Slow Education - A Conversation with Carl Honoré

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

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.

Hi, and welcome back to another episode of the Future Learning Design Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Logan, and the podcast is brought to you in partnership with Notosh. This week's conversation was with the amazing Carl Honoré, who is the best-selling author, broadcaster, and voice of the slow movement. His two mainstage TED Talks have racked up millions of views, and his TED course is entitled How to Slow Down. Carl's first book, In Praise of Slow, chronicles the global trend towards putting on the brakes in everything from work to food to parenting. He then went on to write Under Pressure, exploring how to raise and educate children in a fast world. Then The Slow Fix, thinking about how we tackle complex problems in every walk of life, from health and relationships to business and politics. Carl's latest book is entitled Bolder: Making the Most of Our Longer Lives, which explores aging and how we can do it better and feel better about doing it. He's also recently published his first children's book called It's the Journey, Not the Destination. Carl's work has been published in 35 languages, and he's appeared on TV and radio and bestseller lists in many countries around the world.

Hi, Karl. Hi, Tim Logan.

How are you?

Yeah, all's well.

Good. Yeah, good, good stuff. Well, thank you, Karl. It's firstly a pleasure to meet you. We kind of came together around a post I put out around the unbelievable pace of AI development that's happening right now. And it just felt like we needed to all take a little bit of a breath. And, and I posted your In Praise of Slow TED Talk, which I think now about 3.5 million people have seen. I would love maybe 350 million people to see it so that we can actually start redressing this unbelievable speed that we're seeing with AI, but with other things as well. And I think there's such an interesting connection with your work with the education space. So I just, you know, that's obviously primarily where we're at with the podcast and thinking about the future of learning and the way that schools and education systems might move, but connecting it with the ideas of slow, but then also your other work more recently, I'm really happy to be able to dig into some of that with you. So firstly, welcome.

Thank you. I'm looking forward to digging into these topics together.

Great stuff. So I thought we might start maybe slightly historically when one of the things that I was very interested to hear you talk about was the fact that measuring time was one of the initial catalysts for going faster in a way. So, and, and that really rung a bell with me in thinking about the, in education and how the way that we measure learning and the way that standardized tests and historical measurements and exams have been done. Have really dictated a lot of what happens in education. So it's the measurement seems to be this really important influential force happening there. So I thought perhaps, you know, there's a nice connection there with education. Perhaps we could start there thinking about why was it from a historical perspective that measuring time, you know, initiated this kind of speed up?

Well, time is a very slippery, mischievous beast. And there's, there's an old Italian proverb which says, Man measures time and time measures man. I think that gets at the phenomenon that occurs here when we begin measuring time, that as soon as we start measuring time, the tables flip and time starts measuring us. It starts calling the shots. You can go back as far as ancient Rome when they began installing sundials. You can find people moaning about how their days are now parceled up into chunks and the sundial is determining when they must move and have lunch, go off and see the boss or tend to the fields and so on. Now, that was obviously— the sundial was a pretty limited timekeeping instrument. But once we got into the medieval era when clocks began appearing in town squares across Europe, you began to find a similar phenomenon, much more intense, where people's days began to get diced up and people began to feel like they had to follow a schedule, right? Because that's what measuring time does, is it gives you a schedule. And what do schedules do? They give you the power to optimize, to accelerate, to speed up the process. And of course, that then just went on an upward curve. You hit the Industrial Revolution, and suddenly the clock was really calling the shots in everything. And now the modern world has ratcheted things up even more so that now we're— if you look at some of the more extreme people in the productivity guru sector, they'll tell you you should be parceling up your days into 5-minute chunks, right? And everything becomes squashed into a unit that's been dictated by the clock. So we've lost a lot of the control, I think, over our time because we got so good at measuring it. It's a weird paradox.

Yeah. And I mean, there's definitely a resonance there with schooling and master scheduling and the way that timetables dictate almost everything that can possibly happen. It's almost like it puts a real limit on what is possible because this larger structure is telling you that, well, the bell's gone, you need to move to, you know, even if you're getting really deep into some really interesting learning. Sorry, the bell's gone. That's it. You've got to move.

Yeah, I remember that very vividly from my own schooling that our lessons were 42 minutes, not 41, not 43, but 42. And by the time you hit 40 minutes, people were already aware that we were in a 2-minute horizon. And so things started to unravel, the dynamic shifted, the energy began to drain away. And as you say, you could have been in that 40th minute on the cusp of a breakthrough thought or a rich new connection that took you to a different place in your learning as a group or individually, but the clock had already told you to hang up your spurs. It was time to move on to the next 42-minute chunk. And that just seems so obviously inimical to learning, to life, right, in general, but particularly to learning, I think.

Yeah, absolutely. And where do you feel that kind of urge to do that comes from? Because clearly we're quite keen on doing that. You know, you've mentioned optimizing as the efficiency, that's the industrial paradigm. Is it, but deeper than that, maybe is it there a control and a fear? I've heard you say fear gripping our throats, right? So there's even more base level urges.

