Stories and Essays

My children Emily (17) Travers (11) Angus (10) Maisie (7) and Oakley (2)

Botswana 1997

‘Do you know what you’re going to do?’ inquired Emily eyeing the smart new stationery I had bought for school.

‘Not a clue,’ I replied.

‘Aren’t you going to start on Monday?’

‘Yes.’

‘You do know it’s Friday don’t you?’

‘Yup,’ I replied. ‘I know I am going to hang our work around a theme, but nothing I have come up with so far feels right.’

‘A project you mean?’

‘Yes, I want to find one central idea that will inspire them and unite all subjects.’

The hapless hippo grazed gormlessly. The drought was by now in full swing and the river was no more than a puddle: dead cows and donkeys littered the flood plains.

Only yesterday the children and I had burned a rotting cow carcass because the stench of decomposing flesh had become unendurable. We doused it in petrol and set light to the cadaver. It had gone off like a bomb and a swarm of jewelled blowflies rose up out of the flames and hovered like a cloud in the heat-rippled air. The explosion had knocked Travers off his feet, and the smell of singed hair mingled with the odour of charred rot and petrol. The cow’s remains contorted and twisted in the heat and, in horrified fascination, we watched fat, creamy maggots, wriggling in and out of the charring bones, devouring slivers of protein as if protected from the conflagration by some invisible shield. Come on Kate, focus – sod hippos and burning cows – think about school. I decided to get up early in the morning and go on a thinking walk before the sun rose too high.

The morning sand was night-cooled when I set off at a brisk pace. In time, I passed two boys on donkeys, loaded down by a motley selection of plastic containers that slopped fresh water in rhythm to their faltering steps. The boys’ dusty limbs dangled freely, almost touching the ground, and the unwilling beasts were persuaded on by loud shouts and slaps. I snapped off a branch of sage and bruised a leaf between my fingers. Its pungent volatile oils were aromatic yet blurred by an acrid, bitter note that lingered on my fingers. Think. It was all very well Ralph Waldo Emerson saying, ‘All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better’, but I knew that a well-designed experiment was more likely to bear fruit than a hotchpotch of good intentions. Homeschooling was going to require more than my love to make it work.

The sand was beginning to feel warm beneath my bare feet when the edge of an idea tipped into a corner of my mind. I increased my speed hoping that if I pounded the ground hard enough the thought shadow might shift position and become clearer. A few minutes later I realized that what I was looking for was hiding in plain sight . . . the sand beneath my feet was the product of deep history. Sand had once been rock. I would teach the children the story of rocks.

There are few things that can match the excitement of latching onto a good idea, and now that I had found my bedrock the questions started to flow freely. If I was going to help the children to ‘see the world in a grain of sand’ how was I going to make it enticing? How could I make Plate Tectonics come alive?

‘Toffee Mountains . . . we will make Toffee Mountains’ I yelled out loud, and in a flash I mapped out our first morning at school. We would boil the sugar to different temperatures, and make brittle slabs of toffee for the tectonic plates and softer more malleable toffee would act as the mantle on which the earth’s jigsaw would slip and slide. The children could squeeze out Fold Mountains and create Block Mountains and let the toffee cool slowly or plunge it into cold water to see what happened to the structure of the toffee. From there it would be a simple step to explain how igneous, sedimentary and metamorphic rocks were formed.

With mounting excitement, I realized I had the perfect book for us to share at the end of the morning: Franky Furbo by William Wharton. For those of you who haven’t read it I won’t spoil the story but I can tell you it is about a family that lives in Italy – the mother homeschools the children and the father tells them stories about a fox called Franky Furbo who can speak all languages. At the heart of the story lies the dichotomy of fact versus fantasy. Is Franky a real polylingual fox moving through space-time, or is he a figment of the imagination? Can we believe our own eyes or is reality beyond the limiting scope of our senses? Sometimes to reach the truth we have to suspend our disbelief. Wharton would be a perfect guide for the children.

Another aspect that delighted me was that I could introduce language to the children from an evolutionary perspective; a fresh vantage point might help Travers to come to terms with his dyslexia. Moving through geological time we would take a look at the Rift Valley, and think about how the movement of tectonic plates had influenced human evolution. Fresh ideas came tumbling into my mind at an alarming rate and, pausing for a moment to take stock, I rested in the thin shade of an acacia tree.

In our adaptive landscape, during the Pleistocene, our ancestors weren’t reading and writing, they were surviving using their wits. They were developing language skills that have been passed on to us in an unbroken thread. I knew I had to introduce the children to Stephen Pinker and his joyful book. He was the right man for the job. But it might be tough going for them, so I must prepare the class carefully.

The ground was by now uncomfortably hot and I hopped home, intermittently cooling my feet in scrawny patches of shade offered by a few sunburned bushes.

………….

On Monday morning, the kitchen table underwent its first transformation into the school table. The children cleared away the breakfast, while I laid out our new school paraphernalia, and Maisie got the giggles.

‘Do I have to call you Miss Nicholls?’ she asked.

‘That would be nice,’ I replied.

‘Will you be taking the register?’

‘I think she ought to,’ said Travers wiping down the area where Oakley had been sitting, ‘she never remembers our names.’

‘I had far too many of you. Now teeth, and let me get things organized. Come back in two minutes.’

The children clattered out of the room, and returned one by one wriggling and stifling giggles.

We all felt a bit awkward. Maisie examined the contents of her new pencil case. Travers fiddled with the plastic sheets I had bought to protect their work, Angus beamed at me encouragingly and Oakley, stark naked, trotted out into the garden.

‘Right my darlings this is all very exciting but before we start I want to lay down a few rules.’

Maisie groaned.

‘Not horrid rules Mais – sensible ones. Number one. Whatever happens outside school is not brought to the table So, if you are all piss-pots at breakfast and I’m livid with you I will not be livid in school. Equally if we have a bad day in school, when school’s out all will be forgotten.

