Article
Comment
Education
6 min read

Shouldn’t you be in school?

Beyond headlines about school refusers and ghost children, lies a challenge to adult notions of schooling. Henna Cundill unpacks the issue, inspired, in part, by fish.
A school of tropical fish swims to the right, while one swims to the left.
A school of tropical fish off the Maldives.

The squeaky black shoes are back in the hall, and by now all the white polo-shirts in the land (except aged 4-5, slim-fit) have been snaffled by harassed mums and dads. Yes, it is that time of year again – the time for newspaper editors to dredge up some statistics about the rising number of “school refusers” – anxious young people whose squeaky shoes and white polo shirts are looking set to never leave the house.  

The numbers are “spiralling” frets the Guardian, and the Daily Mail asks “Are you raising a ‘ghost child’?” Forth come the stock images of a sulky teenage girl pulling the duvet over her face, or a young boy with an oversized backpack and hands clamped firmly over his ears. A parent, frowning, is quoted as saying that the school isn’t doing enough. A headteacher, eyebrows knitted, says how difficult it is without the support and cooperation of the parents. Then everybody shakes their heads and blames the pandemic. 

In my time as a School Chaplain, before the pandemic, I saw how truly awful school refusal is – for everyone involved. Beneath the covers, underneath the backpack, there is actually no “refusal” of anything – in fact, there is a campaign to get rid of this term, which I heartily support. Refusal implies there is a choice, but when a young person feels so overwhelmingly anxious and afraid, there is no choice for them, other than fight, flight, or freeze. Parents and caregivers feel judged, teachers are largely helpless. Social workers, when they get involved, quickly feel like they are the enemy of absolutely everyone involved. Surrounding any long-term school refuser there is often a hot mess of frustrated adults, and underneath the frustration, sadness.  

No Scouts, no community choir, not even traipsing down to the park to hang out informally with their peers. Instead, anxiety traps them into the perceived safety of home. 

Why sadness? Because we know that, regardless of our views on the importance of cookie-cutter educational attainments, no young person should be isolated. Even families who are committed and evangelistic about home-schooling will also schedule social activities for their children, be it membership of various clubs and organisations or group sessions of learning with other home-schooled kids. But the school refusers I have known have typically also refused anything like that. No Scouts, no community choir, not even traipsing down to the park to hang out informally with their peers. Instead, anxiety traps them into the perceived safety of home, that one tiny corner of the world where they have a sure sense of belonging and some modicum of control.  

With the idea of “belonging” in mind, perhaps it is helpful to think about what a school actually is. The word school is multi-faceted in meaning. In nature, it denotes a group of fish, all swimming together. Such behaviour would seem counter-intuitive, since it means that all the fish are then competing for the same food or other resources. But ask any fish and it will tell you that being part of the group is itself a resource, enhancing their ability to find food and to protect themselves from predators. We could put this a more familiar way: a school is where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.  

There’s also another meaning to the word school – groups of creatives or philosophical thinkers whose styles and methods influence and complement each other, e.g., “His paintings are those of the Impressionist school.” We can see how, in these schools, people spark off one another, constantly developing and refining their own work in response to the work of others. Those with greater skill and experience mentor those who are just beginning. In this respect, we could say that a school is where people can push the boundaries of human creativity and knowledge.   

Since the ancient days, when learners gathered around the Greek philosophers, first to listen, then to discuss, and then to refine ideas, we have gathered our young people into schools for the purpose of educating them. We have long acknowledged that the best learning is a group activity which takes place over time. This is why home schoolers also schedule the clubs and activities – not just because children need friends (although that is important) but because there is a particular “other” kind of human progress that happens when we have to rub along with other people. When learners are placed in groups, ideas can be tested, boundaries can be overcome, creativity meets with critique - the whole quickly becomes greater than the sum of its parts.  

