presented at the SEAL Conference Canterbury – March/April 2001

In this account, I shall sketch the broad relationship between the science that was presented to us at the conference and the educational paradigm of organic learning that is emerging. I will give some detail just to show how theory translates into practice. Chris Clarke and Joan Walton opened the conference with a presentation of the difference between the ‘old world-view’ of Newtonian science and the new quantum world-view – which has in fact taken almost a century to find general acceptance, and even now is only paid lip service by many, since the majority of scientists still fail to bring this consciousness into the centre of their personal experience and into their research.

The main ideas are summarised by Chris in Chart 1 below.

As Joan pointed out, the impact of science is not confined to those who have studied it; our whole educational process is deeply embued with Newtonian ideas and values. Since new science shows that the context (or learning environment) that we create evokes the things that happen within it, we realise that current educational realities are largely determined by the classroom and its conditions. This includes the attitudes, expectations and emotions of teachers as well as methods, tests and examinations used (cf. influence of observer on environment).

Traditional classrooms have students in rows of desks, working alone, doing as they are told, competing with each other, and using the same processes to reach the same answers – just as in the Old paradigm column in the chart. If we want to achieve the Implications shown in the table, we will have to create a context, or classroom, that produces the behaviours listed in the New paradigm column.

To give an idea of the direction that this might take, I have selected a few quotations from Brian Goodwin’s talk on the new view of the nature of complex systems. Complex systems include, of course, human beings, classrooms, and education in general:

· Complex systems are ‘intrinsically uncontrollable, intrinsically unpredictable’

· Within them, ‘chaos is not disorder but subtle order’. It involves ‘constant movement’

· ‘To attempt to control this leads to all the disasters we are now encountering. Technologies are very dangerous for this reason’

· Instead, ‘… let it guide you and let it emerge…’

· ‘Out of complexity comes simplicity in unpredictable forms’

· As for testing, ‘there is methodology that can explore how to have consensus … We must not impose, but find consensus’

· Classroom management: how do we interact with complex systems? ‘We must learn to participate with them via intuition’

 

Of course we are not advocating chaos in classrooms! But there are long-standing assumptions about order and control that need to be questioned. These ideas can also be applied to the way we present information in classrooms, and this is discussed below. Meanwhile, a few ideas from Dr Rosy Daniel, who spoke about the New Medicine, with particular reference to the treatment of cancer, her own speciality. Everything that she said about what promotes health can be related to education in the direction of what promotes learning.

The use of psycho-neuro-immunology (PNI), which explores the mind-body connection behind illness, is justified for the treatment of cancer on the basis of a simple syllogism:

- Psychological distress can suppress the immune system; this effect can be great enough to increase the effect of physical illness; - therefore people who learn mind/body /approaches can increase their immunological resistance to disease.

Lozanov, who is a medical doctor, has always said that one of the most important aspects of his work is to combat ‘didactogenic disease’. Mind/body well-being helps learning.

 Old paradigm            New paradigm                     Implications

Machine                               Organism                                               Relation to the world is modelled on relation to living creatures

Separate units                     Interconnection                                    Empathy, for people and other-than-humans, is physically real

Dr Rosy Daniel pinpointed four states of mind that constitute the classic ‘negative attitude’ associated with cancer: patients often suffer from feelings of helplessness, anxiety, fatalism (‘Nothing can be done about it’) and/or avoidance or denial of the reality of illness.

Returning to the parallel with learning, this is uncomfortably close to the state into which children are plunged at the beginning of a traditional school education, which loads them with tasks and anxieties at an early age.

The traditional system is so profoundly authoritarian, both for teachers (examinations, bureau-cratic demands, size of institutions) that those within it often feel helpless and powerless. In the Newtonian manner, students are also treated as if they were learning machines without feelings; their emotional life in response to the System is rarely addressed, although it has a profound effect on their capacity to learn.

