Finding 'Aliveness' in Schools - A Conversation with Prof. Guy Claxton

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

It sounds too simple to be true, but the mind-body split is one of the cornerstones of what I'm calling the standard model of education. And out of that mind-body split comes intuitive ideas about the 5 cornerstones of the way schools have developed and be designed.

Hi everyone. Thanks for joining me again on this week's podcast, brought to you in partnership with Notosh. Professor Guy Claxton needs no introduction as he is a prominent speaker on learning to learn and has been challenging the traditional approach to education for decades alongside other eminent thinkers like his friend Sir Ken Robinson. It was an honor to chat with Guy about his fascinating new book coming out next year and the exciting ideas that he's exploring around embodiment science. And how the greatest myths of education that hold us back, to reference his previous book, at the deepest level are the separation between the mind and the body, including our emotional connectedness to place and to others. Guy is the Emeritus Professor at Winchester University and Visiting Professor of Education at King's College London. He has a research background in both cognitive science and education and is a prolific author with his latest book published in 2021, The Future of Teaching and the Myths That Hold It Back. Thank you, Guy. It is an absolute pleasure. We've, I've had a great pleasure to have lots of luminaries of global education on the podcast, but never you. And finally you are here and I'm incredibly grateful and proud to be speaking to you today. So thank you very much.

Thank you very much, Tim. You've, you've been slowly working up to me.

Precisely. I had to build up a head of steam, the courage to actually dive in to talk to the Klaxon.

Right.

Exactly.

Today's the day.

Today is the day. Yes. So no, it's a huge amount that I'm incredibly interested in, in your work. Your most recent book, The Future of Teaching, was interestingly controversial. It ruffled a few feathers, I think, in the education—

It ruffled all the right feathers.

The right feathers, right? Exactly. And I was kind of reflecting as we were back and forth about the questions, but there's something very kind of sticky about this whole culture wars thing, right? It's the sensationalist, slightly salacious, you know, all these, the heroes and villains that play out on Twitter and all of this, all of that stuff. And it's, it's too easy to kind of get drawn into that. You know, it's, it's more heat than light perhaps. So I'm going to avoid that conversation.

I can't resist the temptation. I'm not mature enough yet, despite my 77 years of learning or not learning. To be able to resist the temptation to become a little bit WASPish and contribute.

Precisely. I know, but doesn't it pull us all into that space? It's, that's what's dangerous about it, I think. But I would like to say just a couple of things about that book before we get into your work. It's very balanced despite the fact that it ruffled feathers. It is very balanced and you really do, I mean, there was one particular quote I picked out where you're talking about memory. I think it's in the memory chapter and you say that the progressive idea that any rote learning is a deep insult to the human spirit is equally daft. Yeah. So you are, of course, you're taking on the very narrow memory-focused stuff, the knowledge-rich direct instruction stuff, but you are also calling out some of the perhaps more romantic and naive progressive ideas. So I do, I really appreciate the fact that it is a balanced take.

Yeah. My balanced position is that anything can be done badly and that includes direct instruction and didactic teaching. And it also includes kind of mindless laissez-faire, warm and fuzzy approach to progressivism. We want to be beyond that, you know. Everything interesting in teaching happens in some kind of middle ground, which is much more multidimensional and dynamic and fluid. And to be trapped into this, what I call punch and judy contest of just sort of bashing each other over the head, which I did, I succumbed to perhaps a little too much in that book, but I was truly trying to be as balanced as possible.

Yeah, no, I think that came across. And I know you did a lot of— I have heard you talk about the fact you did a lot of dialogues in person with a lot of people who you don't necessarily agree with in the research for the book, right?

Particularly with Catherine Burbelsheim at the Michaelis School.

Yeah. No, it's great.

Well, it wasn't, to be truthful, very profitable because there was no give and take.

Yeah. Okay.

And I wanted her to see if she would engage and all I got back from her was, you know, you've misunderstood.

Yeah. But I think the dialogue, I mean, that's the generative space, right? Surely we have to be able to create those dialogues. And just as an aside, one of the things I find interesting about Catherine is that she went to a very progressive school in the UK, and that was her own personal experience, as I understand.

Well, my theory, my tinpot theory, is that a lot of the people who are most vehemently anti-progressive are disappointed progressives. That they, you know, I suspect, I don't know, that I suspect that these people who I better not name, you know, but certainly it's true. It's on record of Chris Woodhead, who used to be much reviled inspector for Chief Inspector for Ofsted, the quality control organization in the UK. He was exactly this kind of someone who went into a school and rather as a young teacher and rather naively tried to be progressive. In a way that didn't work.

Yeah.

