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Education

Somebody actually made this list for the UK Educational Systems Programme. Let’s imagine that while they made it they were thinking these were all fresh, innovative concepts. Even more startling is how far they are from the reality that exists in schools today. Not that they are deliberately flouted – it’s just the gap between what you want to do and what actually happens.

Rethinking Education

My Story

My education was way below sea level; nothing stuck on the billboard of my brain but luckily I had the know-how to cheat. For a history test, I wrote the entire ‘Declaration of Independence’ on my thighs. The only thing that kept me from acing it was that I’d sweated away the details. My head under my skirt, I read, ‘All men are created …’ It was a blur, who knew what they were created for? It was written by Thomas … someone (there was only a smudge). People have the rights to ‘life, liberty and dslkdjfdsd’ (couldn’t decipher anything).

During my following years in school, I lost hope, as did my parents, when I found myself in the ‘slow’ class with students who were all short of a few marbles. I didn’t have one of those teachers who saw potential greatness in me; even my typing teacher thought I was ‘slow’ and she added a note in the report to my mother that she thought I had criminal tendencies. Where she came up with this, I do not know. I once threw up into my electric typewriter which could possibly have electrocuted us all. Barf, poof, gone! But no biggie, so what was her problem?

Education did not make me smart but I excelled in learning how to fail, to hustle and to roll with the punches so I snuck into the cracks of possibilities and went where no high achievers would bother to go. For example, I auditioned over seven times to drama schools that couldn’t believe the nerve of someone so abysmal showing up so often with such delusional hope in her eyes. Eventually one in Glasgow let me in, having broken them down, and I went for three happy years to learn the English accent I have today (hear Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins).

Importance of Failure

I have learnt from this research that learning to fail may have originally been a valuable lesson. (I tell myself this daily.) You can only create something unique by experimenting, which means many of your attempts will hit the fan. It’s the struggle to get it right (so something has to be wrong) that gives the results depth and meaning. If you get it right the first time, you’re probably copying someone else’s work who copied someone else’s.

Eventually, at some point in your life you’ll fail and those of us who flew the flag of failure in school will know exactly how to deal with it; the captain of the football team will at this point go down in flames. You need a strong failure muscle in life because it’s waiting for you around every corner, so be prepared.

School syllabuses make us repetitively go over and over again to learn facts; it’s a cycle of preparing, testing, preparing, testing. It’s been shown that a better way to learn is trying, failing, trying, failing, but this is hard to incorporate in a system that treats failure as something to be ashamed of.

Teachers today are forced to follow a recipe to make cookie-cutter kids with the required ingredients beaten into them. They’re under pressure to get those test results even if the kid is driven half-crazy to achieve them. We’re now in danger of being served fast-food education, and as much as fast food is depleting our bodies, this fast-food education is depleting our brains.

My Story

The dream of becoming an actress didn’t stop at drama school. Equipped with my Dick Van Dyke accent, I decided my next move would be to get into the Royal Shakespeare Company. Those who I told looked at me with great sadness and my parents laughed like drains. But working on pure chutzpah (also a subject they should teach in schools), I got in. I auditioned by playing an insane American (little did they know the speech wasn’t from a play, I was just being me – stream of consciousness). No one can play an insane American better than one who is. They tried to get out of casting me by saying I had to be married to someone British to work in the UK. I found a husband within twenty-four hours (poor man didn’t know what hit him). So now they had no excuse and I was in, playing bits of seaweed and an ashtray, but God dammit, I was in.

Juliet Stevenson, also a newcomer, played seaweed next to me. (We once laughed so hard while performing, she peed during The Tempest – I was a witness.) I continued to play foliage while she went on to play Cleopatra but to me she’ll always be a stalk of seaweed.

‘Screw Shakespeare,’ I thought, ‘I’ll write my own shows,’ and then I forced Alan Rickman (a fellow member) to direct them. He told me, gently, to avoid acting in the future, that it was not my forte but that I should consider writing comedy. My friends today say there are two big questions in their lives that they know will never be answered. Who shot Kennedy? And how did I get into the RSC? The answer is that it’s all done by acknowledging that you may suck at what you’re doing but to just steer straight ahead like a deranged arrow to your goal and if you fail, you fail, ‘But screw your courage to the sticking place and we’ll not fail,’ as Lady Macbeth advised. I want to have written on my tombstone, ‘At least she tried.’

What’s Not Working?

First, let me discuss what’s not working in education today and then, as the book promises, what does work.

Some of the questions we have at the moment are the following: Why are so many children burning out from the pressures at school? Why doesn’t it prepare them for the reality that’s going to smack them in the face when they leave? Why do many leave with an embedded sense of failure before they even have a chance to fail? Why after all these thousands of years haven’t we come up with a more inspired and less boring way to teach? Why do we have a system that divides learning into specific subjects that we’re force-fed and then required to regurgitate? And, after all that heaving, why doesn’t it land us a job?

Today’s educational curriculum is based on Victorian manufacturing factory systems developed over a century ago. Kids are put on a learning conveyor belt, then sorted, packaged and labelled according to how their intelligence is measured, and boxed off to the next institution or job (if they’re lucky). As someone once said, ‘We aren’t educating our children, we’re domesticating them.’

In the next thirty years, more people will be graduating school than ever so we better come up with some ideas fast. How do we teach our kids anything in an age where their attention has been taken hostage by tech? It’s known as ‘capturing eyeballs’ (a tagline for target marketing). Education needs to somehow figure out how to capture their eyeballs back.

Who is Smart Any More?

We need to rethink what defines someone as smart these days, because we may have got that one wrong. Those with the highest grades and test scores, who then get the top-dog jobs, may know how to turn a profit for a company but they are also equipped with the tools to rob the bank. And some of them arrogantly think they deserve to rob it too. So success at school doesn’t guarantee honesty or even sanity. In my opinion, the more powerful you are, the more depleted you may be of human qualities i.e. noticing anyone is alive other than yourself. It’s like, again only my opinion, there are very few good-looking people who are also funny. There’s a price to pay for certain gifts. Smart also doesn’t describe those old-school, puffed-up twats who don’t even realize they have spittle dripping down their chin as they smugly spit the details at you of what was the tipple of choice of General Spitoon during the War of the Hardheads in 1458 (I missed a lot in school). We now have to redefine what clever means because, so far, who we called the smartest might just have been having a smidgeon of Asperger’s.

Before you think that it’s not the schools’ fault that some kids can’t learn anything, that these kids are born incapable, let me make one thing clear – as Alex Beard titled his book on education (my bible for this chapter), children are all ‘Natural Born Learners’.

