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Several millennia ago a brilliant man made a mistake. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big fan of mistakes: they are an integral part of learning, but this error was a humdinger. Beautifully expressed, it lodged deep into the bone of thought and no amount of thumping, excavating, or drilling could shift it. In time it migrated to the marrow of western thinking: to this day the hierarchical principles embedded in Aristotle’s Great Chain of Being flow through the tissues, organs and systems of multiple cultures and societies.

Aristotle was inarguably a genius;  let’s face it having Plato as your teacher is a pretty good start in life: a bit like having Shakespeare teach your Eng Lit class. However, Aristotle’s vision of the world introduced an attractive, yet fundamentally flawed, directionality. Vertical progress has appealed across the ages because hierarchy is embedded in nature: humans are by no means the only animals to function under stratified social systems, and linear progression satisfies an innate hunger for order in a chaotic world. Nevertheless, I wonder what our world would like now if the father of biology had envisioned a multi-directional network.

             I like to picture him leaning up against a tree, munching on honeyed bread, gazing up into an azure sky, his brain whirring with questions. On spying an ant scurrying through thin grass I imagine him hastily brushing breadcrumbs from his beard, tucking up his tunic, and crawling upon the earth, nose inches above the soil, following the ant’s zigzag path: the mushroomy smell of sweet rot and metal released by sun-warmed soil driving him to dig into the earth, with sticky fingers: nails cracked from past explorations, skin thickened by small scars.  I see him collecting leatherbacks, beetles, millipedes and earthworms, and putting them into a leather pouch to add to his collection of creatures to be examined in more detail back home. We can be sure he observed the digestive power of soil, and he will have observed the roots of trees entangled with wispy threads of mycelium spreading laterally through a grove of trees, and surmised they had a purpose. But he was not equipped to see the unseeable. The universe of microscopic life living beneath his feet, attached to the soles of his sandals, living in his gut, his ears, his nose, crawling on his skin, protecting him, defending him, attacking him, and on whom he was dependent, was out of sight in his mind’s eye.

Instead, he pictured angels.

Like so many of us surviving amid the unpredictable muddle of life, Aristotle disliked chaos and sought order in a disorderly world. According to him, the mortal earth was corrupt, ever-changing, and the heavenly bodies were perfect spheres, smooth and unchanging. Despite some notably brave exceptions, Aristotle’s vision remained unchallenged until one balmy Italian night in 1606, when a man turned a glass upon the night sky and saw mountains on the moon. Galileo was so excited he woke his little daughter Virginia, and standing sleepily by her father, in a garden scented by night flowering jasmine, a twelve-year-old girl was the second person on the planet to see the moon as “ like the face of the earth itself… uneven, rough, and crowded with depressions and bulges.”  This shattering and profound reality was the beginning of a costly journey for Galileo and his daughter, and for all those who adhered to knowledge energised by curiosity and rooted by the rational.

Sixty-eight years later, a less famous, and perhaps more momentous observation was made by a Dutch draper. What he saw was so shocking that his findings were doubted and dismissed for the next few hundred years. Sitting alone in his study, surrounded by scattered papers and the equipment he used to secretly hone blown-glass droplets into delicate lenses, Antoine van Leuwenhoek took up his wooden paddle in which was set a minute lens, and peering through the glass he saw unicellular life dancing in a drop of water. He was the first person to see the microscopic organisms from which all life emerged, and on which all life depends. He called them animalcules.

‘I suffer many contradictions and oft-times hear it said that I do but tell fairy tales about the little animals'.

Leuwenhoek spent many years studying the behaviour and varied habitats of these previously unimagined, yet astonishingly diverse life forms. He found them in plaque between teeth. “I then most always saw, with great wonder…very little living animalcules…the biggest sort very strong and swift in motion…like a pike through the water.” He found them in between toes, on cheese rinds, peppercorns, and wheat chaff; he found them in water collected from the sea and sky, from ponds, puddles, wells and drains. He boiled and evaporated liquids, he tested samples at different temperatures, all the while trying to avoid contamination, and he repeated his tests over time.

Astonishingly, two hundred years before Louis Pasteur,  Leuwenhoek observed bacterial reproduction and described the emergence of daughter cells in fine detail. He was a consummate scientist by any standards, yet he was relatively unschooled. Antoine was a practical soul, who took his familial and financial responsibilities seriously. He lost his biological father as a boy and his stepfather as a teenager, and on leaving grammar school, with no knowledge of the classics and without formal scientific training, he trained in the cloth trade. He[EW2]  set about his tasks diligently and proved to be a good businessman. Most likely his interest in magnification was driven by his thorough examination of thread counts in cloth. It was only after he had established a reliable living that he gave his immense curiosity full rein and began his exploration of the minute living world surrounding him. He was a tradesman who spoke only colloquial Dutch and we can surely relate to his touching insecurities on being judged by those in the rarefied world of academia.

