Dis-Embodied Learning

Observe how kids learn to throw balls, or to jump rope, or to play chords on the guitar, or to speak a new language if they move to a new place.

All of it happens with others, in activities that involve what we could call the social mind-body.

And compare that to school.

Human beings are—have—inhabit bodies. We are body, mind, soul. And we are all that in conjunction with others in these complex units we call societies. Humans cannot exist without company, except in the rarest of circumstances. Our goals and desires arise in conversation and observation of the others around us.

We learn, in most cases, by wanting to know something, by watching others, by trying things out, by failing a little, by getting a little help, by getting better.

We generally—in real life—go to the places where our interests lead, and maybe that means physically meandering in communities and in various physical settings.

Observe how kids learn to throw balls, or to jump rope, or to play chords on the guitar, or to speak a new language if they move to a new place.

All of it happens with others, in activities that involve what we could call the social mind-body.

And compare that to school.

In school, especially the grim “no-excuses” schools for the disadvantaged, we mostly remove the social—working with others is considered cheating—and the body. Kids have to sit alone and produce things purely mental, cognitive, abstracted from any context. On high-stakes tests, there is only a mind at work. The name, the body, the context are all stripped away and what remains is a lone (lonely?) thinker.

This is such an unnatural state that more and more kids have to be drugged to endure it.

Our persons are embodied. We are made to run and jump and shimmy over to our friends. Sure, humans are not all the same, and we know from anthropological and cognitive science studies that we are shaped by social expectations and by the various practices with which we engage.

But there are limits to our flexibility. We can live with a range of dietary practices, but not without food. We can shape our societies to range from small bands of hunter-gatherers to huge megalopolises, but we cannot live entirely alone and it may be that at the upper range we encounter genuine limits as well.

Psychologist John Bowlby showed that infants cannot live without affection.

And I believe we are seeing the limits of what children can survive. They cannot survive days of solitary practice with meaningless repetitive exercises. Children cannot live on screens and worksheets alone.

Online learning may have some of the same effects, but some kinds of learning bring a social dimension back. “Blended” classes include meetings, or discussion groups. Some ask for photos—recognizing that the physical is a significant dimension of our selves.

Adults drug ourselves in all sorts of ways but we do not allow children to do so. Subject to stresses that challenge our deepest nature, they have nowhere to turn. There is in many cases no recess, no rest, no story time, no chance for idle wondering. So they are forced to sit still, to pay attention, to repeat actions that may have no bearing on anything they know outside the classroom. Who could manage this?

Only someone who has checked her body and social being at the door.

This asks a lot of children. No wonder so many of them need pharmaceutical help to get through their school lives.

In summer many of them have a break from this medication. That should tell us something.

Adults at work take breaks, socializing or checking Facebook or shopping or getting up to get coffee. Nobody monitors our bathroom breaks (except at Wal-Mart and such inhumane settings). But we do not allow our children this kind of bodily freedom. We do not allow them to be social mind-body-spirits.

Is it any wonder so many of them suffer various breakdowns?

It is time to stop blaming the children and look at the system that strips them of their full humanity. That system is our traditional schooling. And it is time to change it.