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122: On Self-Directed Education & "What Works" w/ Dr. Naomi Fisher
20 Plays2 years ago
This conversation comes at an interesting time in the broader context of the future of education. In the wake of progress 8 results in the UK and NAEP scores in the United States, there appears to be a narrowing of educational possibilities toward a very particular model of schooling, or at least a model whose proponents have been the loudest in proclaiming victory. It has has gone by many names over the years but recently solidified under the umbrella of #ResearchEd or the “science of learning”. The claim here is that we understand and agree upon the ends of education - that is to raise standardized achievement scores - and it’s simply a matter of aligning the means around “what works” to close gaps, raise scores - and at least in the context of pandemic schooling since 2020 - combat & reverse “learning loss”. “What works” of course, is the reiteration of adult authority with a laser focus on high expectations and results, the centrality of explicit/direct instruction, and above all a strict approach to school discipline. It’s a model listeners in the United States might associate with Doug Lemov’s Teach Like a Champion and listeners in the UK with Katharine Birbalsingh’s Michaela School, where I imagine the notion of a self-directed education would be greeted with the same incredulity as geocentrism.
Bolstered by these measures of success in national contexts, this model is increasingly decontextualized and exported as the solution to educational ills the world over.
GUESTS
Dr. Naomi Fisher is a clinical psychologist and mother of two self-directed learners. She has a Doctorate in Clinical Psychology and a PhD in Developmental Cognitive Psychology, focusing on autism. She combines years of hands-on experience of self-directed education with an in-depth knowledge of the psychology of learning and well-being. Her work has been published in The Green Parent, The Psychologist, SEN Magazine, Juno and Tipping Points. She is a regular speaker on self-directed education, presenting at the Freedom to Learn Forum, Homeschooling Summit, and recently was a keynote at the Rethinking Education Conference in London. She is also the author of “Changing Our Minds: How Children Can Take Control of Their Own Learning”, which I would highly recommend, and the upcoming book “A Different Way to Learn: Neurodiversity and Self-Directed Education” to be published in 2023.
RESOURCES
Recommended
Transcript
The Impact of Educational Pressure on Children
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So I see some young children who, you know, they're pulling their hair out or they're chewing their sleeves to shreds because they're so worried about things like I'm going to be moved off the sun or I'm not going to get 10 out of 10 on my spelling test.
00:00:13
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And I found myself thinking there's something really wrong with this system where we're creating this anxiety in kids.
00:00:20
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And then they're sending them to someone like me, a clinical psychologist, to try and fix that.
00:00:24
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Wouldn't it be so much more efficient if we could think about what's this environment that we're putting our kids in?
00:00:30
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Is it one that's conducive to flourishing?
00:00:33
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Because really, mental health is about flourishing, I think.
Introduction to Human Restoration Project Podcast Episode 122
00:00:38
Speaker
Hello and welcome to episode 122 of our podcast at the Human Restoration Project.
00:00:43
Speaker
My name is Nick Covington and I'm the creative director for the Human Restoration Project.
00:00:47
Speaker
Before we get started, I wanted to let you know that this is brought to you by our supporters, three of whom are Darren Ushinowski, Julia Valenti, and Michelle Edwards.
00:00:56
Speaker
Thank you for your ongoing support.
Standardized Scores and Their Impact on Education
00:00:59
Speaker
You can learn more about the Human Restoration Project on our website, humanrestorationproject.org, and connect with us to continue the conversation on our Discord, TikTok, Twitter, and beyond.
00:01:11
Speaker
This conversation comes in an interesting time in the broader context of the future of education.
00:01:17
Speaker
In the wake of Progress 8 results in the UK and NAEP scores in the United States, there appears to be a narrowing of educational possibilities toward a very particular model of schooling, or at least a model whose proponents have been the loudest in proclaiming victory.
00:01:33
Speaker
It has gone by many names over the years, but recently solidified under the umbrella of hashtag research ed or the science of learning.
00:01:41
Speaker
The claim here is that we understand and agree upon the ends of education, that is to raise standardized achievement scores.
00:01:48
Speaker
And it's simply a matter of aligning the means around what works to close gaps, raise scores, and at least in the context of pandemic schooling since 2020, combat and reverse learning loss.
00:02:00
Speaker
What works, of course, is the reiteration of adult authority with a laser focus on high expectations and results, the centrality of explicit direct instruction, and above all, a strict approach to school discipline.
00:02:13
Speaker
It's a model listeners in the United States might associate with Doug Lamov's Teach Like a Champion and listeners in the UK with Catherine Burblesing's Michaela School, where I imagine the notion of a self-directed education would be greeted with the same incredulity as geocentrism.
00:02:30
Speaker
Bolstered by these measures of success in national contexts, this model is increasingly decontextualized and exported as the solution to educational ills the world over.
Introduction to Dr. Naomi Fisher and Her Work
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I am joined today by Dr. Naomi Fisher.
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Dr. Fisher is a clinical psychologist and mother of two self-directed learners.
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She has a doctorate in clinical psychology and a PhD in developmental cognitive psychology, focusing on autism.
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She combines years of hands-on experience of self-directed education with an in-depth knowledge of the psychology of learning and well-being.
00:03:04
Speaker
Her work has been published in The Green Parent, The Psychologist, Sen Magazine, Juno, and Tipping Points.
00:03:11
Speaker
She is a regular speaker on self-directed education, presenting at the Freedom to Learn Forum, Homeschooling Summit, and recently was a keynote at the Rethinking Education Conference in London.
00:03:22
Speaker
She is also the author of Changing Our Minds, How Children Can Take Control of Their Own Learning, which I would highly recommend, and the upcoming book, A Different Way to Learn, Neurodiversity and Self-Directed Education, to be published in 2023.
00:03:37
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Thank you so much for joining me today, Naomi.
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Thank you.
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It's really great to be here.
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Your background, Naomi, as a clinical psychologist working with young people, your cognitive psychology PhD focusing on autism, and as a self-directed learning advocate and parent puts you in a fascinating position of seeing the structures and outcomes of what works in an entirely
Addressing Systemic Issues in Education vs. Psychological Interventions
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different light.
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So let's start that conversation with your work as a clinical psychologist and how that informs your understanding of the science of learning,
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the impact of what works and how that's compatible with your advocacy for self-directed learning?
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Wow.
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Well, that's a big question to start with.
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So, I mean, people often say that to me.
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They say, hang on, you're a clinical psychologist, not an educational psychologist.
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Why are you even talking about this?
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And I think it's a really good point, which kind of gets to the nub of it, which is that, so I don't know if it's the same in the US, but in the UK,
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Clinical psychologists are located within the health system.
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Educational psychologists work in the school system, whereas when I worked in the National Health Service, I was based in a hospital or in a clinic, and I would see all sorts of people, adults and children, who were distressed, who had mental health problems.