‘Second rule. No homework.’ This prompted huge cheers from my students, on whom I smiled beneficently before continuing my speech.

‘With such a small class if we work hard we will be able to cover a lot of ground so . . . school in the morning and afternoons free. Third rule. I will work hard to make sure classes are interesting and I ask you to participate. If you try, and I can see you’re trying, and you still don’t understand something then I’ll know I have to find another way to teach it. That’s it. Those are the rules.’

I stopped talking and waited for someone to say something. To my astonishment they remained silent. No backchat. I had become Teacher Mum.

‘Right . . . Okay then . . . let’s get on,’ I said slightly nonplussed. ‘I want to start with something I think you will find surprising. I want us to learn about rocks.’

Maisie’s face fell.

‘Mu-u-u-u-m that’s so boring. I thought you said homeschool was going to be fun.’

‘Exactly, it sounds really boring, doesn’t it? But I can promise you that by the end of the morning you will be eating your words. Literally.’ Angus looked at me suspiciously and I laughed.

‘You will be eating rocks and loving it . . . but first I want to read you something.’ I went to the bookshelf and pulled out The Language Instinct. Seven-year-old Maisie looked at me in horror.

‘Mummy that’s a grown-up book. I won’t understand it.’ I could hear panic in her voice.

‘Trust me. I’m only going to read bits, and I know you will understand it because this man,’ I said, thumping my fist on the book, ‘is so totally on your side you won’t believe it. Let me show you.’ And I began reading carefully edited excerpts from chapter one.

Steven Pinker officially opened our homeschool;

‘“As you are reading these words you are taking part in one of the wonders of the natural world. For you and I belong to a species with a remarkable ability: we can shape events in each other’s brains with exquisite precision.”’

I paused for dramatic effect and the children waited for me to read on:

‘“That ability is language. Simply by making noises with our mouths, we can reliably cause precise new combinations of ideas to arise in each other’s minds. The ability comes so naturally that we are apt to forget what a miracle it is. So, let me remind you with some simple demonstrations. Asking you only to surrender your imagination to my words for a few moments, I can cause you to think some very specific thoughts.”’

Another dramatic pause and the children impatiently urged me on:

‘“When a male octopus spots a female, his normally greyish body suddenly becomes striped. He swims above the female and begins caressing her with seven of his arms. If she allows this, he will quickly reach toward her and slip his eighth arm into her breathing tube. A series of sperm packets moves slowly through a groove in his arm, finally to slip into the mantle cavity of the female.”’

‘Is that true Mum?’ asked Angus, ‘do they really get stripes?’

‘You bet your sweet bippy . . . and the fact you’ve asked that question is part of the wonder. Listen to what he says next: “Think about what these words have done. I did not simply remind you of octopuses; in the unlikely event that you ever see one develop stripes, you now know what will happen next. True, my demonstrations depended on our ability to read and write, and this makes our communication even more impressive by bridging gaps of time, space, and acquaintanceship. But writing is clearly an optional accessory; the real engine of verbal communication is the spoken language we acquired as children.”’

I looked at Travers.

‘See what I mean when I said he’s on your side. Before we look at spelling and grammar and all that stuff, I want us to look at how language evolved . . . you will be amazed by the role children have played in the evolution of language. Steven Pinker doesn’t give a toss how you spell words – what excites him is that you have words in the first place. Listen to what he says: “This book is about human language. Unlike most books with ‘language’ in the title, it will not chide you about proper usage” – see, I told you he’s not bothered about spelling – “For I will be writing not about the English language or any other language, but about something much more basic: the instinct to learn, speak, and understand language.”

‘When you were little you all learned to speak English, just as Oakley is now, but I’ll bet none of you can remember doing it. You call this a table because you heard me call a flat bit of wood resting on four legs a table – the word is just an agreed symbol – if I had called it a kumquat you would be calling it a kumquat ¬– or a bongwangle or a . . .’

There followed a riot of creativity, and as soon as new words for ‘table’ degenerated into the lavatorial I knew I had hooked my audience.

‘But equally,’ I continued, ‘children will have come out with symbolic sounds for something . . . maybe a plant or an animal or something and the grown-ups will have copied them. We all call cereal “cillawool” because Oakley calls it “cillawool” – in our family we know what that means.’

‘When did people first start talking, Mum?’ asked Travers.

‘Good question Trav. The truth is we will never know exactly – it didn’t happen suddenly. What we call language is just a part of human communication and there are lots of ways to communicate. Inside our heads we think in pictures, memories, sounds, smells and feelings. Pinker calls the wordless language in our heads “mentalese”. Let me show you wordless communication. Maisie get me that big book on top of the bookshelf please.’ Maisie tottered slightly under the weight of Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt’s mighty tome Human Ethology.

‘What does “ethology” mean?’ asked Angus.

‘Ethos means the spirit of a culture . . . “ology” means “study of”. . . so really it means the study of behaviour,’ I replied as I opened the book onto a page that had a series of black and white photographs of a Yanomami toddler.

‘Oh Mum, he’s so sweet,’ cried Maisie, ‘look at him, he’s just like Oaks.’ The children pored over the photographs and were soon flicking through the book in search of more pictures of children at play. They were enchanted and easily identified with the human stories Eibl-Eibesfeldt had so carefully recorded on film. Maisie turned over one page and recoiled.

‘Oh, poor thing,’ she said, looking at a series of pictures of a grieving Yanomami woman, ‘what’s happened?’

‘What do you think?’ I asked.

‘Something horrid, look at that picture,’ she said, pointing to one of the photographs, ‘it looks like she’s listening to something really sad.’

‘She’s hearing that someone has died,’ said Angus, reading the caption at the bottom of the page.

