FLD Shorts - Episode 4 - Carl Honoré

Welcome to Future Learning Design Shorts. Join me, Euan McIntosh, and him, Tim Logan, as we don our intellectual scuba gear, plunge into the educational abyss, and resurface with treasures from the minds of education's finest.

We're going to draw on over 200 hours of archives from the weekly 60-minute conversations I have with educational makers and shakers.

These shorts, for our time-poor friends, will distil and dissect all that wisdom for you before the last sip of your coffee break. So Tim, this one from Carl Honoré was epic. I think there's— we could do a half dozen shorts on Carl, but then it would kind of defeat the purpose because then it would basically be Carl's whole interview that you've done. This is one where I would definitely say go and listen to the whole piece, even if you don't think you've got the time, make the time, because it's all about time and how it gets in the way of so much of the good stuff that we're trying to do in schools. And, you know, we invest so much energy and effort in professional learning and building incredible spaces in our schools and all that, all that jazz. And then we kind of shoot ourselves in the feet because we don't give people time to slow down and do things. And I just thought it was phenomenal. I don't know what the highlight for you was in particular, but there was one notion in particular that caught my imagination, and it's this idea of attention theft. And it really resonated. I don't know, it came out quite late, I guess, in the actual interview you did. We'll talk about how you got there, but this whole idea that the economy around us is built on stealing our attention and to make us seek dopamine. And then there was this point he made where he said it's almost like when we're in curriculum development mode or when we're in school inspection mode or self-study accreditation mode, We are seeking dopamine by ticking boxes so we can move on to the next thing. And I am, you know, we're recording this in kind of April, it's that time of year where I think we've got a lot of people doing end of year reviews, school inspections and stuff. That just resonated with me 100%.

Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, I think I feel it everywhere. I mean, you look everywhere. I look at the way my children interact with social media and all of the conversations around that. And just, I mean, it's absolutely everywhere in the economy and just the way that we think about Yeah, where are we putting our attention and what things are coaxing us into particular ways of thinking and moving? And it's definitely a real challenge, I think, in schools. But I think that the kind of invitation to slow down is such an important one. But given all of those things, those pressures and challenges all around everywhere, it's really hard to do. So I think trying to, that's why I really appreciate Carl's work is trying to think about practical ways that we can actually do that.

I think it was really clear though in one point, which is it's nothing to do with not necessarily just to do with what teachers and schools do, that so much of this is also down to the other parent, the actual parents of kids. And I was thinking, I mean, I actually went and had a look at my own screen time. Weirdly, so this is school holiday time, but I've lost half my family to school holidays and I'm having to stay at home and babysit the eldest who's studying for her big exams. So our time is being stolen by exams. But the interesting thing is I've been working away, plodding away, and my screen time is actually down 23% on my mobile phone compared to the weeks where I should be working very diligently at my desk. I'm not entirely sure what that means. So because I've had this impression of having much more time on my hands, 'cause I've got 2 weeks without having to kind of look after quite so many people or things and housework and all the rest of it, I have somehow, I've filled it with, I think, purposeful work and I've maybe wasted less of it on my phone and I am a casual games addict. I love my social media. I love to keep track of what people are thinking about on LinkedIn, what have you, but I've actually done a lot less of that than I normally do. I've been out and had lunch with people. Whoa. Which I never do, but, and they've been much more fruitful discussions than anything I've done by email. But, you know, parents are really as guilty as their kids. Kids perhaps in the pickups on their phone. I mean, I'd encourage everyone to go in your screen time app and look at the number of pickups in your website activity or app activity. It is absolutely terrifying. So, you know, if we struggle to model it as reasonably smart folk, I guess, I just wonder, you know, what hope is there It also got me thinking about what did, before we had the phone in particular, I mean, we had laptops and computers, but before we had the phone in our hands, what did we do with all that time that we weren't picking up and spending 4 hours a day on our phones?

Exactly, it's a great question. I mean, it's so, I don't know if you've seen all of the discussions around Jonathan Haidt's new book, The Anxious Generation, that's everywhere at the moment. Lots of people are, you know, lots of conversation about this at the moment and it is, I mean, the phone challenge for younger people in particular, but I think you are absolutely right. It's everywhere. It's for, it's for all of us. And I think what you were saying there about the idea of getting into purposeful work. So how do we create spaces for that deeper purposeful work where you can get into those kinds of flow states that Carl talks about, right? It's, it's much more about losing yourself in meaningful activity that it may not be for a significant amount of time, but somehow it feels like a really significant amount of time because you've allowed yourself to go into the depth of something. And that's maybe where some of the creative stuff happens as well.