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And one of the things which started to bother me, and actually has bothered me right away since the beginning of my clinical career,
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is how much we tend to locate problems that children and adolescents have particularly in them rather than in the systems around them.
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So right now I see quite a lot of children and adolescents in my private practice and there's a tendency for them, particularly they come because they're struggling with school.
Critique of School-Induced Anxiety and Rigid Structures
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I see a lot of people who are struggling with school attendance and generally they're sent to me because I'm meant to provide some kind of therapy which is meant to stop them struggling with school.
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So it's about, you know, this child is anxious.
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How can we make them less anxious so they can go back into school?
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The more I thought about this and the more I thought about the school system and I had my own experience of deciding not to send my own children into it, the more I thought, but hang on, we've got this system which is basically creating anxiety.
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In fact, it doesn't just create it, it uses anxiety.
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So most teachers won't necessarily think that that's what they're doing.
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But from very early on, young children are told, you know, unless you do the things that we want you to do at school, you aren't going to get a good job later on.
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Or at a more immediate level, unless you do the things that we want you to do at school, you'll get a detention or your name will be written on the board or your name will be moved from the sun to the clouds because we want to show you that you need to do what we tell you to do.
00:06:16
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And some children become highly anxious about that.
00:06:19
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So I see some young children who, you know, they're pulling their hair out or they're chewing their sleeves to shreds because they're so worried about things like I'm going to be moved off the sun or I'm not going to get 10 out of 10 on my spelling test.
00:06:32
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And I found myself thinking there's something really wrong with this system where we're creating this anxiety in kids and then they're sending them to someone like me, a clinical psychologist, to try and fix that.
00:06:43
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Wouldn't it be so much more efficient if we could think about what's this environment that we're putting our kids in?
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Is it one that's conducive to flourishing?
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Because really mental health is about flourishing, I think.
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You know, when people come to see me, it's often about how can we be less anxious or how can we be less depressed or how can we get over our symptoms of trauma?
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But really what we want is we want young people to
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particularly to be able to flourish and grow in a way where we're not trying to create anxiety all the time.
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And unfortunately, what's happening with our school system, I think, is it's getting more and more rigid, more and more children are struggling with it.
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And there's a lot of talk in the UK, certainly about mental health crises, about how unhappy our young people are, how unhappy our teenagers are.
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And I would agree.
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I think they are very unhappy, a lot of them.
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And what we're not looking at is what are we doing to them, particularly in school, which is making them so unhappy.
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And people sometimes say to me, often say to me, actually, oh, why are you looking at school?
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Why aren't you looking outside school?
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What about families and everything?
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And I think
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The thing is that school is something which is provided by the state.
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It's something that we make, almost all children, we make them do it.
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It's compulsory.
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You have to be there.
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What an amazing opportunity that is, really.
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You know, what an incredible chance that could be to say, let's work.
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This could be the most amazing time for you.
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You come to school and you could learn about yourself.
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You could learn about the world.
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You could learn about everything.
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And instead, what we're doing is narrowing it down to let's get you those exams.
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You know, we've got to do whatever we can do so you get the exam results at the end.
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And I just think that's a real tragedy.
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And I think I talk about it as being like the side effects of school that I see in my practice.
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I see the bits that nobody wants to look at.
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And when people talk about evidence-informed practice, they almost never talk about what does the impact on these young people's mental well-being of what we are doing to them at school.
00:08:40
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Nobody comes to ask me, you know, when I was working in these clinics, I worked in a clinic in East London, teaching hospital, we were seeing all these kids.
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There was no feedback between us and the system.
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You know, no one ever said to you, so what are the things that children are reporting?
00:08:54
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And we couldn't say, well, actually, you know what?
00:08:56
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The children are saying they are utterly stressed out of their mind by these exams.
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They're saying that they are thinking about this all the time.
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There was no, there's no system which says that's actually a result of the system just as much as those exam results.
00:09:09
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And you say that then we situate those problems inside the student to be fixed by someone like yourself outside of that education system and then put them right back in the same thing.
Limitations of Behaviorism in Education
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It's like taking someone out of a burning building, putting the fire out and then saying, right back in and go.
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Absolutely.
00:09:28
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Yeah, we fixed you.
00:09:29
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And it's more than that.
00:09:30
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It's saying this time, I think you should put on some better protective clothing and just wear that.
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And if you do that well enough, you'll get through okay.
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So we kind of, we put the onus on them, not just to recover, but also to protect themselves against it when they go back into it.
00:09:44
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And something you write about in Changing Our Minds is the notion that those structures of school are really a thing that precedes any sort of sense that education should be an evidence-based practice in the first place.
00:09:57
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And what the great irony is then as the more that those test scores sort of bolster that notion of what works, which is those structures and systems that were established before,
00:10:10
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our current understanding of the impacts on kids, it all kind of revolves around what B.F.
00:10:15
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Skinner's behaviorism, doesn't it?
00:10:17
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So I wonder if you could go into that a little bit.
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So what is it about behaviorism that places itself at the center of school?
00:10:26
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You were mentioning the
00:10:27
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the stars and points and moving you from the sun to the clouds.
00:10:33
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I'd never heard that one.
00:10:34
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But then what is the off-ramp from that that we could rebuild things around?
00:10:38
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In lieu of that, if we move away from behaviorism, understanding the side effects and the consequences, what is the counter-narrative to that that we could build flourishing school systems
Self-Directed vs. Traditional Education Models
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around?
00:10:49
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So I think that a key thing is that the moment our school system is based around the idea we must make young people burn,
00:10:56
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We must make them learn things that they don't necessarily want to learn for their own good.
00:11:01
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And that starts really early on.
00:11:03
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So when we have our in the UK, when we have our five year olds, they go into year one, which is the first year of kind of school proper.
00:11:09
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Before that, it's a bit more play based.
00:11:11
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And we start saying to them, you know, now is the time you've got to have to learn to read.
00:11:15
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You have to learn to do these things.
00:11:16
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We sit them down and we set up a system that is really almost the antithesis of what children would be doing by themselves at that stage.
00:11:25
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So if you have a group of five and six year olds, they're going to play, basically.
00:11:29
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They're going to do all sorts of different kinds of play, but they will be playing.
00:11:31
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So we've created this system where we say, instead of playing, the playing is just the trivial thing.
00:11:37
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The real work here is when you're seated in a desk and listening to a teacher and doing things like writing and reading, which five and six year olds find really hard.
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You know, this is...
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It goes against the grain for most five and six years, not all of them, but a lot of them.
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And also a lot of them at that stage, they're not really, they don't really see the point.
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You know, you can live a very happy five-year-old life without being able to read and write.
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So it's all about the future.
00:12:01
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We take the learning out of context.
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So we say, you know, in the future, you will need to be able to learn to read and write.