‘Mum look at her baby . . . he’s crying because she’s crying. These pictures are amazing,’ Travers said seriously.

‘Aren’t they just?’ I agreed. ‘No words . . . just human emotions expressed on people’s faces. The baby in that picture hears his mother crying before he sees her crying and suddenly he feels her pain; just as she feels her baby’s pain. That’s called empathy. It’s when you get inside someone else’s skin and feel what they are feeling.’

I noticed Maisie had turned to a fresh page and was studying a pen-and-ink drawing of a rhesus monkey comforting her infant, and I could see from her face she had made the connection between the drawing and the photograph of a human mother and child. I didn’t say anything.

‘This term there will be no spelling tests and no written work. We are going to look at the evolution of language and communication before writing.’

‘I know . . . I know what there was before writing,’ said Angus excitedly, ‘there was painting – cave paintings – people drew stories of hunting and things.’

‘Exactly, rock paintings. That’s why we are going to look at rocks because the story of rock is part of the story of people. Let’s have a break now and then we are going to make toffee.’

The children dissipated like a mist, and putting the kettle on for coffee I watched Oakley pottering about in the garden. His curiosity was visceral: driven by primal instincts he explored his environment learning by cause and effect. He was storing information in a haphazard mental filing system that would become more sophisticated as he matured. He paused in his meander to poke a stick down a hole – I hoped that it would not aggravate a scorpion that might be resting in the shade. He hunkered down on his haunches utterly engrossed in his task, from time to time he shifted his weight to improve his balance as he dug deeper into the sand; soon he started using his fingers, presumably to make the hole larger but from that distance I could not see the finer details. Suddenly he got up, and standing arrow-straight he looked down at the hole, then turning on his heels he ambled off to explore some other element of our large garden. I don’t know what he learned from that tiny experience. Perhaps he had stopped digging because he had lost interest, or perhaps he had felt a movement in the sand or a minute change in temperature had disquieted him. Perhaps he had been looking for something and had discovered the hole was empty. I will never know. But his brief relationship with that hole in the sand would be stored, along with thousands of similar tiny experiences in his day, and form a part of a complex web of experiences that would forever shape his mental landscape.

I called him in and for the rest of the morning we folded toffee into mountains and chopped brittle toffee into continental plates, and when we were finished the children lunched on Gondwanaland and Pangaea.

Angus was raised and homeschooled in a lion research camp, Botswana. He co-authored The Lion Children with his siblings Maisie, Travers and Oakley, while still at ‘lion’ school.

Angus is a journalist and co-host of the Rewilding the Mind podcast. He is based in the UK where he writes primarily about the road to net zero and the COVID-19 pandemic. His recent published work includes in-depth features on COP26, renewable energy, and emissions in the built environment and the food supply chain. He reports on a range of scientific subjects, from archaeology and human evolution to genomics and antibiotic resistance. He previously worked in Spain and Latin America, and was editor-in-chief of The Santiago Times in Chile. He has been published in several major media outlets including The Telegraph, El Pais, The Washington Post, ESPN, and China Daily.

Angus is a former speech writer in UK Parliament, and graduated from Stanford University in California.

Through a Glass Clearly

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 Aristotle had applied his understanding that everything has a function in a less linear fashion. Imagine 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 honey -sticky fingers: nails cracked from past explorations, skin thicken 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 rationale.

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, tested samples at different temperatures, and repeated his tests over time: all the while trying to avoid contamination,

Astonishing, two hundred years before Louis Pasteur, Leuwenhoek observed bacterial reproduction and described the emergence of daughter cells via division in fine detail.

He was a consummate scientist by any standards, yet he was relatively unschooled. 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 as a linen draper. Antoine was a practical soul, who took his familial and financial responsibilities seriously. He 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 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 be 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 LUCA, our Last Universal Common Ancestor, 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. No vertical progression towards perfection. Merely the 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 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 choose to develop their natural or acquired artistic talents, others, like the neuroscientist Erich Jarvis may direct their skills along another route.

Raised in Harem, 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 verbal 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: and still, he 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, 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 curious, 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: in direct contrast to 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. 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 in a new geological epoch the Anthropocene; we have been humbled by a virus; we are facing multiple challenges from climate change; 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. Yet our children are offered a Gradgrinian limited menu on which to feast.

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.

Soil

The soil links us to the stars and to a rootless past. Rock crumbing fungi, lichen and cyanobacteria formed the first soils, and fungi sent out threads of mycelium that formed communicative networks along which flowed chemical messages, nutrients and water. Step by step, supported by the mycelium connected earth, the first photosynthesizing land plants took root. Devouring sunlight, aquatic and terrestrial organisms unintentionally flipping the ratio of carbon dioxide and oxygen in the atmosphere, and opened out endless possibilities. Helping oxygen-dependent children to find their place in this story is exciting, and at times frustrating.

"I thought soil would be boring," said Katya.

"Why?" I asked.

"Well…"

"No seriously why?"

"I don't know…I just did."

I sucked in my irritation. I had been giving online classes, across multiple time zones, for over eight hours and Katya was my last student of the day.

She was at home following the lockdown GCSE program provided by her school in England. I was at home in Rome offering her additional support and enrichment. Using Skype's screen share we had been watching Kiss the Ground: an enlightening Netflix documentary about the impact of soil management on global warming. The story of soil is diverse and entangles history, geography, politics, chemistry, biology, anthropology, ecology, agronomy, economics, ethnology, nutrition, poetry and human creativity. The topic was so rich in nutrients it had been hard for Katya to digest.

"Were you surprised to learn how powerful soil is?" I asked

"Very,"

"Me too… wrapping my head around the fact there are more organisms in a handful of healthy soil than the number of people who have ever lived on earth is tough to picture. What surprised you in particular?"