Yeah, I think there's clearly the imperative that comes from the productivity obsession that we embed in our culture in the Industrial Revolution. This idea that you've got to speed things up to make them better, right? So faster is always better. But I think there is a deeper metaphysical angle here, which I think for a lot of people, controlling time, speeding up, cramming more and more into less and less time, filling our moments with distraction and stimulation and so on, is a form of denial. It's a way of running away from deeper, bigger, more tangled questions such as, who am I? You know, what is my purpose here? Am I learning the right things for me? Am I living the right life for me? Those are frightening questions to be dealing with. They are questions that I think are essential for a life well lived. You know, Socrates talked about the importance of the examined life, but examining the life is certainly— your life is, though essential, I think, can be a little bit disconcerting at first. So it's easier just to fill up your day, fill up your schedule, fill up your head with more, to sweat the small stuff.

Yeah.

So you don't have to confront the big stuff, I think. So there's a bigger angle going on there as well.

Absolutely.

Beyond just optimization.

Yeah, it makes me think of a kind of the end of a therapy session, right? As you say, you might be just about to make a breakthrough. Sorry, and that's it. Time's up.

Yeah. Well, it's a weird— I think it's the weird paradox of deadlines.

Yeah.

The deadlines can be very helpful. And I think we all have that experience where suddenly at the very last moment, everything comes together, partly I think helped by the urgency and the feeling of an end approaching that a deadline brings. But then the problem is that we have created a deadline culture so that we are in deadline mode constantly. And really the secret to any kind of rich learning rich experience or just being alive is knowing when to move in and out of deadline mode, right? To use it as a tool, but not to be enslaved by it. And I think we've become culturally and collectively enslaved by the notion of the clock and the deadline.

For sure. And I think there's the manufacturing of scarcity as well, which is an interesting one because, you know, in terms of what we value in the way that we've carved these things up, you know, in your kind of Benjamin Franklin quote about time is money, right? You know, we've by manufacturing scarcity and cutting these things into tiny, smaller and smaller chunks, it feels like they're more precious somehow. And actually, I mean, that's just a fictional and very economistic way of defining value. Yeah.

It's like economistic, fictional, and deeply neurotic and unhealthy, right?

Exactly.

I mean, it's just so wrong in so many ways, right? I mean, just, it is woven into our vernacular. We talk about saving time. You cannot save time, right? You can only just make the most of the time you have in front of you. You can't save an hour so that you have an hour more tomorrow. Time is not money in that sense, right? Time is just flowing along with us, or we're flowing along in it. And it's about what we do with the time we have right here, right now. It's not this idea of tucking away a few more hours for next week or 2 more days for next year. That's not how time works. And yet that seems to be the way the culture tilts us.

Yeah. And I mean, it segues actually to a question I wanted to ask you about slow. And obviously you've been a huge advocate and voice for the slow movement globally that started with the slow food movement. But this, I know, I think it's at the beginning of your TED Talk where you talk about everybody wants to slow down and they want to do it really fast. So there's a sense that it's a really valuable thing. But also I was thinking about rather than this idea, as you said, saving time and it's like, it's a thing that we can have and save and even speed and slowness. I wanted to ask you, is that, do you feel like that's a way of being rather than just a thing that we, another thing that we can have? And I, I wondered if that's a helpful framing or what did, what were your reflections on that?

It is very much a helpful framing. I, I think in a late capitalism consum, you know, consumerist culture, we just want to turn everything into a, an experience that can be taken off the shelf or a product that can be downloaded from Amazon, right?

Yeah.

And so I think there's, there's always a danger that slow falls into that same category. And there's an awful lot of slowwashing around people, whether it's a company putting up an advertising photo of a woman doing a serene bit of yoga on a beach while selling a product that has nothing to do with slowing down. There are many examples. They are legion. And coming back to the question, yes, with a capital Y. To me, slow is really a mindset. It's a way of being in the world. I mean, musicians have a lovely expression. They talk about the tempo giusto, the correct tempo for each, the natural tempo for each piece of music. And I think that kind of gets at what slow with a capital S is about. It's about doing things at the right speed, finding the right tempo, cadence, rhythm for each moment. So sometimes fast, sometimes you slow things down. Slow in a broader sense, I guess, is, you know, quality before quantity. It's about being present in the moment. It's about doing one thing at a time. If you remember when we used to do that, right? Ultimately, really slow is about doing everything not as fast as possible, but as well as possible. Yeah, really is an immensely simple idea. But also at the same time, a hugely powerful one because it can revolutionize everything you do. And that's why if you look around the world now, you'll find in every field of human endeavor a slow movement, whether it's slow sex, slow travel, slow leadership, slow fashion, slow education, slow medicine, you know, people bringing the lens of slow and saying, how can I do this thing better and enjoy it more by slowing down to the right speed, by doing it with that slow spirit?

Yeah.

And that's why the slow, I mean, it's delicious irony that the slow movement has grown very quickly and more so recently, I think at the beginning you were talking about AI and all that stuff. And I think the truth here is that the faster the world gets, the more we need slow. Yeah.