Early Learning

As far back as 1890, William James, philosopher and psychologist, was saying that babies come into the world as pattern makers. Even in utero, babies are already picking up sounds and trying to find similarities or dissonances. Evolution did its usual ‘survival at all costs’ thing by preparing them with a skill set to enable them to read clues by picking up information from the environment. Other animals are born with claws, fangs and the means to spurt poison, they don’t need to study these, it’s instinctive. But for human babies (born with no weaponry up their sleeves), reading faces, picking up emotions and copying what they see is how they learn. When babies see a smile, they feel that whoosh of happiness, whether they’re in Panga Panga or Punta de la Gusta. We all need someone to reflect back to. If a baby has no one to mimic, it won’t know how to feel emotions or navigate the world and after about a year of not connecting facially and physically to someone, research shows it probably won’t survive. The shared attention between baby and parent or caregiver is where conscious learning begins; not just the exchange of words, but the reciprocal feelings. So anyone who can speak and feel has the ability to learn because that’s what got them this far.

We come out of the womb like Sherlock Holmes trying to crack the world around us. Everything is intriguing and we want to know what it is, how it works and mostly what it tastes like. (This is why almost everything is shoved into the mouth for investigation first.) It’s all a surprise and what motivates us to keep learning is the reward of love and approval we receive in our parents’ eyes whenever we guess a colour correctly or give the right name to something. (I know the day my parents stopped smiling at me was when I said ‘hat’ and pointed to an umbrella.)

So a child isn’t born to obey, they are born to explore. They come equipped with a wide-open mind, zapping with all the curiosity in the cosmos and potential to create anything. For the next couple of decades they learn to shrink-wrap themselves into a pre-packaged perfect prototype of a ‘student’, meaning they function from the neck up, their body only there to move them to the next class.

Whatever grade we get, we forget that it’s just a letter for God’s sake, not a genetic mutation. You might live your whole life drowning in low self-esteem just because you didn’t spell ‘catipilar’ right even though you might be great at drawing the caterpillar, making music about it, dancing like one, but not being able to spell it means you’re a bit of a failure.

This is why kids now suffer higher rates of depression, panic disorders, high anxiety, ADHD, ADD and cutting (that’s a new one – it didn’t exist in my day). The world is hard enough, couldn’t we give kids a break? Allow them to have fun during these years without having to prove how smart they are and feel like failures when they fail? Never again in their lives will they have the ability to just play, without having to prove themselves worthy of being alive by coming home with an ‘A’.

After all, you only learn when something lights up the curiosity section of your brain. This is why, at age fifty-seven, I lit up and went to Oxford. My parents would spin in their graves in disbelief. Anyway, you get my point, that my life was lived by the skin of my teeth. (I don’t know what that expression means but I’m using it.)

I’m aware of how lucky I am and how lucky my kids are that I made enough to send them to good schools. I’m also aware that some parents either can’t get their kids into a decent school or really couldn’t care less (which makes it clear to the kid that she’s not worth it, so she gives up).

In my hood, the parents are in a white-hot fury of ambition; they tear their hair out if their kid gets below a ‘C’, as in their opinion it stands for loser. (C was my best grade – I always think a letter C looks like someone hunkered over a toilet, throwing up.) Anyway, they have their offspring tutored up the wahzoo. Actually, from the moment the head crowns in the cervix, they want the baby tested to get them into the ‘best’ school and then the ‘best’ next school and then the ‘best’ university … and the rejects peel off like burning parts of a rocket that are only holding it back. What destroys a kid’s mind faster than a speeding bullet is a parent who pushes. Twenty years later, these same uber-ambitious mothers now ask if I know of a good rehab? The harder the kids were pushed, the harder the drugs they become hooked on.

Humans learn best when they feel someone cares about them, not for their intelligence, looks or talent but for who they are. This is not how education in school works today so kids are burning out faster than they ever did before; one in three now suffers from some kind of mental health problem. The good news is coming, which I’ll reveal later in the chapter, but at this stage, just to put everything in context, I’d like to give you my version of the history of education – it’s completely accurate, I just took out the boring bits of which there were many.

The History of Education

In the Beginning …

There was no formal education for thousands of years, when we were apes, it was recess all the time. Those were the days. Only when we turned into humanoids did we start to have lessons. Hunters taught young boys to hunt, gatherers taught the fine art of gathering to the girls – which was not as fun. The good news was that the kids learnt by imitation, not repetition, it was all outdoors and there were no grades. Playtime was when we weren’t hunting or gathering, and if you were eaten, you were eaten (shit happens), you weren’t trained to be paranoid by your parents. Not like today where you get into trouble with social services if you let your kid run loose. You can’t get away with saying, ‘Sorry, officer, I was just teaching Zack to hunt.’ Anyway, no one was forced to be exceptional. Obviously, there were some naturally bright, talented cave people. Maybe the one who started etching horses on the cave walls in France won the equivalent of what the Turner Prize is today.

Around 2.5 million years ago, stone tools were discovered in Ethiopia, which suggests that education was no longer monkey see, monkey do, but someone was writing or drawing things that could be handed down from generation to generation, sharing knowledge on everything from how to skin something and make it into a hat to general knowledge on how to survive. It couldn’t have been that informative because Homo sapiens (meaning ‘wise human beings’) did not emerge from Africa until around 200,000 years ago. It took them all that time to grow a cerebrum to a decent size and develop vocal apparatus so they could speak. If the instructions were that good, don’t you think they would have evolved faster than that? (Let’s just say that manual did not become number one on the hominid bestseller list.)

A stone tablet found in Mesopotamia and dating from 2000 BC provides a glimpse into what early schooling looked like:

Then, in Classical times, the whole learning system was reinvented. The Greek word for school was skhole and meant ‘lecture house’. What they read at skhole was really boring; it was like reading the Yellow Pages and they also mainly learnt about accounts.

The First Thousand Years of Modern Education

When Plato’s Academy and Aristotle’s Lyceum came along, the young students in Athens learnt the 3Rs followed by apprenticeship for a trade (if you were a pleb), while the patrician elite learnt drawing, sculpture, rhetoric (winning arguments), maths, geography, natural history, politics and logic; pretty much what you would get taught at Eton today.

Socrates didn’t believe you could learn anything by writing it down so he invented the process of learning through asking questions. Like a game show minus the buzzer, it was all about face-to-face interaction and the purpose was to ask questions like, ‘The unexamined life is okay for cows but not for us. Discuss.’ He put philosophy on the map (it means love of wisdom) but was eventually put to death for asking too many questions, so it did him no favours.

Socrates’ general theories continued through the rest of BC times. We are told that Jesus was praised for asking such challenging questions at his bar mitzvah. (I’m not sure it was there but he was Jewish so he probably had one – not a big fancy one but in the stable or something.)

After that for about 500 years the only learning was in monasteries where lessons were delivered in Latin. Good luck if you didn’t speak it. Here, students learnt grammar, rhetoric and logic. I would have flunked out.

Later, Martin Luther (1483–1546, German priest who started the Protestant Reformation) got it in his head, before he lost it, that salvation depended on each person being able to read the scriptures in their own language, so at least they dropped the Latin.