And they felt that they got their fingers burnt by that. And instead of concluding that perhaps this group weren't ready for this, or perhaps I misjudged it, or perhaps this progressive thing is more complicated than I thought, or it's more sophisticated than I thought, instead of going down that route, they went down the, it doesn't work and it's crap route.

Yeah.

And became sort of vehemently of that, of that mind. I would much rather that they'd said to themselves, how can I do it better next time?

Yeah, no, absolutely. It's interesting though.

I'm a warrior.

Can you feel it drawing us in though? It's happening. It's too easy to get drawn into that.

Yeah.

And it's very polarizing and I think broadly it's pretty unhelpful.

Yeah. But I think— They say scratch a cynic and you find a disillusioned idealist. I think there is an element of that around.

Yeah. No, interesting. But I, and I, I totally agree about things done badly and there's the fact that there's context and time and a place for, absolutely, for different approaches as well. So that's important. Yeah. But the second thing I just wanted to pull out from the book was you talk about in chapter 5, and this is something I've been doing a lot of reading and talking and, and learning myself about, is this idea of active inference, predictive processing. I know as you're a cognitive scientist, yourself and you've got an extensive career in that world, so you'll be able to speak to it better than I can. But there was just one of the things that I notice, and I know you call out in the book, is the way that some people with very particular dogmatic ideas about the way pedagogy and curriculum should happen reach for the evidence and the research to justify and prove, in inverted commas, the correctness of that approach. And phrases like cognitive architecture and cognitive load theory, all of these things, which again, we're not going to get drawn into, and I would actually just point people to your conversation with James, a friend and fellow podcaster, Rethinking Education, where you had an extensive conversation with him about the kind of back and forth of this, which I, I found really useful. But this whole point about the kind of predictive brain and the, the way that, if I can read a quote where you say, so important is our response to surprise that many cognitive scientists are now arguing that our whole cognitive architecture is built around our ability to monitor the success of our constant stream of predictions and to home in on any mismatches or uncertainties as potential sources of noteworthy learning. And then you say it, it is sheer folly to ignore this fundamental design feature of the learning brain. And I think that exactly is where it has been completely ignored. Maybe people aren't aware of it, but this whole thing around dealing with uncertainty and surprise and prediction is nowhere in any of that research, so-called, that justifies the more didactic approach. So that's what I'd love to ask you about, because I think that segues with your learning power work as well.

And it seems that, I mean, it's like, you know, you don't have to buy into the whole quite complex and challenging superstructure of predictive processing and active inference. I've just been writing, responding to that paper of Desirée that I mentioned.

Oh, have you? Okay. So I—

You mentioned that to me.

Precisely. Yeah. I spoke with Laura Desiree DiPaolo, is her name, yeah, Italian, working in Berlin, working with Andy Clark's team at the University of Sussex. So, ah, interesting. So you're responding to that Active Inference Goes to School paper.

Yes. And then I was taking a sort of friendly pop at Karl Friston, basically, and saying, you know, I've been at a conference with him where people were generally acknowledging that there are at the most 5 people on the planet who understand what he's on about.

Konrad Wolfram is one of them and there's not many others, right?

And he, you know, and he brings a kind of physicist's mindset and he's interested in a grand theory of everything, which boils down to prediction error elimination and all of that complicated stuff.

Free energy. Yeah.

The free energy principle I find is just unnecessarily complicated. It's like, it's one of those things that sounds rather impressive, but doesn't get you any further. And certainly as a, as a jobbing teacher, of course, by trying to get your, your head around it. And I think part of where I would just question, not take issue perhaps, but question with the idea of active inference is the idea that we act in order— so action is now drawn into this grand theory of everything.

Yeah.

Like, you know, we anticipate, we are prediction machines, prediction engines, as Andy Clark says, and we monitor the outcomes. And when there's a disparity, we can do one of two things. We can either change our model. Improve our model so that we predict better next time, or we can act on the world so that—

Change the world. Yeah.

We try and make the world fit our predictions. And so the motivation for action is the elimination of prediction error. And I, for me, that's a bridge too far because it excludes what I think is a useful everyday vocabulary, the vocabulary of intention and interest. No, I don't act react to reduce prediction error. I react to get things done that matter to me.

Yeah, interesting.

I react out of intention. I react out of curiosity. I react out of surprise. And they often, Andy Clark often kind of lapses into that folk psychological language. But I don't think, I think, and what I said in this piece that is going to go into my new book now, which I wrote in response to this, is I don't think as a practitioner in the practical world, that that attempt to create a kind of conceptual tidiness, Einstein is attributed to have said, "Make things as simple as possible, but not more so." And I think there is an attempt for me that he gets into the more so and sacrifices a useful intermediate level language, which is the language of emotion and intention and motivation in an attempt to squeeze everything into this notion of prediction.

Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah.

So that would be, you know, I'm nothing like as brainy as Carl Friston. But, you know, if I met him again, I ran into him at a conference in Heidelberg a little while ago, and wasn't, my thoughts were not well articulated enough for me to tackle him about it. But if I were to do it again, that would be what the point that I would raise.

Yeah.

Because this actually, in terms of the practicalities of education and the future of education and the purpose of education, Does trying to get your head around this stuff help? My suspicion is it doesn't.

Interesting. That's great. That's a great question because I have been in exactly that space for the last, I don't know, 6 months, a year trying to get my head around it because it felt that one of the things that I find, so I very much take your point. There's a kind of an instrumentality about it that explains the intentionality behind everything in this one particular way. And then it may be messier than that, probably is messier than that. But one thing I do particularly like about it is from Laura, the idea that it somehow integrates some things which we have always felt to be separate. So the idea that the kind of knowledge, knowing, learning, developing are somehow all separate processes that happen in different ways and, and school and formal education is all about really just about the knowing piece. I mean, it has historically been more so about the learning piece in more recent times. But even the development piece is something that some more progressives will talk about, you know, developing whole humans and all of this kind of language, but actually it's broadly separate. And, but I think the active inference frame does allow some more connection between those ideas.

I agree, but I don't come at it from the, I mean, I, I'm very sympathetic to the whole idea of prediction and surprise, you know, the Helm-Holzian idea that art, what we perceive and what motivates us are our own imagining. What people call constrained hallucinations about the world. I'm very sympathetic to that. I just don't want to go too far in it. The framework that I like is more of the framework of embodied cognition, or what I prefer to call embodiment science. The word cognition smuggles in a kind of assumption about intellect, that it's like cold cognition rather than warm cognition or hot cognition. My current book that I'm working on at the moment which will probably be called Bodies of Learning: How Embodiment Science Transforms Education.

Fantastic.

Plug for that, which will be out next year sometime, is trying to develop that whole 4E cognition approach, which I'm much more sympathetic to. I'm, I love the idea of embodiment. And my argument at the moment is that the, it sounds too simple to be true, but the, the mind-body split is one of the cornerstones of what I'm calling the standard model of education. And out of that mind-body split comes intuitive ideas about the 5 cornerstones of the way schools have developed and be designed, which are a notion of intelligence, learning, thinking, memory, and knowledge.

Right. Yeah.

Right. We have culturally accepted views a sort of folk psychology, if you like, which relies on, all of which are underpinned by the mind-body split. If you smash them back together again, each of those 5 concepts, that's the chapter I'm writing at the moment, takes on a very different hue and drives what we think of as education in a very different direction.

Right. The other thing I would say though, is it, does it not also go deeper than that? And that's one of the things I enjoy about the active inference idea is that it's not only a mind-body separation that we've come to kind of many people culturally, this is not universal, but it's, it's been touted as being a universal by the kind of Western Eurocentric frame, but also the separation between us and others and us and the world. And the—

it's all part of the same thing. I mean, that's part of what I'm thinking of as embodiment science. That's why the 4 E's of the 4E cognition It's like you have inactive, you have embodied, and then immediately you have embedded.

Exactly.

As well. So the model we need is something that needs to be rescued from another set of obscure thinkers called the European phenomenologists.

Yeah.

Right. So you don't have to go and read Merleau-Ponty.

Yeah.

Right. Rescue him. But, you know, part of what we do in this book is to create hopefully a more 21st century brain-friendly understanding of what that embeddedness looks like, why we are constantly constituted by our surroundings. We are much more contingent on all kinds of things than we thought we were, which of course, you know, the Buddhists figured that out a long time ago.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. As did many other cultures and people with different ontologies, right? And I would also say, I've had this conversation in different ways on recent episodes, but the other way that there's always been a strand in, even in Western thought, there has been the kind of process sociology or process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead and those kinds of people who have always allowed the kind of right back to Heraclitus, right? That we are all constantly in process and embedded in process. And that's a really challenging frame, reframing for many people who have just kind of assumed that everything is just as it was always been taught and told.

Well, you have to, I mean, the whole Romantic movement was a out of revulsion at the mechanistic model that Descartes and others were adopting.

It feels like it's shown up so many times in different ways with different, often binaries, which is probably unhelpful. As we've just mentioned about education, I think it shows up there, but I think it's a really interesting time now as all of this science converges. I really feel that with the philosophy and with some of the more indigenous kind of ontologies and it's really interesting things happening.