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So we're going to teach you now.
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And we're going to take it out of context.
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And we're going to teach you the system, which is also out of context, which isn't about the words you find really useful and interesting.
00:12:16
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It's about the words that we think you're going to find easiest to learn to read.
00:12:19
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We're going to teach you those ones first.
00:12:21
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And all of those things make learning a lot harder.
00:12:23
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And when we do that, in order to get children to comply, we have to control the children.
00:12:28
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And that's where the behaviorism comes in.
00:12:30
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We have to basically find a whole system of ways to keep children doing the things we want to do.
00:12:37
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And so we set up this elaborate system of rewards and punishments.
00:12:41
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We do have people do tell me a lot about charts they have on the walls or traffic light systems where young children will be on the red if they're, you know, and then they move to the green and it's all in public and it's all very much something that children really feel.
00:12:54
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And we have to do that because we've decided that education should be something that you have to be made to do.
00:13:02
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So the flip side, so what I talk about in my book
00:13:05
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is self-directed education.
00:13:07
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And that's something that's often really misunderstood.
00:13:10
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But basically, the way I define self-directed education is it's education where the learner is in charge of choosing what they learn, how they learn it, and they can choose when to stop.
00:13:20
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So it's not about just, you know, it doesn't preclude anything.
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It doesn't preclude going to a very, very structured school, if that's what you want to do.
00:13:30
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It doesn't preclude taking classes.
00:13:32
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It doesn't preclude being taught.
00:13:33
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What it precludes is being made to do those things.
00:13:36
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And once you take away that element of compulsion, things start to look really different because the task is no longer for schools.
00:13:44
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A lot of the task is how do we get children into school?
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How do we keep them there?
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And how do we make them behave well enough whilst they're there?
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The task is entirely different with self-directed education.
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The task is how do we help this child learn?
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Basically, that's it.
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And however that's working for them right now, how do we help them do more of it?
00:14:01
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And it really is that open.
00:14:03
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So when we see with self-directed education is that it's a rare five or six-year-old who says, I want to be taught to read.
00:14:09
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Very rare.
00:14:10
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There are five or six-year-olds who learn how to read because they want to, but they don't usually say, I want to be taught how to read.
00:14:17
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They usually will be pulling in learning from all sorts of different places.
00:14:22
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So my own children learned to read much later than they would have done if they were at school.
00:14:26
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But they did it very much through their own process.
00:14:29
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So my son started learning to read from road signs.
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He looked up, actually, he learned to read from Minecraft, but he recognized it from road signs.
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I think I write that story in my book.
00:14:37
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So he would, one day he just looked up at a road sign and he was like, does that say zombie?
00:14:42
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And I was like, no, that's odd.
00:14:43
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Zombie in the road?
00:14:44
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Probably not.
00:14:45
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And it said zone.
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And I was like, oh, you're learning to read.
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He's picking it up.
00:14:51
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Because in Minecraft, I don't know if you've played Minecraft, but all the...
00:14:55
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work that everything has a label it's very clever so it says zombie so my children learned to read words like obsidian quite early on um and in fact the first words that my children learned how to read was the word free because on the ipad if you want to buy a game that's free so when they were to really quite small they would come and say look it's free and i'd be like yep it is
00:15:17
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In the book, what I love is you actually kind of set up like the cognitive, the motivational, the like, because so much of the training in the context of school is set up to reinforce a particular behaviorist way of learning.
00:15:33
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It's built around this, you know, so-called, I'll put it in big square quotes here, the science of learning, only because I think it's, not that it's not scientific, but I think it's a very narrow slice of what the science actually says about how kids learn.
00:15:45
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But then builds this kind of self-reinforcing structure that as soon as you deviate it, it kind of moves into that language of like, oh, this activity or this learning task doesn't work because it doesn't fit into that system.
00:15:57
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This way of learning doesn't work.
00:15:59
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Project-based learning, self-education doesn't work.
00:16:02
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So what then, in the book, you actually build those structures and say like, hey, parents, here's actually...
00:16:09
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the framework that self-directed learners use through self-determination theory and things like that.
00:16:15
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Could you unpack a little bit of that?
00:16:17
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Because I find that absolutely fascinating.
00:16:18
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So I suppose one of the things which I think is really key about this what works idea is what does it mean to work?
00:16:24
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What do we mean if an education works?
00:16:27
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And typically what people mean when they say what works is what gets the best exam results.
00:16:32
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And the problem, there's a big problem with that idea, actually.
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And the biggest problem is that
00:16:37
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everybody is never going to get the best exam result.
00:16:40
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So I find that the whole pressure for achievement and success and everything, I find really difficult because the kids I work with are often those who aren't doing very well.
00:16:49
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And there's often this push that everything is about doing well in those final exams and those final tests.
00:16:56
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And no recognition, particularly in the UK, I don't know if it's the same way you are, but a third of our young people fail GCSEs.
00:17:02
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And that's because they're set up like that.
00:17:04
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The exams that they take at 16, the exams are graded on a curve, basically.
00:17:08
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Oh, OK.
00:17:09
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A third of them have to fail.
00:17:11
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Otherwise, you know, that's how it is, whatever happens.
00:17:14
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So when when a school really does amazingly well and raises their exam results, that means there's going to be kids somewhere else whose school whose exam results are going to have dropped because that's how it works.
00:17:25
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And yet our system never seems to have acknowledged that this is a problem.
00:17:30
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You know, we've got all these young people coming through the system and we've got a system that ends up with quite a heavy percentage of them, a high percentage of them failing.
Challenges in Personalized Learning and Cognitive Science
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what works for them?
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Because we can't just say, oh, well, if they'd worked harder, they would succeed.
00:17:46
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We just can't because they're not able to succeed.
00:17:49
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And also because the way that school works, a lot of it is about ranking.
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So a lot of it is about sorting people out.
00:17:56
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Who goes to the best university?
00:17:57
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Who goes to the top colleges?
00:17:59
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Who goes to the next rank down?
00:18:00
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Who doesn't go at all because they failed?
00:18:03
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That's what happens at school.
00:18:04
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So we can't just pretend that that doesn't happen.
00:18:07
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We can't just say, you could all be the best.
00:18:09
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They can't be.
00:18:10
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They just can't be.
00:18:12
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So where my thinking comes from is if we just acknowledge that and we say they can't all be the best, that's not going to happen.
00:18:19
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They're not all going to succeed on the same terms.
00:18:21
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It can't happen.
00:18:22
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It's not possible.
00:18:23
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So then what do we want to do with education?
00:18:25
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Because at the moment, we've got a system that focuses on what works as being this acquiring of information,
00:18:30
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And that's where the science of learning stuff comes in.
00:18:33
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So the science of learning is, as people talk about it, or I often see it, hashtag cog sci, cognitive science.
