Editorial
For more on the subject see: Nightmare or Opportunity in UK Education? by the same author in Year 10; Issue 6; December 2008.
Aux Armes! Human Intelligence is at Stake
Grethe Hooper Hansen, UK
Former director of SEAl, now writing, researching and currently involved in Open Eye, a campaign by independent teachers against early-years policy in UK education.
E-mail: ghooperhansen@onetel.com
Menu
Introduction
Background
Argument
Outcome
You may have read my article about the Open Eye campaign and its relation to teaching methodology in the December issue of HLT. Our campaign is fighting government policy in early-years education (EYFS), the thin end of a wedge that is transforming intelligence into the machine mode. I referred to the work of Lozanov, who leads in the opposite direction of working with a multi-dimensional concept of the world, responding to its complexity. Things have moved a lot since December: the negative side effects of EYFS are causing waves of protest, reports are revealing decline in intelligence, and research from New Zealand has shown that the early forcing of children does not improve later cognitive skills (the claim behind EYFS). But our government continues to select information to prove what it wants to prove, lean on teachers to support whatever they impose, and select all information through the narrow filter of materialist science. In this way, the EU managed to discover that computer games are good for children and teach them essential life skills, with a gold star for Nintendo! This is no longer just about UK; robotic education is on the march in many countries.
This article will say more about the campaign, the issues and in particular, the work of Dr. Lozanov, who has been persistently misunderstood, misrepresented and misinterpreted (and I include myself in that). This began with USSR secrecy, but is really due to sincere and innocent materialist thinking – particularly well illustrated by the catalogue of disasters of New Labour education.
For those who missed the earlier article, The Early Years Foundation Scheme is the new government programme for 4-5 yr. olds. Practitioners, by law, now have to monitor daily every child’s progress against 69 ‘early learning goals’, 117 assessment points and over 500 developmental milestones, a vast compartmental task that effectively diverts them from that of empathic response to toddlers. Compulsory goals include ICT skills, phonic knowledge, writing sentences with punctuation awareness and some mathematical knowledge. The system is monitored by Ofsted (Office for Standards in Education, the policing body that replaced our former schools inspectorate) and failure to comply bring heavy penalties. It has been forced onto all private fee-paying nurseries and schools as well as state, a breach of human rights.
In practice, nursery carers now carry clipboards and spend their day ticking boxes so that the results can be fed via computer into national statistics to track the future progress of each child, and the ‘slow’ ones can be put in remedial catch-up groups for reading and writing (at age 5 or 6!). Compare this with countries like Finland, which allow children to play until the developmental window for literacy opens, somewhere around age 7, at which point they can learn easily and swiftly.
At a neurological level, play is a vastly complex activity whereby the intricate faculties of the sub-cortex unfold and develop through the meeting of needs, emotional impulses and responsive reactions that drive children to do the things they do; the early years are the most intensive period of learning that humans undergo. As neuroscience reminds us, 95% of mental activity is unconscious. It has to be because everything happens simultaneously and all is constantly transforming in mutual adaptation; the conscious mind can only register an occasional ‘freeze-frame’. Because we cannot consciously track such complexity, it is not recognised by materialist science, and this is the problem.
There are countries that forbid the teaching of cognitive skills under the age of 7, but that too is a form of controlaholism. All children are different; the ideal is to remain flexible, meeting the child’s need as it arises and embedding everything in the dreamy, imaginative, ‘magical’ context in which young children live and thrive.
A fierce invader into that context is television. Staring at a screen, watching already processed images and listening to already processed sounds, with no possibility of interaction, forced into the mode of passive information reception, there is no call on the imagination, the child’s own creative faculty. However, at a deeper, unconscious level, the mind absorbs all the subtle implications of what it watches, and automatically adapts to them, reshaping itself. This is why the introduction of television to communities that did not previously have it, always leads, after a few years, to bullying, violence and crime 1. By the same principle, a major problem of computers is that, while intellect focuses on information skills, at a deeper level, the body-mind absorbs the computer’s own pattern of binary functioning, which will eventually flatten and impoverish intelligence. Children, whose minds are still unformed, are the most susceptible.
Open Eye does not oppose EYFS in principle, only its compulsory nature that leads to all the knock-on effects; our demand is to substitute ‘guidance’ for mandatory status. We are a small group of teachers, researchers and authors in education who, in their spare time and without external funds, have taken up the challenge to expose the dangers of EYFS. But in the process, we are unearthing a great store of skeletons in the cupboards of education. Do visit our website: www.savechildhood.org
What have we done and what have we achieved?