Yes, definitely. So our, our new book that I'm writing jointly with an American thinker who's living and working in Berlin at the moment called Emily Poole will, I hope, be a kind of rallying point for the implication, the radical implication. Quite a lot of people have been writing about the superficial implications of embodied cognition, you know, so we have to get kids moving and we have to pay more attention to their gesture. You dig into the philosophy behind the behind the 4 Es, or in our book, they've expanded to become 18 Es.

Yes, there's a lot.

There's a lot of Es.

It's better than all the Cs, hey? We've got to move past that. No, I think it's very, very interesting. But I also, I mean, I want to make listeners aware of the fact that you did also write Intelligence in the Flesh in what, 2014, 2015 or something like that? Yeah. So, you know, you have already published a book on exactly this topic, which I, you know, I love and I wanted to ask you about because, you know, this is not a new subject for you personally, right?

No, absolutely not. It's been around for me for some time. And when I met Emily, this was a real opportunity for me to smash the kind of cognitive scientist stream of my thought, to like knit that back into my educational work, two strands in my life that have often run in parallel rather than in symbiosis. With each other. So in my twilight years, I think I'm finally being able to kind of see them more as a double helix rather than the wisdom, two different strands.

That's amazing. But it is, I mean, I heard you say it somewhere about remembering our bodies. It, I mean, you know, I also find this interesting. There are so many embodied metaphors in the English language anyway. I'm not sure about many other languages. It's so interesting, isn't it? Like remembering, right? We need to understand, we get in touch with something. There's so much that we've been kind of, we know, we understand deeply that this is the fact that we are embodied beings interacting with the world physically is huge.

Our limbs, our arms and our legs are members, aren't they? They're called members. So remembering is to reconnect with the entirety of your being. With all the limbs, physical limbs, but also emotional limbs. Yeah, all the sides of what it means to be human.

Exactly. And but, but the, as you say, the particularly the mind-body split has just everything in the way that we have designed school feels like it's been about brains.

Well, or about the rational mind anyway.

Sure. Yeah.

Which, which is then in the 20th century stalled not even in the whole brain, just in the prefrontal cortex, the seat of our intelligence. And, you know, and everything from there down through the limbic system was uninteresting and unreliable. You know, the idea that the body is somehow more unreliable, more corruptible, you know, that does go back to the Greeks. And you find it even in Buddhism, sadly, you find that disdain of the body. There's a separation between me and the body.

Yeah.

It's like I have a body. No, you are the body.

Yeah.

Your mind is a facet of your embodiedness.

Yes. As it connects out into and with the world as well. So the mind, I mean, that's more a Batesonian idea, right? Gregory Bateson and the idea that the mind is actually, cognition is distributed everywhere.

The rational mind is just one excrescence of mind at large. It's a very useful set of high precision instruments, like the instruments that a surgeon would lay out. But just because you've got that set of instruments, it doesn't mean you have to go home and dig your allotment with a scalpel.

Yeah, exactly. Like the hammer and the nail. Yeah, absolutely. But the other thing I was wondering as I was listening to you talk about this elsewhere was the idea of professionalism even as well for teachers and for anyone, that the idea that we are so mistrusting or we ask people to repress their physicality in even in professional environments, don't be too emotional or don't, the idea that you would use your body and get up and move around or express yourself in ways that are unconventional. I mean, so much of some of the scripts of the way that we do kind of modern professional life is also disembodied.

There's that wonderful riff of Ken Robinson, who was an old friend of mine, Sir Ken, in his much-watched TED Talk about if you want to witness an out-of-the-body experience, get yourself along to the disco on the evening of an academics conference. Where you will see a room full of grown men and women writhing uncontrollably off the beat.

Perfect. So true. And the other thing I also shared with you previously was I've had some contact with Evan Thompson, who wrote The Embodied Mind in 1991 with Alan Roche and Francisco Varela. And there was a funny meme that he shared with Marty from Back to the Future. He plays the electric guitar and they're in the '50s and then they're looking at him like he's completely crazy. Basically say, "You're not quite ready for this, but your kids will be." And he put this out about the embodied mind because it's published in 1991, right? And we're what, 30 years later, more than, and we're just beginning to kind of, it's becoming popular. There was the book by Annie Murphy-Paul. So yeah.

There's a nice little book by Caroline Williams called Move. I don't know if you've seen it.

Ah, yes. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I haven't read it, but I know it. Yeah. So it's really important. I think it's a very, very important aspect. But the implications for teachers is beyond the get them out in nature, more play, those kinds of things. Like, what are the more everyday moves that we can make? I'm not necessarily asking you to give it all away now, but, you know, maybe share a few thoughts.

But that's, we're going to, I mean, we're just about to finish part 1 of this book and then part 2 is the so what. And then we have to break that into a 'so what now?' in terms of 'so what can teachers do?' which does include gesturing and moving and paying greater attention to relationships and emotions and all of that kind of thing. But then there's a deeper, you know, the chapter that we're really looking forward to writing is 'so what for the whole enterprise of education?' Right. So what, so what for rethinking education?