Yeah. But I love that, that it's not about tempo and time only. It's actually something much more qualitative about presence and being responsive And the idea that you might go quite fast because that's the right thing for that moment to bring more quality and responsiveness to that experience. And I think because slow in itself as purely a time aspect has quite negative connotations when you contrast it with the pace of change and exponential change and all these things that we talk about.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, slow in our culture is a 4-letter word. It's a dirty word. It's a byword for lazy, stupid, boring, unproductive, unmodern. Yeah. You know, if you slow down, you're roadkill. And in some cases that's true. So that's why it's so important to widen the lens and to say that slow is much broader than just whether you're going at 10 kilometers an hour or 15 kilometers an hour. I mean, that's part of the conversation. It's one of the variables in the equation, but it's not by any means the whole story. And there's another thing to bear in mind here as well, which is that if you think of slow as a state of mind, then you can combine it with being fast. So if you think of the greatest athletes or the greatest sportsman, say football, right? At the moment, the greatest footballers, you think of Lionel Messi, whether— what is the one thing that sets them apart from all other players? It's that they're never rushed. They always seem to have enough time, even though they're moving at superhuman speed. They always have a kind of stillness or an internal serenity, a calm that they radiate even in the fastest moments of the battle. So that kind of, I think, is another metaphor for slow, is this idea that what you're bringing to the fight is a calmness, right? An ability to connect the dots, see the big picture, understand when to move, when to stop, when to pause, when to put your foot on the ball, look around, and when to sprint through that gap between the defenders and put the ball in the corner of the net.

It's so true. Yeah, it's so true. I've not thought of that, but it's very tightly intertwined with mastery there as well, because Lionel Messi, as an example, has developed such an enormous mastery over his art that somehow provides an opportunity for more calm. The people who are perhaps less masterful are more concerned, or I don't know, there's not that same sense of flow or presence or calmness, as you said. And that's really interesting.

And I think that's— I love the word that you drop in there, mastery, because I think, I mean, mastery is all about slowness. It's about an investment of time. You don't download mastery yesterday or tomorrow. The whole point of mastery, building and honing and burnishing your craft is time. It's an investment of time and awareness and learning and unlearning and failing and then failing a little better and moving forward and so on. And, you know, in our quick-fix culture, we want even to be masters in the blink of an eye, which is the worst kind of self-delusion, right? Because it's just never going to happen.

So true. And I, yeah, I'd love to come back to that on slow education cuz I think that's a hugely, uh, interesting area. But before that we do that, perhaps just thinking maybe more chronologically in the lifespan, you know, thinking about young children and your book Under Pressure was a really interesting take on the way that parenting gets pulled into this, this space. Uh, and education as well, but, but that idea of raising young children and obviously that's, as educators, that's a huge part of what we do is looking at, you know, how do we support and nurture the development of young children into reflective and mature adults. That idea of parenting has really been pulled into this cult of speed as well.

Well, 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, 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 also 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? 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 giving children that space. I mean, Virginia Woolf had the 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. 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.

Yeah. It's like my mother-in-law uses the phrase that children should have, they should have time to pick their nose. And it's like, like it's just obviously, you know, disgusting habit and not recommended, but, but at that point that they're just, they have time and space that where then they haven't got all these other inputs and all these other things happening. I love that cathedral. I'd not heard that before, that idea. And it feels very strongly that it's, it should be our role as adults to protect that time. And we're, categorically failing, I would say, to do that.

Yeah, we are. I think that we approach— well, I use the phrase project management or product development for modern parenting. I think that's very much the case. I think what happens now is a child is born and we look at the kid and we think, okay, 21 years from now, I want this kid to be that thing there, right? So input X is going to get me output Y. And so we invest every spare euro, pound, dollar, every ounce of energy, every minute we can possibly muster to drag the child from the womb to that place we think it needs to be 21 years henceforth. And that's just not human life. That's not true. There are a million ways to grow up and we have no idea where the child is going to end. The way to go about it is to flip that model on its head and say, rather than knowing what the destination is and pulling you kicking and screaming there, let me take your hand and together let's discover who you are. Let's turn it into a journey of discovery rather than an industrial process of, of creating, you know, just sort of industrial creation because it's basically product development, that approach. And I think this is where we're going wrong. Is with our approach to kids.

And I'd love to come back to that point when we talk about The Slow Fix because I think, you know, so that's another one of your books, but I think that's so much of what's happening is that it's the quick fix and the quick fix to everything. But before we go into those other topics, I'd love to just spend a bit of time on the idea of the attention economy because I think that for me is one of the biggest challenges that we have as parents. I've got 3 of my own children, but thinking about how do I create and protect that space for them where the commodification of the dopamine rush and the, you know, the eyeballs on the screens is such a force in people's lives that I don't know what, if you have any thoughts or advice there for parents, because it's a phenomenally difficult tidal wave to, you know, stand up against.

I think it is probably the hardest challenge that we face, not just as parents, but as a society now is rolling back this juggernaut of attention theft because the whole, the whole culture, the whole tech world, the whole economy is built now on stealing little bits of our attention every, every corner. And that just undermines— well, I mean, we're talking about children here. It undermines child development. It undermines education and learning because when you've— when you're marinated in stress, distraction, overstimulation, you're constantly taught and tempted to be seeking out the next dopamine squat, you're just not going to learn, right? I mean, that creates a culture of box ticking, which is what we've got now in so many, so many parts of the education world is just everybody rushing and just ticking boxes to get on to the next thing. And real learning, deep learning takes time, but it also takes attention. Those are the two things that we need, the two pillars of a life well lived, but also education worthy of the name are time and attention. So you ask things that we can do. I mean, I think there are simple things we can do at schools. Children should not be wandering around with mobile phones in schools, I think. Certainly in the early years, I think we should be looking at ways to think more meaningfully and sensitively about when we use tech in the classroom, like when we turn to a screen and when we don't.

Yeah.