"Oh, I don't know,"

"Try…dig about in that mind of yours…was there a bit of the story that stood out?"

"Not really?"

"So, what surprised you?"

Long pause.

"Everything?"

The documentary was so rich in content it was hard for her to unravel. Her expression reminded me of the look of despair worn by children when asked them to tidy a bedroom that looks like a landfill site. Whaaaaat? Mum, it’s not fair… where do I start?

Katya's English was fluent, but her thinking wasn't. Entangled learning comes naturally to young children, but unless practised the skill atrophies, and like so many children walking the GCSE treadmill Katya had set her speed and was marching doggedly towards good grades. Looking neither to left nor right she persevered, following her timetable, completing her tasks, seeking help from me when losing her footing, and all the while the rich landscape of her journey passed by unnoticed. So, to help Katya find her footing we sorted through the elements of the story together, and she choose the parts she found most interesting. Gradually she gained confidence as she touched on new connections and dared to explore their tributaries.

Many of the teenagers I support, attending mainstream state or independent English schools, have similar struggles. The GCSE exam driven system decouples history from geography, biology from chemistry, creative writing from physics, music from maths, and ecology from politics, and art from science. Students and teachers are trapped in a system that does not enable harmonious joined up thinking.

A case in point arose only other day when I was working with a child on an engaging GCSE history unit Medicine in the First World War. However, when I asked her what WW1 poets she was reading in English Literature she looked at me blankly.

"We're doing Heaney and Auden in English."

"Both wonderous poets," I replied, "but surely also you're also reading some of the WW1 poets. Sassoon…Owen?"

"Er no,"

"Maybe you're reading Journey's End?... Birdsong perhaps?"

"No… Julius Caesar is our Shakespeare and we're doing a 19th century novel… I can't remember what it's called."

Unspoken Anglo -Saxon expletives ricocheted around my skull.

This bright, lovely child was being offered zero connectivity between history and literature. I tried another tack.

"I know you've been looking at wave lengths in physics. You and I revised alpha, beta, and gamma rays only last week. So have you been looking at Marie Curie's work with x-rays on the battlefield."

"Who?"

"Marie Curie… she developed the mobile radiography units for WW1 field hospitals you're learning about. That's why they were called Little Curies. She was astonishing…generated the electricity for the x-ray machines by putting dynamos into the cars …real life physics in action…she trained up one-hundred and fifty women to use the machines and sent them into the field. Marie Curie? She discovered radium for heaven's sake."

"Never heard of her!"

"Holy moly! Right my treasure that's our next class sorted. We'll watch Parts 1-3 of Six Experiments that Changed the World on YouTube. It's a hellova story. I'll pop the links up for you."

"Will I need it for my exam?

"You need it for you my angel…."

Sometimes I just want to put my head in a bucket!

Children need the power of visual storytelling and documentaries such as Kiss the Ground stimulate joined up thinking. Do I ask my students to blindly accept all the information presented in documentaries: of course not: we discuss, challenge, question and research. Nevertheless, it is the entangled web of stories in a good documentary that stimulate creative thinking and inspire children to reach outside the boundaries of a ‘topic’.

Just as I encourage active reading, I encourage active watching, and triggered by questions, or gasps of wonder and surprise, we pause and discuss. Trying to awaken the living roots in their minds, we will pop onto YouTube to peek inside a chloroplast, or meander for a while in ancient Sumer’s wheatfields, or trundle with the Joad family through choking Oklahoma dust, or drop in on Seamus Heaney listening to the sound of his father digging outside his window.

Between my finger and my thumb

The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

Under my window, a clean rasping sound

When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:

My father, digging. I look down

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds

Bends low, comes up twenty years away

Stooping in rhythm through potato drills

Where he was digging.

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft

Against the inside knee was levered firmly.

He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep

To scatter new potatoes that we picked,

Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

By God, the old man could handle a spade.

Just like his old man.

My grandfather cut more turf in a day

Than any other man on Toner’s bog.

Once I carried him milk in a bottle

Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up

To drink it, then fell to right away

Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods

Over his shoulder, going down and down

For the good turf. Digging.

The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap

Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge

Through living roots awaken in my head.

But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb

The squat pen rests.

I’ll dig with it.

I never insult the young by dumbing down. Interestingly it's often younger primary school children who explore the network of interconnected stories in Kiss the Ground most confidently. Concepts they are learning in class: the water cycle, food chains, photosynthesis, are brought to life. They see with their own eyes how plants generate inland water cycles; how healthy soil stores carbon; how diverse micro-organisms power complex communication networks. They see how microbes in our bodies and in the soil break down elemental bonds and release nutrients that power our lives.

I am used to the squirming and cries of “Yuck and Eugh and Disgusting’ at the sight of worms and bugs busying themselves in the muck. But for the most part children find it astounding that the microbiome in their body, comprised of fungi bacteria, protozoa and viruses, outnumber their human cells.

“ Whaaaatttt am I a bug then?”

“ Not when I last looked…you are indeed a boy… with lots of merry bugs in you and on you nourishing and protecting you.”

The story of soil touches our humanity and young children are natural ecologists.

Crawling on the earth, smelling it, and tasting it children kiss the ground before they walk on it.

One Autumn afternoon in 2011 I took seven- year- old Dora to Down House, Darwin's home in Orpington. We were the only visitors on that pumpkin orange day.

"What's that smell?"

"That's the smell of death coming to life."

We were walking in Darwin's wood. Damp soil sprang beneath out feet as we left fleeting imprints on the busily decaying leaves scattered across the Sand Walk: Darwin’s ‘thinking path’ where he walked and pondered daily. The smell of sweet rot in an English wood is bloodless, so different to the smell of death I'd grown familiar with in the Okavango Swamps, and yet not so very different. I felt the salt space where metal and gas break earthly bonds in rain-soaked earth.

