective on you, how you could be successful. And I think that's the other thing we were trying to do with that book, which is trying to give them the message that you can go on succeed. Even if you don't manage to attend school for the next few years, even if you don't get your exams, there is still going to be a future for you, and we need to help you find that future, rather than say the only way to that future is through passing exams. Because actually, talking about privilege, a lot of young people go through the school system and fail all their exams, and they also come out the end feeling like there's no hope for them. And I think that's a terrible way to end your education. Education, really we should be thinking profoundly about what we're doing to young people, that we've got about a third of them ending up with the thing, well, that was all— I'm a failure, that was a failure, where do I go now? And I would say one of our aims for education really should be how could we end so that every young person ends thinking of themselves as a capable learner, and that, that should be our aim throughout the system. How can we preserve this sense that I am a capable learner, I can do things whatever level they're at, because everybody is capable of learning at whatever level they're at. Yeah, absolutely.

It really makes me think of one of the things I was involved in in the UK when I was teaching there, was a program we called Fresh Start, which was essentially for those young people who had nowhere to go and were completely, you know, their self-esteem was completely crushed. You know, they'd either been out of the system, they failed their GCSEs, they've been out of the system for a while. And then, and essentially what that program was, was, I mean, of course they were coming doing some takes or whatever, but largely a lot of that was pastoral well-being, coaching, support, you know, just because actually they were psychologically, emotionally damaged by coming out of that system, right? Yeah. And I mean, I'm also conscious of the fact that, you know, if we focus too much on the acute cases, it does skew the conversation. But I think there are, you know, I think one of the things I was thinking as you were saying about the invisible effects effects, and you can call it damage if you like, but I just, I think there are, one of the things I've been exploring on the podcast a lot is the invisible conditioning that happens in the way that we, even if you highly successful by all objective measures and you are thriving in, you've been to the Ivy Leagues, you've been to Oxbridge, whatever, you know, you've got all the ticks on the spreadsheet of life of this linear reductive. Yeah. You know, treadmill, let's say, as you called it, you have still been deeply conditioned into a particular way of being in the world. That is defined by that system. Yeah. And that is not how everybody thrives in the world. There are cultures in the world who have a completely different understanding or definition of what flourishing community means. And so even that, whether you call it success, damage, or whatever, it still is a, an invisible effect of a particular systematic process you've been through.

I mean, how could it not? Exactly. Oh, you are so many years, 12, 13 years in the, in a formal education system. How could not have a massive effect, particularly at essentially the most malleable time of your life, childhood, right? There's no way it couldn't have a massive effect. And I would agree, I think that you can appear to be highly successful and you can tick all the boxes, and you, you still are going to be conditioned by your experiences. But also you can still have some really unhelpful beliefs. And so I work with adults as well, and I quite often work with people in their 40s who get to their 40s and they suddenly go, I have no idea what interests me, I have no idea what I enjoy doing, and I have just followed all the blocks of doing what I was meant to do, and now what? You know, what— where's the payoff? It's like it's always meant to be about this happy ending or whatever it is, and it's like it never happened. It was always just the next thing on the course, and I don't know where I go now. And when it gets to that point, I think you do start to unpick some of these beliefs about other people know better than me, for example. Other people need to tell me— I mean, I had this when I wrote my first book. I had this strong feeling that somebody needed to read it and kind of tick it off and tell me that it was right, you know, that what if I was getting it all wrong? And I thought, wow, this is my schooling coming out, this idea that there's somehow an expert teacher always, even now, there's an expert teacher who knows better than me, who is better qualified to 'Yes, that's it, that's good enough. Yes, you can put that forwards.' And I think— well done. Yeah, exactly, get my gold star for it. Yeah, a really profound idea for me actually, as I've written these books and as you say, I get a lot of pushback about my ideas. But just the idea that actually you can have ideas, you can put things forwards, other people can disagree with them, you can have a proper discussion about it, and it's not about 'and you're wrong' in the way that in school it can feel like, you're wrong, you've got that wrong, do you know what I mean? Whereas actually knowledge production and learning is all about that dynamic, it's all about that discussion, it's all right, well, this is what I think and that's what you think, and what between those two things, where does that take us, right? I don't feel that was something I really learned at school at all.

