Don't trap your learners in a small world!
The world's large, and kids need to learn this isn't a scary thing.
I’ve been reading an excellent book called Radical Uncertainty. While overtly a critique of economic models through the lens of decision making, I keep thinking about schools.
One metaphor they keep returning to is that of the small world / large world contrast. A small world is a tightly framed one where variables are contained or constrained in an attempt to create a predictable environment. In such worlds, logic reigns: there is one rational answer to situations if one is to act in their best interests, because it’s easy to see the outcome of a decision.
What we have in small worlds is akin to an ‘IF>THEN’ scenario: the world of algorithms.
But this is a nonsense isn’t it. The world we live in isn’t small, it’s large, full of a multitude of variables (some we know about, many we don’t). To think deferring to logic - a rational weighing up of variables before making a decision - is a good way to live is unreasonable. No one has the time or energy, let alone the cognitive capacity, to do so.
If school is a place where kids get prepared for the world, surely they must learn how to get on in a large world, a world where ‘IF>PERHAPS THIS, BUT WHO CAN BE CERTAIN’ is how things are. They’re got to learn that this isn’t a scary thing.
What does it take to navigate large worlds well? Emotional intelligence is a big part of it, because that’s where we listen to our gut, our instinct, our intuition.
“In a famous study, the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio reported on a patient whose brain damage rendered him effectively unable to experience emotion. The outcome was not that the subject was a hyper-rational denizen of a large world - he could function only in a small world. In everyday life he was unable to make any decisions at all. He would agonise for extended periods over matters of no real importance, such as the time of his next appointment. His problem was that there is a more of less unlimited amount of information potentially relevant to any decision. Trying to process all this information led to paralysis in his decision-making.”
Kids don’t learn how to get in-tune with their emotional intelligence if their school experience is consists day-after-day of clear best-decisions made in small worlds. This is why the messing about stage of learning is so important. It provides a context where many things are possible, none of them certain, and the best way to find out what will happen is by doing and finding out.
In other words, gaining a feeling for things through experience.