How Darwin would have loved the solemnly, joyous child beside me. Her movements were smooth and careful; her eyes were darting.

"Look at that humongous fungus Kate. What's it called?"

"No idea, but let's explore it."

"Look at that secretion Dora?" I said, pointing to an amber string of clear homogenised liquid seeping from the grand organism that erupting through the soil had grown up boldly through a riot of vermilion and umber beech leaves.

"What's a secretion?"

"Snot."

She laughed and her questions joined the questions that echo through the ages, and some of them I could answer because on that very path a kindly father had untangled hidden connections

"Look there's a sweet -chestnut husk caught in the folds of the fungus...oh and look a dead fly...amazing ..what a saprophytic feast. If it weren't for fungi and bacteria we would be sky high in rubbish."

"You would have walked by," exclaimed Dora, "I saw it first… I'm so happy I did."

Her child's eyes saw more than mine. Did I know too much? Had I lost the visceral curiosity that children burn with? The thought overwhelmed me with sadness.

"He had eyes like yours Dora," I said as we walked on, "he unravelled the biggest question ever asked by observation and thinking. To come up with the theory of evolution by Natural Selection, and to know that traits must be inherited is unfathomable genius. If he had read Mendel who knows what might have happened?"

"Who's Mendel?"

"Oh the sweetest man..what fun you don't know about him you will love to meet him. Next class. He had a fantastic mum who loved plants and children...and just like Darwin Mendel asked massive questions. He worked out how some traits were passed on. He did mindboggling patient experiments with pea plants....he pollinated hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of them with a feather isn't that beautiful."

But Dora had been enchanted by a small twig bespangled by bright orange fungi...Mendel could wait.

I was certain Emma Darwin would have loved this thoughtful child, and taken her to church on Sunday. Dora was raised a Christian and she walked easily in Down House where God and Questions had once painfully co-existed. It was a loving space, where noisy children had slid down the stairs on a homemade wooden slide, and beneath an unreproachful gaze had snatched balls of string and sealing wax from their busy papa's desk.

After tea and cakes Dora and I sat on the floor in Darwin's study. The house was quiet and taking out a book I opened it at the last page. Wriggling until she was comfortable, she turned to me expectantly.

"I want to read you something," I said, "it's very short...but it will be special to hear it here where he wrote it. He wrote it for you and for me and for anyone who cared to listen. It changed the world Dora, really and truly. Not many books are powerful enough to do that."

And by the failing light squeezing through dusty window- panes I read her the last paragraph of On the Origin of Species.

"It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth…"

In life there are some perfect moments. Sitting on the floor with Dora in Darwin's study was one of them.

Stumbling

“Don’t expect too much from Travers. He has extreme dyslexia. He will struggle in mainstream academia. On the bright side he may become an artist!”

The educational psychologist's words thrummed in my ears twisting neural connections into a confused knot of sorrow, rage and rebellion.

It was Autumn 1993, and my partner and I were sitting in a chill room painted hospital cream. I could feel the metal frame poking through the chair’s thin upholstery, and the blood pulsing in my neck. Blinking like a cartoon character I tried to unravel the double whammy delivered to us about our nine-year-old’s future.

First hit: Don’t have too many hopes for your fantastic child. Well, the doc can stuff that where the sun doesn’t shine.

Second hit: The tone in which he said ‘he may be artist’ implied this was some second-rate activity undertaken by the educationally challenged. Was this man an idiot?

Resisting the temptation to smite him with the nearest blunt object my eyes leaked maternal anxiety, and I couldn’t find my words.

“What do you suggest?” inquired Ian.

“Well, a special school might help, one that specializes in learning difficulties.”

Again, with the blinking! What learning difficulties? The boy was bright as a button, wise, kind, and deeply engaged in the world. He just couldn’t read very well. He needed time to unravel symbols on a page. Does that constitute a learning difficulty?

My brain flashed a patchwork of images: I pictured Travers snuggled on the sofa in his pajamas, stoically doing his homework, sounding out each letter as he read to me about Johnny Red Hat living his tedious life in the Village with Three Corners.

I pictured me as a small person in furious tears reading to my mother; my swimmy eyes trying to make sense of the blocks of darkness smeared across the pages of my turgid early readers.

How I loathed Old Dog Tom and the stupid Runaway Pancake, and the sight of my mother's immaculate oval nail scoring deepening lines under the words I sounded out l e t t e r by agonising l e t t e r.

"W.. h.. en."

"Not w…H Katy w just w."

“S ..a.. I.. d…"

"Sed darling–just sed–it looks like S A I D, but it says SED–always has always will!"

Huge sigh.

"I sh a… l l give the bone to the w.. o.. lf."

"Wooooolf…not w.o..lf….look at it Katy… it's just the same as it was on the last page."

"But it says wo lf…not woolf,"

"Give me strength,"

"I hate reading, soooooo much,"

"No, you don't."

"Yes, I DO"

"Let's start again, shall we?"

My mother’s impatience grew in correlation with my despair. I swear she emerged into the world able to spell onomatopoeia and simply couldn’t understand why untangling a pottage of letters caused me such anguish. To this day, form and from, and defiantly and definitely look identical to me.

Finally, my brain decongested, and I spoke.

“So, it looks as if Travers has inherited my dyslexia,” I said.

“ There is strong evidence that it is genetic,”

“ Right then. Ok… so, we need to do some thinking. Thank you for your time. Do you have any ideas re a school?”

“ There is one I have heard of I believe it’s called Bruern Abbey.”

“ That sounds a bit fancy…is it private?”

“ I’m afraid so.”

Ian and I looked at each other: our eyes groaning in silent panic! Bills, bills, bills.