When the fall of the monasteries occurred, the fall of education for anyone other than the rich came too; it then cost a fortune and it was mostly private tutoring (the birth of hot-housing). Poor people just learnt how to be poor over and over again until they understood how poor they really were.

Meanwhile in America

In the US in the mid seventeenth century, Massachusetts became the first colony to mandate schooling to keep the kids obedient by training them to be good Puritans. They learnt to read from a primer known as the ‘Little Bible of New England’, which had short rhymes to help kids learn the alphabet, beginning with ‘A. In Adam’s fall, we sinned all.’ It went through the whole alphabet, each letter with a saying about the Lord, ending with Z for Zacchaeus, ‘He did climb the tree, his Lord to see.’ All the lessons were to instil fear of God and the wrath of adults if you faltered. Also the rhymes were shit.

From Factory Fodder to Classroom

In the Industrial Age, kids moved from the bondage of rural poverty to the factory floor. They worked seven days a week, many dying of disease and starvation, and if they did manage to go to school they just learnt the basic numbers and letters; the duller the subjects taught in schools, the better to numb their minds. Then, in 1883, England passed laws limiting child labour, saying that children couldn’t work under the age of nine and restricting weekly work hours to forty-eight for ten- to twelve-year-olds and sixty-nine for thirteen- to seventeen-year-olds. Imagine today, telling your kid they’d have to work even for ten minutes; they’d take you to court.

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as industry became automated, the need for child labour declined in parts of the world. Childhood as a concept was invented at this point (before that, kids were considered mini adults) so this was when we got those paintings of a ‘wittle’ girly sucking her thumb with cutesy blonde curls, a teardrop in her eye, holding a kitten. It may come as a surprise that these adorable images of children didn’t stop the Victorians from continuing to beat them senseless. Their justification for this was that as they were born evil, it was necessary to discipline them to keep them obedient. This clearly attracted people of a sadistic nature to become school teachers. One master in Germany kept records of the floggings he did in fifty years of teaching: 911,527 blows with rod, 124,010 with cane, 136,715 blows with hand and 1,118,800 blows on head. Punishments were understood as being a natural part of the educational process and most people thought play was a waste of time, but they let them out once in a while to let off steam. It turns out recess is important after you’ve been slammed. Who knew?

Everything stayed pretty much the same. The rich people went to Eton to study talking like a peacock and running the country, and the poor had to study the Bible so they’d know what God could do to them if they tried to step out of line.

Twentieth Century

Scroll on a bit, then bingo, in 1954 the National Union of Teachers in the UK decided that the quarter of a million teachers, free from government or Church interference, could decide what should be taught, how it should be taught and then go teach it.

So by the 1970s, experimental schools were opening, where kids had no rules and studied having sex with everyone, including teachers. Sadly, it didn’t work as standards went to pot. Schools were failing to produce kids who could even read and write (there had been too much of an emphasis on finger-painting) and there was an economic downturn, making people nervous that the UK would go down the drain because schools were producing kids with the academic ability of glow-worms.

A few years later, Thatcher came to power and as a result of various complaints and media exposure of failing schools, she took out her whip and put a halt to free-fall education. It seemed we didn’t need people majoring in pottery. And that was the birth of today’s highly controlled National Curriculum where all children were taught maths, English, science, a foreign language, history, geography and technology, and tests were introduced based on attainment targets, at ages seven, eleven and fourteen. (What do you know at seven, besides spitting at people? That was my major then.)

The final phase was when we invented Ofsted and now teachers were no longer considered to be in the same professional league as doctors or lawyers and started being examined and scrutinized by inspectors on what and how to teach. Boxes had to be ticked and targets reached; the kids went into their rooms and put on headphones.

Where We Are Today

So that’s how we got to where we are. Now, please don’t burn me at the stake for what I’m going to say, it’s just my opinion. Though these subjects are fascinating and very important for exercising our brains, they will not ensure a job in the future; they say that in thirty years’ time, 80 per cent of today’s eight-year-olds will have jobs that haven’t even been invented yet. Knowing that Churchill liked to play miniature golf on days off or King Leo the Lionheart had a stutter will not get you work in 2030. In the meantime, computers can do the maths, spellcheck can do the spelling, a USB stick can hold memory and Wikipedia knows everything.

My suggestion would be to start giving kids degrees in ‘people skills’, which is something I doubt any computer will ever accomplish, mainly because the coders who do the coding can’t code it into the programs because most of them have no idea what people skills are. Hopefully, the CEOs in the future will be there because they got ‘A’s in Empathy.

Something to feel good about, though, is that teachers are very safe from being replaced by robots. When it comes to classroom management, I don’t know how an avatar could stop the back row using biros as blowpipes and covering the ceiling with screws of paper.fn1

League Tables and Why They’re Shit

Not only are the kids set against each other at school like chickens in a cockfight, now schools, thanks to the league tables, are ranked against each other to be the ‘best’, forcing head teachers into the business of chasing results like the CEO from a bank. The current system is making teachers ‘teach to the test’ so that lessons are focused on getting the kids to swallow and then spew out the syllabus. Henceforth to be known as the ‘swallow ’n’ spew’ model.

Then there is the big scary monster called PISA – Programme for International Student Assessment – that is an international survey which evaluates education systems worldwide by testing fifteen-year-old students. Every three years, students in over ninety countries are tested on reading, maths and science. So, now it’s not just a cockfight between UK schools, it has become a worldwide competition. The UK has flopped over the years. Guess who’s in front? China, Singapore and Japan.

The highest-performing schools in the world are in Shanghai. These countries push their kids into whatever generates the most capital, putting the economy first, rather than the children. Guess what’s sacrificed? Well-being, a moral code, personal development, emotional intelligence, improvement of relationships, communication – all tools for a better life.

China

I’m aware that my international readership might be feeling left out so to make them feel included, I went to the East – my books are translated into Chinese, it’s the least I can do. Coincidentally, I’d been invited to do a talk at a school in Shanghai, which was a branch of Wellington College UK where Sir Anthony Seldon was the headmaster for twenty years. He’s convinced that truly happy people are made, not born, and so created his own curriculum which included mindfulness; the school’s academic results shot through the roof. He identifies five really important things he has learnt in life:

I understand all of these except the last one. I was asked to go and give a talk on mindfulness in Shanghai.

11 April 2019

Before going to Wellington, Shanghai, I asked if I could visit a regular Chinese school. I had to send in my ‘intentions’, which didn’t bode well, but then they found out I worked in TV as an entertainer so the gates were thrown open and I was greeted by a smiling staff and a neon sign with my name in lights. As soon as I entered the halls, I noticed there was no noise anywhere. I was told the reason was that everyone gets a number of points called social credit and if anyone misbehaves they deduct points, which will affect their future job opportunities. So no one acts up, and if they do, their peers will report them and gain points for themselves.