00:18:39
Speaker
It's the science of acquiring information.
00:18:43
Speaker
And it's the science of information processing.
00:18:47
Speaker
Well, as you know, I've studied quite a lot of psychology and cognitive psychology does exactly what it's, it describes that process of acquiring information and learning information processing with models.
00:19:00
Speaker
I mean, none of it is real, right?
00:19:01
Speaker
It's all models.
00:19:02
Speaker
Psychologists are very into models that help you think about things, but it doesn't necessarily map onto the brain or anything like that.
00:19:08
Speaker
But actually most of the studies that were done looking at all that cognitive science, they weren't done on children at all.
00:19:14
Speaker
Most of them were done on university undergraduates, I think.
00:19:17
Speaker
I certainly when I was at university, I took part in quite a lot of those kind of studies.
00:19:21
Speaker
We could we were paid to do it.
00:19:22
Speaker
And so they kind of take this acquisition of information completely out of context.
00:19:28
Speaker
They say the point of school is to acquire a lot of information.
00:19:32
Speaker
This is the science that tells us the most efficient way to acquire lots of information.
00:19:36
Speaker
So that's what we must do.
00:19:37
Speaker
And we're going to do it.
00:19:38
Speaker
But it doesn't take into account that around this kind of model of acquiring information is a person, and it's a child.
00:19:46
Speaker
And actually, should education be about acquiring as much information as you can so that you can show it as best you can at the end?
00:19:54
Speaker
Because as I've just said, the problem with that system is not everybody can succeed.
00:19:59
Speaker
They just can't.
00:20:00
Speaker
It's not possible.
00:20:01
Speaker
So do we want that?
00:20:03
Speaker
Do we want a system that tells quite a high percentage of our teenagers at the end you failed?
00:20:10
Speaker
And in fact, it tells them a lot quicker than that because they know.
00:20:13
Speaker
they know quite early on that they're not the clever ones, the bright ones.
00:20:17
Speaker
They know all of that.
00:20:19
Speaker
And it's a really soul-destroying way to spend your formative years, I think, knowing that you are not going to be one of the stars.
00:20:27
Speaker
And I think people will often say, well, you know that you've got to change your mindset.
00:20:30
Speaker
You could do it.
00:20:30
Speaker
They can't.
00:20:31
Speaker
They can't all do it.
00:20:31
Speaker
It's not possible.
00:20:33
Speaker
One person can do it, but if one person goes up, another person comes down.
00:20:37
Speaker
It's how it is.
00:20:38
Speaker
So do you want me to go on and talk about that motivation?
00:20:41
Speaker
Yes, please.
00:20:42
Speaker
Okay, so that's the cognitive science bit.
00:20:44
Speaker
So the bit that I think is missing that is why do we do it?
00:20:47
Speaker
What makes us want to learn?
00:20:49
Speaker
And I think that that with children is absolutely fundamental.
00:20:52
Speaker
And I think unfortunately, the way we organize our school takes away a lot of the motivation of why they learn things.
00:20:57
Speaker
So if you look at young children, they learn because they want to participate in the world.
00:21:02
Speaker
They learn to talk because they want to communicate with us.
00:21:04
Speaker
They learn to walk because they want to get from place A to place B. Everything has purpose because they, and that's why they do it.
00:21:10
Speaker
And then, and their play is like that.
00:21:12
Speaker
So they acquire skills as they play because they want to, they want to play.
00:21:16
Speaker
They want to enjoy what they want to be able to do what they're doing.
00:21:18
Speaker
You know, some children will draw pictures for hours and hours and hours and will become really highly skilled at drawing pictures.
00:21:23
Speaker
Others will become amazing building Lego models.
00:21:26
Speaker
or others will get really good at cycling, or, you know, they do all sorts of different things, but they do it because it's important to them.
00:21:35
Speaker
They don't do it left to their own devices.
00:21:38
Speaker
They rarely do it because someone says, I really think you should get better at drawing.
00:21:41
Speaker
Why don't you sit down and practice?
00:21:42
Speaker
In fact, once you start doing that with children, you immediately come across a problem, basically.
00:21:47
Speaker
They're basically immediately saying,
00:21:49
Speaker
don't want to do it.
00:21:50
Speaker
So I think the question of why people do what they do is really important.
Understanding Self-Determination Theory in Learning
00:21:54
Speaker
And there's this whole other field of psychology called self-determination theory, where these scientists, Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, looked at what is it that means that people want to do things, really?
00:22:06
Speaker
What is it that leads someone to be intrinsically motivated as opposed to externally motivated?
00:22:14
Speaker
And when we were talking about the rewards and punishments and kind of behavioural behaviourism, that's very much the external motivation type of thing.
00:22:21
Speaker
The internal motivation is when you're doing something because you want to do it.
00:22:25
Speaker
And there's a whole spectrum of that, which I go into my book.
00:22:28
Speaker
So people often say to me, you mean that they just just do things they want to do all the time?
00:22:32
Speaker
You know, how are they ever going to learn how to get a job if they just do things they want to do all the time?
00:22:36
Speaker
But actually, it's far more complex than that, because it's also about things like
00:22:42
Speaker
My son, for example, practices the piano a lot.
00:22:44
Speaker
He actually really enjoys practicing the piano, but he practices it partly because he wants to get better at it.
00:22:49
Speaker
And that is also internally driven in that he's like, I want to get better at this goal.
00:22:53
Speaker
So I'm going to do this.
00:22:55
Speaker
So it's not just internal, intrinsic motivation isn't just about I'm doing this right now because I really love doing it.
00:23:01
Speaker
It's also about what is important to me, what has value to me and therefore what am I going to do?
00:23:07
Speaker
which is a really different thing to, I will give you this reward if you practice the piano.
00:23:12
Speaker
You know, if you practice the piano every day for a week, I'll pay you 10 pounds.
00:23:15
Speaker
That is extrinsic motivation.
00:23:18
Speaker
Whereas I'm going to practice the piano every day to week because I want to learn how to play this piece.
00:23:22
Speaker
That's internally.
00:23:24
Speaker
And that's much higher quality.
00:23:25
Speaker
So what they found in their research is when motivation is internally driven, you get higher quality learning.
00:23:31
Speaker
They did a lot of work with people at work.
00:23:33
Speaker
You get higher quality work.
00:23:35
Speaker
And yet what we're doing in schools is we're deliberately taking these really self motivated children and we're making them externally motivated.
00:23:43
Speaker
So it's another way we're just saying we make learning harder in schools.
00:23:48
Speaker
We make it harder and then we blame the kids for the things that we've done.
00:23:51
Speaker
Why can't you learn?
00:23:52
Speaker
Yeah, exactly.
00:23:53
Speaker
Yes.
00:23:53
Speaker
Yeah.