Yeah, that's fascinating.

Looking forward to doing that. And I think one of the stimuli for writing this book is the continual frustration that there are thousands of interesting innovations and experiments going on around the planet, but they're not igniting. You know, they really are interesting and very good things within and beyond the IB, International Baccalaureate, but all kinds of things, EL education schools in the States and a whole range of different things. But there isn't, they're not catching fire, they're not joining up, you know, the future is already here, it's just unevenly and rather unsatisfactorily distributed.

Exactly.

As somebody said. So the premise of the book is that one of the reasons why is the deeply embedded mind worms that we have, of which the mind-body separation is one major cultural blocker to innovation. So our book is an attempt to tackle head-on that blocking, to unearth it, to dig it up. And say there are rational, scientifically based, you don't have to go into the realms of woo-woo here, scientifically based alternatives, which will give us a new set of starting points, a new set of axioms for thinking about what a 21st century education could be and should be.

Beautiful. And I would also love to make the connection that that's so important now, that deep questioning of some of those kinds of deep codes, because the progress narrative and the industrial, infinite growth on a finite planet, all of those kinds of myths are just patently being undermined every day by the headlines about rapid climate change and all of these things. So I think there is, I hope anyway, there is a broader readiness, readying to begin to excavate some of those deep kind of scripts.

Well, let us hope that the time is right. I could do with a bestseller.

Let's have major world transformation so Guy Claxton can sell a few more books. I love it. That's brilliant. But no, I mean, I do genuinely believe that it's, there are convergences from different sectors and that's where I find there's power and an interest that, you know, you've got, it's not just a romantic progressive argument that things need to change because they should change. There is convergence from many different areas, as you say, some really rigorous science that's suggesting that perhaps some of our, some of our myths and fictions are wrong.

Unfortunately, education is one of the most recalcitrant constituencies that there is. You know, it is, I mean, one of the things that we tackle in the book is from a systems theory point of view, how come education is such a successful meme or such a successful system? It is absolutely brilliant at resisting change.

Right, exactly.

It is an incredibly successful survival organism. Yeah. And that's part of the puzzle.

It is.

It can take almost any form of perturbation and bounce back.

Yes. It's interesting, isn't it? Because it almost, I don't know, there's almost an active inference response to that, that it minimizes uncertainty every single possible move. So no, it is incredibly resistant to change, of course, but I think For many good reasons as well though, because I think as we've been discussing, a lot of these things go very, very deep. And I also am of the mind that we're not going to finally realize that those people were wrong all along and these people were right all along. And thanks, Ken, for bringing it all up. And finally, we've seen the light. That's not the thing that's happening. I don't think. I think what's happening is a rebalancing because actually what Yes. Some of the movement back and forth is a dynamic between different tensions of a more conservative, I want things to stay the same versus a more progressive urge to now we've gotta explore, we've gotta be curious and move. And I think if we're only ever curious and moving and exploring, we're not preserving and digging in and embedding. And there's some interesting dynamics.

Yeah.

There's an argument, right?

I mean, that That's why I have developed a greater sympathy for the fact that the learner profile contains balanced as one of its critical things in the IB. In fact, I was just talking, I was doing another online thing earlier this morning, talking to a group of teachers, online research group. And the idea, I mean, a lot of work in education, this might be a suitable segue, has been around how we can teach and configure schools in a way that incorporates a wider range of desirable outcomes, which would include character traits, or whatever you like to call them, 21st century skills, bits of mind, learner profile, learner attributes. The fact that there's a complicated and entangled vocabulary is testament to the fact that lots of people are groping around the world for good ways of articulating this, what I sometimes call when I'm talking to teachers, results plus. It's like, you know, we want results as in conventional terms. This is like your both/and approach to balance. You know, it's a legitimate aim that schools should give kids knowledge and credentials which have some currency in the real world. But every school that I've ever come across doesn't just say, send us your kids and we'll squeeze grades out of them. And we won't do anything else. Every school claims that there's plus, results plus, but they articulate it in such vague language and attempt to evidence it in such weak ways that the plus doesn't really gain traction. So a lot of my work has been devising, having talked a bit about sort of fundamental, more revolutionary or deeply evolutionary approaches to education. There is also a strong case for, so how do we help teachers in real schools here and now to move in that direction, in a direction of paying effective attention to a broader range of outcomes, which will include knowledge. We're not going to exclude knowledge. This is not anti-knowledge. I'll even let you have knowledge rich, which is a banner under which quite a lot of people will march these days. But what I won't let you have is knowledge cram, knowledge only approach. So broadly, the things we want out of school, you know, if you think what would equip young people to flourish in the 21st century, knowledge of certain kinds, expertise of certain kinds, and attitudes or characterological or deeper kind of mindsets of things of certain kinds. So how do we articulate what those are as well as possible? And lots of smart people have been working on that through the OECD and all of the work at Project Zero and other kinds of people. And then how do we constrain, this is my work around the learning power approach, it would like those two frameworks. So how do we articulate what I like to think of as like a trunk of 21st century character? We don't want all kids to turn out to be the same. Their branches, their foliage will all be entirely different and hallelujah to the diversity of human beings. But is there some kind of common core of a trunk like the learner profile, but perhaps a bit more 21st century rather than mid-20th century, which we can say, and how would teaching maths look slightly different with curiosity in mind, with independence in mind, with collaboration in mind, with intellectual humility with critical thinking in mind. So how do we begin to infiltrate that agenda into schools in a way that is acceptable and manageable by busy, hard-pressed teachers confronted with antiquated parental expectations and high-stakes testing? Yeah, that, that's a lot of my professional work has been within that, you know, first steps along a road. Process. But bearing in mind, I feel as I'm getting older, I'm becoming more radical and going back to more radical in the sense of to the roots.