I walked into a classroom; none of the students turned around. They sat stiff, facing forward like little numb soldiers with Chinese Miss Trunchbull from Matilda at the helm. She was writing mile-long equations on the board, expecting immediate, speeding-bullet answers. I spoke to friendly Trunchbull afterwards who told me maths shapes the brain, knowledge doesn’t count, memorization makes muscles as does competition, which results in a better life. You make money, you have success and it guarantees a better partner. (Clearly they marry for maths.) She referred to the humanities – history, language, philosophy – as ‘arts’, with a curled lip of disdain.

I was told that a thirteen-year-old has the equivalent intelligence of a UK university student and that Chinese parents are famous for their tyrannical discipline to ‘help’ the child at home. Some use various methods of beating which I don’t remember finding in my ‘How to bring up baby’ books. But, boy, does it get results. If the kid gets below 100 per cent it’s considered shameful and may call for more beating.

There is no Mr or Mrs Nice Guy, the parents compete ruthlessly with other families for whose kid’s smartest and which of their kids sleeps the least. (That’s high status here.) Some of the kids stand up in lessons so they don’t fall asleep, which would also be considered shameful. There is no time off; after they finish school they have four hours of homework, then many are privately tutored until 2.00 a.m. (Tutors who get the best results can make about $400,000 a year. Parents spend about 70 per cent of their income on education so their kid better hit that 100 per cent.) After all this, some kids are chained to a violin or piano to become maestros at age three then have to get up again at 5.30 a.m. All this happens so the parents don’t ‘lose face’, the biggest taboo of them all.

I asked discreetly if any of the kids suffer from depression or other mental problems. The answer was, ‘Very little.’ I was told there is suicide, but no depression, which is good.

If they do show signs of a ‘problem’, including dyslexia, they may be asked to leave school for a year and are taken to the country. Then, I was told, some are, strangely, never heard of again. (I think this has always been an excellent cure, especially for dyslexia.) However, if a kid thinks he needs help (and this is shameful), he goes to the school counsellor. I went to meet her in a small room where she showed me her technique for kids with ‘concentration’ problems. In the middle of the room there was a sandbox filled with white sand. Shelves along the walls were filled with miniature toy figures: housewives, soldiers, clowns, ballet dancers along with plastic trees, tiny furniture, model cars, etc. The kid with the ‘concentration’ problem is asked to put whatever they want on the sand. I asked why and the counsellor told me she had no idea. But she assured me, if the sand therapy doesn’t help there are other methods. I was taken down the hall and proudly shown a red padded room where the kids can hurl themselves around and bang off the walls to let off steam. There are life-sized blow-up figures which they can club till bursting. (I’m guessing they represent parents or teachers.)

Suddenly, hideous carnival music was pumped into the airwaves to eardrum-shattering volume. This marks the time when all the students stop what they’re doing and do exercises for the eyes. In circling movements, they massage their cheekbones and the sides of the head to improve their eyesight. Many of the kids wear glasses from straining their eyes through the long hours of study and this improves their sight. These same kids who are maths geniuses think the rubbing of the face cures defective eyesight. I didn’t question it out loud. I left with the teachers waving me farewell as the kids still sat riveted to their seats, chanting numbers like automatons.

Well, there you have it, the highest grade results in the universe making China the richest country in the world and no one has any mental problems. Problem solved.

Oh, did I mention China and Korea (another hothouse of schooling and where my book is sold) have the highest suicide rate among thirteen- to twenty-four-year-old girls in developed nations and the boys aren’t far behind.

12 April 2019

I was introduced to Ewan, head teacher from Wellington College, who couldn’t have been more loving. Ewan loved Girls on Top (my first TV show) so he made sure my every whim was fulfilled. I had the day off and he had to teach so he gave me Yvette as a guide to show me the sights of Shanghai.

We didn’t understand each other right off the bat. Yvette told me she was my ‘Urine’ and I should call her that. I said maybe not. A few days later we figured it out, she was saying she was my ‘Ewan’ for the day. At one point, I told her I had gum and she blanched. She whispered, ‘You can’t have gum in China, it’s against the law.’ I figured it’s that litter law again where you can’t deface the sidewalks. I asked her if she wanted some, she nearly fainted. She told me they frisk you in the metro and if they find it on you, you’re arrested. I asked her if anyone is allowed gum? She told me only the police for security reasons. I told her I’m going to use it anyway because what’s the worst that can happen? She said, ‘You could shoot people,’ to which I asked, ‘By spitting gum at them?’ Gradually it dawned on us both she was talking about guns. We bonded after that.

She took me to see some of the more unusual sights of Shanghai. Each Sunday, in People’s Park, hundreds of parents sit behind umbrellas which have a sheet of paper pinned on them. The paper gives information about the son or daughter, advertising them for potential marriage. (I guess it’s their version of Tinder – though they’re supposed to be so technically advanced and here they’re using umbrellas to deliver information. See what I mean, how confusing these people are?) So there they are, the parents perched on little boxes, behind their parasols, pimping the kids.

Yvette translated some of their CVs:

‘Single daughter of Ning, height 1.68 metres. Worked at Goldman Sachs for two years; now chief engineer at Apple looking for boyfriend. Nianha is honest, self-motivated, wants boy over number 10,000 in Shanghai.’ (There is a quaint old system here in Shanghai where they number you in order of how smart you are. In a city of 24 million, 10,000 isn’t chopped liver.)

Another one said, ‘Unmarried man born 1989, height 1.70 metres, graduated in finance, stock analyst, can buy house, looking for kind lady as companion.’ (I almost answered that one.)

13 April 2019

It’s my first day at Wellington College and it’s a whole different barrel of fish to the first school I saw. You hear laughter, kids are playing football outside, teachers are smiling.

I was shown to a classroom where I would be doing a talk on mindfulness and found there were no children, only Chinese parents. When I got to a point about stress, everybody’s face went blank. I asked if the translator spoke English, thinking it was her fault, but she explained to me that people in China don’t have stress. I wondered why I had been brought here in the first place. I asked how they reacted to being pumped with bad news about wars, crime, disaster – didn’t it frighten them? She told me that there’s no bad news on TV or digitally because it’s censored so they only hear news of how wonderful China is and that the rest of the world is a cesspit of corruption and that they should consider themselves lucky to be there. She explained that even if they did feel something like stress, they would lose face. I had to remind myself that though I was at a liberal school, this stuff is deeply ingrained. I politely asked if there was a biology teacher in the house, and if there was, did these kids ever learn about the damage cortisol does to the brain from the pressure of learning even while they’re saving their faces? There was a biology teacher who raised his hand but looked blank. (I think ‘blank’ is the ‘in’ look in China.) When I asked what he taught the kids, I swear he said, ‘Polar bears,’ but maybe it was lost in translation.

Later, when I met the children, I asked them how they defined happiness. A boy who shone with intelligence told me he equated happiness with money and when I asked how he pictured happiness, he said a pool with gold coins at the bottom. I thought, now I’m really wasting my time.