‘I have oft-times been besought, by divers gentlemen, to set down on paper what I have beheld through my newly invented Microscopia: but I have generally declined; first, because I have no style, or pen, wherewith to express my thoughts properly; second, because I have not been brought up to languages or arts, but only to business; and in the third place, because I do not gladly suffer contradiction or censure from others.'

            It would a long time before the world embraced the importance of the invisible world revealed by van Leuwenhoek. It is still hard to conceptualise that we are dependent on the universe of microbes living in healthy soils, in animal guts, in sponges, on plants, in lakes, rivers and oceans, by hydrothermal vents deep beneath the oceans and on the outside of the International Space Station.

Curiosity and need have always driven innovation. We owe a deep debt of gratitude to the tenacious and creative problem solvers who have helped us to better understand the world. When I think of what men and women of the past have achieved, I am left breathless with wonder.  Every gift we take for granted today is directly linked to a human story. But let us not forget that in addition to celebrated geniuses, we owe our existence to our unnamed ancestors whose grit, skill, and ingenuity enabled them to survive, reproduce and raise fecund offspring under harsh conditions, confounded by the elements and pathogens and challenged by trying to understand that which lies beyond the reach of the senses. We are entwined with our ancestors, and their histories are threaded through our DNA linking us to the past, present and future.

There is no good, better, best. No vertical progression towards perfection. From our connection to a community of microbes that lived in the metal-rich sulphurous depths of the ocean four billion years ago, LUCA,  our Last Universal Common Ancestor[EW4] , genes have spread horizontally, weaving to and fro as populations have mixed, and divided, spreading north, south, east and west, widening, growing, changing, and blooming into the complex tree of life we recognise today. A muddled, magnificent combination of chance and the heritability of beneficial traits has driven the unfathomability rich diversity of life on the planet. A glorious entanglement of simple and increasingly complex lifeforms, living side by side, cooperatively and combatively; communicating and sharing energy and nutrients; and dependent on each other in ways we are only beginning to understand.

In the grand scheme of things, we humans are very new. archaea, bacteria, protozoa, and fungi[EW5]  have been around for billions of years and are so well adapted they will long outlive our fragile species. Archaic Homo sapiens has been around for 300,000 years, and modern  Homo sapiens sapiens for only 160,000 years. These numbers are constantly being revised in the light of new palaeontological and genetic information, but when contrasting a few hundred thousand years with a few billion years no amount of numerical tweaking can change the enormity of the gap.

There is no denying we are a clever species. We have evolved myriad symbolic languages with which to communicate our feelings and ideas; we understand ourselves in relation to others and the world; we can think in abstractions, as well as analytically and emotionally; we have creative imaginations and considerable mental agility; we have diverse gifts and skills; our brains continue growing well into adulthood; we are highly social; highly cooperative and combinative, and we are capable of change in response to new information or a new set of conditions.

 However, for reasons passing all understanding when educating our children, we cling to vertical progression and remain resolutely attached to19th-century educational values. We fail to optimise the potent power of our children’s curiosity and innate skills, thus thwarting liberating learning practices. Vertically directed programmes chop away at nutritious horizontal growth and children are consigned to taking their place either in the bottom, middle or top of the class.  Equally destructively boxed up  ‘facts’ are learned without the oxygen of research, and thus often outdated information is absorbed and regurgitated. Platonic values place maths at the pinnacle of academic subjects: in most schools, maths is taught every day. Science is deemed more important than the humanities and commonly is allocated double lessons: neatly sidestepping the findings of multiple neurological studies on the optimal time for focused learning. Literature is valued, but art, drama and dance are given lower status. Astonishingly children gifted in these areas are deemed less academic than their science and technology-loving peers: oh, what will become of the artists will they ever get “proper jobs”?

Subjugating skills in art, drama, music and dance is diminishing innate forms of human expression and communication. It is highly probable that we were dancing, painting and creating music before the evolution of spoken language. The ‘arts’ are deeply embedded in the natural world: other creatures dance, sing and decorate for a variety of excellent reasons. Energy zinging around our brains through entwined verbal and non-verbal neural matrices permits the liberation of complex, creative communication. Through art, drama and dance children are creatively problem solving, while expressing feelings, ideas and stories. Some may choose to develop their natural or acquired artistic talents, others, like the neuroscientist Erich Jarvis may direct their skills along another route.

