Innateness And Education

In many ways, education has become one of life s earliest dividing factors. From extremely young ages, children are placed into sets more concerned with immediate ability and not future potential. They are pigeon-holed into certain categories based on apparent interest and competence. Consequently, the education system seems to mirror what in economics is called the Matthew Principle based on a passage from Matthew s Gospel which reads: for to everyone who has will more be given, and he will have abundance& but from him who has not, even what he has will be taken away. Encouragement and stimulation is often offered only to those at the so-called top, whilst those at the bottom flounder in insecurity. This is clearly a vicious circle, one that becomes even more striking given that &a paper produced by the LSE in October 2013, asking lt;i>What Predicts a Successful Life, noted, The most powerful childhood predictor of adult life-satisfaction is the child s emotional health. Next comes the child s conduct. The least powerful predictor is the child s intellectual development. [1] Of course, there is biological variation, and children who are clearly gifted should in no way be reprimanded or have their talents curbed. However, biological, psychological and philosophical investigations throughout history also indicate that the intellectual field may be more level than the education system claims it to be. In fact, it may be the case that there are neurological faculties that exist in all of us that, given the right stimulus, could lead to greater results across the current educational hierarchy.

The nativist case really began with Plato, who asserted that all things have a specific metaphysical Form that is its true being. Plato took this idea further, and, in his explanation for how our minds could ever know anything at all, proposed the theory that all these Forms were already implanted in our minds before birth, consequently allowing the identification of different instances of the Form. Inevitably, some of Plato s ideas seem fantastical in retrospect take, for example, the claim that our soul flies up to the metaphysical realm in order to grasp the Forms before being locked in our bodies. Even if this is metaphorical, it does cast our imaginations to a multitude of awful movies. Nonetheless, the nativist stake was claimed, its consequences monumental. The mind was no longer seen as an external tool to the world, but had the very essence of the world within it. All it needed was the right stimulus, and education system was just that. Indeed, Plato s predecessor, Socrates, advocated the Socratic Method, a form of cooperative discussion in order to draw out ideas. We ve lost such a faith in the human mind in the 21^stcentury. As a consequence, we have lost faith in one another. No longer is the relationship between two minds seen as a drawing out of creative and essential ideas. It is now a power battle, even at the tender age of four. A more specific and, perhaps, more plausible nativist theory arose in the 1960s as a result of the linguistic work of Noam Chomsky, who claimed that a baby is not exposed to enough primary linguistic data, that is what is hears and reads, to account for the infinite creativity and accuracy of adult speech. As a result, he argued that a baby must have innate linguistic structures built-in to its brain, that allows for such effortless learning of language. Citing similar aspects of all languages across the globe, he concluded that a baby does not have a specific language hard-wired in its neurons, but a Universal Grammar, that, with the right stimulus, leads to fluent and faultless language use. This idea has clearly not taken hold in the Modern Language faculties in schools. More than often children see learning languages as a bore, a Sisyphean effort, asking can t I just read that in English ? This year the government has a set a target for 75% of pupils to study a language at GCSE by 2022. Only 29% of state institutions have achieved that so far.[2] Perhaps such a figure could be improved not by drilling uno, due, tres into the pitiable skulls of young children, for not only is this tedious but it also regards the foreign language as wholly external to a pupil s life. &Perhaps, instead, we should trust the minds of our pupils, trust their biological flexibility and adeptness, treating them like the incredible machines they are. If we do this then at least children will be more confident and enthusiastic, remembering the Platonic maxim that we are learning things that we already know. If we spread this message, instead of resigning thousands of children to a life of academic failure, perhaps education will no longer be seen as a pointless adjunct to our childhood lives, but a fulfilling component of our every living moment.

[1] http://www.lse.ac.uk/business-and-consultancy/consulting/consulting-reports/what-predicts-a-successful-life-a-life-course-model-of-well-being

[2] https://www.britishcouncil.org/research/language-trends-2018