In the afternoon I did my show, Frazzled, in the theatre attended by parents and teachers. At a point in the show I talk about how I was a great failure at school because I thought out of the box when those around me didn’t even know there was a box. Then I say, ‘And what happened to all those girls who got straight “A”s and were cheerleaders and everyone expected them to do so well? Well, now they’re all crack whores.’ The woman who was translating just ground to a halt, no idea what it meant, the parents went blanker than any blank I’d ever seen but the teachers laughed and applauded. A bizarre experience.

Because some of these kids (mainly those with a Western parent) will go to university in the US or Europe, they are also offered classes in emotional intelligence. I watched a class where the students learnt how to read each other’s emotional state by noting the tone of voice, posture and word choice. They learnt how to understand ‘below the words’ by listening with their ‘whole body’ as they call it. They practised how to hold back on instant gratification, to pause before reacting and to notice their own biases before responding. There’s an exercise I watched them do to help them tolerate uncomfortable feelings of boredom, confusion and bewilderment.

When they have to get their heads down for the pressure of academic courses, they’ve learnt to get their minds cool and collected to take in information and consolidate it with ease. What an irony that in China they’re teaching kids empathy. (Mao would spin in his grave.) As I said before, I think social skills will be the gold standard in the future and Wellington is ahead of the game.

Here, when they teach maths, it’s not dry theory, it’s taught with an application in mind. Rather than chant numbers, the kids learn how to make solar panels which they send to places like Cambodia for people without electricity or they make seismographs out of cardboard to detect earthquakes or a robot for the purpose of delivering medicine. They have a website called solarbuddy.com where the students build tech (drones, robots, programs, apps) for anything that’s needed anywhere in the world. So here, in the land of the red dragon, there are signs of green shoots.

The Bad News for Tech in Education

There seems to be some evidence around that says passive screen-sucking is not just unhelpful to children’s learning, but could set back their development. As always, I’m not knocking tech but we need to keep our fingers on the pulse to make sure we’re still pumping blood not electricity. With too much screen time the ‘white matter’ in their brains depletes, impacting numeracy and language skills. ‘Babies require face-to-face interaction to learn,’ says Dr Vic Strasburger, professor and spokesperson for the American Academy of Paediatrics. ‘The watching probably interferes with the crucial wiring being laid down in their brains during early development.’ Even if they’re watching an educational programme, like Sesame Street, it delays language development. I’m so sorry, Big Bird, I loved you, I had no idea you were stunting my mental growth.

Dr Vic also says that children’s videos are causing a generation of overstimulated kids. People assume that stimulation is good, so the more the better, but it’s not true, there is such a thing as overstimulation. The more television children watch, the shorter their attention spans later in life. ‘Their minds come to expect a high level of stimulation, and view that as normal, and by comparison, reality is boring.’ For those who want to know what the screen-time limit is for them to allow their kids, here are the guidelines.

The ideal number of hours on screen for kids aged two to five is up to an hour a day. For teens it’s up to about two hours a day. Good luck getting them off. If anyone has any ideas about how it’s done, please write to me.

Using a computer to help you with a problem or to find information actually makes the brain lazy and deskills you in the long term. When the brain can take a shortcut, it does, but in doing so it fails to lay down the cognitive architecture needed to deepen intelligence. Proof of this is the overuse of the satnav. Many of us no longer know where we live without it. We have lost the ability to find our way home.

The Good News

However, green shoot-wise, tech can democratize opportunities for learning globally at a much lower cost than formal, classroom-based learning, often offering it for free for those unable to pay. If a kid has access to a smart device and a Wi-Fi signal, even in the remotest village in Africa or some sliver of an island in the Pacific, they can learn anything. Developing countries don’t want third-rate schools so the students are better off with remote course providers.

I don’t know if you’ve looked at what’s available online but even at the universities you could never get into in real life, you can take a course remotely. You can no longer get away with saying, ‘I missed the bus.’ The greatest of all professors are a click away and if you find one boring, just click another. Here are some examples of what’s out there:

In all the courses, you have the chance to interact and chat with instructors, unlike in real life where they will never in a million years have time to see you personally. There’s also interaction with fellow students so you aren’t learning in a bubble. You can learn on planes, trains and automobiles with ‘real-time interactivity’. You can study in the bathtub, but if you do, I’d shut off the interactive button.

Here’s a bonus: rather than online dating, which may still be weird for some, you can hook up with someone in your class who has similar interests. You can pretend you’re studying together and then make your move. It may be difficult if one of you is in Siberia and the other in Abu Dhabi, but it’s worth a try.

A study in 2018 showed 85 per cent of students who had previously enrolled in face-to-face courses and then switched to online courses felt that the online experience was the same or better than the classroom. So you can get any degree, in anything, just sitting at home in your underwear.fn2

Even More Good News

I met Lee Daley at TEDTalks, co-founder of an emerging technology called Hello Genius. He calls it a ‘platform for outlier kids’ aged three to nine years old. This covers kids with learning disabilities to kids who are unique and don’t fit in the conventional educational system. The individual machine learning and AI encourages kids who think differently; it caters to those who think out of the box.

When using Hello Genius, they ‘embark on a self-guided exploration through a treasure trove of knowledge’. Their imagination leads the programme, rather than being forced through what he describes as the ‘cookie cutter’ education system. By the way, Ken Robinson is on their board, who is deeply opposed to cookie-cutter teaching.

Also, Daley says, when you tell a student to ‘pay attention’ and they don’t, usually there’s a reason behind it. Probably, you’re not capturing their attention, that’s why they’re not paying it. Most of us adults don’t even know where our attention is from moment to moment, so how would a kid? Attention has to be captured first and then trained. This programme follows the attention of the learner. For example, the kid types in ‘dinosaur’ and images of hundreds of dinosaurs come up on the screen. They’re then encouraged to zoom in to the one which takes their interest. Choices come up about things you might want to learn about the dinosaur. What’s their favourite food? Who do they like to kill and how? When did they die out? Etc. Whatever the kid taps in leads to more choices. Let’s say, they want to watch a pterodactyl fly and that ignites their curiosity about how aeroplanes fly, so they tap a button to watch a video of aeroplanes, which may make them wonder how wind works and with another tap an expert tells them about meteorological reasons for gales. You get the picture? They can choose what excites them, through their minds and fingers. Whenever they tap a choice, another world opens up. Curiosity rules.

This is using tech as a teacher to widen their minds. The data also allows parents to get an insight into what their child is really stimulated by. If they see their daughter is interested in aerodynamics, get her a toy rocket and not some cliché pink doll they think she’d like. Or if the boy has a penchant for making tutus, give him the doll. Isn’t this an exciting development?

And Now For the Really Really Good News: REAch2

I visited a state school in the UK that is beyond a green shoot, it’s a fully thriving tree.