But isn't that the energy of the diversity that we were talking about earlier? Yes. I mean, it's like the energy that is created by bringing diverse perspectives into a space on around a particular issue or whatever, that creates an energy that is really kind of dynamic and important as a life force, I would say. And so yeah, the feedback is a reality of the world. I mean, you can try and ignore it, but I think the world will give you some feedback on your book somehow, right? Absolutely. But yeah, that idea that there is this kind of, well done, you've done it right, or no, you've got it wrong, is a construction, right? Is a particular construction. Yeah, yes.

But I think when you talk to teenagers, you'll find that— and certainly I was very much like this— I think you'll find most of them are terrified of feedback. They hate it. They don't like being told any feedback. But also, I remember doing this myself as a— at university as well, actually, that I would write an essay, hand it in, get it back, and there would be a comment, and I would almost not be able to read the comment because it would make me feel so terrible. And I would kind of read it quickly, look at the mark, and then I would put it away and never look at it again. And now I think, you What was it that was— and I think it was that sense of, "I've got it wrong." And I think all the way through my— and I was a high achiever. I did really well at school. And I think I went through my whole school career with this terror that I was gonna get it wrong and be exposed as having got it wrong. And that's still there. Yeah.

So just, no, just on that point about getting it wrong, I did wanna ask you about the inverted snobbery around homeschooling, self-directed learning, about getting that wrong. And that feels like a good segue, right? 'Cause there's sometimes I find there's this kind of inverted snobbery of poor people who are participating in this barren industrial mechanistic system. And we are doing this homeschooling thing and this self-directed learning thing, which is where the life is and which is like the right way that children want to live and thrive. And while of course I agree with lots of the specific aspects of that, I find it really interesting again.

You mean it's schooled basically, it's wanting to do things better. Yes. It's, it's the same thing of like—

The same dynamic shows up.

Want to be superior. Absolutely the same dynamic shows up. I think, yeah, we— I mean, most home educating parents are schooled. And also I think it— for home educators, it takes such a lot of effort and time to do home education that you kind of have to convince yourself that it's better because it's an enormous thing to take on in terms of responsibility and in terms of finances, everything. There's all sorts of stuff about it, but I think, like everything, I think there are children who are thriving at schools, and I think there are schools that are doing amazing jobs, and I think there are children who probably aren't thriving at home, right? So I don't think there's an immediate, yes, this is definitely better. And I think it's all about opportunities, really. The way I see childhood is it's a— or adolescence in particular— is it's a time of opportunity and vulnerability and the kind of task us as adults and educators is how do we help young people come through that time whilst protecting them enough for their vulnerability, but also providing them with the opportunities that they need to grow at each stage. And school can do that. Good schools do that, definitely. They're providing kind of increasing pool of opportunities for young people to grow into. And that same thing needs to happen for home educators. There needs to be a kind of expanding path of what children able to do, what they're able to access. And that just requires a lot of effort on the part of parents usually. But I think that kind of— I mean, it's also possible to home educate in a way that does take away agency from your young person. There's no inherent agency that's there of home education. It's about the choice that you make really in how you relate to your child. But it makes me uncomfortable when it's particularly about the children, actually, if the children feel that this is kind of superior. And I think And they often, they need to go through that phase sometimes, particularly if they've left school, because often when young people come out of school, they have a deep sense of failure around that. They have a deep sense that, you know, I've, I'm— they internalize all the things that people hear about those who don't go to school, that you're a dropout or you're a loser, or there's a lot of horrible stuff around young people who don't go to school. And so I think that their way of kind of bouncing back from that is often to kind of get a, you know, I'm better, this is better, which it may well be for them, but I think think, yeah, I think it's unhelpful to pit the two things against each other because I think really we're just all trying to work out how do we help these young people come through this period in the best way that they can, yeah, as the best adults that they can be.