00:23:54
Speaker
That's what I found so frustrating as a high school teacher because so often the lunchroom talk or the talk around the table at PD would be like, you know, all these kids aren't self-motivated.
00:24:04
Speaker
All these kids aren't self-directed.
00:24:05
Speaker
All these kids.
00:24:06
Speaker
And I'm like, because we've trained them so well not to be.
00:24:09
Speaker
And so we need to help reignite that same curiosity about the world, those same self-motivated things.
00:24:16
Speaker
And as I started to do that more in my own practice, I really hit a wall with students.
00:24:20
Speaker
And it was kind of despairing to some extent because I would ask my high school students, these were seniors who were 17, 18 on the cusp of the rest of their lives outside of school.
00:24:29
Speaker
And I would ask them,
00:24:30
Speaker
what's the purpose of learning?
00:24:32
Speaker
I'd ask them, how do you know when you've learned something new?
00:24:35
Speaker
How do you show to somebody else that you've learned something new?
00:24:37
Speaker
And so often I would get IDK or, you know, I don't know, or I've never been asked this question before.
00:24:43
Speaker
And I would just sit there with my head in my hands and I'd go, how do you not know what the purpose of learning is?
00:24:48
Speaker
You've been in school for 12 years.
00:24:50
Speaker
You're about to either go on to a college education or the rest of your life outside of it.
00:24:55
Speaker
My goodness, if you haven't figured it out now,
00:24:57
Speaker
How can we expect our school's mission and vision to create lifelong learners to hold any kind of weight if we're not constantly, you know, rewarding, punishing, coercing kids into doing that next thing and then turn them out into a life where that's not always the case.
00:25:12
Speaker
You have to be self-directed in life.
00:25:14
Speaker
I know.
00:25:14
Speaker
It's so frustrating.
00:25:16
Speaker
It is.
00:25:16
Speaker
But also they've learned their lesson well, haven't they?
00:25:19
Speaker
Because I bet if you ask the four and five-year-olds, they would probably say something different and they would probably have more to say because they know what learning is about.
00:25:27
Speaker
And that's the thing that gets me.
00:25:29
Speaker
We take these sparky, motivated young children.
00:25:32
Speaker
And we turn them into adolescents who don't know why they're learning things and who just want to learn stuff on the test because we've told them that the important outcome is the test.
00:25:42
Speaker
And so they've learned it.
00:25:43
Speaker
You know, it's like a process of indoctrination.
00:25:47
Speaker
We send them through this whole process where we say what we want you to do is more important.
00:25:50
Speaker
And often when teachers say, oh, you know, I couldn't I couldn't let my young people have any choices.
00:25:55
Speaker
They have no self-regulation, no self-direction.
00:25:58
Speaker
What they mean really is they won't do what I want them to do without me telling them.
00:26:02
Speaker
So do you see what I mean?
00:26:04
Speaker
That's what people often mean by self-direction.
00:26:05
Speaker
They mean, I would like you guys to go off and learn the stuff I want you to learn, but I don't want to tell you about it.
00:26:10
Speaker
I want you to learn this, write the same stuff.
00:26:12
Speaker
yourself.
00:26:13
Speaker
And actually, I think self-direction has to start with a detachment from outcome on the part of the adult.
00:26:20
Speaker
The adult has to say, you know what, I don't know what's going to be the right thing for you, for the young person, because it is your process.
00:26:27
Speaker
And
00:26:28
Speaker
If you decide you don't want to do those exams at 16, I'll support you in that.
00:26:33
Speaker
I'll support you in learning the way you want to learn, learning what you want to learn.
00:26:37
Speaker
Once you set a sort of time limit and you say everybody has to do this same standardized thing at the same time, no matter what,
00:26:44
Speaker
you've kind of lost the battle already because you've already defined what they're meant to be doing.
00:26:49
Speaker
So that's what they think it's all about.
00:26:52
Speaker
And they're right, aren't they?
00:26:53
Speaker
They're not, you know, your high schoolers went wrong.
00:26:55
Speaker
They know what it's about.
00:26:56
Speaker
It's about passing these tests.
00:26:58
Speaker
So I get to the next level.
00:26:59
Speaker
It just is so frustrating to see how schools kind of build up this ever-growing tower of behaviorism.
00:27:06
Speaker
Meanwhile, the science is kind of shifting gears and actually supporting more of that self-determination theory.
00:27:12
Speaker
And there just needs to be sort of a separate conversation around once we know what that self-determination theory demands, what, autonomy?
00:27:19
Speaker
Yeah.
00:27:20
Speaker
competence, connectivity.
00:27:22
Speaker
It's just like, yeah, relatedness, just building the brand new structure of school around that.
00:27:28
Speaker
Because I too, I'm like a firm believer in the power of schools and then the way in which we kind of squander that.
00:27:33
Speaker
Like I view it as such a sacred thing.
00:27:35
Speaker
Like here you have this wonderful opportunity
00:27:37
Speaker
for these young people to be together in the same place.
00:27:41
Speaker
Like, let's go ask big questions about the world.
00:27:43
Speaker
Like, let's do big, meaningful, important work.
00:27:45
Speaker
And what do we have them doing?
00:27:46
Speaker
Worksheets, pass, you know, scope and sequence.
00:27:50
Speaker
And it's just like, I view that as a total waste of time.
00:27:54
Speaker
I wonder too, like thinking,
00:27:56
Speaker
Like if the goal is standardized, not just standardized processes, but towards a standardized outcome.
00:28:03
Speaker
I mean, the science of learning is just is not inclusive of people whose brains work differently, who are neurodivergent, who are disabled.
00:28:13
Speaker
That research base just doesn't include people who are at the outliers of that basic cognitive model in the first place.
Incompatibility of Behaviorism with Neurodiversity
00:28:21
Speaker
So I wonder, like thinking ahead to the book that you either are writing or have written, this one that's going to be coming out in 2023.
00:28:28
Speaker
Yeah, A Different Way to Learn Neurodiversity and Self-Directed Education.
00:28:34
Speaker
The more that I, even just in the last year, have talked to neurodivergent and disabled people about their struggles within those ableist structures of school.
00:28:45
Speaker
That's to say that from their perspective, behaviorism is ableism.
00:28:49
Speaker
If you're trying to control my body and my brain towards a particular direction that it can't or won't go, then you are denying, you are excluding me from a learning process the way that my brain works.
00:29:02
Speaker
I get more fired up then about the self-directed connection to that too.
00:29:05
Speaker
So what can you tell us about the origins of this new book and what's going on there?
00:29:11
Speaker
So my interest in neurodiversity, although we didn't call it then, that then preceded my interest in self-directed education.
00:29:19
Speaker
And it was, so I did my PhD in autism a long time ago, and I have been interested in autism for many years.
00:29:26
Speaker
And it was a surprise to me, actually, when I started home educating my own kids to discover that I would say at least 50% of the kids we met, maybe more, were neurodivergent in some way.
