Education and forming the brain?

A chap on the Today programme just now was claiming that no one becomes a top sportsman/woman without at least ten years of practice, which doesn’t just develop the body but changes the brain. Pretty well anyone’s brain and body, moreover, can get there with enough practice.

We know about the brain changing with learning from London taxi-drivers and the archaeologist I heard who’d taken singing lessons for a month (or perhaps it was a year) and had his brain scanned before and after -- sure enough one part had grown, and I imagine the change was in the structure too, what was connected to what, how many connections each bit had. Sorry to be so technical.

Dr Johnson said that education in childhood should be determined and relentless because that is when the brain is particularly retentive so that knowledge gained then lasts for life.

So I wonder: is there enough emphasis in contemporary ideas of education on the sheer volume of repetition and application needed? is education arduous enough? is there enough practice to decisively reconfigure the brain?

Ian Pringle and Aviva Freedman in the 1980s did a study of students' writing at different ages in a Canadian school board and concluded that by the age of ten children should be writing many pages of continuous text every week. It seems to me that most children are well capable of that if properly taught from the start, and that it should be happening.

Similarly, it’s necessary to read a certain quantity of poems in a school year. No one has attempted, as far as I know, to say how many but I'm sure it’s far more that most kids do have the chance of reading. Books likewise.

Classrooms cursed by too much variety of activity, not enough sheer application and persistence? too low a tolerance of the possibility of boredom?

Or am I just getting reactionary in my old age?

Feeling, knowing and writing

In Saturday’s Guardian Zadie Smith wrote brilliantly about George Eliot’s Middlemarch
http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/classics/story/0,,2281931,00.html .
Here are some quotes and some comments. (I hope I'm not violating anyone's copyright -- this is educational, after all. Well, self-educational at any rate.)

Experience, for Eliot, was a powerful way of knowing. She had no doubt that she had learned as much from loving her partner George Lewes, for example, as she had from translating Spinoza. When Dorothea truly becomes great (only really in the last third of the novel, when she comes to the aid of Lydgate and Rosamund), it is because she has at last recognised the value of emotional experience:

"All the active thought with which she had before been representing to herself the trials of Lydgate's lot [. . .] all this vivid sympathetic experience returned to her now as a power: it asserted itself as acquired knowledge asserts itself and will not let us see as we saw in the day of our ignorance."
….
In order to be attentive to Fred [Vincy], Eliot had to take the long way round. It was a philosopher, Spinoza, who first convinced her of the importance of experience. It was theory that brought her to practice. These days, "writer of ideas" has become a term of abuse: we think "Ideas" are the opposite of something we call "Life". It wasn't that way with Eliot. In fact, her ability to animate ideas is so acute she is able to fool the great Henry James into believing Fred Vincy a commonplace young man who was wandered into Middlemarch with no purpose. Nothing could be further from the truth.
….
Doesn't she seem to solve the head/heart schism of our literature? Neither as sentimental as our popular novelists, nor as dryly cerebral as our experimentalists. Under the influence of Spinoza, via an understanding of Fred, she thought with her heart and felt with her head. It's a fictional procedure perfectly described by one of her creations, Will Ladislaw:

"To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern, that no shade of quality escapes it, and so quick to feel, that discernment is but a hand playing with finely ordered variety on the chords of emotion - a soul in which knowledge passes instantaneously into feeling, and feeling flashes back as a new organ of knowledge. One may have that condition by fits only."

This seems as good support as any for the argument that literature, or let’s say imaginative writing in the school English classroom, can be a means of setting down a sort of knowledge that is as real as facts. To have ‘no shade of quality' escape one’s awareness is an achievement of cognition, an apprehension of what is actually out there. Feeling is a way of knowing; to which we can add that imaginative writing (fictional and autobiographical writing and poetry) can be a way of articulating that feeling/knowledge, an alternative way to the discursive statement conventionally associated with knowledge.

The poet’s—or the child’s or adolescent’s--quick discernment, instant emotional response (or slow persistent sense) is a knowledge that can’t immediately be stated; it may be able to be stated eventually, after time, or it may not. Such knowledge can still ‘come out’, however, and make itself communicable (and thus more consciously available to the knower herself) through being written into representations of real or imagined experience, i.e. through, for instance, fiction or autobiography or poetry; or film or drawn graphic story.

"All the active thought with which she had before been representing to herself the trials of Lydgate's lot [. . .] all this vivid sympathetic experience returned to her now as a power: it asserted itself as acquired knowledge asserts itself and will not let us see as we saw in the day of our ignorance."

Exactly—and this is relevant for assessment in education: the criterion for the presence of knowledge isn’t only whether we can state it (in answer to a question or in an essay); it’s also whether it functions as ‘a power’ that generates correct perceptions and prevents us seeing things wrongly. To be knowledgeable can be not to be at risk of seeing things wrongly, not to have delusions and misapprehensions; it needn’t just be to be able to say what is true.

One more thing about that quote: Smith says that George Eliot knew she had learned as much from experience as from philosophy. But note that it’s through ‘the active thought with which she had before been representing to herself the trials of Lydgate's lot’ that ‘all this vivid sympathetic experience returned to her now as a power’; reflection is involved, an effort to represent the experience, at least to oneself internally. In education and specifically in English, talking and writing can be a vehicle for such thought.

It’s that sort of philosophy that lay behind much important innovation in and refreshing of English teaching from the mid-1950s to the 70s. It underpinned in particular a large body of impressive children’s writing and enabled a great many students to be motivated. In the long run, it’s true, many of us who were involved in that movement have concluded that as a rationale for English it wasn’t enough. But that doesn’t mean that what’s replaced it represents progress—in some ways what we have now seems a return to ‘the day of our ignorance’ in which we stumbled about ineffectually before that burst of new thinking.

Part of what was missing is what Zadie Smith leaves out. To write Middlemarch, or to be Ladislaw’s poet, it isn’t enough to have the feeling that amounts to knowledge; you also have to be skilled in engaging with semiotic stuff—words and their multiple and slippery meanings, associations and colourings, syntax, sounds—and make an artefact with it. The arts of rhetoric come into it as well as Romantic theories of expression.