Yes, exactly.

Rethinking where should we be heading? How do we disentangle the idea of schooling from the ideal of education?

Yeah, no, I mean, the generative and much more expansive idea of education and the narrow idea of schooling. Absolutely. But I really appreciate what you're saying about the diversity there because I think one of the things I struggle with all of these, different people will go with their different frameworks, their preferred language around what these and whether they like the character strength stuff or they like the different language, right? Or the 21st century skills language, whatever. But you end up with a, I've sometimes called it a kind of a, almost a manufacturing mindset of, well, we're just going to, whether they're knowledge outcomes or dispositional complex competency outcomes, we're still gonna articulate what we want this graduate to look like, and then we're just gonna go about kind of producing that output. And I'm not saying that's how everybody does it, but that is, there is a tendency towards that sometimes, that this is the kind of person we produce.

Right.

And that is always to deny the fact that fundamentally, I mean, one of the, the glorious diversity of the way human beings show up, and that's what makes it interesting. There's an important space for that. So I appreciate what you're saying about some kind of core trunk element.

Yeah, I think, I mean, David Perkins frames this, the question very well in his book Futurewise, where he says, what is it that most young people are likely to need to know, do, and be in order to flourish in the world that to the best of our ability, we imagine they are likely to inhabit? You can't frame the question any more tightly than that. But the question is, what is— is there a common core of knowledge, of expertise, I would say rather than skills, I have trouble with the word skills for other reasons, and some kind of things that you might call whatever that you've begun to rehearse, character strengths, learning dispositions, whatever it might be, some which a lot of people, you know, if you get a room full of parents, they could line up behind the idea, resilience, right? So I would like my grandchildren, if I had any, all other things being equal, to be adventurous, inquisitive, curious, resilient, brave in their attitude towards life, wouldn't you? But sometimes they will need to be conservative and protective.

Exactly.

And sometimes, you know, I learned this far too late in my life. Sometimes it's giving up on a book that isn't giving you what you want. There's nothing ultimately good about persevering. You know, it's called banging your head against the brick wall.

Exactly.

You know, one of the developments which I think has not hit the mainstream yet, and it's about to hit the International Baccalaureate learner profile, is to take that concept of balanced and apply it to the other learning dispositions. So it's like imaginative often and rigorous sometimes. So collaborative, yes, but also solitary.

Yeah, exactly.

So I think we can get a more accurate and more flexible conception of this trunk. If we use, I quite like the idea of defaults, if we have kind of default ends of the seesaw, always in the recognition that in the moment, in the circumstance, in the world as it shows up for you, the brain, the body-mind computation will tip the seesaw in the other direction on this occasion.

Right, exactly. I think that's this kind of responsiveness or discernment or that kind of the idea that I would say it comes back to the 4E stuff about embeddedness and the idea that you are responding to the context because what is right in this moment, it's like this idea that trust is always a good thing, but well, sometimes in certain situations—

Precisely so.

It's a really bad idea.

Yeah.

But which situations? Can you preload an algorithm into a young person of what those situations are going to be? Of course not. So there's something about this idea of responsiveness to context. That allows that balance to emerge because it is precisely responsive to the particular moment they are in.

But I also, we may disagree slightly about this, Tim. I would go with the idea of sort of default dispositions.

Mm-hmm.

