This might be our chance to revolutionise how we teach our children

Their best case is to remind people of how deeply unsatisfactory the previous “normal” was. What, we should “get back” to overwork at bullshit jobs, to a scarily warming planet, to widening rates of inequality, to rising stress and depression levels, to digital and retail addiction … ?

Yes, the discontinuities of Covid open up spaces for musing about a gentler, more supportive, more just arrangement of our lives. Not merely emergency sticking plasters, but lasting remedies for our societal imbalances. Yet humans need continuity, too. Political progressives can sometimes be far too hopeful that shocks, disruptions and disasters will turn the suffering citizens their way.

Our default, evolved setting tends towards a need to restore balance. The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio often talks about humans’ craving (and indeed that of every organism) for “homeostasis”. This is our deep drive to return ourselves to a healthy equilibrium, after life inflicts its inevitable injuries and unsettlements.

Yet we’re not pack animals; we’re itchy, imaginative humans. Any new continuities after Covid will be constructed and designed among ourselves. We crave balance, but then we also need to create and flourish. So what “new normal” will we make?

I’ve been thinking about all this in the context of schools and Covid. And specifically the announcement the other day from Nicola Sturgeon and John Swinney about the “blended learning” plans for the Scottish schools restart in August.

Zoom out to a biological level, and, of course, learning itself is one of the unique ways that humans maintain homeostasis. Education is the way we skill ourselves in order to cope with the complexity and unpredictability of our fellow creatures.

Damasio actually prefers the lesser-known term “homeodynamic”. Humans don’t just retreat to the safety barriers to deal with threats, they always leave themselves some extra zones – and energy – to explore things, to be curious. Teachers and teaching, learning and learners, thrive in this zone.

In this light, I was struck the other day by how much the eviction of children from their schools was returning them to something like the primeval scenes of human education.

Like hunter-gatherer communities, they’re physically located in the hearth and home (with a back garden, if they’re lucky). They may be living with parents who combine doing their own work and teaching their children (maybe even teaching them about the work they’re doing). And they have more time to idle and play, to self-direct their activities, to let new interests emerge from boredom.

What’s missing from this primal scene, obviously, is the social rough and tumble – children playing, testing each other and learning together, in a shared public space.

I think it’s generally recognised in this country (due to the dogged advocacy of Sue Palmer and Upstart Scotland) that lots of sociable play is the foundation for a child’s capacity to learn, right through into adulthood.

So if you take an evolutionary perspective on education, you’d want to start “blending” our domestic teaching with in-school teaching, as soon as it’s pandemically safe to do so. Our kids are being starved of their life-nutrients. But these come from clattering about with their daft pals as well as from the careful attention of a professional teacher. It’s a double deprivation.

Education expresses, then, of one of our most desired continuities: that each generation equips its children to be capable of making a future for themselves among other subtle and needful humans. But let’s be honest. Even before this era of biospheric disruption (which has only just begun), we were in profound dispute about whether we were achieving this goal for education.

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THE current angst is whether enough “quality” education can be conducted to give credibility to qualification exams in 2021. Or whether exam marks can be credibly assessed by a combination of teachers and authorities this year. And this is because our benchmark of educational success is a qualification grade – tickets that help your child achieve a purchase in the labour market.

The labour market? Well now. Is this the labour market we know is driven by a consumerist model that is basically bust, essentially toxic (to our insides and to our environment)? Is it the same labour market that was already facing being ripped apart and compressed by Artificial Intelligence and other automated processes?

And is it the same labour market that now knows the difference between an “essential” and an “inessential” service, when faced with a total public health crisis? Somehow, I don’t think “readiness for the labour market” should be the sum total of our educational ambition. So what, exactly, is the form of education and learning which prepares our children

for such an accelerating and unpredictable future?

Are we to simply shut down our anxieties and barrel, with relief and gratitude, towards a “something-like-the-old-new-normal”? Or do we grant ourselves a zone of creativity here, so we can all together – pupils, teachers, parents and state – adapt and redesign the whole educational system? Are we going for homeostasis, as the neuroscientists might ask, or homeodynamics?

In the excellent new news-analysis site Source (from Common Weal), Ben Wray boldly suggests there’s one way we could collectively give ourselves the space to explore what an education system for runaway times should look like: to forget about exams in 2021 entirely.

If teachers were allowed to “concentrate on maximising the educational experience of their students”, then “something good could come from this”, Ben writes: “Imagine a year of project-based learning, where problem-solving, multi-disciplinary thinking, pupils developing social skills requiring empathy and compromise, was the aim of being at school, rather than additional extras to the rote learning of exam preparation.

“Skills that actually prepare you for life”, concludes Ben, “to be an actively engaged citizen capable of critical thought – those are the ones pupils need to learn.”

Pause. Some of us thought this was the original point of Curriculum For Excellence (CfE) – maybe lost in the last few years’ stramashes about PISA scores and attainment gaps.

I have before me two current ScotGov documents about CfE’s “Recovery Phase” and “Refreshed Narrative”. These are replete with phrases about “developing children’s future skills that will help equip them for the uncertainties of the future … to be democratic citizens and active shapers of that world”.

As the crisis shake and shudder us, you might well wonder: was this educational vision ever more important and relevant? But maybe this is an opportunity to look at CfE’s original ambitions, under teaching conditions that are not those of the proverbial aeroplane. You know, the one that’s being built, at the same time as it’s flying through the air.

I’m not too hopeful: it seems that only nature thumping at our doors, or on our chests, makes us listen – and maybe all too briefly – to the need for serious system change.

On April 25, Sturgeon was eloquent about the need for it: “When things come apart – when the kaleidoscope of our lives is shaken – there is an opportunity to see them put back together differently, and see a new way of doing things.”

Maybe our education system could be that new pattern, that coronashift. As long as the wee viewhole in the tube stays open.