A SCHEME TO HELP TEENAGERS TO UNDERSTAND THEIR WORLD. SOMETHING THAT SCHOOL SHOULD DO.

07.1 SCHEME: TEENAGE THINKING introduction

07.2 Plan of the 30 categories for teenage thinking project

word document including 3 cones of History.

alternative list of themes

 

"TEENAGE THINKING" Do teenagers protect themselves from school!?

The concept of inter-disciplinary study can be just fine sounding phrase making: a pious hope rather than a program for thoroughly "joined up" education.

•  Summary

School subjects have a tendency to create distinct territories, each with their separating border controls. I presume that the concept of inter-discipliniarity arose from an awareness that many stimulating intellectual connections were being lost in such separation.

School and its subjects should help teenagers to get a handle on the ordinary world they live in, and so help them to intellectual independence. Too often they see school and its studies as having little connection to their daily perception of the world. What we mean by joined up thinking is that which leaves the student at the end of his schooling, practiced at seeing and making connections.

Interdiscipliniarity is much more than a few teachers "cooperating". Some common intellectual coordinates have to be agreed upon. The scheme "Teenage Thinking" is not a presumptuously finished thing. It's just a rough draft of 30 categories that are rich in interconnections, each accompanied by 11/2 pages of nested ideas that teachers and pupils can improve upon. It connects 1. man's millennial DNA inheritance. 2. All forms of culture. 3. What Freud called "Civilisation and its discontents".

HOW TO HELP TEENAGERS TO THINK DEEPER AND QUICKER

Preliminary; What is the "self"

Adolescence. .A period in which despite hesitations, a person develops a sense of "self" in relation to others, to his/her own time and possibly to other times.

It is often said that adolescence is a time for young people to discover "themselves ", to discover their "self" . It seems more useful to put the matter differently. Adolescents are in the process of understanding the world and other people and are developing still further the skills in the manipulation of their environment that started already as an infant. The self is the sum of these skills, memories and preferences . This is a different explanation or emphasis to that which we could call the existential description which sees self as a sort of true core that "needs to be discovered" . According to this idea, we all have to "discover" our self: almost as if to uncover, recover it. Often we use 2 words: our "true self"!

I think this leads to a confusing introspection , as we look for the needle "self" in the hay stack! This view can then encourage a mistaken view of adolescence and its needs. The " self" of adolescence is in fact, closely involved with its surroundings: those shifting sands that are made up of parents, peers pressure, commercial pressures, school, emotional AND intellectual needs and deficiencies. Seen from this point of view we could almost say that the self is OUT THERE! That's why adolescents can become so disorientated and "read", or interpret images out there as a ME: something that they incorporate with all the other "me"s of the self . In modern speak; they are "identifying with": almost one could say that they are being invaded by "selves": potential versions of themselves. This is what advertising works on; a kind of ventriloquism of selves.

"Identifying with" is one of those common expressions that we accept simply because so common, but if we question them, suddenly they seem weird. I think that the "self", that we think is so intimately "me", is in fact the sum of the traffic of outer and inner world. The phrase "identify with" indicates a going out where the "self" borrows another "self". A recognition that, "Yes, that's a "me" thing; something I want to make part of my internal geography: I see myself in that way".

The adolescent is in the middle of radical body changes. This change over to adulthood can sometimes be accompanied by strong body manifestations where either the self becomes identical with the body/image or the "self" sets itself against the body in a form of estrangement (as in self harm and anorexia).

"UNDERSTANDING AND TEENAGE THINKING"

I want to describe a "problem" that I have only gradually become aware of and which, seeming to be so vast a problem, the only adequate solution I can suggest may also seem too vast.

The single word "problem" is maybe too neat and the problem is really a congery of interdependent problems - in fact, a complexity.

Teachers slowly build up their style of teaching, but sometimes an illumination occurs which makes us see all our accumulated past experience in a new light.

