Teach-Primary-Issue-20.1

The loss of wonder in learning isn’t just affecting enjoyment, but attainment, too. However, a change in outlook could bring it all back, says Kenny Primrose T here is a romantic ideal of education that I would like to keep alive: images of schools where young people encounter ideas, wrestle with meaning, and feel a sense of genuine wonder at what they are discovering. Increasingly though, this ideal feels naive and misplaced in an educational culture that is continually being optimised for efficiency and measurability. Of course, measuring is incredibly useful; we need to know how literate and numerate students are. But as metrics have become the currency of accountability in PISA scores, Ofsted inspections, league tables, and endless internal data dashboards, something subtler gets lost. Evidence becomes a proxy for trust. Teachers are treated as technicians, and schools are managed into mechanistic production lines. And perhaps that’s the danger. When measurement becomes the driving principle of education, the immeasurable aspects of learning begin to wither. What cannot be counted begins not to count. Quality or quantity? This narrowing of an educational vision shapes and distorts the attention of both pupils and teachers. The psychiatrist and philosopher Iain McGilchrist has argued that the kind of attention we pay to the world shapes what we see. In The Master and His Emissary , he describes how our two brain hemispheres offer profoundly different modes of attending. The left hemisphere fixes on detail, seeks control, and treats what it perceives as material to be used. The right hemisphere, by contrast, holds things in context. It sees relationships, ambiguity, and implicit meaning. McGilchrist argues that the left hemisphere mode of attention has come to govern and dominate society. It is manifest everywhere, and education has not been spared from this grasp for control. What is valued is what can be manipulated, counted, or displayed on a spreadsheet. The result is an education that may have become more efficient, but not necessarily wise. When schools operate purely in instrumental terms, we train students to ‘see every tree as potential wood’ as philosopher Hannah Arendt put it. In doing so, the ability to see and value what cannot be weighed and quantified is lost. What about wonder? We have come to value what the left hemisphere values: that which can be instrumentalised and controlled. This has entailed an approach to learning which is increasingly prescriptive and formulaic, and as such, aspects of learning that don’t lend themselves to quantification are overlooked. Among these, a sense of wonder in young people is one of the saddest casualties. The psychologist Dacher Keltner has done considerable research on the emotion of awe, finding it to be a human universal with a distinct set of benefits for individuals and groups ( tinyurl.com/ tp-DKawe ). According to Keltner, ‘Awe is the feeling of Isn’t it AMAZING? “What cannot be counted begins not to count” www.teachwire.net | 29 F EATURE S P EDAGOGY