00:29:37
Speaker
Because I think like lots of people have this kind of,
00:29:40
Speaker
preconception about self-directed education or home education, they think it's kind of the place where people house their kids.
00:29:46
Speaker
I don't know if you have the same thing in the US, but in America and in the UK, we have this idea.
00:29:50
Speaker
It's about, you know, accelerating your kids through and that it's something that the really privileged people do like home sort of home tutoring and they, you know, get their kids into university like years earlier and higher.
00:30:02
Speaker
And actually the reality on the ground when you get there is it's the kids who don't fit school and it makes perfect sense.
00:30:08
Speaker
It's the kids who
00:30:10
Speaker
And it's often the parents who didn't fit school as well.
00:30:12
Speaker
So it's the kids who find the whole structures of school so difficult to deal with that they can't learn.
00:30:20
Speaker
And I think those are kids that now we'd think of as neurodivergement.
00:30:23
Speaker
So it's not just the behaviorism.
00:30:26
Speaker
It's everything.
00:30:27
Speaker
It's everything about how school works.
00:30:29
Speaker
So it's about being with a large group of your peers all day, not having any time to decompress.
00:30:35
Speaker
The playground, which is meant to be your kind of decompression time, is actually
00:30:38
Speaker
the most stressful time.
00:30:39
Speaker
It's highly hectic and chaotic and there's nowhere to get away from anybody and the toilets smell horrible and the canteen smells awful and everything is just like, it's designed to put some children into this state of heightened arousal all the time, which is a rubbish place to learn.
00:30:57
Speaker
You know, you can't learn well when you're in that situation.
00:31:00
Speaker
And so lots of parents see that or their children show them that, usually through their behavior.
00:31:06
Speaker
particularly with younger children.
00:31:07
Speaker
So the kind of pattern I see is younger children, it will often be about a lot of externalising behaviour.
00:31:12
Speaker
And then often the schools will respond to that really punitively.
00:31:15
Speaker
So the schools will be like, you know, basically get on top of it.
00:31:19
Speaker
They'll tell the parents, you've got to punish them.
00:31:21
Speaker
You've got to put them on the naughty step.
00:31:23
Speaker
You've got to do all these things to control them.
00:31:25
Speaker
which is horrible for everybody, horrible for the parents, the children start to refuse to go to school and then often their parents are told you've got to force them in, which again is a traumatising experience for everybody.
00:31:37
Speaker
And then by the time they get to teenagers, they're at the point where they're not going anywhere, they're shutting in their bedroom saying, I'm not coming out, I'm not doing anything.
00:31:45
Speaker
And I think...
00:31:46
Speaker
we're really bad at recognising the chronic stress that school systems put on our young people because there's a kind of mindset that school must be good.
00:31:55
Speaker
School must be the right place for young people.
00:31:58
Speaker
And if young people think that it's not or are saying that it's not, then the problem is them.
00:32:02
Speaker
So this comes back to what we were talking about at the beginning, that
00:32:05
Speaker
young people will be sent to me because they're not conforming to the structures of school.
00:32:10
Speaker
And I'll be asked, can you, you know, fix them?
00:32:12
Speaker
Basically, they won't say like that.
00:32:14
Speaker
It'll be how about if we have some therapy for this?
00:32:16
Speaker
If we had some therapy for anxiety, maybe they'd be better at school.
00:32:19
Speaker
But you look at what's going on between the child and the school and you're like, of course, they're anxious.
00:32:24
Speaker
Who wouldn't be anxious?
00:32:25
Speaker
Who wouldn't be?
00:32:26
Speaker
Yeah, exactly.
00:32:28
Speaker
And that's, I think, my starting point with neurodiversity.
00:32:31
Speaker
It's like,
00:32:32
Speaker
Well, of course they feel this way.
00:32:34
Speaker
Look at the systems and look at their interaction with the systems because everything is always an interaction between the child and the environment they find themselves in.
00:32:43
Speaker
And I think what happens with schools is people tend to assume school is the same for all the children who are there.
00:32:50
Speaker
You know, everybody experiences this school the same way.
00:32:52
Speaker
So people say it's a really good school.
00:32:54
Speaker
It's a lovely school.
00:32:54
Speaker
It's a nurturing school.
00:32:56
Speaker
Maybe it is for some of the kids, but for other kids, it doesn't feel like that.
00:33:00
Speaker
And we're really bad at recognizing the experience of those kids, the ones who say, it's not good, it doesn't feel like good to me.
00:33:08
Speaker
We tend to tell them they're wrong.
00:33:10
Speaker
And so a lot of the kids and teenagers and adults I see who are neurodivergent,
00:33:15
Speaker
would be saying that my whole school experience was one of feeling that I was wrong.
00:33:21
Speaker
Feeling that I was wrong to feel the way I did.
00:33:24
Speaker
I was wrong to find this difficult.
00:33:26
Speaker
I was wrong to struggle.
00:33:28
Speaker
I was wrong to get home every day and just be totally exhausted, not be able to do anything but lie on the sofa.
00:33:35
Speaker
Or I was wrong, you
Supporting Neurodivergent Students: Acceptance Over Benchmarks
00:33:36
Speaker
know.
00:33:36
Speaker
So I think my starting point with neurodiversity and self-directed education is what if we were planning an education which started with its idea at its core of you are okay.
00:33:45
Speaker
You are okay just as you are, you know, and you can learn in a really idiosyncratic way.
00:33:52
Speaker
You can do things really out of sync with what the school system thinks.
00:33:56
Speaker
Because I think what happens with these kids is we've got a school system that expects things to happen in lockstep.
00:34:01
Speaker
You know, when you're five, you should be able to do this.
00:34:02
Speaker
When you're six, you should be able to do this.
00:34:04
Speaker
When you're seven.
00:34:05
Speaker
And it even starts really early on.
00:34:06
Speaker
You know, when you're three, you shouldn't be wearing diapers anymore.
00:34:08
Speaker
You should be able to, you know, you should be able to go to the toilet by yourself.
00:34:11
Speaker
You should be able to change your clothes.
00:34:13
Speaker
You should be able to do your buttons up.
00:34:14
Speaker
There's all these requests, requirements that we have.
00:34:17
Speaker
And when children don't fit into that,
00:34:20
Speaker
then they get blamed.
00:34:21
Speaker
They get told they're wrong all the way along.
00:34:24
Speaker
And so I think what we can do with self-directed education is we can say, let's just get rid of all of those requirements for now.
00:34:29
Speaker
And let's just start with where the child is right now and work with that.
00:34:34
Speaker
And that's where we are.
00:34:35
Speaker
So instead of saying you should be doing this, we'd say, how can I help you do more of what you want to do?
00:34:40
Speaker
And how can I help you learn the things you want to learn right now?