REAch2 is a radically new type of school, a type of school that I wish I’d gone to. There are two primary schools: Tidemill Academy in Deptford, London, and Garden City Academy in Letchworth, Hertfordshire. Both are part of an Academy Trust run by a state-funded charity. It started with a few schools and now is the biggest school trust in the country, serving over sixty schools – that’s about 20,000 students. It’s partnered with Mindfulness in Schools. At the start, 17 per cent were considered ‘good’ by Ofsted standards; now the figure is 82 per cent, which is in the top 10 per cent in the UK, with their SATs results 23 per cent above national average. Half the kids come from a ‘deprived’ background (free school meals). A further twenty-two REAch2 schools are going to be opened in the next few years. The idea, besides teaching them formal education, is to grow these kids into great human beings; discovering who they are, what their responsibility is to the world and how to show compassion to themselves and others.

REAch2 promises to give kids eleven positive experiences before they turn eleven. It’s the kids’ choice what those are: to visit a foreign country, cook meals from vegetables they grew themselves, climb a mountain, sleep under the stars, paddle down a river; things they could never do in their normal lives. They are also challenged to do ten good deeds in ten days.

I went to look around Letchworth Garden City Academy. There was a notice I passed that said, ‘Big feelings are not to be ashamed about but they may stop us from doing what we want in life and affect our mental health. If your feelings are too big to cope with on your own, you can speak to Leila at Place to Talk in room 130.’

Other signs around the school said:

I met a group of nine-year-olds who told me their names and then how they felt; they call it ‘checking in’. Most told me they were nervous meeting an outsider. (My own kids never told me how they felt outside of a grunt.) They study the brain to learn what happens inside themselves when their brain gets aroused and when it’s calm. The teacher had them do an exercise where they go around the circle saying what was special about themselves. A little overweight boy said that kids used to tease him but he’s learnt to be kind to himself and therefore be kind to others. If they started bullying him he used to get into fights; now he walks away and later writes down what the bully might have been thinking and feeling – it wasn’t about him after all.

Another exercise they did is called the ‘train of love’ where they go in a circle, telling the person to their right what they like most about them. They said things like ‘being there for me’ and ‘letting me tell my secrets to you’; the kid next to me said to me, ‘Thank you for helping kids and coming to see us today.’ This is a tribe if ever there was one. One kid talked about how his dad was stuck like a marble in a bottle and he wanted to help him get out. The children now tell me they’re teaching their parents to focus on their breathing when they feel they’re about to blow; their parents are shouting less.

After school, the kids have about thirty clubs to choose from as an alternative to going home for video games.

They all are assigned a ‘buddy’ to bond with, always pairing an older student with a younger one, helping each other with problems and becoming like a little family, which they might not have at home. They practise listening to each other mindfully, giving each other their full attention so they both ‘feel heard’.

To teach them to deal with tough situations and learn to self-reflect, they’re given a workbook. On the first page is an exercise which they fill in.

You have made a choice to do something and that means you need to stop and think about the following things:

By making this choice, I was not showing …. Check which one applies:

Then there’s a drawing of a boy crying, with questions:

What words can you see in the boy’s tears?

What are these tears representing?

What would your tears say?

Did the boy build a wall and have you ever put a wall up so people don’t know how you’re feeling?

Do you have someone kind in your life?

How can you be someone’s kind person?

On my visit to the school in China the kids were like robots, all facing forward, chanting the answers by rote. Here at Letchworth Garden City Academy, as I passed the classroom, the kids all smiled and waved for me to come in.

I went in and each room had a ‘regulation zone’, which was a place to take ‘time out’ when they felt overwhelmed. In the space there was a cardboard sheet on the wall coloured red, blue, yellow and green. The kids are allowed to get up and move to the colour zones. Here they choose a colour that helps them identify their feelings. If you can name it, you can tame it. The red zone has the words: furious, frustrated, shocked, frightened, restless, worried, uneasy, etc. Blue has the words: disgusted, mortified, alienated, glum, excluded, drained, alone, bored, tired, etc. The yellow zone has the words: surprised, joyful, hyper, thrilled, inspired, energized, proud, blissful, etc. The green zone has the words: humble, blessed, calm, relieved, relaxed, tranquil, fulfilled, etc. There are also pictures of facial expressions so they can identify their mood. Once they identify their state they use tools to help them get to the green zone. They can write down the answer to the questions: What were you doing that made you feel in that state? What can help you next time to get to the green or yellow zone? Once they identify their feelings, if they’re in the blue or red zone, they have options. They can listen to calming music on earphones or practise various mindfulness exercises to help them focus on sight, sound, taste and touch.

There’s a breathing ball to help them become aware of their breathing. When they push the ball in with both hands they breathe out and when they release the ball they breathe in. There’s a ‘mindfulness jar’ filled with water and glitter. When they feel chaotic they shake the jar to reflect their minds. Then they hold it still and watch the glitter settle and imagine this is their mind settling. There’s a green snake-like stuffed animal which, when they put it around their necks, they told me, feels like someone is hugging them. There are bubbles which represent their negative thoughts, which they can blow (only a few) and then pop them so they get the idea that thoughts aren’t solid, they’re as insubstantial as soap bubbles.

They talk about the amount of sleep they need and what happens to their brains when they don’t sleep enough. Newborn babies up to three months need fourteen to seventeen hours’ sleep, infants from four to eleven months need between twelve and fifteen hours’ sleep, toddlers (one to two years) need between eleven and fourteen hours. School-age children from six to thirteen years will need between nine and eleven hours.

They have tools for helping them sleep using a technique from the .b Mindfulness in Schools Project where they do a body scan last thing at night in bed to help them relax from their toes up to the top of their heads. Or by putting a favourite stuffed animal on their stomachs and watching it go up and down, then noticing how the movement slows down when their breathing slows down. Thousands of schools in the UK use the .b curriculum to help kids learn to regulate their stress levels, focus their attention, come into the present and use empathy.

In the afternoon I was taken to the Zen Den in the garden where they learn to plant vegetables, then take them home and cook them for their parents. A little girl told us she never saw a courgette (or zucchini if you’re from my land) before or knew lettuce grew in the soil.

Builders, decorators, painters and electricians volunteered from the community to create the Zen Den even though they didn’t understand what it was for. The kids were all sitting on cushions where a little girl led us in a mindfulness exercise which she wrote herself.

Sit comfortably, shoulders relaxed, hands on your lap. Close your eyes if you wish to. Take 3 slow, deep breaths in and out.

(Pause – count to 17)

Breath in all that is kind and happy.

Breath out all that is negative and unwanted.

(Pause – count to 17)

Smile into your heart.

Take a moment and, when you are ready, wiggle your fingers and toes.

Slowly open your eyes.

Another girl did stretching mindfulness, instructing the kids to stretch to the sky and feel the sensations in their bodies, open their arms, taking in the universe. And then shake all negativity out. At the end she told them all to picture their happy place.

A little boy led a mindfulness sound exercise, telling us to take in all the sounds around us, tune in to them and allow the sounds to come to us. He wanted us to tune in to the rain outside. He said it reminded him of his sadness but then, when it hits the ground, it disperses. He uses the image at home where many members of his family suffer from mental illness so there’s always screaming. The teacher told me he used to have violent meltdowns, once punched through a glass door, but now he walks away and does the breathing ball.