Launched in an open letter in the Times in December 2007, we opened an on-line Downing Street petition that when it closed in November 2008, had achieved more than 10,000 signatories. In February 2008, we ran a conference in London with international speakers and 200 delegates, and with the proceeds, commissioned a film that was launched in July. In March we launched an Early Day Motion in Parliament that attracted over 50 MP signatories and led to an investigatory sub-committee meeting in May, attended by our steering group. As a result, the DCSF announced changes to EYFS (which we found insufficient) and in July, launched an exemptions procedure, which has subsequently been exposed as designed to be well-nigh impossible to cope with. However, a few Steiner schools have managed to achieve exemption, the thin end of a long wedge. Throughout the year, we deluged the media with letters and seized opportunities to appear on programmes. The Times supported us with another Open Letter on EYFS signed by many well-known children’s authors. We also ran a professional seminar in London bringing together experts in the field. All the major newspapers have supported us, and we like to think that we have stirred the education professions into greater recognition of the issues and abuses, and encouraged them to take action. Teachers are now, of course, painfully compromised by professional evaluation in terms of what the government approves, and nurseries by the need for state support.
What have we learnt?
Protest is a wonderful incentive to dig out deeper truths, and responses to it point us in new directions. At first we argued the issues of developmental readiness, the hidden dangers of goals and outcomes, schoolification of early childhood, suppression of joy and imagination, knock-on effects throughout the system, children’s fear, anxiety and loss of self esteem. The newspapers were convinced, but not the legislators, fixed firmly in their materialist paradigm and propaganda issues.
Bureaucrats in positions of power think differently from most educators and child carers, and interpret the same words in a different light: “play” tends to mean “as we tell you to play” (so that I can flag the points I need to analyse statistically). Legislators think in terms of measurement: they have to produce quantifiable outcomes. They attract towards them those teachers who think the same way, and promote them to positions of power because of their ‘intelligence’. Those of the profession more likely to be pulled in the opposite direction of multi-dimensional thinking (which recognises the power of volition: play has to be self-initiated), know that both children and institution will suffer if they do not succeed within this system; what choice do they have?
What we are now seeing is the corruption of power as it drifts from mild propaganda into authoritarianism, making England (or that bit of the EU that still thinks of itself as England) strangely similar to the old Communist world. The EYFS classroom has quite rightly been described as ‘close to child torture’ and thousands of carers have resigned from a profession they loved. But all this happened by default, a total unawareness of the non-quantifiable, those things that cannot be measured, and are therefore left out of the equation: volition, skills of listening and relating, respect for the child’s own process.
Children are so sensitive: they soak up every influence, especially discrepancies such as actions that contradict words. As soon as the teacher enters the room, they feel her expectations and try to live up to them and conform with her agenda. If she wants literacy and numeracy, they strive to produce it and when they fail, beg for parental help: “Goodness,” says mother, “She really wants to read!” They learn to want literacy and numeracy because the message has gone home that this is how you succeed in life. In this way, as soon as curricula guidelines hit the teachers, they begin to be fulfilled .
Mainstream education has never really ‘worked’ (as we know from Shakespeare, Blake and Wordsworth) because it has always been fixed in the materialist paradigm and focused on the intellectual. It had no concept to understand the importance of all the subtle dimensions that were being ignored and denied. But in the past, teachers were free to follow their professional intuition, and most knew instinctively or from experience (right-brain learning) that children needed stories, poetry, art, music, games, the things that disappeared with the ‘audit culture’, to hold the rest in balance. The person who held the key to all of this was Steiner, an advanced quantum thinker, who has therefore always been an object of popular ridicule. This brings us to…
Lozanov
Lozanov was 18 when Communism took over Bulgaria. Rebellion quickly landed him in prison where he was tortured daily for refusing to give details of fellow rebels. But this trauma was to fuel a lifelong passion for psychotherapy; he took a medical degree, gained a doctorate in psychology and for 10 years held down 3 jobs simultaneously in order to glean the knowledge he needed. As a therapist, he was working to heal the brutalised victims of authoritarianism, while also using his growing understanding to pursue his personal ideal of releasing the “locked gods” of humanity from what he saw as a socio-hypnotically induced trance of victimhood. Hypnosis, the Soviet tool to use when all else failed, could always heal symptoms, but in a limited way: he found that all forms of control diminish human autonomy, energy and will.
With long experimentation, he gradually perfected his own solution, an infinitely subtle constellation of carefully prepared influences to inspire his patients to self-activation, set in the framework of a method of language learning saturated with suggestion, to be absorbed spontaneously rather than ‘delivered’ by the teacher. His patients were ‘unlocked’ so rapidly and decisively, with results so extraordinary in terms of symptom removal and language learning that even the government noticed. Soon Lozanov was head of an institute packed with psychological researchers and his experiments became the cynosure of world eyes. But because all this happened in a Communist state, he fell foul of the state and eventually found himself back in prison, all evidence of his work destroyed. It was not until the iron curtain fell that he was able to leave Bulgaria.
When he arrived in Europe, he found that his ideas had taken root in many versions, most within a materialist paradigm unfamiliar to him. He watched aghast as students lay on the floor with eyes closed: that was hypnosis, the exact thing he had worked so hard to avoid! Having worked in an insulated world of highly trained psychological professionals, Lozanov had always chosen his teachers and trained them himself. In Europe, his ideas were not understood, and as a man fiery temperament, he was sometimes driven to confrontation. I was an offender and still have the bruise. We in the West were heavily conditioned materialists living among electronic machines and doing our best to think as they do. That is the conditioning that Open Eye is now struggling with. On the one hand, we have quantum science, now a century old, pulling in the Lozanov direction, and on the other, the whole panoply of the Western world dragging us down into materialist thinking. We are shifting, but slowly.