You know, so on the dimension, the important dimension you were just talking about, I would rather be the kind of person, I would rather be around the kind of people whose default was trusting. I think that's a more, in some sense, wholesome or healthy attitude to life.. But when my 12-year-old granddaughter, if I had one, which I don't, was online, her default disposition to be skeptical.

Right, precisely.

Who is this person? What are they telling me? In whose interest is it that I believe this? Yeah. You know, how do I know they are who they say? I think that's an onboard life skill that education should certainly pay attention to in the 21st century.

Yeah.

And I don't know many people who would argue against that.

Precisely. And I think that's a great example. The only point at which I would perhaps disagree is because I don't know in response to emergence from an entirely different cultural frame may give rise to a different set of priorities culturally around whether being a trustful default is a good thing or not. That's a normative claim, right? And so let's—

it is. Let's have that conversation.

So exactly.

Let's have that conversation properly. Precisely.

Precisely. Let's have the conversation because I think I'm not suggesting that it's not, and I'm not suggesting therefore it's a descent into cultural relativism, but I am just saying I've been playing with the idea of pluralism rather than relativism because there are some, and within the IB, we struggle with this, you know, all the time. There are things that show up which are counter to certain values of others. And that's what, that's one of the core aspects of the IB is how do you hold two things together where you, the other person completely disagrees with you, But both of you might also be right, right? Maybe is a problematic word in that sense, but there's something interesting there about how do you hold those things? And again, that's also a disposition that is a complex disposition for young people to be able to be reflexive about their own cultural frame, respect somebody else's cultural frame, hold them together, navigate that. I mean, it's incredible complexity of being human, right?

Yes.

Beautiful. Can I, I really would love just briefly to ask you, And this will be the last question, but one of the things I really appreciate about you and your work and your own exploration in life has been you've been kind of, I would say, if I can, almost smuggling in sometimes some ideas about spirituality at certain points.

Yeah, absolutely. The learning power approach is proto-Buddhism, concealed Buddhism for beginners.

Interesting connection back to Evan Thompson, who wrote a book called Why I Am Not a Buddhist. So there's some interesting connections there. But I think there's something I find really compelling about that, and maybe that's just me. There's something— you talk about aliveness and you talk, you talk about glimpses, and you gave a great talk at the RSA a few years ago.

Yeah.

About that. And I wanted to ask you about that because I obviously sitting here in France and the idea of spirituality and religion anywhere near education is incredibly problematic. Yes. Nationally.

Yes.

How do you hold those two things together? I mean, where do you see the role of that kind and you wrote a book about it in 1981, I believe, Holy Human: Western and Eastern Visions of the Self.

Well done. You have done due diligence on me, haven't you?

I very much have. It's there. It's been there. But that holding, again, that balance of holding Western and Eastern visions of the self together, again, that's an amazing thing to bring to young people, isn't it?

I see myself as being, to some extent, like Socrates in the midwifery business of being able to have access technical literatures and then say, but everybody needs to know about this, or all teachers need to know about this, or interesting enough. And to write, this is why I was joking about needing a bestseller. I tend to write into a gap between highly successful pop science and academic writing. And some of my books have been more or less successful than others, but sometimes it's like it's too intellectual for, you know, to have by your bedside. And it's not quite scientific and/or academic enough to connect it with the thing. But I have a small and faithful readership.

Love it.

No, I mean, I think that the talk at the Royal Society of Arts that you refer to was an attempt to talk a little bit about spirituality without using the word, and to find a language that is more acceptable, more accessible perhaps because that's what I am, more psychological rather than religious in its connotations. And the impetus for that talk, and for, I think, one or two little places where I've written this up, was being interested in what seemed to me an interesting parallel between the way people are describing the research on, and this is another problematic word, but I'll use it without defending it, mystical experiences. On the one hand, and the kinds of extreme behavior that we see in young people, adolescents particularly, on the other. And the argument basically is, if you look at like the wonderful collection of reports of these religious experiences or mystical experiences, or what I called in that talk glimpses, a wonderful collection by Sir Alastair Hardy, which is now at the University of Wales in Lampeter has a great selection of these things. And like the reports by different people, often by young people, surprising numbers, wonderful book called Inglorious Wordsworths, which is the report of such experiences by children and adolescents.

Interesting.