At the end of the day the whole school, all 600 of them, gathered in an assembly and sang out, glowing with happiness, the song ‘A Million Miles’. Afterwards, they gave me a ‘thank you’ card that read: ‘Dear Ruby, many, many thanks. You wonderful delighter. Your presence made our day happier and brighter. From all the children and staff at Garden City Academy.’ With every student’s fingerprints on the front. Well, no matter how strong my medication was, I had to cry even though I don’t like that song.

How We Should Measure Educational Success

All good learning takes place when you are either passionate about the subject or you’re having fun. In a study on how to measure success, those who are naturally proficient at a subject have a highly developed sense of play. Doing something over and over can make you proficient but won’t help you produce something original. As Adam Grant (brilliant organizational psychologist) said, ‘Practice makes perfect but can’t make new.’

In the book Natural Born Learners, Alex Beard talks about this and says that now neuroscience is mapping our brains and finding that inspiration is only achieved when you’re not focused. Creativity comes out of associative thinking, not from depth but breadth of knowledge. My greatest ideas come to me in the shower, so I have to run out naked to type my gem. Alex quotes Einstein, who said, ‘The greatest scientists are artists too,’ and that ‘the theory of relativity came to me by intuition’ (I bet he was in the shower).

In Finland they have taken this to a whole new level and are achieving high results in a breakthrough new way. So off I went to discover how and why.

Finland, the Hope for the Future: A Country of Green Shoots

As a birthday present, my son Max said he’d take me on a holiday of my choice. I asked for Finland because it’s recently been the ‘It Girl’ of travel. Out of nowhere, suddenly, everyone wants to go to Finland, so I had to go. I’d never even used the word ‘Finland’ before and suddenly I was obsessed, picturing reindeers jingling everywhere you look and taking dog sleds to local markets which are ‘Christmassy’ all year round, with everyone living in saunas, drinking glögg (this is the power of good branding). It turns out it’s not exactly what it says on the label. First of all, the saunas: as you enter what could be a wooden outdoor loo, you see horrible igloos of human flesh sizzling by a bowlful of burning coals. Helsinki itself is what I like to call ‘late Soviet bloc, early gulag’: big concrete slabs of buildings with tiny tinted windows for spying, housing dead shopping malls selling cheap clothes and herring. And then suddenly the depression architecture stops and you walk straight into a forest. Not even a park, it’s a forest with lakes in the middle. There it is, like Narnia, from concrete to a carpet of greenery in one step. There are forests everywhere in this city, all where you least expect them. So we kayaked across a lake and hit a sidewalk where our mode of travel was electric scooters, dodging street cars on cobbled streets so wobbly that my liver fell out. There are 5.5 million people in the whole country so you have no fear of crashing into anyone because they don’t exist. Basically, Finland is not charming but the good news is it costs a fortune.

I have to be honest, there is one building that sucked the oxygen out of me, it was so spectacular and unexpected: the Oodi Helsinki Library, 17,250 metres of undulating waves made of curved Finnish spruce wrapped by curved glass. Everything in here is free for the locals: 3D printers, screening rooms, VR equipment, robot librarians (who don’t just tell you to ‘shut up’ – you can play with them), cubbyhole womb rooms lined with orange leather seating to meditate in (picture sitting inside a pumpkin). I won’t go on but it’s worth flying into Finland, seeing the Oodi and flying out again.

Finnish Education

The story of how education became the cause célèbre here in the land of concrete and lakes is that about a hundred years ago Finland was incredibly poor from being raped and looted by Russia. The younger generation were moving away to Canada and the US so the country was abandoned as a home for the elderly. Some bright spark came up with the idea that since Finland had nothing concrete to offer (I beg to differ), they would create the best educational system in the world, and they did and the world’s people came to find out how it’s done.

Now tourists no longer talk about the food (herring – no comment), clothes (sacks and rubber clogs) or accommodation (Soviet and smells like your grandmother); the schools are the most interesting aspect of life. Where America’s motto must be ‘more is more’, Finland’s motto is ‘less is more’. They start school age seven, arrive at 9 a.m. and leave at 2 p.m. (civilized or what?) with little or no homework, because, guess what, you learn what you need to at school from your teacher and fellow students, not from Mommy or Daddy or tutors. Also, studies have shown that whether you start a kid at five or seven doesn’t have any effect on his reading; as a matter of fact, if they start too early, they may resist reading later on.

The reason taxes are high in Finland (which no one I met seemed to mind) is to ensure everyone gets a high-quality education. I mean everyone. I had a Congolese taxi driver who said as soon as he immigrated to Finland, rather than extradite him, they made him go straight to school and paid him for it. This means it isn’t a country full of stupid people (see my country). Finland ranked first in the 2016 World Economic Forum human capital index, which was judged on how effective a country was at helping all its citizens fulfil their potential as workers and people.

6 July 2019

I went to the home of Petter Elo, teacher at Hiidenkivi comprehensive school, to find out what’s so special about education here. Also, I wanted to see how he lives (he’s rich). Teachers are extremely well paid; it’s considered a prestigious job and they rank primary school teachers as top of the professions people look for in an ideal partner. His home is in a forest (again) – very Hamsteady-looking.

It’s decorated in that Finnish minimalist style: an ice rink of oak floor, enclosed by walls of windows looking out at evergreens. It’s decorated with a futuristic chair in the far distance. They don’t like clutter so one chair is enough and a tiny table with nothing on it. This chair is so futuristic, you don’t know whether to stand, straddle or have sex with it.

He told me the emphasis of the country was to raise good human beings and that the idea is to create a society where you feel free to question things. If it’s narrow-minded it’s not democratic. Question everything, ask stupid questions. Life is not about knowing the right answers. (Socrates would have agreed.)

Later on, I met the Minister for Education at the hamburger bar of his choice. It was like sitting with a celebrity, people seemed to want to hug him and endlessly came up, thanking him for the work he’s doing. He’d got ketchup down his front but didn’t seem to care; a total human, not a hint of politician about him. He explained that their mission at schools isn’t to create Nobel Prize winners or big industrialists, they want everyone to feel that they count and to make each kid (and adult) feel safe and equal (women have equality with men in all professions) and be part of the community.

Petter explained that the kids in Finland learn to question their desires, asking themselves, ‘Do I really need this? Do I really need to buy a new one? Will this make me happier?’ They start teaching this to their kids when they’re around three years old, at the age that most Western kids learn the ‘I want, I want’ mantra of consumerism. He told me that at the school he taught at, they still have to follow a curriculum but, more important, they also learn how to think. They may not be able to keep up with a Chinese kid in maths but at skills like complex problem solving or critical thinking, they would leave them in the dust. No cookie-cutter kids found here.