Certainly in the home, where we have more autonomy over how screens are used and how our children interact with them. It's time for parents to take the unpopularity hit and just say, no, that's it. You're turning that off. We're going to go for a walk, or you're going to go outside and mess around in the garden, or you're going to do a puzzle, or you can do something with your hands, right, that doesn't involve a screen. Uh, you can do that as a, a family and say there are certain hours or certain half days when we just have no screens on in the household. We don't necessarily have to force anyone to do anything. We may build in a family ritual that we do at that time, or we just leave the time open to let people work out what they'll do on their own. But, you know, there's no sort of one-size-fits-all universal recipe for how to stem this tide, but there are many, many things that we can all do, I think.

Yeah. And I think a lot of it comes back to centering back in on what do we actually want? What do we actually think is fundamentally important? And as you say, taking the hard choice because the easy choice is to leave them with TikTok or the iPad or whatever, especially when parents are so busy, right? And teachers are so busy. There is a sense of, well, that's the easy babysitting option, but the hard choice is actually to say no. But I also, I wonder, there's a tension there for me as a parent and thinking about, they are also going out into the world full of tech and full of the attention economy manifested everywhere. And so there is also a sense that And I've talked about this with my wife, but you know, how do we prepare them for that? Because I think taking the screens away entirely, there is a thought in my mind where, and then they're suddenly gonna enter this world as young adults where they actually just can't self-manage around these things. So there's some modeling of self-managing, stopping and starting and timeboxing and, you know, certain element of control around those things.

Yeah, I certainly don't advocate for most people a total removal of screens. No, I think you need to wean and introduce the screens gradually, as slowly as possible, I think, and also be having a conversation as a family around these, as young as the kids are, to talk about the world that we live in. Why does our family have a slightly different approach to screens than other families, maybe, and explain the why, the wherefores, and sort of put it in some kind of context. And I think you'd be surprised how acute and sensitive children can be to those explanations, right? They'll understand. And then you talk about how do we equip them from the world outside. Really, as parents, I think the main lever we have to pull for that equipping job is what we do in the home, right? So that's how you do it. You create that base, that strength, so they understand how to use the gadgets, they understand how to get the most out of them. You set the protocols, you set the approach, you set the the standards in the home, right? And also as parents, I think this is something that it's easy to fall into as well because we're all under pressure from work, is to be sending the wrong message with our own gadgets, right? So if you're constantly distracted by your phone or one eye is on a screen, you are never going to be able to transmit a different way of being with tech to the people, the little people around you. They'll just do what they see. So I always say that it starts by putting our own house in order first, right? That's how you have— and that's in some ways the hardest thing. Once you do that, then I think it weirdly becomes, or maybe not even weirdly, it just becomes easier to sell it to the kids in the home.

Yeah, no, I mean, I totally agree on that idea of actually having conversations around it because I think that's really important. And it's amazing how responsive children are to those kinds of more mature conversations around, well, we need to, we all need to learn how to manage this and you become somehow co-learners in that process of, you know, I'm not great with my phone. I, you know, there's more addiction there than I would like. I need to get better at this. Let's do that together. And I think there's as an important reflection and almost stepping back and metacognition that young people can develop as you engage them in those kinds of conversations. Yeah.

And any kind of learning is always richer if, if it's a two-way street, if there's some learning and teaching going on at the same time, right? That works so well in the classroom, but it works equally well at home. So if you say, you pull yourself down, we're on the same level here, we're, we're wrestling with the same demons. What ideas do you have? Right? And what, why don't we try this together? And just, You know, it's that idea that I was talking about earlier of let me take your hand and together discover our way of navigating this brave new world.

Yeah. Oh, that's great. So then I know, I mean, I'm bearing in mind you're not necessarily professionally an educator, so I'm always nervous to ask this question of non-educators that, you know, in both ways, you know, I think it's important that educators take on these ideas around slow and think about what does it mean for themselves. But I know that you've done a huge amount of thinking and talking to other educators. So I do want to ask you this question around what would you understand by a slow education? Because I, I know that people have taken on this idea and used it, which, like, for example, Mike Grenier in Eton College in the UK. So I'd love, yeah, love to just think more specifically about education and how that—

Yeah, slow education or slow learning. I mean, just to situate myself in this conversation, I, although I'm not a professional teacher myself, I, both my parents are and my brother is a teacher, and I've done, I have taught in the classroom. So it's, it's a profession that's close to my heart. I have done a lot of work on, and I do work with a lot of schools as well. So what would I talk— I would describe slow learning is about honoring the pace and rhythms of each child. It's about promoting calm reflection. It's about going down rabbit holes, taking wrong turns, playing with ideas, changing your mind, and then maybe changing it again. I think that a slow learner is going to be at ease in that rich liminal space between knowing and not knowing, getting away from that optimization, that binary world we live in where you either know something, you don't. Sometimes the greatest discoveries and unpacking of things happen in that place in between. It's all kind of fuzzy and unchartable and unmappable, the liminal space.

Yeah.