Rosy showed that stress radically affects the body’s ability to cope. Schools nowadays have to cope with anonymity and endless herding of bodies from place to place as well as competition and testing, which make education stressful for everyone; the ‘sick’, those considered slower learners, have additional problems. Medical research shows the value of assertiveness, which is action against powerlessness and which dramatically reduces stress. Research of sibling pairs shows that the more assertive sibling is less likely to succumb to genetically-inherited illness and weakness. In classrooms, this would correspond with ‘learner autonomy’. Medical research also points to the influence of our physical energy on the way we think, which largely determines whether we succumb to illness or not. As energy drains away, we lose confidence and buoyancy. The reintroduction to modern medicine of ancient systems to maintain energy has made a great difference in cancer treatment: homeopathy, acupuncture and acupressure, shiatsu, yoga, kinesiology, flower remedies, etc. This concept is important to education too: how can we boost vitality and optimism? Kinesiology and yoga are already in use, with impressive results. In the early days of PNI, ‘positive thinking’ had a placebo effect: it worked for a while, but not always in the longer term. Now it is clear that emotional health involves the ability to face pain and anger as well as the pleasurable. Valium and prozac anaesthetise people from conditions such as depression or panic which are often due to accumulated unexpressed anger and frustration. The implication for education is that children need an emotional training which teaches them to acknowledge and accept the shadow side of their life, to recognise their own and others’ emotional displacement and projection, explore their judgments, express their hurt. We cannot learn to generate healthy emotional states until we understand the negative as well as the positive. Sadly, we remove from the curriculum subjects such as music, art and games, which used to provide outlets for emotional expression.

HeartMath, a system of treatment and research developed by cardiologists, shows that the heart’s electrical output is one hundred times stronger than that of the brain; heart activity dominates our whole system. When the heart is functioning well, it pulls other systems into entrainment with it, helping other organs to reach a harmonious state. Simply focusing attention on the heart in a calm and positive way has a dramatic effect on its action and long-term health, and on the whole body-mind complex. It is interesting that Steiner education advocates first and foremost that a heart connection be established with each child, which will inform all future interaction. A heart focus emphasises cooperation over competition, harmony, and constant search for mutual understanding. Finally, there is the spiritual aspect of medicine, led by the research from Harvard University on distant healing and the power of prayer. This shows ultimately, Rosy explained, that ‘every one of us is a cell in the body of the Universe’. Every thought we put out makes a difference both to our own health and that of others. Healing can take place through thought alone, radiated over distance and beyond the boundaries of time. In the classroom too, the thoughts we think make a difference for ourselves and for everyone in the group.

These are some of the general links between new science and new education. The old view that ‘Seeing is believing’ gives way to the new view that ‘Believing is seeing’: we see only those things that we already have a concept for, and which we are prepared to see. We need to recognise the power of our thought to affect the world, and take responsibility for it. In a situation of paradigm change, we cannot rely on merely changing the content of what we teach. The methods of teaching and the attitudes behind them, which are the embodiment of our fundamental beliefs, are instrumental in determining what gets across. In the words of Marshall McLuhan, ‘the medium is the message’. Many innovators in the 20^th century introduced new ways of doing things, most notably Rudolph Steiner. The reason why mainstream education did not pay more attention to these obviously excellent approaches is simply that they did not have the support of currently accepted science. Steiner’s is an organic approach which assumes that when the right conditions are provided, the organism will take its own course of healthy growth. Lozanov heads in the same direction in his different way. With a similar end in view, PNI addresses the subtle dimensions of illness – energy and thought – as well as the gross, and new science verifies this approach.

No 21st century educator would deny the existence of the unconscious mind and its vast influence on learning and behaviour. But in the absence of a science that could describe it in a systematic and practically usable way, we continued to teach from conscious mind to conscious mind as if the learner were a learning machine, which is to say devoid of needs, emotions and other neurological distractions.

A new science of psychology, which offered something of a quantum leap, emerged from London University in 1981 with the publication of NF Dixon’s PreConscious Processing (Norman Dixon presented at the SEAL conference in Brighton in 1995!), acclaimed in the USA and later used to develop remote viewing.

Unfortunately, it appeared at just the wrong moment, when universities were seeking a paradigm for the development of Artificial Intelligence. Thus it was eclipsed by the emergence of Cognitive NeuroScience, which regards thinking as rational and logical, a perfect basis for AI. This brought funding, new jobs and a rich field for research to cash-strapped universities. Its premise of rationality was famously attacked by Antonio Damasio in his book Descartes’ Error, but this did not appear until 1994.

Lozanov’s work in Bulgaria was based on pre-conscious science although he knew nothing of Dixon’s research; he was working through his own reaction to the Pavlovian tradition of the USSR. Assagioli in Italy was also thinking on exactly the same lines. Some of Dixon’s ideas are sketched very roughly below; you will see how they fall into place with Chris Clarke’s New column in the table of paradigm change. This was a first scientific attempt to cross the threshold between the conscious and unconscious mind. Dr Dixon was careful to confine it to the shallowest and most accessible area below awareness, the pre-conscious (the action that takes place in mind and body in the fractions of a second before we start to think or act). In America, where it is referred to as Unconscious Processing, this was seen as unnecessary caution.

