When I first met John Abbott 20 years ago he told me a story: as a young teacher at the prestigious Manchester Grammar School he had led several expeditions of boys to study agriculture in rural pre-revolutionary Iran.
After a week the village headman felt he knew John well enough to ask him a difficult question: ‘These young men,’ he said, ‘they are so tall, so strong, so beautiful. But what use are they? They cannot reap, they cannot ride a donkey, they cannot make a fire, they cannot even sew or sweep or cook like our girls.’
This stopped young Abbott in his tracks. The Iranian headman had a point! Teenagers must be stretched, they need diverse experiences to jolt them out of apathy and into learning mode. And so for the last 40 years Abbott has been trying, with terrific vigour, to change the way we teach.
He has drawn on anthropology, neuroscience and his own decades of experience to prove his point: that we have misunderstood the nature of adolescence.
Abbott’s methods have been extraordinarily successful. Politicians really should take note. Poor beleaguered Ed Balls, in desperate need of a workable education policy, should really buy a copy of Abbott’s book, co-authored with Heather MacTaggart. Overschooled and Undereducated, the title says it all. It’s just the lesson Balls needs (though not perhaps one he wants) as he launches the first of his Schools for the Future, the 180 new or refurbished schools the government has promised to deliver.
Abbott argues that both common sense and science — specifically, new insights into how the brain develops — should force us to overhaul our attitude to those scary teenage aliens slamming doors and grunting.
It used to be thought that the brain was fully developed by the age of 12. Not so, says Abbott. ‘Far from being fully finished, the teenage brain remains a teeming ball of possibilities, raw material which is wildly exuberant and waiting to be synaptically shaped.’
And listening to your iPod while hanging about the park swings won’t, says Abbott, promote the best synaptic shape. Nor will sitting in a classroom learning (or dozing) by rote. The adolescent brain sloughs off unused circuits and develops the most exercised ones like mad. So to give teenagers the best chance of becoming a happy, productive adults, all their circuits need regular workouts. They need to challenge, to be challenged, to experiment, to take risks and learn from experience. If they’re prevented from this, they become stuck in a permanent childhood of dependence, caution and clone-like acceptance.
Abbott’s other point is that teenagers aren’t set in their neural ways. Many of the synaptic connections they make in early childhood are ruptured between 11 and 20. So adolescents are ready to make different synaptic connections. Whatever their background, most teenagers can be inspired by the right sort of education. The potential for an enterprising, confident adult is there. But, Abbott argues, our education system and our society are keeping our children from becoming their best selves.
Of course top schools instinctively know this, without the evidence of brain scans. They believe in sport, community service, the Duke of Edinburgh award scheme, Outward Bound, trips, work experience, theatre and music productions — anything that requires teamwork and risk-taking. The Prince’s Trust does much the same for disadvantaged young people with astonishing results. Food teachers will tell you that the most difficult student can be trusted with a knife if he or she is engaged in creative cookery.
Abbott has another lesson drawn from the traditional habits of other cultures. Apprenticeship — learning alongside an experienced older person — is, says Abbott, such a long-standing practice that it is literally hard-wired within the brain of every teenager today. It is what their instincts tell them they should do. As is the idea that they should face difficult tests to win the approval of a mentor. Some African and aboriginal tribes still send their young men off to fend for themselves in the bush, or set them initiation rituals that test them and confirm their worth to the community. Many would argue that National Service did the same.
But even knowing all this, knowing that it’s natural for young people to learn through experience, we still expect teenagers to sit quietly in class and do what teacher tells them. And at home we’d like them to stay in their bedrooms and swot. What we are doing, Abbott fears, is stunting the development of the brain and producing overcautious, unimaginative, conservative clones: fine for the days of few bosses and armies of manual workers; fine for passing exams even, but no good for surviving in 21st-century life.
Let’s look around the world, says Abbott. When you walk down a Hong Kong or Shanghai back street in the evening, you see children working in the family shop. Your average British parent would probably categorise this as slavery or child abuse. But which children grow up responsible and independent, ready for today’s world? Ours (few of whom ever make a bed, wash a car or cook a meal) or theirs (knitted into family and community, ready to pull their weight)?
Abbott tells me about a school in Melbourne, Australia, where every child spends one whole term in the village of Clunes 70 miles from the city. Over 100 teenagers live in houses, eight students to a house. They must do their own shopping, budgeting, cooking and housekeeping, and organise their own learning around just two subjects they have chosen themselves. Their mentors and teachers are local people. The students play in the village sports teams, help with odd jobs, organise a crèche, join in community barn dances. They are trusted, and they rise to the challenge.
Of course they love it, their headteacher says. ‘Quite simply, we can see them grow up in that short ten-week period. They go in as children and come out as young people.’
Abbott wants the schools of the future to include the community, by which he means the sports club, the old age home, business and the arts. Teachers should come from all these places, he says, and quotes the philosopher John Macmurray, who was a significant influence on the young Tony Blair: ‘…communal life is the normal state for human beings. But human life is not organic: a shared existence is a matter of intention, not a fact. Community has to be created and sustained by conscious purpose, and the more successfully this is done, the more we fulfil our personal natures.’
Abbott would like schooling to happen all over the place, by which he means a lot less in the classroom. He sees the purpose of education as the gradual weaning of the young from dependency so that by the time they are 17, our children should be self-motivated learners, equipped with the confidence and judgment to be useful to society.
So it’s easy to see why John Abbott is nervous that Schools for the Future is not going to be the great reforming measure it is meant to be. He thinks the purpose of education and the best means of achieving it should have been properly debated, before rushing to build modern versions of the Victorian schoolhouse. If we spent that money on educating children outside the classroom as well as in it, on supporting community life, sponsoring apprenticeships and engaging parents, says Abbott, ‘we could start a movement that would change the world’. John Abbott is in his sixties. He has been passionately trying to make us see sense for 40 years. It is high time we listened.
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