Slow learning is about challenging received wisdom. It's also just understanding there's no such thing as a stupid question. I guess slow education is also tapping it back into the broader slow movement. It's about prizing the journey over the destination, understanding that hard questions are better than easy answers. And it's also, I think, in this world of instant access to all information, slow education puts understanding ahead of remembering. It's again coming back to technology. It's about, you know, finding the right balance with screens, giving kids also enough time to rest and recharge and pick their noses, right? And yeah, those moments, it's also connected, you know, mens sana corpore sano, um, healthy mind, healthy body. It's having the time to keep children moving physically, right? So that they're cognitively, mentally, physically sharp and fit. I think it can also be about tapping into nature. I mean, nature is the original classroom, and, you know, forest schools— I'm not saying everybody needs to move the classroom permanently out to the nearest forest, but there is something about being outdoors, being in nature, that fires up that— those learning neurons and muscles. So I think that's part of the slow education conversation as well. And also it comes back down to how we measure achievement, finding more meaningful ways of measuring achievement that go beyond the sort of simple scores out of 10 or ABCD, right? There's so much more to learning, not reducing children's learning or their journey through the educational world to a number. Because really, I think if you tap all these things I'm talking about with slow education, that's learning. That anyone of any socioeconomic group or cultural background can become a free thinker and a lifelong learner, which is what the world is crying out for right now.

Absolutely. And there's so much in what you've just said, which really connects with all of the work I know going on across education in terms of innovations around nature-based learning or, you know, all different kind of initiatives to challenge and question and do something different than the current industrialized model. But there, but there is also this huge impetus within the main system, you know, broadly speaking, to compete somehow with the attention economy and these other things we've been talking about. So there's, you know, there is this idea that the more tech that we get, the more we can accelerate learning more, you know, there's these kind of words around speed. Do hover around education still accelerating learning. And even the, the original etymology of curriculum is about the race, right? Running the race, getting to the end, you know, and, and somehow this, I was, there was a student I was, I taught in Berlin when I was teaching there and, you know, he was very advanced and, you know, was gonna graduate early. So completing the IB diploma by the time he was only just turned 17 and then realized he couldn't actually go onto the thing he wanted to do cuz he wanted to go and study medicine. So it was really difficult. To then progress on to the next thing you wanted to do because the other systems weren't quite ready for that level of acceleration. But somehow that was seemed to be a great thing, you know, finishing early, getting through the content quicker. There's this real sense that we should be able to optimize learning with all the things we now know about learning, with learning sciences and, you know, all of the educational research. We should be able to optimize it and just make it faster. But what you're— what you were talking about there, particularly the nature point, I think is so interesting about how do we come back to the pace that life actually moves at, right? Which that may sound kind of up in the clouds and a bit abstract, but I think when you see nature, it moves as fast as it moves, right? You can't rush nature.

Yeah. Well, that's a great teaching of Mother Nature, right? That you, we try to rush nature and it always ends badly, doesn't it?

Exactly.

I mean, that's the whole point that nature always has time.

Yeah.

It never, it's never in a hurry. And, and those, it, I mean, I think particularly now as we're moving into this extraordinary moment with AI and so on, promising or even threatening to accelerate some of our processes in ways that would have been unimaginable 5 years ago. But this— there's a whole speed thing coming now that we've got to contend with, that we need, I think, to be tapping into even more vigorously those natural rhythms, right? So because that's— we've got to hold on to the natural. As we were talking there about the people in Berlin and getting ahead So quickly, I remember when I was at school back in the 1980s, it was held up as a great prize if you'd skipped a grade, right? Yeah. And yet you look back at the people who did that and was it necessarily a useful thing? I mean, you know, okay, you got ahead a little bit more academically, but maybe socially you weren't quite as adept and ran into problems later on. It's a bit like the gestation of a human baby, which normally takes 9 months. I mean, do we want really to be speeding that up to 7 months? Is that even doable? And if it were, would there be gains there to be had? I mean, it's just, there comes a point, I think we've reached it already. We've reached it before AI broke upon us recently the way it has, but we've reached the stage of diminishing returns when it comes to acceleration, right? And you particularly see that, I think, with education and learning, which is why there has been in the last, I'd say, 10 years, a big rethink around pace, rhythm, speed, timelines and stuff in the classroom and so on.

I agree. But I'd love to pick up on what you said there about, because Having read the writing of Mike Grenier about the way the work they're doing at Eton College around slow education, fascinating stuff. But then obviously that's the most elite institution in the UK. And it left me with a question around going back to what you were saying earlier about talking about the slow learner. I mean, that's a pejorative term, right? You, you know, nobody wants to be the slow learner because, you know, again, back, back to all the things we've just said. So it's, that idea that is there some aspect of, maybe it's fine at Eton and they can take their time because, you know, actually they, they've got some significant status already built into the system there. But actually for other people who are competing at lower socioeconomic levels of the ladder, let's say, that idea of slow education might be much more of a challenging thing to focus on.

Yeah, I think it's true that, that if you have money, prestige, social capital, of course, anything is easier, right? So that's just good. Implementing slow education is going to be easier in a private school that can decide how it runs its curriculum and how it delivers it in a way that a state school cannot because they haven't got the same wiggle room. They're getting bombarded by new initiatives all the time. There's just so much pressure, right? So, so of course it's easier in a private school, but that doesn't mean that it's impossible to do in state schools. Harder, but it's definitely already happening. So I see, you know, examples from around the world where individual schools with a forward-looking head teacher or principal will say, okay, the— within the narrow parameters that we are operating here, there are, there are levers to pull, there are things we can do. So, you know, I've been to schools, and these are all examples from state schools around the world, where, you know, one school I went to, they had introduced at the beginning of each lesson a 1-minute or 2-minute moment of silence, like at the beginning of a Shaker meeting, just so that when the kids came in, they just had a moment to just take down the fight or flight response, all the excitement from the hallway. And so just, and just kind of be in the space in a calmer, more serene way. And found that just a little thing like that, like a 1-2 minute investment of slowness made the lesson that came after it much more coherent, much more calm, much better, richer, right? So that's something that any class or any teacher can do. Another thing I've seen work in, and I alluded to this earlier, in state schools is getting older pupils or even pupils within the same classroom to teach each other, right? You sort of slow things down because one of the best ways to learn something is to teach it to someone else, right?