50% or more of young people can identify an experience of that kind. And by that kind, I mean, they're usually quite short, evanescent, so they don't last. But they have a number of different qualities. Sometimes people unpack them and talk about visions and powers. But from a more psychological point of view, they seem to have certain qualities like an intense sense of aliveness is one, a sense of belonging, of not being— one of my teachers, a wonderful, I think originally Austrian monk called Brother David, Brother David Steindl-Rast, but I remember hearing him give a talk about these fundamental drives, if you like, what it means to be human, a drive to be alive and not feel dead or depressed, a drive to feel belonging and not to feel, as Brother David said, like an orphan in the world, not to feel like you're orphan. So the longing for belonging comes out of that feeling of being separate or separated. So aliveness, belonging, care. We need things to care about. That's a deep motivation in us. Depth, which I think is to do with mystery and uncertainty, the urge to understand, to dive deep. So we're working our way up the alphabet. And then E is for ease. I remember I went to a weekend meditation retreat with a very venerable Japanese Zen master, Maezumi Roshi. And we were all sitting there in a hall in a dojo in North London. And he came in after a long delay and real buildup. We're sitting cross-legged on our mats and he walked up to the front and took an age to kind of sit and adjust himself. And then he said, the accent will not be appropriate, but he said, so what are you all doing here? And then there was another, we laughed like he'd broken the tension that he deliberately ramped up. And then he said, you're here because your mind are not at ease. And we all went, yeah, that's it. So that sense, so that's ABCDE, aliveness, belonging, care, depth, and ease. And it struck me that a lot of the reckless things that young people do are misguided, but valid attempts to recreate those experiences in their lives. Instead of to find them in a wholesome and sociable and productive way, they're desperately looking for aliveness through drugs or aliveness through reckless sex or aliveness through fighting. If you look at the ethnographic studies of fighting by young people, it's often not about winning, it's about that sense of aliveness. Self-harming, for example, for a lot of youngsters, boys as well as girls, is about having an experience that jerks you into the present, away from all the self-doubt and the claggy stuff in your mind. Tombstoning, which was very popular a while ago, kids jumping off cliffs into water of uncertain depth, really dangerous. Quite a lot of people crippled for that. And one young, young person was interviewed in a piece that I wrote about that. And he said, I do it because just for those 2 seconds, your mind goes clear.

Wow.

And it's that search. So it's like, I thought it was an interesting way of trying to reframe what young people are in a, with a degree of desperation and a degree of self-defeatingness, trying to find, like having unprotected sex and getting pregnant and having a child when you are 15, maybe absolutely what you want. But it may come out of a sense to have something in my life that really matters, something in my life to care for and to care about, maybe, and so on. So this article that I wrote was an attempt to try and explore those parallels and then to say, and I didn't go this far, but it connects with the Learning Power Approach. So what kind of education would honor that and try and give young people more sociable, more wholesome, more productive ways of honoring those deep urges inside themselves rather than finding desperate and self-destructive ways.

Fascinating. That's very— I'm so glad I asked. I mean, I would say also adults. I mean, that was one of the things going through my mind, right? We're all searching, but there's something there for me around meaning, some kind of a different language perhaps, but connectedness, fittedness to just that real coherence that you get in those moments of feeling flow or it chics at me high, talking about flow. There's lots of different language around gesturing towards the same kinds of ideas.

Yes. Can I give you a little example?

Please do.

Just to intrude. I think it was the talk that I was at with Brother David, a fragment of a poem by Yeats, W.D. Yeats, which is part of a much longer poem. But it's called Vacillation. I don't know if you know it.

I don't.

And it's just a beautiful little— it's like lapidary bit of poetry, almost like something that William Blake could have produced. My 50th year had come and gone. I sat a solitary man in a crowded London shop, an open book, an empty cup on the marble tabletop. While on the shop and street I gazed, My body for a moment blazed. And 20 minutes, more or less, it seemed so great my happiness, that I was blessing and could bless. Beautiful. Isn't that beautiful?

That's really, really beautiful. Yeah.

And that, for me, is like this essence of something very important about the urge to be human and the urge which for so many young people is stifled in part by their education.

100%. And I, I would say it comes back to what we were talking about of those kinds of separations that are put in between us and the world all the time in these, particularly these kinds of industrial institutions that we've created. They create all these separations between us and ourselves, us and each other, us and the world. Yeah. And, and that connectedness is coming back to what, you know, trying to rid ourselves of some of that influence, right? It's, yeah, fascinating.

Yes.

Beautiful. Thank you, Guy.

So these are deep challenges and deep questions for education. And meanwhile, we also need to be building the stepping stones along which regular teachers in regular schools can find their way towards something that, despite the cultural differences that you're rightly talking to, and despite the need for balance and diversity, some kind of an image that a lot of us at least could line up behind in a heartfelt way and say, this is what we want for our kids.

Yeah. And what they want too, I think. Brilliant. Thank you, Guy. I mean, it's just such a pleasure to meet you and get to have this conversation. So thank you for the incredible work you've been doing, and I know you will continue to do. I'll be very happy to help you publicize the book, make sure it's a bestseller when it comes comes out.

Thank you very much, Tim. It's been a real pleasure talking with you. Thank you.

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