00:34:45
Speaker
So it means, and the thing that first got me interested in it actually was observing the children around me and my own kids.
00:34:53
Speaker
and imaginative play, because I don't know if you know much about autism and imaginative play, but one of the things that I learned when I was learning about autism a very long time ago was that many autistic children don't play imaginatively the way that neurotypical children do when they're young.
00:35:07
Speaker
So like two, three, four years, it's one of the things that people kind of flag up.
00:35:11
Speaker
They start saying, oh, maybe you should think about an autism diagnosis book if the child's not playing imaginatively.
00:35:16
Speaker
So this is the kind of imaginative play like that really small, neurotypical children do like tea parties or holding a thing up to their head and saying a telephone, you know, that kind of really basic imaginative play.
00:35:28
Speaker
And I saw lots of children around me in the homemade community who weren't doing that at that kind of age.
00:35:34
Speaker
But what I saw then was that when they got to like seven or eight or nine, a lot of those children did start playing imaginatively, but in quite a different way.
00:35:42
Speaker
So they would start playing things like real life Minecraft.
00:35:45
Speaker
or real life plants versus zombies, or they would start acting it out at the park and it'd be like, let's go out and let's start mining those trees.
00:35:55
Speaker
Or they would be doing imaginative play within Minecraft.
00:35:58
Speaker
Your Minecraft is this amazing place for imaginative play.
00:36:01
Speaker
And I was thinking that this was quite a long time ago before I wrote my book.
00:36:04
Speaker
I was thinking,
00:36:05
Speaker
OK, so, you know, conventional theory would say these children don't do imaginative play.
00:36:11
Speaker
That is the kind of conventional way of I was trained in thinking about autism.
00:36:16
Speaker
But these kids are doing it, but they're doing it a lot later.
00:36:20
Speaker
And if they were in the school system, they might well not be doing it because they're in an environment where it's being nurtured and where it's being encouraged and where nobody is saying to them, come on now, you know, you're meant to be focusing now on sitting down and reading and writing.
00:36:34
Speaker
And what if they're actually just developmental stages that are happening at different times and the school system is actually not allowing that to happen because it's defining, you know, that school system for very young children, it basically provides environments for imaginative play.
00:36:50
Speaker
But it doesn't continue to do that.
00:36:51
Speaker
And it certainly doesn't provide the environment for you to do imaginative play in Minecraft.
00:36:56
Speaker
That's a really, there aren't many schools that would do that.
00:36:59
Speaker
No.
00:37:00
Speaker
And then by the time students get into that, the schooling has moved on.
00:37:04
Speaker
They've said, you've had your time for imaginative play.
00:37:06
Speaker
Now you're seven and eight.
00:37:08
Speaker
It's book work.
00:37:08
Speaker
Exactly.
00:37:09
Speaker
Exactly.
00:37:10
Speaker
So they've missed it.
00:37:11
Speaker
And it doesn't, whereas self-directed education, you can make the space to do it later on.
00:37:15
Speaker
And I was like, this is actually mind blowing because what if by doing this with school, we're stopping these kids from doing what they need to do at this particular time.
00:37:26
Speaker
We don't know what long-term consequences that's going to have for them.
00:37:29
Speaker
not having that chance to do it.
00:37:31
Speaker
And also a kind of undervaluing of
00:37:34
Speaker
play, which lots of autistic children do, but loads of children generally, an undervaluing of video game play, I think is also something that, you know, I talk to many parents, they'll be like, oh, we really limit their time, or, you know, we don't want to play with them, or we don't want to get them too obsessed with playing whatever game it is.
00:37:51
Speaker
And I'm like, get in there and start playing with them.
00:37:54
Speaker
Play Minecraft with them.
00:37:55
Speaker
It's an amazing thing to do together.
00:37:58
Speaker
And there's so much learning to happen in a Minecraft game.
00:38:03
Speaker
And yet we don't value it in the same way as we valued those two and three year olds who were having tea parties and you know what I mean?
00:38:09
Speaker
Or playing with Legos and Minecraft is essentially virtual Legos.
00:38:13
Speaker
Oh yeah, but so much more than Lego.
00:38:17
Speaker
It's like Lego just, you know, yeah, exactly.
00:38:21
Speaker
No, for real.
00:38:21
Speaker
That's what makes it such a powerfully engaging learning space for kids who are just intuitively curious and motivated because they see that open space with full of potential, yes, and possibility.
Educational Benefits of Games for Learning
00:38:37
Speaker
And they have that vision in their head even as they get into, here's what I'm going to do.
00:38:41
Speaker
Exactly.
00:38:41
Speaker
And then the chance encounters and interactions with the environment.
00:38:44
Speaker
There's so many feedback loops that we would say would be part of, you know, a good, rigorous, you know, positive, engaging educational environment.
00:38:53
Speaker
And you're like, it exists in this box of the game.
00:38:56
Speaker
Let them play Minecraft.
00:38:58
Speaker
Yeah, exactly.
00:38:59
Speaker
So great for them to, I know so many kids who really struggle with social interactions in real life, but who can actually manage it in Minecraft.
00:39:08
Speaker
And so it's such a good way as a kind of stepping stone to a different way of interacting with other people.
00:39:13
Speaker
Because it's like being in a massive playground together.
00:39:16
Speaker
It's amazing.
00:39:17
Speaker
But we don't value it.
00:39:18
Speaker
So I think that's the key.
00:39:19
Speaker
When I'm talking about neurodiversity and self-directed education, the key thing is we value.
00:39:24
Speaker
Self-directed education allows us to value all different types of being in the world and learning at different stages.
00:39:31
Speaker
So if the way that you want to spend your time is playing Minecraft, we can embrace that.
00:39:36
Speaker
you know, whatever age you are.
00:39:39
Speaker
And I think that's quite groundbreaking.
00:39:42
Speaker
I wonder if there has not been a little bit of a shift.
00:39:46
Speaker
And I think...
00:39:47
Speaker
The more that I'm thinking about it here, I wonder if some of the tension that we're seeing now, and maybe it's just something I'm seeing because I'm constantly online, but I'm seeing that tension between sort of these traditional what works, hashtag COGSI models, and then more of an inclusive, neurodiverse, that self-directed model.
00:40:07
Speaker
Those two things kind of seem at odds because really it's about shifting a perspective from education as something that is done to another person.
00:40:16
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
00:40:17
Speaker
Where the learning takes place in an environment, the learning is something that is transmitted from adult to child, and, you know, all of those hierarchies are sort of valued accordingly.
00:40:28
Speaker
And increasingly, the research base, the neuroscience base would support, and I think constructivists have maybe had this right for 100 years, but learning is something that happens inside here, inside your brain.
00:40:39
Speaker
Yeah.