100%.

Rather than having the kind of what looks like the efficient, optimized, fast approach, which is the teacher one way downloading the information to the pupils, you take more time, get pupils teaching themselves. But that investment of time, that slowing down at the beginning will be more efficient further on because the learning will stick. It will be more nuanced. It will be more complex. It'll be better learning, right? So it's the old kind of slow fix, fast fix, right? The quick fix always looks really useful and efficient now, but later on when it blows up in your face, yeah, it doesn't seem quite so cheery. So those are, you know, or, or, you know, there's a lot of state schools that have been rethinking the obsession with homework, right? Sort of taking down the homework load or changing the nature of homework so it's less about box ticking and more about applying what you've learned in the classroom in the home with your family, right? So there are things I think that any state school can do if it has the right imagination and approach.

Yeah. Yeah. No, I do agree. And I just briefly, I'd love to come onto the slow fix thing, but the idea, I, I saw a quote from Carlo Petrini about the, above all, the, the slow movement was a movement for cultural dignity. And I found that really interesting as well. Just in, and if you think about more excluded groups, marginalized groups, you know, of different ethnicities in society as well, there's a sense there that I think there's a really interesting idea that again, not necessarily about time, but just that idea of quality and kind of reflective engagement and responsiveness to where we are, who we're with, the space we're in. And I found that idea of cultural dignity really powerful.

I think it is. I think that that's one of the things that we sacrifice on the altar of speed, busyness, and distraction is our dignity, our basic human dignity. And if you look across the culture now, Who is in the most undignified positions? Well, it's people further down the ladder, right? So if you go to an Amazon fulfillment center, I think often, don't they, people are having their toilet breaks timed, right? Or delivery drivers sitting, waiting to take your pizza to your apartment or your home, being timed down to the last second, right? Those are jobs that have very, very little dignity in many ways, whereas people higher up the chain, they make you wait for the meeting, you know, The person who's got this sort of prestige and the social capital, and I guess along with that, the dignity, doesn't wait on the phone for you. You wait on the phone and then they come on, right? And I think that this, whenever I talk about slowing down, I always feel like the key to it is people regaining their, what I call temporal autonomy, right? So control over your own time, which not only allows you to do things better and enjoy them more, but also gives you back your dignity, right? You know, you're not rushing around on someone else's clock.

Yeah.

You're not dashing about like a headless chicken. You have the dignity of Messi, you know, in the middle of the football park, this kind of avatar of calm mastery.

Yeah. I think also though, in the, in that phrase, cultural is the cultural dignity is the cultural part. Because I think if we, as we all get funneled into this kind of global capitalist speed cult, actually there's a loss of the local and the, and e, you know, even back to the nature we were talking about, but that kind of local cultural nuance and responsiveness is so important and so rich. And now I just, to reflect there, I think there's an important aspect of that cultural—

Well, that's, that's of course what, that's what globalization does. It hand in, it's, that's the handmaiden of speed, right? It just rubs away all the wrinkles and the weird little knobbly edges so that everything is smooth, everything is the same, so everything can be sold, marketed, and shipped around the world more quickly, right?

Yeah.

And that's what's happened to culture as well. So I mean, this is one of the great lies that's been told to us, I think, in the last 30 years, is that globalization was going to bring this endless buffet of choice. But in fact, it seems to have done the opposite, right? You, you know, I live in London. I'll go to, you know, Rome or Toronto or something, and everybody's wearing the same clothes, right? And listening to the same music and exactly eating the same version of fusion food. You know, we seem to have lost that kind of local cultural, yeah, dignity, I suppose, in a way, those differences, the differences bestow dignity, I think. And that's a big part of slow movement in general is, is, is reclaiming the local.

Absolutely. Yeah. No, and I just, there's a personal interest there for me in relation to education about how important the local context in which you are educating is. So I think that comes hand in hand with that kind of the slow way of being with a sense of place and where we are rather than exporting a uniform solution that can be universally applied. I think that's a really important aspect.

That's the temptation because that's the speedaholic approach, right? Is what's the thing off the shelf that's the fastest thing? Education, perfect example. One of the countries that's very often held up as an avatar of slow education is Finland, of course, right? So with, you know, all the things that I'm sure your listeners all know, but, and yet the very idea that you could take the Finnish model and import it 100% wholesale to the UK or Argentina or Taiwan is, is utterly preposterous, right? I mean, it's Finnish model because it's been Finland, right? That's the whole point. There are some principles that we can all learn from the Finns, but the idea that we are quickly going to import exactly the same thing is just, that's, we're on a hiding to nowhere, right?