You may notice that many schools promote themselves as being a “learning community” or a “family.” It’s not just about being twee – research shows that promoting a sense of belonging reduces the amount of school refusal and non-attendance. We know that belonging matters, as Belle Tindall has recently discussed, and that a sense of belonging can impact our health and even our mortality. (“Well, I told you so!” says the fish.)  

This was something the early Christians knew too. In the first few decades after Jesus’s life and ministry they gathered in groups to pray and to discuss, just like those earlier followers of Plato and Aristotle had done. There was an eagerness to learn from those who had heard Jesus’ teaching first hand, and to develop and refine their understanding of what that teaching could mean in practice. It was a school, although they called it a church – or strictly speaking an ecclesia in the Greek, which just means a gathering of people.  

In the ecclesia there was good natured debate, but also some spicy disputes and arguments, along with a lot of discussion about who was “in” and who was “out” - something which is also a hot topic in the school playgrounds of today. Into that context, Paul (one of the first leaders of the ecclesia) wrote that the church was a bit like a human body, in which:  

The eye cannot say to the hand, “I don’t need you!” And the head cannot say to the feet, “I don’t need you!” 

His point was that belonging is about knowing not just that you belong but that you are needed. In a human body, different parts have different roles, and Paul also asks his readers to consider this point:  

“If the whole body were an eye, where would the sense of hearing be? If the whole body were an ear, where would the sense of smell be?”  

I have seen that schools do often try very, very hard to communicate to young people that they belong. But, shackled to the syllabi and never more than a few short months away from the next round of exams or individualised assessments, it’s much harder for schools to show young people that they are needed. With our present system, how can we show young people that, even if they are not predicted to be the student in the class who gets straight A’s, their presence there in the group and their role in the learning process is vital, and contributes to the learning of others? 

When it comes to the presence of absence among our young people, schools have often gone as far as they can practicably go, as have parents, as have social workers. And the young people themselves? Well, they are stuck – biologically their only options are fight, flight, or freeze.  

So that leaves us, the society that over-emphasises individualised achievement, that glorifies celebrity and individual success. In adulthood we so quickly forget how to “do” school, how to model it to our young people, swimming all together in a way designed to promote human knowledge, protect each other from danger or even just to ensure that everyone gets fed. No wonder our young people absorb a sense that their presence isn’t needed, when in so many areas of life it’s every fish for themselves. 

As adults, perhaps we should be asking ourselves the question: why aren’t we in school?          

Article
Biology
Comment
Wildness
5 min read

There’s a sting in the tail if we construct lessons from nature

Don’t be like the bees

Juila is a writer and social justice advocate. 

A bee keeper hold honeycomb to the light
HiveBoxx on Unsplash.

‘Be like the bees’ we hear not infrequently. These furry hive dwellers have been coopted by many, from socialists to capitalists, to put a point across. One party draws on their social structure as an inspiration, another their worker bee ethic. They are indeed an example to us. And yet at the same time, bee communities do things that we would find reprehensible in fellow humans. Male bees are expelled from the hive when they are no longer considered reproductively useful. The bees we see out and about this summer are often the oldest, sent to do the dangerous foraging work because they are considered the most expendable. This was a jarring discovery for me, reading it in Katherine May’s timely book, Wintering, during the first COVID-19 lockdown. I was one of the millions shielding and being protected by the ways that society shifted to serve the most vulnerable to the virus; bees, I had just learned, would not behave like this. There are some limits, it seems, to the lessons we construct from nature.  

For we do love to construct them. Spend a moment on LinkedIn or Substack, and there are a multitude of articles drawing lessons from the world around us and the creatures we share it with.  

This impulse is not new; throughout history, people and communities have done this. People’s relationship with nature is not static or homogenous. The wilderness has been variously a place of fear to be avoided, of growing wonder as described by the Romantic Poets, a site of knowledge neglected by those in power but maintained by others, often women and indigenous communities.  