There's this kind of ongoing joke in the Notosh team that we get more work done when Euan goes on holiday. And it's not because I get out the way of everyone, but I think it's because when I go on holiday, actually, for the first 2 or 3 weeks have the most productive deep work of the whole year because I know I'm about to switch off. I know that I'm going to a place that just, it won't work. So there's all this good stuff that's been fomenting away for months and it's got to get out. So there's a little bit of a deadline, bit of a Pareto principle going on there as well maybe. But what struck me is that the phrase that Cal has used in his books and his TED Talks and all these things is slow education or slow learning. And he gave, you got out of him a beautiful kind of definition of what that is. And as he was going through every one of these elements, I was thinking, that's design thinking, that's expeditionary learning, that's what Gordonstoun, one of the top schools on the planet does and is world famous for. So it was this thing of calm reflection, That's what I do at the start of a holiday because I've not got a phone or a meeting or a Zoom call organized. So calm reflection, changing your mind and then changing it again. And of course, that's what we do on holiday all the time. We don't think twice about it. We can't kind of, well, we're going to go to the beach, but actually we're not going to stay by the pool. Being comfortable in that liminal space of knowing and not knowing, being comfortable that, you know, actually I'm probably wrong and then challenging the received wisdom. You get a confidence when you think you're wrong. That allows you to challenge assumptions. Of course, that's our day job. That's what design thinking is all about, assuming that you probably don't have the right answer yet and trying to help other people do that. The journey over the destination. The fact that, to be honest, I can't access all the information that I need and, and more that I didn't even know I needed. So what's more important is learning how to understand than just knowing all this stuff. And then the other thing, moving physically. And I made the point, I've been out for lunch, I've gone for walks this week, even in the atrocious Scottish weather that we've had to celebrate the dawning of spring. But I have been more out and about on this so-called holiday week than I normally am on a deadline, gotta get there, sit at the desk week. And I think there's so much in that definition of slow education. I hope we can share the definition as Carl says it so eloquently. But I was thinking how that luxury that I have of being able to work to my own pace on a kind of more on this week than others, the luxury I have of taking quite a long, what people would call a vacation, even though 3 weeks of it is actually good quality work, it's a luxury that I'm lucky to have. And it suddenly really cast my mind to some of those in lower socioeconomic groups who are in schools that we work with in inner city London, for example, where there's this mad race to get their qualifications by the age of 16 because there's this assumption that they're going to leave the school and they've got to leave with something. We can't let them leave. It would be a social derogation of our duty to let these students leave with no qualifications. So we are going to keep the pace up, we are going to pump them through courses that they are most likely to succeed in And so you end up with kids studying stuff that an adult thought was better for them because they've got more chance of succeeding in it, rather than doing the meaty, tough stuff like literature that takes a bit of time to get through and to think about, and there's a risk that you maybe miss the deadline. And I'm just thinking, what, what perverse kind of society is that where the people who would benefit most from going at their own pace are not allowed to because we are worried that they're not going to leave with what we think is valuable, the qualification, the letter, the number. And oh, and it's got to be done by this use-by date.

Exactly.

Because if you don't do it by the use-by date, then it's all, all bets are off. And how can you do slow learning in an environment like that?

And I mean, I think that is exactly what Carl is doing so well as, you know, I mean, advocating for shifts in all sorts of places, not just in education, but in parenting, in food, in the way that, you know, we sit together and have meals in all sorts of spaces. Exactly that kind of perverse— like we're obsessed with the rapid goal-directed, got to get this done. It doesn't matter who's told us to. It's just like this productivity efficiency mindset.

Yeah.

And it's, and it's everywhere. And I think you bring up the kind of socioeconomic— I think it's just, it's everywhere in kind of particularly Western capitalist societies. But I don't know if you've seen the book Never Enough by Jennifer Berenice Wallace. 'When achievement culture becomes toxic,' and it's exactly, again, it's exactly about that.

