Born to learn

 

Vocabulary

• thereabouts: environ
• grown-up: adulte
• desperate to: désespéré de
• knock togheter: entrechoquer
• to pull apart: démonter  
• going along with what: qui est en accord avec
• the longing to: le désir de
• to walk out the door: prendre la porte
• pliable: docile 
• bewilder: dérouter, rendre perplexe  
• exhilarating:  exhaltant, grisant, enivrant
• to bear in mind: garder à l'esprit

Transcript

Ever feel like you're capable of far more than what society expects of you?

I know I do, remember being a teenager and school being less about a passion to learn and more about getting good grades. How many times did you sit in class bored and desperate to just get away?

Every teens felt that. Albert Einstein acted on it.Aged just fifteen he's sitting in class when all of us sudden, he decides enough is enough, gets up and walks right out the door, he never goes back.

Remember being a kid and just wanting to play around with stuff, pulling things apart, knocking things together and to the grown-ups saying no, no or being called “good” for sitting still or “naughty” when you couldn’t bear to sit still any longer. It’s all completely well-intentioned of course but that doesn't make it any less insane because the fact is, our capacity to create and learn knows no bounds and the latest research proves it.

The invention of MRI scans, only in the past twenty five years, has allowed scientists to see which part of the brain is used by different kinds of thinking.

We now know infinitely more than we did about how we learn and what makes up human intelligence and it's extraordinary. So, want to know what you’re really capable of?

Let's start at the beginning. A baby's brain is amazing, it doesn't take nine months to create, it takes seven million years and around three hundred and fifty thousand generations.

All the skills, knowledge and talents cultivated by our ancestors are stored inside it. These are like numerous software programs which can only be activated by the baby engaging with its environment, here's the striking thing, if not activated at the most appropriate time, they simply disappear.

Take language, if a child doesn't hear language by around the age of eight, they may never learn to speak. So you can see just how important our interactions are, they ignite our dormant intelligence and they reinforce it too.

There's something else. We have evolved to learn by looking at things from different perspectives and making connections between things and we do that through play.

So wouldn't it be amazing if we bore all this in mind when raising kids, letting them play when they're little and when they're older too.

Charles Darwin's teacher did never amount too much because he spent too much time playing with insects. So let children play because it's never just play, of course it takes more time and energy to do this but when you’re deciding where to focus resources for kids learning, you couldn't do better than focusing on pre-puberty, that's when we learn by copying the people around us, after twelve or thereabouts it's all changed.

Say goodbye to pliable easy child and hello rebellious challenging teenager. Huu, where do those cute babies go. Ah well, let's have another look at that brain. See what's happening?

Loads of the connections made through childhood are breaking up and reforming. From around the age of about twelve through twenty, the equivalent of an earthquake takes place in a young person's brain, no more going along with what the grown-ups say.

The adolescent brain needs to go its own way. Oh no say parents, Oh yes say evolutionary scientists because if we hadn't developed this urge to do things differently, we would never made it this far. Up until about sixty or seventy thousand years ago, it was fine for children to grow up like their parents but then along came the last ice age, Thank goodness for that handful of our ancestors who chose to break away from their doomed parents freezing to death in the ancestral caves.

They built rafts and set off across the ocean hoping to find a place with a warmer climate. Critically this made “risk taking” the essential feature of adolescence. We shouldn't bewilder adolescence, we should be honoring it for what it really is: the defining struggle,  the moment when the next generation challenges the status quo and pioneers new ways of thinking and being that ensure our survival.

Now just imagine if we actually gave adolescents the freedom to undertake that's struggle rather than force them to sit passively in class. How about trusting that their earlier “clone like” learning now enables adolescent to spread their wings and works things out for themselves? If that sounds terrifying, it needn't be because if we allow their natural curiosity to flourish in childhood they will be bursting with the longing to learn and climb unscaled mountains of the mind and that's not scary, that’s exhilarating, this is the way we've evolved to be, it’s what makes us fulfilled well-adjusted human beings.

Let’s stop trying to live in a way that still goes against how we’re hardwired to live. Let's allow ourselves and the next generation to reclaim the incredible gift of our ancestors. Adolescence is not a problem but it’s an opportunity.