Finally Free To Learn At Full Capacity

I recently took a long walk. As I walked, my mind, as one's mind does, wandered. I assume that traffic continued whizzing past me on the roadway alongside which I walked, but because my mind was elsewhere I can't say for certain. I can only assume so because there had been traffic the last time I checked in with the present moment and there was traffic the next time I became conscious in the present. But the truth is that I was, while my mind wandered, somewhere else.

Consciousness is an incredible thing. Even as my body was moving, step-over-step, along a sidewalk, my mind was busy elsewhere: reliving a moment from my childhood; anticipating a conversation I expected to have with my doctor later in the day; regretting an embarrassing comment I made the night before; fearing the implications of a news story I read earlier that morning. Indeed, most of the time I was walking my conscious mind was everywhere other than that sidewalk along a busy road.

Of course, part of me, the unconscious part, was at least vaguely aware of what was going on around me. When I came to a crosswalk, I briefly returned from my time travels to attend to the present as I located the crosswalk signal, checked both ways for cars, and calculated the proper moment to continue. But even before I was on the other side of the street, my mind was, once more, elsewhere.

As author and researcher in psychology Julian Jaynes writes: 

"Consciousness is a much smaller part of our mental life than we are conscious of, because we cannot be conscious of what we are not conscious of . . . It is like asking a flashlight in a dark room to search around for something that does not have any light shining upon it. The flashlight, since there is light in whatever direction it turns, would have to conclude that the light is everywhere . . . Right at this moment, you are not conscious of how you are sitting, of where your hands are placed, or how fast you are reading, though even as I mentioned these items, you were. And as you read, you are not conscious of the letters or the words or even of the syntax of the sentences and punctuation, but only of their meaning. As you listen to an address, phonemes disappear into words and words into sentences and sentences disappear into what they are trying to say, into meaning. To be conscious of the elements of speech is to destroy the intention of the speech."

The project of modern schooling is one of directing children where to shine the flashlight of their consciousness and in the process we destroy meaning. We provide their minds with subject matter. In preschool that might be "the letter of the day" or the life cycle of a butterfly. We then proceed to tell them what they are to think of this thing. Then, finally, we grade them on how well they are later able to recall, on command, the salient points.

In no other aspect of life, other than school, do we demand this of human consciousness. For instance, I am currently writing this blog post. A moment before writing that last sentence I realized that the words on the screen had no meaning. They had become simply the place where my eyes were resting as my mind, always traveling, was back in the classroom looking around for an example to make my point. I then became aware that I was elsewhere and redirected my gaze out the window where they rested on the view. My mind was then transported briefly to the future where I saw, based on how the sky looked, that it was going to be a sunny day. When I returned my eyes to the screen to write the above sentence that begins with "For instance . . ." the words once again had meaning. And by the time I got around to writing this current sentence, my mind has been around the world, even inside your mind, predicting how you, the reader might react to this or that choice of words. The reality is that I spent most of my writing time, not writing at all, not even really thinking about the words. In fact, most of these words I've written here came to me when I was emphatically not trying to think of them.

When Jaynes writes "To be conscious of the elements of speech is to destroy the intention of the speech" he is putting his finger on one of the great myths about learning and thinking. I've found that one of the worst ways to come up with an idea or solution is to "think" about it like we expect children to do in school. The French call this phenomenon "genius in the stairwell." We've all had the experience of having our best thoughts flash upon us while, say, in the shower. We've all walked out of an interview only to curse ourselves over all the things we should have said. Our best thinking is rarely the product of conscious thought.

Thinking, real thinking, deep thinking, is rarely a conscious process. This is why play is so much more powerful than direct instruction. Play frees our minds to travel, to bounce about between past and present, here and there, now and then, as our bodies engage the present. Direct instruction attempts to chain our magnificent minds, our time traveling minds, our creative, critical, connected minds, to a single point in time. It limits the beam of our flashlight to this meager crumb of reality while the traffic whizzes past us; while the bird soars overhead; while the candy goes untasted. And perhaps worst of all, we punish and drug children when their minds do what minds are designed to do, which is to play.

The reason that a child at play, to quote Lev Vygotsky, is "a head taller than themself" is because when we play our minds, brains, and bodies are finally free to think and learn at full capacity.

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"Few people are better qualified to support people working in the field of early childhood education than Teacher Tom. This is a book you will want to keep close to your soul." ~Daniel Hodgins, author of Boys: Changing the Classroom, Not the Child, and Get Over It! Relearning Guidance Practices.

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