00:40:39
Speaker
And I think that shift to that model then and the change in the language, say from like a special education in the United States where it's like, well, the way that you don't fit into the system has a label.
00:40:51
Speaker
And then that label is going to allow you to get the supports that you need to be supported within it.
00:40:57
Speaker
And I think that's wonderful.
00:40:58
Speaker
I think that's fine, right?
00:40:59
Speaker
Like neurodivergent disabled kids should get the supports they need to succeed in those systems.
00:41:04
Speaker
However, a shift to neurodivergence recognizes that no brains are the same.
00:41:08
Speaker
Yeah.
00:41:08
Speaker
And that we should really rebuild those structures of school around that framework, not say top-down standardized transition model to one that actually starts bottom-up and from like inside the learner's brains rather than from without.
00:41:24
Speaker
And self-directed education, like you said, and like we've been talking about this whole conversation, doesn't preclude any learners from seeking out any form of direct instruction through YouTube tutorials or
00:41:36
Speaker
Duolingo apps or seeking out instructional methods and teachers for language, for music, for arts, for all those things that, you know, that I just engage with with my own kids when we're playing around, you know, but it does seem like it's just such a it's such a hard sell because it does seem to break that that what works model again to bring it around full circle to that.
00:42:00
Speaker
Well, I think it's quite radical to say children can choose.
00:42:02
Speaker
That's the thing.
00:42:03
Speaker
Because what if they don't choose the things we want them to choose?
00:42:07
Speaker
That's the crux of it.
00:42:09
Speaker
But it's about what works.
00:42:10
Speaker
It's like, but what if they don't choose to do GCSEs?
00:42:13
Speaker
Okay, well, they might not.
00:42:15
Speaker
You know, they might not, or they might choose to do something different.
00:42:18
Speaker
And then people start talking, saying, you know, that's going to be increased inequality, because basically those who are more privileged, their parents will push them towards doing exams.
00:42:26
Speaker
And those who aren't, their parents won't push them towards doing exams.
00:42:29
Speaker
I think that's really slippery ground to be on when we start saying we have to make them all do something because we think the less privileged kids will make choices that we don't like.
00:42:39
Speaker
I find that really morally uncomfortable.
00:42:42
Speaker
And I think that we need to be thinking much earlier.
00:42:45
Speaker
We need to be thinking right away from the start of how can we provide these kids with loads of opportunities.
00:42:51
Speaker
so that they can learn loads of different things and have so they can start to see all the different things that they could do because it's just way too late to be doing that at 16 17 18 we've already you know they've already lost so much their spark unfortunately for those who for those who don't do well they're the ones who've particularly lost their spark that's the problem because to keep your spark in the school system you get the approval if you're doing well you know you're the teachers like you if you're doing well
00:43:18
Speaker
You're kind of the star of the week and everything.
00:43:21
Speaker
You get all the positive stuff if you're doing well.
00:43:23
Speaker
If you do badly, you get all the negative stuff.
00:43:26
Speaker
And so I think it actually widens inequality because the people who struggle most have the hardest time at school and they feel less good about themselves at school.
00:43:36
Speaker
So we end up with these kids who not only haven't got the GCSEs or the exams that other kids have, but they also feel terrible about themselves.
00:43:44
Speaker
And that's what I see.
00:43:46
Speaker
On the one hand, it's like a virtuous cycle for kids who can survive and thrive and kind of work the system in their favor.
00:43:53
Speaker
They kind of get sorted and separated up to the top of the pile.
00:43:58
Speaker
And then there's a destructive cycle for kids for whom the system doesn't work.
00:44:02
Speaker
Because it's a punitive one.
00:44:03
Speaker
It's the idea that if we just punish them a bit more, they try harder and they do better and it doesn't work.
00:44:08
Speaker
But I mean, it has to be said further down the line.
00:44:10
Speaker
Yeah.
00:44:11
Speaker
And it has to be said, though, even the high achievers who I also sometimes see in my clinical practice, they will also describe intense anxiety.
00:44:18
Speaker
They will just because they'll say, you know, it always feels like I'm on a knife edge.
00:44:21
Speaker
What if the next time I don't do so well?
00:44:25
Speaker
I'm going to lose all that.
00:44:26
Speaker
They know it's all dependent.
00:44:27
Speaker
It's a highly conditional system where they know it's dependent on them doing well.
00:44:31
Speaker
They don't want to disappoint their teachers.
00:44:33
Speaker
They don't want to disappoint their parents.
00:44:35
Speaker
So they are also suffering.
00:44:37
Speaker
I think the thing about neurodiversity, I wanted to say one thing.
00:44:40
Speaker
So the book that's coming out, I interviewed a lot of, this is, it's a bit different to my first book because I interviewed lots of families.
00:44:46
Speaker
I also interviewed some neurodivergent adults about their experience of school.
00:44:51
Speaker
And I also interviewed some young people, self-directed young people about their learning.
00:44:55
Speaker
And I think the really, really sort of joyous thing about the interviews that I did
00:45:01
Speaker
was that I heard the stories of these families who were really moving away from a deficit-laden way of looking at their children.
00:45:09
Speaker
And I think that's another thing that self-directed education can really offer neurodivergent children and their families, because it enables us to focus on our children's strengths rather than on their weaknesses.
00:45:20
Speaker
And a lot of what happens at school is, you know, if you're not learning to read when everybody else is, for example, there'll be a lot of focus on you learning to read.
00:45:28
Speaker
and you will be focused on learning to read potentially for most of your primary school education because it's thought to be so important.
00:45:36
Speaker
That is important.
00:45:38
Speaker
But I also see in my work the side effects of that.
00:45:41
Speaker
I see how distressed children become about it all and how they develop kind of phobias about reading and they stop enjoying it.
00:45:48
Speaker
It becomes something they're made to do.
00:45:50
Speaker
And I think with self-dress education, there's something so powerful about being able to say, you know what, they're not interested in reading right now.
00:45:57
Speaker
So we're just not going to do it now.
00:45:58
Speaker
We'll wait a few years.
00:46:00
Speaker
You know, we have time.
00:46:02
Speaker
I think there's something about just allowing ourselves to have the time to let our children develop, which is so, so important, particularly for neurodivergent children.
00:46:10
Speaker
Thank you so much, Dr. Naomi Fisher, for joining me today.
00:46:13
Speaker
Thank you.
00:46:13
Speaker
It's been great.
00:46:15
Speaker
Thanks again for listening.
00:46:17
Speaker
You can find Dr. Naomi Fisher's work and subscribe to her newsletter on her website, naomifisher.co.uk and follow her on Twitter at Naomi C. Fisher.
00:46:27
Speaker
You can learn more about the Human Restoration Project on our website, humanrestorationproject.org and find us everywhere on social media by searching for Human Restoration Project.
00:46:37
Speaker
And let's restore humanity together.