Precisely. And that's the perfect segue really into the idea that we are looking for that quick fix. So even if we, whatever we think about all the slow ways of being we've been talking about, we still want however we're trying to change, the quick fix to get there because we don't want the change when we've decided what's a good idea to take ages to get there. But I think that's what is really powerful about what you've laid out in the book, The Slow Fix, is there is so much richness and important aspects in the slow fix that if you don't take time to do those things, the quick fix is just not gonna hold anyway, right? Or it will have so many unintended consequences that it's—

The thing about the quick fix is that it's really essentially designed, well, A, to be fast, and B, because of that, to treat the symptoms of the problem. It never gets down to the core, to the heart of the matter. It's really just putting Band-Aid on a wound that really needs deep surgery, right? Which is never going to end felicitously. I mean, there's a— I'm just reminded of the Silicon Valley idea, which I think is also infected. It's part of the speed culture. It's infected so much of the way we approach things is this idea of frictionlessness, right? Everything must be frictionless, right? Every transaction, whether the classroom, the bedroom, the boardroom, must be frictionless. And I think that is just so gruesome and so misconceived because it's actually when we need friction. It's— friction produces heat, it produces light.

Yeah.

And it's in those moments I talked earlier about the liminal space, that place in the middle where you're not quite sure what's coming out of it, but you can feel that something's taking shape. If you try to accelerate that, you kill it, you annihilate it, right? You need those little friction points. You need those little moments to stop, to change, to move, just to pause, to contemplate, and then you move forward and so on. So yeah.

And isn't that the most phenomenal irony and actually just complete misunderstanding is that you can't move forward without friction.

Yeah, exactly.

You actually cannot move forward without friction.

Without it. Yeah. Yeah.

That's so true.

And another delicious irony, of course, is that just recently, Many of the— Elon Musk among them— many of the sort of, you know, merchants of speed from Silicon Valley signed an open letter saying, actually, we need to slow down and have a really complex, time-consuming conversation here about AI, where it goes, right? So even the deities of speed in Silicon Valley are now waking up to the folly of frictionlessness. They want a bit of friction now. They're calling for some friction in the system.

So here we are. But I just, I'd love to, on the slow fix idea, I've just come back from a retreat with the Kinevan Company, which is a, they work in complex adaptive systems. And I think there's such a clear connection there with some of your ideas about the slow fix, because I mean, just to take some of your ideas from the slow fix, you know, joining the dots to build holistic solutions. Seeking ideas from everywhere, building up expertise and remaining skeptical of the experts, thinking alone and together, you know, getting catalysts at the right place at the right time, following hunches, the idea of just what's the next right thing. And that's one of the big phrases that Dave Snowden uses. What's the next right thing? 'Cause you've gotta, you cannot backwards engineer the whole solution for this thing that we want to to do. So that, that idea of just taking time and then figuring out, oh, we've made a mistake there, we need to adapt and pivot. And I think there's so much connection there and resonance between that and these working with complex systems, which fundamentally most of the things we're dealing with now are complex adaptive systems. Yeah.

I mean, we live in a world of complexity now, don't we? And complexity and speed just don't mix, right? They, that's going to end in tears. You need for all the reasons, you know, the slow fix, and you've just enumerated some of the recipe of the slow fix. There are a great many of the ingredients. Yeah, we have to slow down to make sense. It's only really by slowing down are we going to be able to understand this complex change that's going on around us, and also not just understand it, but to fashion it and maybe even steer it in a way that's going to be good for all of us rather than just going along for the ride because we haven't taken the time to inject a little friction, inject a little pause, inject a little slowness into the equation.

Absolutely. And then just being willfully blind to the things that have been created by our quick fix that actually are potentially even worse than the thing we were originally trying to fix. And we just kind of ignore those because they weren't on the spreadsheet. You know, it's like KPIs. Well, this is what we're focusing on. Externalize everything else, environmental damage, or, you know, all these things we know about.

It's so true. And the trap we fall into is not following on. We get our fix together very quickly and then that's it. We don't see how it's playing out. We don't see all those unintended consequences and then respond. We've already moved on to the next problem that we think we're going to solve with another quick fix.

Exactly.

Until that first quick fix just goes south. And then we've got to go back and spend more time and money and resources than we would ever have had to spend if we'd actually slowed down from the beginning, invested them then and got a solution that really worked and kept an eye on it and allowed, you know, evolved with it and ducked and dived as, as it needed to change, you know, rather than just thinking I'm going to take this off the shelf, throw it into the world and then move on to something else. I mean, that's, that didn't, wouldn't have worked 50 years ago especially well. It is really, really doesn't work in 2023. I mean, it's just too much complexity now for that kind of a fast-forward approach.

100%. Amazing. So in the interest of time, not wanting to feel rushed, but I would love to ask you about your current work because I think, you know, I'm conscious everything we've spoken about has been earlier on in your career, but I think there's such important ideas there and, and I don't see your current work thinking about aging as particularly disconnected from all of that work. It seems somehow, you know, we started with the young children and we're, you know, we're ending the conversation with aging with dignity. So I think there's real throughlines there, but I just wanted to give you a chance to spend a bit of time on that current work, because I think that's perhaps there's a learning aspect there. I was thinking, you know, about, you've mentioned lifelong learning earlier, but I wonder, you know, where does learning fit into aging, having people make the most of their longer lives, which is your current book.