Two years ago I read a letter written by a mother to an Italian newspaper and that was such an "illumination". The mother wrote; "Help, my son is an imbecile". She went on to complain that her son lived in a limbo without any conceptual framework with which to understand or even feel interest in his wider cultural, national or historical situation. He and his peers lived in a becalmed present, using a barely adequate slang language. This dire description of the mother made an impression on me, and certainly caused some stir in the correspondence columns.

In a letter of similar import, a teacher in Rome called Lodoli wrote to say that a kind of annihilation of the mind was occurring amongst his pupils. Many of them were not even capable of describing the simple chronology of say, what they had done the previous afternoon.

In 2003, as part of an experimental project I taught over 1000 Italian pupils in schools for 12-20 hours each. It was in fact the best way to offer teachers a training course. From what I saw, I can say that I understand what Lodoli or the mother were referring to.

In teaching English I have often verified this by getting students who had done very poorly at description or narrative in English, to try in Italian, only to get similarly poor results. My own son at school in England found great difficulty in handling the stuff of literature or History. Yet in his subsequent career in business he has shown himself to be extremely competent.

We could call this adolescent inability, a matter of limited capability in "abstraction". That is to say, there is no familiarity with a handling abstract concepts; no practice in the gymnastics of moving the pieces around in the mind in the process of rational analysis. Analysis is difficult for them: mysteriously difficult, considering their otherwise sound intelligence. So the problem is, why did the mother find with alarm and surprise, that her son had become "stupid" (cretino) ? What had happened, or rather, not happened?

At this point we start to stammer explanations such as, pop culture, peer group pressure to reject school, the way consumerism flatters them by ascribing to them buying power (thanks to indulgent parents) etc

Here is part of a letter to a newspaper from a student girl a propos of what she saw as unfair adult moaning about "youth".

"Often we hear adults complaining about our ignorance. Sometimes in schools we meet teachers who help us to find our way in a complicated world, but mostly school fails to give us the means to understand that world".

It seems presumptuous to offer solutions especially since I go as far as to say that my suggestion should be also relevant for children from 6 upwards.

What I suggest is that throughout school, there should be offered to students a sort of companion grid, a concept map, an intellectual envelope of concepts which would help all students and TEACHERS to make interdisciplinary connections of the sort that would make school subjects more relevant. At the moment too many students are being made stupid by school. That is to say, school is not empowering their understanding. Boredom hardly makes people intelligent.

"Unconnected". A few years ago, an interesting series of experiments and research, at Chelsea college and Exeter University , was carried out under the direction of Michael Sher. He used a "framework of cognition" laid down by Piaget, concentrating particularly on the period (roughly 11-16 years old) that comes after the development of "formal" thinking. According to Piaget, between 6 and 11 children learn "concrete operations". That is, they learn to describe things where there is only one variable to mentally arrange: as for example in a simple description or sequencing. From 11 - 16 a child moves to a cognitive stage which Piaget calls "hypothetical thinking". In this a child learns how to manipulate 3 or 4 variables. This is not linear but requires that the "variables" are moved about mentally. This form of cognition is essential for Maths or Science or any verbal analysis that interprets or "hypothesizes" judgment. The education professor, Michael Sher, who at the time was at Chelsea college wanted to test how many children had entered this later stage of hypothetical thinking between 11 and 16 as forecast by Piaget. He and his team looked at 14,000 school children and they found that, using the Piaget tests, by the age of 16, only half had "entered" in to this cognitive stage described by Piaget as normal. The implication for schooling in most subjects especially Sciences, was that children would be at huge disadvantage in such subjects. It became apparent that at around 11-12 there is a sort of "window" of opportunity to pass into "abstract thinking" and that if missed, pupils find increasing difficulty at school.

Sher also used the work of Ligotsky who found that 4/5 of children who do make the "jump" to hypothetical thinking, have done so within experience that is often outside of school. They do so by observing others and as it were, "catching the trick" of this hypothetical thinking.

Sher devised a 30 hour program (over a period of 2 years) to aid teachers with a teaching procedure that would recuperate 60% of those pupils who had "missed the boat".