You definitely see it in non-Western cultures. So we've got a couple of projects in South Korea at the moment looking at the learning environment, looking at how kids learn, how teachers are nurturing children and helping them learn most effectively. And our biggest enemy is the after-school activities, the Kumon classes that go on till 11 at night in some cases, you know, the after-school study classes that go on endlessly. So Carl mentioned this idea of, you know, schools being the great cathedral of childhood. I thought, wow, that's good, just a beautiful phrase. Yeah, I was thinking how, you know, that many of the elite schools that we are lucky enough to visit are far from being great cathedrals of childhood. They are pushing kids against a deadline, a timetable, They're reluctant to play with the timetable. I had an elite school where we were exploring the idea of super classes. It's where you get 2, 3 classes together with, with all the adults that would normally be teaching them individually working together in concert. And I saw this in New Brunswick for the first time in bilingual education, and it's just phenomenal because kids are able to go at their own pace, they help each other out far more, there's a lot more metacognition going on. Because there has to be. You've got a teacher supporting the weaker ones who need that extra support. You've got another one pushing the kids that need pushed out of their comfort zone into their zone of proximal development. And you've normally got a lead teacher. You know, if I was an elementary school teacher, I wouldn't enjoy teaching numbers, uh, number work and maths. But if I had a colleague who was great at it, I would quite happily hand the bat on to them. They're going to explain it better, be better. So you've got all this going on. That feels like a great cathedral of childhood. But if we were doing that, the school said to me, yeah, but if we do that, we've made the promise to parents that class sizes don't rise above 18. And so the idea of a kid coming home saying, yeah, I'm in a class with 60 kids is anathema. So you've also got this constant, I mean, they've given up before they even try because it involves educating parents on the best ways of learning and teaching, of easing off the pedal in terms of pace in order to open up more possibility. And then the other challenge in that environment is if you've got a more traditional schooling going on after hours with your Kumon classes or after-school activities or tutoring, then is there a place for the school to act as the balancing act? Normally we'd say the balancing act occurs at home, but if home is unable culturally, geographically, socioeconomically to support the yin to the yang, then maybe the school has to actually change and meet halfway. And so that's something we're thinking about as well. This, this podcast absolutely pushed me towards that. And I, I would just end by saying I think there's probably some cynicism about the idea of changing timetables to longer periods of time. You know, the 3-hour math lesson seems hard for math teachers sometimes to get their head around. But I love these, uh, comparison to Lionel Messi you know, the rock stars of football, of sports, that they have— maybe they don't have slow in the pace of their week because they have matches they have to show up to, they have timetables that they have to operate to. And I thought there was actually a parallel with championships and exams and, you know, timetable of training with the timetable of school. But they have slow as a state of mind, he said. I thought that was brilliant, that they never seem rushed even if they've got 4 players on them. They always seem to be able to slow down the world around them. And you know, he said, "Slow is sometimes perceived as a dirty word, but these guys show it's not." And my bias, I'm a musician, I love music, and musicians are the same. When you see a young flautist, good, excellent flautist, but not quite there yet, you'll see them moving physically around a lot as they play to get the dynamics in. And then you see the same flautist a decade on super pro virtuoso and they barely move, but what they're playing has even more energy than the 10 years ago when they were physically moving all over the place. Benjamin Zander talks about that in his TED Talk about one-buttick playing, you know, where the kid who's starting to play piano is maybe, you know, physically moving a lot to get the notes all in, but eventually they slow it down and they see music as one phrase rather than 100 notes on the page. And I think that there's a couple of extra little videos and talks if people want to go down that rabbit hole of how to think slow and have slow as a state of mind. But it's a beautiful podcast, Tim Logan, beautiful interview, amazing ideas. We're going to share just a tiny, tiny teeny little bit because we don't have time, ironically, to share any more in this, but people can always go and dive into the full hour and go deep.

I think it's very true that we've stumbled into a unique moment in the history of childhood where children's lives are now controlled, have been hijacked by adults in a way we've never seen before, hijacked by our fears and fantasies and anxieties and agendas. I mean, a lot of kids now come out of the womb and they just hit the ground running, right? So it'll be Baby Einstein DVDs, baby sign language classes, baby goes pro sports clinics, Mandarin lessons in the Moses basket, and then endless extracurriculars to give them schedules that would give a CEO heartburn. And I think for a lot of parents, parenting has become a cross between a competitive sport and product development, which is exactly what we're talking about here, that just this kind of cult of optimization has been imported into parenting. And so we regard our children as projects to be managed rather than people to be nurtured. And I think that's just a category failing, right? It's just getting it completely wrong because children are not algorithms, right? They're not machines that need to be honed and maintained. They're human beings. And I guess that's why within the slow revolution in general, one of the main strands focuses on children. So you've got slow education, slow parenting, slow families, whatever rubric you want to hand on it, because people are realizing that this is no way to raise a human child, right? That children need, they need unstructured time, they need the freedom and the space to explore the world on their own terms, to play freely without adults jumping in and telling them how to play better and play faster. They need to get bored, right? You know, we're all so terrified of boredom nowadays. Boredom is the supreme sin of the 21st century. It's like, you know, we're surrounded by this smorgasbord of diversion and distraction. How can you be bored, right? And so throughout history, when a child came to a parent and said, I'm bored, that was the child's problem. Your mom would say, well, go outside or find a friend, or they would use the eternal expression, use your imagination, right? Now what happens when a child gets bored? Parent freaks out and thinks, oh no, my kid's bored. I'm failing as a parent. Where's the iPad? Or maybe we need another extracurricular in this. But no, what you actually need to do in that moment is back off, slow down, and let the boredom happen. Because it's precisely in those moments of not knowing what's coming next, of restlessness, of moments without tests, targets, and timetables, right? Moments of boredom that children learn how to think, how to create, how to invent their own fun, how to enjoy the moment, how to use their imagination, how to get along with their peers. How to look into themselves and work out who they are rather than what everyone else wants them to be. So what we are in dire need of at the moment, and I see more and more of it actually, to be honest, in the educational space and also in parenting, is a 180-degree spin around so that we're, we're giving children that, that space. I mean, Virginia Woolf had the one wonderful expression. She talked about the great cathedral space of childhood. And I think that's that sense of capaciousness of endless distant horizons of freedom of maneuver as a child, just to go out and invent and find and explore and interrogate your own play and your own relationship to the world. That, I mean, that's really what the science is telling us very clearly is what kids need. It's not to be sitting down looking at flashcards and going to Kumon tutoring after they've already spent 8 hours in the classroom. It's— they're going to, they're going to be much more agile, well-adjusted emotionally, able to learn, happier if they have that space and time to slow down. I'm using slow down in the broadest sense of the word there, but slow down and get bored from time to time.

Thanks for joining us, and you can listen to the rest of the episode linked in the description.

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