Think of the mind as an iceberg, of which only the small tip appears above the water – to give some sense of the proportions involved. The tip is the part that carries conscious awareness; it is like a tiny misted window through which we can look into the vast complexity of the non-conscious. The major task of the brain, apart from overseeing the running of the human organism and intervening when things go wrong, is to take in information on the environment, sort it out and act on it. Millions of impressions are registered through our senses simul-taneously and without conscious awareness: all that we see, hear, feel, smell and taste. Most of these impressions are automatically stored in memory so that they are available for regular scanning and selection for conscious attention. Below the threshold of awareness seethes a perpetual frenetic activity, a continuous pouring in of information matched by the turmoil of items seeking for selection by endless kaleidoscoping into new patterns from which meaning can emerge.

Conscious awareness evolved to perform several functions, eg:

· to give us access to the end products of extensive pre-conscious activity

· to prioritise information, plan and prepare for action

· to set physical action in motion and direct that action when necessary

· to monitor the automated system, intervening when things go wrong

· to allow us to suppress information that might upset us or distract us from action (This is the basis for defence mechanisms such as projection and denial. There is not space in this article to explore these, but Dixon’s model makes them easy to identify and understand.)

 

Because we are conscious only of that of which we are conscious, we tend to assume that conscious awareness is all there is. In fact the conscious mind has severe limitations. It is a low-content, short-term buffer aimed at stimuli with action potential. Specialised for making quick judgements about the world that it perceives, and acting on them immediately, it likes to focus on one thing at a time. Prediction, generalisation, classification and simplification are major strengths. It seeks certainty and tends to be uncomfortable with ambiguity – but it can also teach itself to override its natural attitudes, and this is what counselling and facilitation training are all about. This is the mind developed by our ancestors, hunter-gatherers whose survival depended on such things as identifying the right plants to eat and defending against attack. Its skill in reduction preserves our sanity, protecting us from cognitive overload.

Only a tiny fraction of our mental activity becomes conscious. There are many layers in the unconscious mind. We use the term subconscious to indicate that which is just below the surface, active in thought and easily accessible. Unconscious points to the less accessible or firmly hidden; this includes memories from a whole lifetime, atavistic traces of our ancestors’ lives, the collective unconscious, archetypes, the mental residue of the species. Psycho-therapy reveals that the unconscious also harbours disturbing memories that we have deliberately hidden from awareness but which may nevertheless continue to influence every waking moment; these influences can be highly active while still almost totally inaccessible.

Lozanov, in his method of learning, aims at what he calls the para-conscious. This is the field of potential awareness that exists when the mind is only lightly focused so that it still remains receptive to other possibilities. This is our state of normal awareness when we are doing something that does not require careful thought – for Lozanov, non-didactic activities. He ensures that the target information is close to the surface, things that we are vaguely aware of and could focus on if we wanted to, but do not. At the same time we remain open to influences from the most profound depths of the psyche, which is why Lozanov uses games that can help recall of happy times from childhood. He deliberately avoids precision and focus in learning so as to keep the mind open to the richer, more voluminous and still ambiguous fields of information below awareness.

As in all threshold experience (an important concept in psychology), progress from one world, or dimension, to another tends to bring a reversal of rules. This is a particularly important point to understand in a situation of paradigm change. Operating on the basis of a Newtonian set of assumptions that we automatically employ in making decisions, we now need to be more conscious of what we are doing in a new-paradigm environment. Chris’ table shows some of the typical reversals of the way in which objects are seen to interact. When science found a way of measuring the infinitely small, below the range of the physical senses, it was crossing a threshold into the equivalent of the world of the unconscious

To give just one example: while reason and the conscious mind tend to select information on the basis of what makes logical sense, the major criterion at the non-conscious level, shared by the rest of the animal world and the plant world, is that which gives pleasure. At an unconscious level, we respond to everything in terms of the pleasure it offers us – and then translate that response into the terms of the dimension that is prominent in the interaction.

Thus, if the lesson is unpleasant, the child may resist it, albeit unconsciously, by going to sleep or ‘failing to understand’. Failure to understand fits with the language of lessons. It is well known in the world of remedial education that hearing problems are often due to a habit of tuning out the voice of a nagging parent. Lozanov usually responds to learning difficulties by giving more attention to the student and choosing activities in which he or she can excel, thereby pleasing a person who is obviously not happy.