Yeah. Well, I guess all the work I've done hitherto and still do on slow I see it as being my way of taking down the cult of speed. What I'm doing with my new book, Boulder, and all the stuff around that is taking on the cult of youth, right? The idea that somehow younger is just better and that aging is a curse or a punishment or disease or a form of failure, right? So I can see why we've created a cult of youth that, you know, youth has its attractions. And also in a world that worships speed, physically, at least, we tend to get slower as we get older. So that's something that we, you know, shrink away from and so on. So there are all kinds of reasons why we have created this aversion to the very idea of growing older. But what I'm arguing is that there are, as you age, yeah, some things fall away, but other, many things actually stay the same and, and many get better. And one of the things that stands out as a through line here, I think, is learning. That when you talk about what are the secrets to leading a healthy, longer life. One of them is novelty, right? It's exposing yourself to new things and learning new stuff that keeps you physically, cognitively sharp and fit, whatever age you are. And of course, there's one of the great myths, one of the great ageist myths of the moment is that older people can't learn things, right? You know the old saying, you can't teach an old dog new tricks, right? You know, it's not even true of dogs though, right? And it's certainly not true of human beings. People can go on learning new stuff all the way through our lives to the very end. And doing so is actually a really smart investment in how you age and how you move through the world and how you live fully. So yeah, there's so much to be tapped into there. And then just finally bringing it all full circle a little bit. One of the things we've also lost along the way is mixing the generations.

Like we've—

our modern culture is very much age siloed. So you're in your age cohort. Those are the people you deal with. But there's so much richness and connection and learning to be done when we mix up the generations. And so I'm a big advocate of also in schools, right? You know, getting people of different ages, different age groups, because that's where you see the age silo most acutely is in schools. You start off in a grade and everybody is within one year of you, right? And that carries on off in some ways through life. But if you can break down those silos and get people mixing up the, you know, we know that from a lot of the research that you know, multi-generational teams are more productive, they're better at solving problems and more creative. And also you can share the knowledge and understanding across generations. And in fact, mixing up the generations is a very good way of taking down the cult of youth, right? Because when you get to know people who are older than you, that's how you undermine all of those ageist myths, right? I mean, the best way to take down ageist stereotypes is to get to know the people being stereotyped because you realize that ultimately those stereotypes stereotypes are nonsense. So there's so much to be gained collectively, individually by pulling down the age silos and getting people mixing up, which I think schools can be a great spearhead in that, right? But also bringing in people, you know, older people, adults to, you know, from different generations to talk about their experience of the world and so on and exposing older people to children who, you know, in both directions.

No, it's true. And we've, I've been working, doing some work with the International Baccalaureate on exactly that, bringing different generations together to think about collective inquiry. So how do we, you know, ask the big questions together? Because I think there's an interesting tension as much as we do certainly have a cult of youth, which is driven by more of the kind of the marketing and the corporate machine a little bit more. There's an interesting thing that we've learned talking to the young people is that they feel excluded from a lot of the spaces where they can actually influence decisions that affect them directly. And obviously you see Greta Thunberg and, you know, all of the, the people who have become voices of Gen Z. And, and I think there's that intergenerational piece is so interesting and important because it, it does both because, you know, we do still have, as people live longer, they stay in positions of power longer. And so, you know, you look at Joe Biden and other leaders who are still at an age that they wouldn't have stayed in that position you know, 50 years ago, they'd potentially not be with us anymore. And I think there's an interesting piece there that, that young people are somehow for a longer period of time excluded from some of those positions of, of discussion and power.

Yeah, that's absolutely true. I mean, ageism affects all of us, young and old. I mean, there are, there are ageist stereotypes about young people as well. So there's, yeah, absolutely. So a big part of rethinking our approach to aging is making sure that nobody at any age is defined and limited by the number on their birth certificate, right? So whether you're 21 or 81, that shouldn't be the defining characteristic of you, right? And, and so once you do, once you rejig the culture in that way, then I think those spaces open up. And there you— we've got Greta Thunberg, but then you'd have more Greta Thunbergs, right? You have more people that age who could step up and share their ideas and maybe even take a leadership role in some of these movements for social change or whatever it is, right?

Absolutely. It's defined by their age. They don't know enough to give a perspective or influence decisions. And actually that's nonsense. When you start speaking to some of these young people, they have phenomenal insight. They absolutely do. Perhaps even, even more so than, you know, some of the older people who are in those positions of power. So, but I agree. I think, you know, that's an interesting take on it that it, yeah, it's really important that it affects everybody of every age, that ageism—

No, absolutely. And I think I love the idea that you're talking to as a former IB student myself, to hear that they're embracing this idea of getting all sorts of different ages inside the room together, because that's where the music and the magic will happen. Just getting people of different generations and ages and experience inside the same room talking, that's how we're going to make the world a better place.

Fantastic. Well, yeah, that's a good place to close. But just before we do, I know you've got your TED course on how to slow down, which people can see. And I also heard you'd written a children's book. Has that been published?

I did. Yes, I have.

Yeah.

It's called, um, It's the Journey, Not the Destination. So it's about slow travel. Yeah. Yeah. My first book, it was a thing that came up during the pandemic, which is pretty lovely.

Fantastic. Yeah. Good. Well, I'm sure I'll point people towards those things in the show notes. Um, but if there's anything else in terms of things that are coming up, feel very free.

Well, the simplest, the easiest place to get me is carlhonore, my name, carlhonore.info. And there you'll find just everything from books, videos, audio, you know, everything, podcasts, you name it.

Fantastic. Well, thank you, Karl. I know we've got a little bit over time. I hope I haven't kept you from the next time box.

I was building a big liminal space there.

We love a liminal space. Absolutely. But no, thank you. It's been a lovely conversation. Thank you so much for taking the time.

I've enjoyed it. Thank you very much, Tim. Been a pleasure.

Amazing. Thanks, Karl. We hope you've enjoyed this episode. Please feel free to continue the dialogues with our guests, with us on our blog or on social media, or within your own networks.