That was twenty-eight years ago, but the drive home is emblazoned on my memory. It was a drizzly, grey afternoon, and the car smelled of child and wet wellington boots. The wipers intermittently juddered across the windscreen smearing away the raindrops, while Ian and I murmured in coded parent speak, and our disconsolate boy slumped in the back among his siblings. The abstract difference between an assessment and a test, so clear to adults, meant nothing to the nine- year- old. He had failed. That was that. He could ‘read’ perfectly the forced brightness in our voices, but our parental comfort fell on deaf ears. His confidence was crashing, and I was kicking myself for not recognising the symptoms earlier, and thus saving him humiliation at school.

His reading difficulties had become more visible as he moved onto chapter books with fewer pictures. Up to that point he had seemed to be doing fine. He read slowly for sure, but I had not picked up on his struggles with word shapes and tangled letters. I hadn’t realised that much of his reading had been achieved either from memory, or by making smart associations with the illustrations. Ian’s forefinger beat a rhythm on the steering wheel, and I wondered if he was counting out imaginary figures in his head.

“ Well then,” he said after a time, “ I suppose we’d better go and have a look at this school.”

“ I guess so.”

As a passionate believer in state education, I hated the idea. But in those days, for reasons passing all understanding, there was a disparity between counties with regards to dyslexia as a learning disorder. Like his siblings Travers went to a local school, and his teacher had suggested we got a diagnosis. However, we had been warned that whatever the outcome Gloucestershire did not recognise dyslexia, therefore would not offer a teaching assistant. If we had lived in neighbouring Warwickshire that would be different matter. Bonkers! Things have changed of course. Snuggling her brother in the back of the car, fourteen-year-old Emily would grow up to become a brilliant primary school teacher working within an inclusive system that offers support to children with varied special educational needs.

As we trundled home it never occurred to me to teach Travers myself. Despite the fact I am a boundlessly curious lifelong- learner, and at the time was studying evolutionary biology, I conformed to the tradition that children’s education happened at school. Perhaps a lack of confidence narrowed my vision and I wasn’t able to respect that fact I was already teaching my children.

Education begins as we take our first breath and family, caregivers, friends, and community members are our first teachers: all qualified by shared humanity and experience. The capacity to learn is hardwired. Our survival depends on our ability to be responsive to shifts and changes in our internal and external environments. Babies and young children acquire new information at breakneck speed. In the first year of life, a baby’s brain develops trillions of connections between billions of brain cells. While we are cooing and nurturing– our helpless babies are rolling up their developmental sleeves and getting down to some hard-core learning. It is awe-inspiring to witness the dizzying wealth of new data babies and young children process moment by moment. But they do it in their own way and at different speeds.

Watching my five babies grow has taught me much about diversity, complexity and plasticity. Each birth was different. Each baby emerged profoundly their own person: they weaned at different times, lived by differnet temporal rhythms, walked and talked at different ages, liked and disliked different foods, were susceptible to varied illnesses, and responded to the world in multiple ways: all the while sharing an environment, and receiving equal love, care and attention. My children have been shaped and weathered by their genes, their environments and each other. The psychologist Gary Marcus uses a lovely analogy:

“The brain is like a book, the first draft of which is written by the genes during fetal development. No chapters are complete at birth, and some are just rough outlines waiting to be filled in during childhood. But not a single chapter—be it the one on sexuality, language, food preferences, or morality— consists of blank pages on which a society can inscribe any conceivable set of words.”

The natural earthy education that takes place in the pre- school years is often overshadowed by the dominance of formal education, and the belief that Education with a capital E is something ‘other’ –offered by people who have gifts we don’t possess. Blinking away tears we kiss our children at the gate and send them out into a new land: a land in which we have no place; inhabited by people with special skills. A child’s first day of school is a rite of passage for both parent and offspring. There are rituals: First Day of School shopping: bright new pencil cases, crayons, erasers, sharpeners, water bottles and lunch boxes. There are tribal costumes: grey, blue, maroon or dun uniforms with badges. There are ceremonies: carbohydrate-rich breakfasts, peppered by lovingly repetitive advice. If we are lucky the day is recorded by a hasty photograph that capture the birth of a new emotion in a child’s eyes: pride-fear. And so, begins the epic journey. There is little point in asking our offspring what they did in school.“ Nothing much,” is the usual refrain. Sometimes we get a nugget of detail such as: “Steve was sick on my foot,” or a reproachful “You forgot it was Roman Day!”

On the drive home from the Psych Ed an oxymoronic tender rage was tugging at my heart: a maternal need to wrap my wings round my boy conflicting with maternal ire towards the man who dared to glibly dismiss hopes for my son in a few words.

Something had to be done.

Change is a Good Thing

My children and I had moved from England to Botswana, because I wanted to raise Emily 17, Travers 11, Angus 9, Maisie 7 and Oakley 22 months, in a developing country. I wanted them to be resilient to change and to integrate into a new culture. The world was changing fast, and life as we knew it might not be offering the life skills that could help them in a future I found hard to imagine.

We were all newcomers in Botswana and we learned together. We became a unified team of problem solvers.

They made good friends in Maun, a small town on the edge of the Okavango Delta. But academic life was dull and dry, and they lost confidence. That mattered.

In the UK Emily, Angus and Maisie attended state schools, and Travers had been moved to a school for children with dyslexia - a trait he inherited from me. The transition from the UK to Africa was smooth: we were all up for adventure. I thought homeschooling would be a one-term stopgap, while I sought a permanent solution.

If anyone had told me that a few years later the children would graduate to University from our lion research camp, I was studying the impact of disease on reproduction, and I would be running a homeschool in Rome 24 years later, I would have rolled about laughing. Impossible. You must be joking. Me? I’m an ex-actress turned biologist not a teacher. I wouldn't know where to start. Teaching required gifts way out of my league. Parents during the lockdown may recognise that feeling.