Where do you stand?
- Do you like to set aims and goals at the beginning of a class?
- What would you expect to achieve by doing that?
- What do you believe would be the effect of that action on the learner’s mind?
I think I know what Lozanov would say about this, but I might be wrong. I do know that he would never do it because to set aims and goals is to control: it conditions the way the students think by prescribing the goal of that thinking. It also deceives, giving the impression of freedom where there is none. As well as giving these mixed messages, it ultimately lowers intelligence: when the destination is defined in advance, learners know that there is nothing to be gained by wider exploration, and the next time round, they automatically lower their sites. Lozanov’s aim is to preserve freedom at these subtle levels so as to encourage a full flight of mind. He also accepts that the place at which each student arrives is best for him or her. This runs against the grain of assessment and examination, which are means towards standardization and suppression of variety.
Even if you have your learners determine the goals collectively, writing their ideas on the board and agreeing the aims collectively, you are still narrowing the goalposts and discouraging the mercurial mind. To Lozanov, every person is different and each one will achieve something different.
The same applies to stating outcomes at the end of the session. To say what has been achieved by a group is to flatten each individual – and make many students feel they have failed. For Lozanov, the achievement is not the point: his focus is on process, not content. Content is no more than a means to activate mind.
The difference here is mechanistic thinking, or observance of only the physical level of reality (to which logic applies). ‘Quantum’ or multi-dimensional thinking recognizes that subtle levels of reality are more causal than gross, and that logic is context dependent.
Another illustration is the ambiguity of the word ‘holism’. What does it mean to you? Sitting in a circle, varying classwork to include physical, visual and aural-intensive activities, playing music and adding role-play and drama? But to focus on the activity itself, rather than on the effects and conditions it accomplishes, is to tunnel the mind down into the material dimension. Lozanov’s intention in using activities is to nudge the mind into working in a natural (non Cartesian) way of letting impressions pour in, which are processed unconsciously, and surface into awareness when they are ready.
To help teachers who could not grasp what he was doing, he created a procedure for asking questions indirectly so that learners respond in this natural way rather than using the mind in the top-down obedience mode of the materialist-focussed classroom. This involves a series of steps, hard to remember and follow until it becomes a habit, but it always works, and the result is much greater mental autonomy in the student.
An element of Lozanov’s work that many people find odd is the inclusion of classical art, added by Evalina Gateva. Art plays an important motivational role: it can send the mind soaring, and gradually mould an inspirational disposition to keep the mind at this level. By contrast, our unthinking inclusion of jokes and cartoons drags the mind down to the level of ‘normal life’, bringing with it all the ‘normal’ expectations of limitation. Students may enjoy learning how to gossip and backbite in another language, but when they do, at a subtle level, mental shutters close.
His work was called ‘quantum’ (although certainly not by him!) because working at these subtle levels causes effects, and leads to conditions, that are the polar opposite of Cartesian thinking. An example is that the harder you work, the more energized you become (nature’s principle of use it or lose it); tiredness, to Lozanov, is an indication that students are working in the wrong way. Another is that the less you concentrate, the more you can take in. The ‘quantum classroom’ depends on the careful orchestration of a great many subtle effects and avoidance of lapsing into the materialist.
In the early days of quantum science, the reversal of logical rules at the quantum level was quite baffling. For example, the absence of the law of contradiction: how on earth can A also be not-A? We find it easier to accept now because we take for granted such things as the causative effect of emotion in illness (accepted only after a long battle to establish psycho-neuro-immunology, PNI, in medicine). It is much easier now to accept that logic is context dependent. A psychotherapist will not see a destructive child in the same light as a policeman does: the therapist focuses on the pain behind the action; the policeman (materialistically) judges the physical act. In the case of an angry child, would you take the policeman’s view of causality or the psychotherapist’s?
As a last word, a frequent misconception of Lozanov is that he was just trying to pass off work as play, but that is a materialist observation. Of course work is not play! It is the feeling of playing (the subtle dimension) that allows the mind to switch out of the fear induced by classrooms, to suspend judgment and other intellectual activities, and just follow its own natural dynamic of learning from inside to out. Steiner, Montessori and Reggio Emilia incorporate a similar understanding. Nature learns and advances only through chaos, and its message now, through a general collapse in the face of rampant controlaholism, is that we are ready to advance – but in the opposite direction.
1 See Sigman, Aric, 2005, Remotely Controlled: How Television is Damaging our Lives, Vermilion. Dr Sigman has compiled 30 yrs of research to show precise effects of television on the mind: how it corrupts the dopamine mechanism, leading to attentional problems, ADHD and autism, and how the body absorbs trauma represented on the screen, as well as violent and sexual behaviours.
Please check the Methodology and Language for Primary Teachers course at Pilgrims website.
Please check the Methodology and Language for Kindergarten Teachers course at Pilgrims website.
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