What strikes me about the current trend is that it seems to push to an extreme of unquestioning veneration: nature is perfect and our whole teacher. There are posts about perfect harmony we should emulate, or a call to copy an endless adaptability. These are the things that we might long for – but do not seem to be borne out in ecosystems where sea urchins demolish kelp forests, and the climate crisis reveals the limits of species to adjust. We are being called to see what we want (or feel we need) rather than what actually exists in the world around us.  

This instinct to carve lessons from creation extends beyond the natural world to the work of human hands. The Japanese art of kintsugi, repairing broken pottery with gold, has become increasingly prevalent as a metaphor for healing; a beautiful idea but one that risks being stripped of its culture, and that has both limitations and dangers. In Sarah Perry’s novel, The Essex Serpent, Cora’s husband Michael masks his abuse by speaking in a romantic metaphor of his intention to break her down and mend her with gold, like the Japanese art in their hallway. But Cora is not a vase; she is woman. Michael’s breaking harms her. She only begins to repair after he is gone; it is messy, some parts seem irrevocably changed. I think of my own losses, and how healing is indeed available, but rarely as straightforward as putting the same pieces back together. To think it is so can hinder our restoration, and miss out on the transformation that may be possible. As the journalist Poorna Bell wrote after her husband’s death by suicide: “I was in some ways sadder, wiser, but also my existence was much bigger, more honest.” 

We have a great capacity to learn – and we need it to survive. As writer Andy Crouch put it in his book, Culture Making: “a human baby is the strangest and most wonderful creature this world can offer. No other mammal emerges so helpless from the womb, utterly unable to cope with the opportunity and adversity of nature. Yet no other creature holds such limitless possibility… We are hard-wired for nothing but learning. All we begin with are possibilities.” 

This ability to grow and understand and change is essential if we are to navigate the world. And in our encounters with this place, with brokenness and confusion, the instinct to make meaning, to tidy, to be able to point to something and say 'this is how we should be’ is a form of comfort. Maybe even control it. We are grappling with not just how to understand the world, but how to be in it.  

If we are always looking for the lesson, we devalue nature by prizing it just for what it can give us. 

Creation and creativity have much to teach us – they’re a testament to and the fruit of the imagination of God. But to prize them just for their lessons seems to fall into another form of extraction and to miss out on something else, something that may be a greater gift in this messy world: wonder.  

Bees moving from flower to flower are not setting out on their mission with a side hustle of education for the human race. They are being their full bee selves. Nectar is necessary; this is how it is collected. Bees share knowledge about the good plants via a ‘waggle dance’. This is how the colony persists. It is not for my benefit (though it may encourage me to a moment of playfulness).  

Writing this on my balcony, I pause when I see dozens of birds circling one thermal; a moving column of gulls and red kites that goes up and up and up. I could strive for a teachable moment (maybe something about co-existence?) but it feels not just unnecessary, but an interruption. In that moment, I was a human being in awe of birds riding the warm air; that feels like something full of beauty in itself. I worry that if we are always looking for the lesson, we devalue nature by prizing it just for what it can give us. And we miss out on the opportunities to marvel at creation itself.  

And, in calling each other to be like other creatures, we accidentally dehumanise other people and ourselves. In the face of conflict, polarisation and disconnection, to contend for each other’s humanity feels vital. And to recognise our own humanness is to acknowledge our limitations. There are parts of nature currently beyond our comprehension. Birdsong holds complexity heard by the intended audience but we can only guess at its meaning. There is something to accepting the edges of our own understanding. Sometimes we touch on truths that seem to contradict or be in tension. Perhaps they are layers that we cannot intellectually fit together but that build up a fuller, richer story that resonates in our souls. Glimpsing something of the multifaceted wisdom and wonder of God himself – and that helps us to remember who we are. A particular type of creature: a human. 

So, I won’t be a bee. I’ll keep trying to learn to be what I am: a particular human in a bigger community, world and story. Now, I’m off to admire the goldfinches, glinting in the sunshine. 

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