Fortunately, I had brought an eclectic selection of books from England, among them my childhood copy of Little Men by Louisa M Alcott. I re-read it for comfort and inspiration before planning the term's work. For 10 years, every term had a cohesive theme. My passion is uniting the sciences, arts and humanities, a unification lost in mainstream secondary education. My rag-bag mind is full of colours and valuable snippets: creating a program is like constructing a patchwork of stories and patterns.

I set simple rules: no homework until age 14, and the school-time/family-time divide was sacrosanct: a bad day in one was never carried over into the other. Monday to Friday mornings were divided into bite-size classes; afternoons were free. My personal rule was as follows: if preparing a class isn't fun, don't teach it. Sometimes, we had to plod through the tall grass, but I made sure they understood why.

Teaching many ages was challenging, and I made mistakes along the way. The children spoke up - I listened, and between us we made a plan. Days began and ended as a team, starting with the “wonder of words” and ending snuggled up with a story. Over the years, we read widely as a family: novels, memoirs, plays, popular science, philosophy and psychology. I constructed as many shared classes as possible and set aside time for individual work.

Oakley officially joined the table aged seven. Before that, he played, joined classes that interested him and shared story-time. He was driving a Land Rover before he could read. He learned painlessly in a week and became a happy, independent bookworm.

By then Emily had left Botswana to travel the world before University, and we’d been living in the bush working on a lion research project for several years: our tented camp in Okavango was home for 11 years. There were many practical and elemental challenges; living and working alongside wild animals required skill and responsibility. We were a powerful team. Camp was always busy, and some of the children's friends joined “lion school”.

A significant academic challenge arose when Travers and Angus approached 15 and 14. Choices had to be made re tertiary education: American Universities required SAT exams and European Universities A levels. The boys chose the States, and Maisie chose Dublin. Though my courses integrated the curricula, none of the children took GCSEs. Locking them into a two-year restrictive programme seemed miserable. Would you want to study the same literature for two years? Would you want to explore the same period of history for six terms? I'd rather boil my head.

Instead, they studied widely, and wrote The Lion Children published in 2001, and then prepared for entrance exams. They were accepted by Stanford, Duke, the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the National School of Art and Design Dublin.

Were there limitations to homeschool? Yes. We made cursory attempts at French and Italian (not a success) but a few years later Angus moved to Chile and became fluent in Spanish. They didn't learn music, but later Oakley taught himself to play the piano. I can’t draw to save my life, but I found someone who could, and Maisie's artistic talents were not thwarted.

There is no doubt the responsibility of teaching children is scary. I had many sleepless nights. In the end, I had to trust myself and the children, and enjoy the adventure. The freedom of homeschool gives wings to curiosity, and to this day, teaching is a wonder.

Rome is my classroom now, and integrated, holistic learning is my top priority when I design bespoke programmes for children at my small ‘homeschool’. To serve the needs of 21st-century children I have to keep sharp. Studying quantum mechanics rivets me: a baseline requirement if we are to embrace the nano revolution with gusto. My curiosity is never sated, and each student teaches me something new about the world. I have helped many children to achieve their aims, and I treasure all of them.

Architecture Nature’s Classroom

The great Roman architect and civil and military engineer Vitruvius (80-15 BCE) was inspired by the aesthetic and geometric elegance of proportion; he believed beauty was expressed in nature’s symmetry. I wish we knew more about his family life because he was a gem. We do know he was a practical man of action, and that he travelled widely serving in the engineering corps in Caesar’s army. After Caesar’s assassination, he plugged on and served Octavius. Vitruvius will have seen much on the battlefields and learned a great deal about rebuilding shattered cities.

His initial training was in architecture, and he viewed the union between nature and construction through a sophisticated prism. Like Neri Oxman he believed successful design required multifaceted skills: ‘Let {the architect} be educated, skilful with the pencil, instructed in geometry, know much history, have followed the philosophers with attention, understand music, have some knowledge of medicine, know the opinions of the jurists, and be acquainted with astronomy and the theory of the heavens.’

His passion for a holistic approach to education is the subject of the first chapter of his ten-volume treatise On Architecture and his well-argued plea for a practical, integration of the humanities, arts and sciences is as relevant today as it was in 27 BCE. “The architect should be equipped with knowledge of many branches of study and varied kinds of learning, for it is by his judgement that all work done by the other arts is put to test.’ This premise has universal value and the great thinker’s pragmatic wisdom lays the foundation for liberal arts education and provides a structure on which a living breathing education can grow and thrive. The irony is that it may have been architecture and the construction of the great cities that diverted education down a cul-de-sac that has kept children cornered for millennia.

                                                            …..

The blood and guts of architecture flows through the streets of Rome. Everywhere I go I can feel the human stories told and untold captured in concrete, brick, stone and marble, and nature is embedded in all the narratives. The entangled relationship between art, socio-economic and political history and science is expressed in architecture with raw boldness. Architectural vision cannot be achieved in solitude, its purpose is to serve, its limits are not earthbound, and its only constraints are the universal laws of nature. Humankinds’ genius and carelessness is wordlessly expressed in design, and the social evolution of childhood is woven through leaf and stone.

The products of the earliest architectural union between Homo sapiens and nature live only in our imaginations: for long ago bacteria, fungi and beetles devoured the organic dwellings made of woven reeds, bone, hide, rooted saplings and broad leaves. Yet, the deep history of human cooperative learning is embedded in organic architecture.

 During the Palaeolithic ( approximately 2.5 million years to 10,000 BCE) men, women and children will have observed their surroundings, foraged, problem-solved, designed, constructed, and decorated temporary shelters in response to available resources and environmental pressures. Learning from mistakes they will have taken into consideration the movement of the sun across the sky, the direction of prevailing winds, the seasons, local topography and the movement of dangerous and nutritious fauna through the area. Children will have been protected and instructed, but it is reasonable to assume their nimble hands, agile bodies, sharp eyes and creative curiosity will have ensured they were valued members of the design and construction team. The strength and recklessness of adolescence will have offered energy and innovation, and those with the experience of many seasons will have contributed empirical wisdom and guidance. Those were dynamic and dark times. Towards the end of the Palaeolithic climate change presented life-threatening challenges and drove migration. Cultural evolution was driven by biological and environmental pressures and children played an active role.