Raised in Harlem, Jarvis was educated in New York City public schools. He was a dancer: his high school graduation performance was glowingly reviewed  in the New York Times: “Lisa Arrington and Erich Jarvis had the audience cheering with their Soviet-style lifts in a War and Discord pas de deux." Jarvis continued dancing while at college where he developed an interest in animal communication. He was young, chaotic and by no means top in his lab classes. Indeed, he was told he was a rotten scientist. Now he leads the Jarvis Lab which investigates the neurogenetics of complex traits, with a specific focus on vocal learning and spoken language, and he is the adjunct Professor in the Department of neurobiology at Duke University. He still rocks the Salsa.

         Don’t get me wrong. I am by no means suggesting that Jarvis’s pursuit of science was preferable to him pursuing his significant gifts as a dancer. No, the joy I get from his story is how he combined his interests, used his curiosity and creativity, worked hard and carved his own path. His intimate relationship with music and expressive movement led him to explore communication and vocal learning in songbirds and led to his observation that brain areas controlling vocal learning are duplications of pre-existing pathways that control movement.

 “Maybe that’s why humans and cockatoos can both dance and sing to the beat.”

         Children dance freely to their own beat, they are naturally curious and their brains are hardwired to learn. The depth and breadth of knowledge acquired during their first five years is incomparable to any other time in their development. Children and adolescents are dynamic learning machines. They function at different speeds and acquire and absorb information in diverse ways. They have talents that can be strengthened or squashed. They have weaknesses that can be supported or neglected. Every child is unique. And yet for the most part we continue to offer them standardised, linear education programmes that are ill-suited to enable and inspire independent thinking: this is in direct contrast to the ubiquitous promises made by school prospectuses. Our young are required to plug on regardless of how happy they are or how poorly they are being served by outdated systems. Frustrated, creative, dedicated teachers are hamstrung by having to teach linear non-integrated programmes. Dynamic education is thwarted by thought strangling exam curricula and by schools’ achieving or maintaining status via students’ test results. 

Education is the one commodity in which the dissatisfied consumer has no say. It is astonishing that 21st-century participants in and consumers of education don’t take to the streets.  Recently, along with 3,500 attendees from 120 countries, I attended a virtual conference for teachers run by Kognity.  Between the hours of 5.00 am  and 9.00 pm UK time  I listened to excellent speakers from educational institutes across the globe discussing multiple topics. Unilaterally, it was agreed that assessing young minds by exams and testing was inefficient and insufficient. The speakers’ experience in classrooms supported research findings that students thrived better when offered verbal or written feedback rather than grades and percentages. However, teachers continued to be pressured by adult carers for graded assessments and class position: vertical progress, recorded by marks or percentages spoke more eloquently than deeds and thoughtful words. I was fascinated throughout the day, but when the philosophy teacher David Spooner gave his presentation I stood on my chair cheering and punching the air. Spooner has been teaching for many years at universities and schools across the globe and, in addition to his work in classrooms, he has been training teachers in the International Baccalaureate system since 2004. The man knew what he is talking about. Throughout his talk he advocated passionately for the young and held no punches on his views about the dilapidated state of 21st century education.

He called for revolution. 

I second that. The days of patching and tweaking worn-out linear programmes are over. We need radical action. These are radical times. We are amid the nano revolution; we have generated a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene; we have been humbled by a virus; we are facing multiple challenges driven by the climate crisis,  we are having  difficulty feeding and watering our populations; we have lost one third of the planet’s tops soil; we can see light that sprang into being 45.6 billion years ago and we can talk  to each other from space, mountain tops and from the deep dark depths of the oceans: humanity is connected as never before.

Every day we act across multiple webbed networks: social, familial, economic, and cyber.  Now is the time to share skills, to ask fresh questions, to learn from the past, to reshape our present and to face an unknowable future armed with practical skills; the ability to solve problems; the courage to be creative, and to learn from our mistakes. Our children have voices that need to be heard, skills that need to be supported, questions they need to be encouraged to answer for themselves, and all of us can play a part in their education. Learning through community, accessing knowledge by reaching outwards, finding resources in our neighbours, and our neighbourhoods, respecting diverse skills, using the richness of cyberspace, learning how to recognise conscious and unconscious bias, and relishing choices while being supported by thoughtful guides shining light onto unexpected connections.  Let our children weave sustainable, fecund fields of knowledge, on which their stories vibrate among all stories, spreading waves of understanding.

We know unequivocally that indestructible energy flows through all things: enabling information and nutrient generated by minerals, fungi, bacteria, soil, plants, animals, and humankind, to be exchanged and shared. Without these intertwined, multidirectional networks we would not exist. Nor could we have created visions of angels and demons; nor invented the lenses that opened our eyes to new possibilities, nor could we have understood that we are part of the aether. We are constructed of elements formed in the stars, and like all organic life we have been shaped over time by natural selection.

We are part of the great web of being.

Kate Nicholls

March 2022