Yeah, no, I completely agree. And what, you know, what do they need? And, and yeah, I'm really conscious of kind of norming the industrial system, right? And everything else is the alternative to the norm. And the thing I appreciate deeply about, you know, the kind of more home education networks, et cetera, is, and more progressive schools and small communities that do progressive education, is the relationality of that, allowing, like allowing to your point about opportunity, allowing young people the opportunity to notice ecological process as it happens, right? As it unfolds. And when you are in such a programmatic, highly structured environment as a school, which has to be run like that because there's 1,000 young people in this school. And of course we have to run it in very very regimented, systematic ways. Otherwise there'd be chaos. Mm-hmm. But in that context, it's much more difficult. There is very little opportunity to notice the ecological shifts and dynamics of how life actually works. Mm. In that context. And so that for me is such a, is a really powerful motivator of how do we help the different networks learn from each other and how, and help people who work in these industrial contexts contexts to recognize some of those things and bring in opportunities, spaces that could be a bit more ecological, like it is at home.

Yes, and it's a good point because I think the thing is that because most of us were schooled and then we send our children to school, it just feels like, like the air that we breathe. It's hard to see it as different, you know. It's just— I often say that school is like the invisible intervention. Like when I did my PhD on developmental psychology, it didn't occur to me to go and seek out children who weren't attending school. I did all my recruitment through schools, and I assumed that that is where children were. And now then, seeing children who don't go to school, it really struck me how differently they were developing and how invisible that was as well to the schools, you know, that because it was all seen as deficit again. So for example, lots of home-educated children don't learn to read until much later than children in the school system, but that would only be seen in terms of deficit. Usually it'd be like, like, you know, they're 6 and they haven't learned to read. And actually, Harriet Paterson's research looks at this. There are some evidence that actually it may well not— was certainly not a deficit, but it's just a natural variation, and that home-educated children who learn to read late late don't have the same disadvantages as children who learn to read late in the school system. So you can learn to read at 10 or 11 as a home-educated child, and you can be up at the same level as your peers in a couple of years, and you won't have missed out because your education has been able to flex around you, basically. And I think that kind of research just doesn't get talked about. There isn't any kind of reflection in the school system on what can we actually learn from these children aren't in the system and how differently they are developing, and might that inform changes that we might want to make? There's not really a two-way flow at all because it's just seen as something different, completely different, not relevant. And actually, I think there are some really useful lessons to learn from how children are and how they develop outside the school system.

100%, absolutely. Because I, I think, I mean, I heard you speak about that, that even the concept of child development or human development is so anchored by the school system that we almost can't even imagine how humans, young humans might develop differently because of this, you know, behemoth of the school system that basically everything is in the shadow of that.

So that, and everything is that they're not measuring up to it. So it's like this thing that goes along in steps and then it's like, are they doing this? Are they doing this? Are they doing this? Are they doing this? We've kind of set a standardized set of stuff for child development and then they are judged as lacking or exceeding that at every level. It's like, yeah, it's hard. It is hard to imagine without that. If we take that away, what happens then? And I think often people assume what happens then is they don't really grow up. So sometimes people will say to me, well, you know, they'll just continue to be young children, essentially. They'll say they'll just continue to go from whim to whim, or they'll never learn to sit and concentrate. If— I think this whole idea of if we don't make young children do these things, they will not learn to do it as teenagers and adults is completely not true, because there are many countries in the world where lots of young people don't actually go to school and they do become adults. That, you know, they don't carry on being like young children. They grow up, they change, they develop, and they become functioning adults often in their societies. And we don't take that into account. And I think there's a lot justified in the name of we must make them do this or else. How terrible would it be, you know, if we don't teach them phonics when they're 5? How awful would it be if they can't read when they're 15? Childhood does not have to be all about we must make them do this now just in case they won't be able to do it later.

No, absolutely amazing. Thank you so much. No, this is absolutely amazing. I so appreciate your time. And yeah, just so many more questions I would love to ask, but maybe another time. Thank you.

No, it's been great to talk to you, really Interesting.

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