Chart 2 shows the general reversals in crossing the threshold from conscious to unconscious. The intention is not, of course, to say that we must do everything as if for the unconscious; obviously the mind is always working in both modes. But if we are to deal with issues such as motivation and learner autonomy, which have very little to do with the conscious mind, we need to be aware of both sides of the coin. Brackets are used to show the relation to Chris Clarke’s analysis in Chart 1. If we assume that learning is largely unconscious and therefore decide to take this table seriously, we turn the classroom inside out and upside down:

• give students what they like, not just what is considered good for them

• move desks from rows to clusters

• allow constant movement and interaction, and much more self-direction

• reduce testing, prescribing, telling, correcting, even praising

• add creative/artistic/musical activity, which allows for the expression of dammed-up emotion (‘Art every day keeps the doctor away’!), gives incubation time for unconscious learning work in progress, and above all, engages the bottom-up processes of organic unfoldment.

active & controlling                                           –                 receptive, spontaneous, participatory

part analysis: build from part to whole                 –                 whole comes first: from whole to part

(focus on atoms, separate units)                         –                 (interconnection, patterns, fields)

low volume, reductive                                         –                 high volume

specificity (determinism/exact quantities)             –                 ambiguity (indeterminism/pattern)

recoding: interpretation/consistency                      –                no recoding: infiltration of the new

right/wrong; obsession with correctness               –                 errors are learning material

fixity (machine); preservation of concepts             –                organic plasticity: let it emerge

analytical: deeper into detail                                 –                creative: looking for new relationships

criterion for acceptance: Does it make sense?      –                 criterion: Does it give pleasure?

working mode: high focus, concentration             –                 working mode: relaxation

interaction: competitive (separating/ranking)         –                interaction: bonding is first impulse

focus: mental dominant                                         –               holistic: feeling, sensation, intuition dominant

viewpoint: objective                                             –               subjective

serial function predominates                                 –                 parallel function

A very important concept to grasp in of all of this is the direction of the flow of learning in the head. Traditional teaching (conscious-to-conscious) assumes a top-down direction, Lozanov’s approach is bottom-up. For the enthusiast, the different ways in which the unconscious and conscious minds arrive at conceptualisation is famously described by Lakoff and Johnson in their book Metaphors We Live By. Meanwhile, Chart 2 gives a very general idea.

Our minds have evolved to take in a specific narrow band of information that pertains to physical survival in a material world, and we naturally do this by walking about using eyes, ears and other senses to respond to what is around us. We take in information unconsciously, as shown in Dixon’s model, allowing the most useful and relevant to float up into awareness, using the conscious mind to assist this process. But this is not what happens in traditional classrooms. In classrooms we have to sit still, focus hearing and vision only on the teacher and write down or try to remember all that is said. This involves actively suppressing information from the unconscious (through senses other than ears) that is trying to make its way into awareness, often spending more energy in closing the mind than in receiving. It takes effort, especially if the talk is less than interesting, in which case the mind automatically fishes for more entertaining material in memory. The normal flow of information is from outside into the unconscious, and by selection up into conscious awareness. Selection in a natural state is largely bottom-up: items cluster together until by virtue of their collective volume and strength of signal, they self-select into conscious awareness. There is also a top-down process of semi-conscious scanning for relevance set off by a conscious or unconscious intention to seek out particular meanings; the brain is a compulsive problem solver and pattern maker, and is always busy looking for something.

The point is that the mind does all this of its own accord and in its own way. Teaching can either dovetail with this process, in which case learning is exhilarating and does not cause tiredness, or it can oppose it, in which case it is true to say that ‘One must suffer to learn’.

Traditional education favours opposition and suffering, which we often learn to enjoy, but which is less likely to produce the natural motivation that can be seen in small children ecstatically crashing among the saucepans. Montessori’s self-appropriated learning through games involving the manipulation of objects (bottom-up process) dovetails with the natural process. When we choose opposition, information is ‘pre-digested’, divided into elements which are then ‘spoon-fed’ from the teacher’s conscious mind to the learner’s conscious mind. The information transmitted is low-volume and is a part of a greater whole, which will be arrived at by accumulation.

 By contrast, Lozanov always shows the whole picture first, bombarding the brain with a high volume of information to disrupt the habit of focusing on elements – and to put across the information that learners will later have to retrieve by their own efforts. What Lozanov does not demand is the ability to parrot back what was transmitted, an unspoken requirement of traditional teaching – which has the effect of holding the mind on constant alert and rehearsal of information which blocks the natural learning process! He also presents information in such a way that the learner’s conscious mind is lightly distracted from the target learning material (eg concentrating on the thread or story of a text rather than the syntactic details which are the real target) in order to engage the para-conscious dimension of learning. In the natural world, I walk along a mountain path focusing lightly on getting from A to B and in the process I absorb, unconsciously, the information I need to respond to the conditions around me.

