Mini-series: Education Extinct (Episode 3)
I have stood in a school hall with fifty other teachers, two fingers pressed to my collarbone, switching my brain on. They were called brain buttons. Nobody laughed. And we were taking notes.
All this week I’m digging up the bits of school that have quietly gone extinct in a single working lifetime. Today I’m going back to my early years in the job, and the training day where I found out what sort of learner I was.
Because that was the great gift of the era – everybody got a letter. You were a V, an A or a K, and so was every child in front of you, and once you knew, the rest followed. I labelled my class. I planned three versions of the same lesson so each type got theirs. I explained it at parents’ evenings with the quiet confidence of a man passing on settled science, because somebody credible had stood at the front of a training day and told me this was how the brain worked, and it felt right. It felt like it honoured the children as individuals, which is exactly what made it so easy to believe.
Brain Gym went further. We crossed our ankles and wrists to connect our hemispheres. And the manual explained that holding water on your tongue would hydrate the brain directly through the roof of the mouth. I am not making that up. Public money went into it, and it ran in thousands of schools.
Then people checked. When over 900 teachers across several countries were asked whether individuals learn better in their preferred style, 93 per cent of UK teachers agreed. Hattie’s enormous survey of what affects learning found that matching teaching to learning styles had an effect a fraction above zero. Goldacre called Brain Gym a vast empire of pseudoscience, and he had the manual to quote from.
Here’s the awkward bit for a series about extinction: it hasn’t gone completely. Learning styles still linger in some classrooms and staffrooms, long after the debunking, because it never felt like being wrong from the inside. It felt like being current. It felt like caring.
And that, honestly, is why I tell this story. Yesterday I argued that human intelligence is where schools need to concentrate alongside the tech. Today’s episode is the caution that comes with that. Human intelligence includes the unglamorous discipline of asking “how do we know?” – especially about the ideas that flatter us. The machines aren’t the only things that need testing rather than idly accepting. So do we.
Verdict: extinction overdue.
Tomorrow: fifteen minutes whole class shared write, fifteen mins at sentence level, twenty in groups, ten for the plenary. If you know, you know. And the extinct list stays open – along with a new category: what were you trained on that quietly vanished? No judgement here, clearly.