 I am not suggesting a romanticised happy families nirvana: just as today the abuse of power, jealousy, sexual rivalry and violence will have divided families and tribes and led to conflict. However, unlike today the young will have significantly contributed to the survival and well-being of the group. As Jonathan Kingdon argues so cogently in his book Self-Made Man and His Undoing children played a creative role in the design and development of early technology. All this was to change. The roots of children’s gradual demotion from active contributors to passive learners lie in ancient wheat and cornfields.

During the Mesolithic (10,000 to 8,000 BCE) piecemeal movements toward the domestication of plants and animals led to more sedentary lifestyles. Who knows it may have a bright-eyed child who first noticed discarded grains of wild emmer grass sprouting from a midden heap? Or an observant adolescent may have noticed a heavy foot unintentionally pressing a few scattered grains into silty Levantine soil, and later observed a verdant haze immerging. The domestication of wild grains took experimental and generational time: some argue it took centuries others suggest millennia. The only thing we can be sure of is that no members of any community engaged in proto plant and animal husbandry could have dreamed they were part of a revolution that would change the course of human history.

Then, as now, surviving from harvest to harvest was precarious. Many communities will have died from starvation when crops failed, and their untold stories lie trapped in soil glittering with quartz and feldspar delivered by the waters of the Tigris and the Euphrates.  Nevertheless, sticking around to see what the soil offered up was worth the risk: if things went well farming was tangibly easier and safer than hunting and gathering.  As in nomadic societies children would have been dynamic members of the agrarian workforce: their observations and efforts contributed the whole. Humans are excellent problem solvers. and with language offering the means to pass on helpful do’s and don’ts, the rhythm of days slowly shifted and there was time to play, to think, to create and to walk for pleasure.

Walking and relaxation play a profound in human thinking. As Barbara Oakley reminds us in her book A Mind for Numbers, “What’s crucial about the diffuse mode it can allow the brain to hook up and return valuable insights… it turns out, diffuse thinking what you often need to be able to solve a very difficult, new problem.”

We can suppose the human aptitude for focused and diffused thinking enabled these early farming communities to become the first selective breeders and inadvertent geneticists. Over generational time they became experts at producing robust crops. But constrained by the limits of their senses the nourishing union of visible and invisible life forms in the soil was beyond comprehension: this would  have had dire consequences. Scars on global landscapes continue to bear witness to humankind’s maltreatment of the earth’s soils.

The domestication of plants and animals enabled the development of creative cerebral and physical concepts and constructs in which nature, architecture,  science, engineering, economics, philosophy, ritual and art were entangled parts. It is highly probable that over time children’s contribution to the group was simply overwhelmed by scale: mammoth monuments required mature strength. Familial and tribal group structures were subsumed by large populations that required complex decision making and legislation.  Land conferred power on its owners, leaders arose, laws were written, accounts were drawn up, taxes were paid, spiritual leaders arose, and highly stratified hierarchies emerged. Children were consigned to the lower orders and their creative contributions to society were thwarted. Small bodies were more useful in the fields or caring for animals and only the offspring of the elite were educated in the new ways to ensure they were able to manage the power blood had bestowed on them and to promote development along paths prescribed by elders.

The Assyriologist Vitali Bartash argues:  “Childhood is more than just a biological stage in human development, it is also a social and political concept. Ancient Sumer was no exception.” Bartash has studied the socio-economic and political history of southern Mesopotamia between 3,300 and 2,000 BCE paying particular attention to children’s lives.  Fifteen hundred cuneiform texts reveal the impact of the rise of complex urban life on children. The records were kept by public servants and may be biased, nevertheless, the picture that emerges reveals an approach towards itinerate children that has a Dickensian familiarity. To keep homeless children from roaming the streets they were institutionally housed, clothed and fed and supported by temples or palaces. This benefited society as later the children joined the workforce: some as young as five. The children were predominantly the offspring of low-status individuals, slaves, semi-slaves, debtors, orphans and foundlings. They were legally free but with no education and limited funds they remained socially immobile. The data revealed education was valued. There are records of colourful educational institutions in Old Babylon offering instruction to children of the powerful. There are no formal records of the happy, loved, well-protected, curious, children who were supported and advised by caring adults, as they went about their daily lives. We have to picture those families for ourselves.  

No matter what their status is impossible to keep an enthusiastic learner down. It is in a child’s nature to observe, test, experiment, invent, create, question and challenge and those were vibrant times full of colour. Children’s hands and minds were occupied working in the fields, cutting canals, preserving food, making clay pots to store grain, weaving and dying cloth, creating jewellery with stones from mystic lands and problem-solving alongside members of their community.  Life was rich with experiences real and imagined. Stories told around evening fires gave birth to heroic poetry and well-recorded mythologies. Without attending formal school, the children of ancient Mesopotamia were absorbing wonders in a rapidly expanding world and acquiring skills they applied throughout their lifetime. It was an epoch of plenty: until the soil spat salt and the land cracked under the strain production.

However, the dominance of architecture and the rise of temples and palaces moved attention away from the earth and towards ideals dominated by imagination and aestheticism. The evolution of symbolic written language turned attention inwards and the maturation of mathematics open the floodgates to the stars. These shifts in intention generated new layers in upwardly mobile societies. Over time civilisation disconnected children from their natural place in the world, and they were relegated to developing under socially constructed systems. This practice became embedded and to this day informs how children receive formal education.