There are many innovators who work in a similar way, including Montessori and Steiner. Lozanov’s contribution lies in his meta-conscious awareness of what he is doing. He provides guidelines for a systematic application of holistic approaches, so that they are not simply hit-and-miss. He has also formulated ways of doing things in the classroom which help to maintain the wave form as long as possible before collapsing into particle form. An example of this is asking questions in a particular sequence so that the mind of the responder remains in para-conscious mode until the last possible moment, prolonging the bottom-up process. These techniques must be scrupulously non-manipulative if they are to build learner autonomy in an organic way, and once again, Lozanov provides a solid framework for understanding what is and is not manipulative. Understanding this focus is the kernel of Lozanov’s ‘superlearning’. It is relatively easy to make learners feel better about themselves and learning, but in order to achieve the extraordinary results that Lozanov achieved in his early work, the detail must be in place and bottom-up principles rigorously applied.

 Of course, many of these things used to be done instinctively in schools. What has happened over the years is quantitative increase without qualitative reassessment:

· in the size of institutions: we closed the small schools

· in the quantity of examinations: according to the Independent, children in the UK who leave school at 18 will now have taken 75 public tests or examinations!

Relying on the general ideas and quantitative verification of old science, subjects that could not be justified in academic terms were dropped from the curriculum. What we are now beginning to realise is that arts, crafts and sports address unconscious aspects of mind which are fundamental to psychological well-being, motivation, creativity and the higher intellect.

Control is something that the conscious mind does automatically since it has to select and reduce information; meditation teaches us how to let go, consciously, of that control. In response to threat or demand, the mind steps up controlling activity; stress mounts quickly in competitive environments. Teachers who feel insecure impose heavy control on children, and governments who feel insecure impose heavy assessment on both teachers and children. In the brain, control is like focusing down the lens of the mind, which reduces peripheral receptivity, and with it creativity and learning – with the exception of rote learning. A certain amount of control is normal and healthy, but the tendency to control comes from having a lot of repressed emotional material, such as anger which has never been allowed expression. The only way, over the very long term, to reduce controlling is once again, by developing EQ.

Competition ‘works’ in highly controlled environments which rely on top-down process. It does not work for organic approaches relying more on the bottom-up. The basic principle of an organic approach is that the human organism, just like a seed or fruit, contains its own pattern for perfect growth, which will unfold unless it is obstructed. In the new medicine, to quote an example from Deepak Chopra, when the body produces cascades of biochemicals in fractions of a second too small to count, our interventions through drugs are never more than clumsy and inadequate and very often harmful; a better solution is to learn how to harness the body’s own exquisite self-healing processes. For example, valium and prozac anaesthetise the mind so that the emotional conditions behind the disorders it treats are numbed into inactivity; development of EQ enables us to understand, deal with and delight in our emotional life – and will have immense long-term consequences for self and society. Lozanov believes that if the classroom is sufficiently protective, nurturing and stimulating, the individual organism will find what it needs for its own growth – and blossom in its own way and at its own speed.

This is not at all the same as the 19th century notion of ‘laisser faire’, which had no psychological basis or concept of direction; it is no good giving freedom to the child whose autonomy has already been eroded. The responsibility of the school is to provide an environment in which autonomy is supported and rewarded. For Lozanov this always includes opportunities for expression through the arts, psycho-dynamically an invitation to the unconscious to reveal its excellence, and emotionally an opportunity to release tensions built up through the normal action of defence mechanisms, and which block or distort the learning process. An inspiring description of teaching in this way, albeit through intuition rather than science, can be found in Sylvia Ashton-Warner’s book Teacher, recently reprinted by Touchstone. Sylvia Ashton-Warner was an Englishwoman who taught Maori five-year-olds in New Zealand in the 1930s. She described these children as small volcanoes with two principal vents, one of destructiveness and the other of creativity; when the creative aspect was developed, the destructive would atrophy. All the classroom projects were based on language and concepts from the children’s own life, that which deeply engaged them, and all was elaborated using their own extraordinary abilities in such things as song and dance. This eventually produced skilled and disciplined as well as passionate adults. The science that she arrived at through her own personal sensitivity and wisdom is the science that was presented and explored at the SEAL conference in Canterbury in 2001.

ghooperhansen@aol.com