Further interesting work that illuminates this "thinking" problem, has been the experiments in teaching "Philosophy" to primary school kids: even on a no-school day of Saturday morning, in one Glasgow school! In secondary schools there has been interest in "cross curricula", interdisciplinary teaching, which is supposed to increase awareness of interconnection.

"Interconnection". Interdisciplinarity' as antidote to the way school "subjects" often seem like stranded islands. At Exeter they devised what you could call a system of remedial thinking with its own special tasks and exercises.

In an attempt to offer a remedy for what one could call, shallow thinking, I have devised a "culture chart". In this I use 30 categories, which could be considered as collecting points for thinking about the world. These share with the "philosophy" projects, an aim to help pupils to think. I have chosen these 30 concepts as an initiating push which at the same time is not too cumbersome and unwieldy. Where the philosophy project is about me-in-the-world-thinking, I wanted to find a structure that started from certain givens of the modern world and which could be classes as "culture" categories, if culture is understood in the widest sense. I suppose you could say it is a more sociological, rather than philosophical approach.

In the English grammar book which I and my wife wrote for Italian secondary schools, I included some 45 pages of "culture ideas" - that is, pages of initiating material around 30 key concepts which might initiate discussion or research, or aid newspaper reading, around concepts which had been chosen for the rich cross connection that could be made between them. There happened to be 30 because the grammar had 30 units and each "Culture page" was written with focus on an aspect of grammar. However this merely arbitrary figure of 30 was also a usefully limited number of concepts. These concepts have to be above all manageable and offer multiple use. In deciding on these categories I saw culture as not local or national but as already "global" and historical. I also chose these "culture" categories, as it were, backwards. I had first collected many newspaper articles on what I felt were representative and significant themes and slowly defined them into sets by means of a set of indexing categories that I was continually modifying: - I certainly did not start from these 30 categories. They grew as it were, organically out of the material. You could say that the articles and material slowly sedimented into 30 categories. All of them had a high degree of connectivity and a large capacity to "host" sub categories - rather like Russian dolls. These 30 have no pretension to completeness. ("All human life in 30 categories"!) Our "30" you could say are in the manner of little Barry, an 8 year old who said so wisely, "I'm good at thinking, but I need someone to start me up"! Our categories are a starting kit, a set of weights for a weight training program for abstract argument and "hypothetical thinking" that runs above, both parallel and independently to the normal school "subjects". and yet which can also connect down to them. In themselves the "30" have high connection and cross reference. I chose weighty concepts rather than the often ephemeral topics of "culture" which I've heard talked of in conferences. For example, "the significance of hand gestures in different cultures" or "Christmas pudding and mince pies"!

One of the reasons for which the Italian mother found her son "cretino" was that he had no interest or understanding of the past or knowledge of the constituent pillars of the modern world. He was suffering from a sort of cultural Alzheimer's disease! To maximize this aspect of "only connect" and flexibility, I devised this view of history. You could call it "the 3 ice cream cone conception of history"!

SEE DIAGRAM 1. THE 3 EMPTY ICE CREAM CONES

Imagine 3 empty ice cream cones stacked one inside the other. Imagine that the inner cone represented our animal, evolutionary core -that which has been laid down during the millennia of evolutionary history, and in which we share 98.6% of our DNA with Chimpanzees. This is our evolutionary core. Our bottom line.

Now imagine the exterior cone as representing all that we can call culture in the most extended sense. All science, technologies, social institutions languages from spoken to Mathematics or music, and all the chronology of changes in human history.

Now imagine the cone between the inner and outer as representing in general terms that which we might include under the title that Freud gave to an essay: "Civilization and its discontents". That is to say that sense of oppression and compromise of our instinctive being under the constraints of complex social life.

These mutually influencing cones could be sliced horizontally at any moment of history to give us a view of the state of each generation and such a view we are used to hearing from anthropologists, sociologists, historians or poets. Literature passes on the voices of these moments of history. It conserves the changing faces of the "human".

link to diagrams in TEENAGE THINKING in word document

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SCHEME: TEENAGE THINKING introduction

07.2 Plan of the 30 categories for teenage thinking project

word document including 3 cones of History.

alternative list of themes