7 July 2019

I need to mention what happened today. It’s not about education but I think it’s equally important. Max and I had stayed in an Airbnb and at this point Max had left me, so the man who owned the flat asked if I wanted to go riding at his stables. He told me his wife was a showjumper. I do not know why this came out of my mouth, but I said, ‘So am I.’ It turns out I’m not a showjumper, but I didn’t know that at that point. Anyway, he drove me out of town to his other home where there were stables for about twenty horses. Everyone in this country is rich, by the way, but they are kind of humble with it.

So I began by cantering around the ring a few times and then for some strange reason, I do not know why to this day, I decided to take the jump. Now, I’ve horse-jumped before, years ago, but for some reason I did not obey the jump rules. I leant back and the horse obeyed by stopping sharply, but I didn’t. I flew through the air and the noise of my landing was something you should never have to hear in your life, but every bone was involved. Being a Finn, he didn’t show much emotion, just said, ‘Everyone has bad days.’ So unAmerican – he didn’t worry about a lawsuit even when I couldn’t walk. He moved me like a broken puppet and shoved codeine in me before I started screaming. Somehow he drove me back to the flat, brought me food and a girdle.

Later, after he’d left me at his flat, I had to navigate my way to the bathroom on my knees in the dark. I couldn’t reach the light switch and ended up falling down some stairs, which is when my back said, ‘Okay, I’m broken now, you’ve gone too far, I give up.’ I decided to leave Finland earlier than I was booked to but not before I went to visit the school I’d arranged to visit. Yes, even though I was going to be disabled for the rest of my life, that’s how committed I was to writing this book (though I was on a lot of codeine so maybe I was out of my mind; certainly I was in bliss).

8 July 2019

In the morning I called an Uber driver and said I’d pay him extra if he came upstairs. When he entered the flat, I asked him to pack my suitcase, giving him directions on how to fold the undies. Then I made him carry me and the luggage down the stairs. Only in Finland would this not be considered weird. So he lugged me into the taxi to take me to Kilonpuisto school and the students I was visiting, dragged me out at the other end like an old sack and placed me on floor cushions.

From the floor, I met Susanna Ahvalo, an innovator in teaching emotional skills and self-awareness. She let me lie there for the day.

She explained that she stays with the same class, same students, for six years so they’re like family. By law, the classes are all mixed ability. There are no rows of desks in the school rooms. (Rows always remind me of cattle in an abattoir.) Here, the kids sit in a circle and within that circle is another circle. Susanna watches from a distance, doesn’t interfere, just steps in to guide once in a while.

The learning comes from the power of the group, they do all their work as a team and this is drilled into them, so if one kid is slower, it behoves the group to help them. She explained to me that the inner circle discusses a topic like what to do about the climate crisis (these kids are ten). They were encouraged to think way out of the box, so the crazier the idea, the better. When the inner group finished, after a set time, they turned to the person behind them in the outer circle and had a discussion. The outer circle fed back their observations on how well the first group listened, whether they made good eye contact and whether they dominated or let others speak. (Children learn better from peers than from teachers. Why didn’t we ever think of that?)

The class then brought in their projects. Weeks earlier, they decided it would be Vikings. Each kid could choose which area about the Vikings excited them most; even if you wanted to learn how to pillage that would be fine. In the previous weeks they were sent out like little detectives to find their own way of expressing the life of Vikings. They could shoot a video, write a script, sew the outfits, cook, sing, dance, paint, sculpt. And the kid with the wildest ideas doesn’t get bullied like they might anywhere else, because in this school eccentrics rule. Rather than regurgitating some historical information, they are finding their own way to get a taste of what life might have been like back then, even if it’s not accurate. (Who knows what’s accurate anyway? History isn’t accurate, it’s a story.) There is no test on Vikings, they all pass and they evaluate how they think they did by giving themselves grades.

When the kids get older, Susanna explained, they begin to introduce a programme that includes being tested for university, but before that creativity is everything. At this young age, they have no fear and don’t think of the future, so why scare them about what’s coming – let them have fun while they still can.

I was carried into another class, where they’d set up a business village. Each kid had picked an occupation: a grocery store owner, a teacher, a plumber, a clothes manufacturer, an entrepreneur, a video-game maker. Then they research by interviewing people who have the relevant job. At the follow-up presentation, the kids have to explain how they would run their business and how much they would pay themselves and their employees in order to be fair. I was told that what they’re learning is not about financial profit but personal profit; how would they use business to have a nice life? Can you imagine suggesting this technique at Harvard Business School? You’d be shot out of the window by a cannon.

They have recesses between every class. Susanna said that after a class their brains are clouded from learning and they need to play throughout the day to recharge their minds.

The most impressive class was watching Susanna teach them how to deal with their emotions, using fairy tales as mindfulness exercises. To begin, she had them lie on the floor and instructed them to put a toy on their stomachs, as in the .b course, watching how their breath affected the movements. They were told to be aware when the toy was jumpy and when it slowed down and barely moved. They raised their hands when they felt the toy calming down. Then she told them the story of ‘The Little Mermaid’. She told me this is the way she teaches them how to deal with disappointment. She asks them how the mermaid might feel when the prince leaves her for the princess. They all pitch in – ‘anger’, ‘sadness’, ‘loneliness’. Susanna asks what those words feel like – ‘sweating’, ‘shaking’, ‘stabbing’. She hands them all paper with an outline of a body on it and asks them to draw where in the body they feel those sensations; giving them colour, shape, texture. Then she asks what the thoughts are that go with the feelings – ‘I hate him’, ‘I want to tell my mother’, ‘I want to disappear’ – followed by what actions those thoughts and feelings would motivate them to do.

One girl said, ‘I would kill him.’ (That would be my answer too.) At the end, they discussed if those actions would make the feelings and thoughts go away or would they just keep the cycle pinballing of thoughts, feelings, emotions, actions? Susanna asked them to come up with a solution for the Little Mermaid to help her deal with her situation that would help ease her feeling of disappointment.

These kids are learning how to stand back and observe their feelings and thoughts, and not lash out because of them. They’re learning, in spite of the discomfort and pain, not to react but to reflect and come up with clear-minded solutions. One of the kids came up with a great strategy, which was to tell herself it was a lucky break that she didn’t marry the prince because if she had, she’d have had to give up her tail and no longer be a mermaid, which would be such a bummer. Then, they made a new chart of their thoughts and emotions in the light of the new solution; much more peaceful. (My favourite girl stuck to her guns with, ‘I would still murder him.’) Susanna said that that exercise also works a treat with ‘The Ugly Duckling’, where the kids have to come up with coping mechanisms for the duck; she said it’s great for problems with low self-esteem. Who has low self-esteem in Finland? No one. First of all, they all look like blond gods and then it’s the happiest country in the world.

After that point, I don’t know what happened, but when I woke up, my toy was still on my stomach and I could tell I had been snoring. They gently carried me out to a taxi where I was whisked to the airport. What I mainly learnt from all this superior Finnish style of education was that I will never ride a horse ever again.