The cloth and the loom and what the child has to say

How does a student get something to say?

By reading and playing and experimenting and talking and imagining and observing and noting and touching and questioning and listening and dancing and singing and helping and walking and running and swimming and falling. By being in the world. By feeling. By being wrong. By being right. By being open and receptive to diversity.

These are the things all schools should make their business.

How does a student learn they have nothing to say?

By reading for achievement. By being told play is for younger children. By replacing talking with persuasion. By following the instructions. By sitting still. By facing the front. By copying. By answering the question on the board. By being assessed. By being assessed again. By learning that the teacher already knows the answer. By learning that there is an answer. By being right in the way you were told to be right. By being wrong in ways that are marked.

The curriculum is the enabler or the disabler.

I have been experiencing a slow-moving realisation that is both shaking me to the core when I think about how school currently is, and exciting me when I dream of how it could be. Do I think these reforms are moving us in the wrong direction? Absolutely. But not because I think structured literacy is wrong — it has a place. I feel it as a deeper unease, which I also feel as a rupture: how the knowledge-rich science of learning approach acts as a totality to subsume the inner life of the child, how it erases all that came before, its spectre only raised to scare.

For the child, thirteen years of being told what knowledge counts, and being told how to learn, and that learning only runs through the teacher, and the scope and sequence they are enacting, and of having to perform all the time to ensure they are demonstrating that they have digested what is required — these are not conditions that open a child up.

Feel it. It’s invisible. It’s there. It’s real, as real as anything you’ve known and held.

None of this is new. John Holt was writing about it in the sixties. How Children Learn, How Children Fail — the observation that children are natural learners until school teaches them that learning is something done to them, that the demand to perform shuts down the thinking it claims to measure, the fear that comes from this and is the most efficient teacher of helplessness. We have managed to forget him. We have managed to forget a great deal.

I remember watching cricket on the television with my grandparents. Our shared unshakeable knowledge — and it was knowledge, not belief — that we could influence the match. If I sat in this chair and not that one. When our team, not us, needed chips. If one of us left the room at the wrong moment, the wicket would fall and it would be our fault. Something continually passed between us and the small figures on the screen. Nobody could have shown it on a diagram. Nobody needed to.

Feel it. It’s invisible. It’s there. It’s real, as real as anything you’ve known and held.

The Norse had three women who knew.

At the foot of the world-tree, beside a well, sit Urðr, Verðandi, and Skuld. What was. What is becoming. What shall be. Every day they draw water from the well and mix it with the white clay around it, and every day they pour this over the roots of the tree, because without their daily attention the tree would rot and the world with it. They carve runes into its bark. The bark holds the marks. The tree holds the world.

They weave, too. The cloth that every life is a thread in. The weaving is the shape of how things hold together, the pattern that lets a thread be a thread and not a loose end. A life woven into other lives. The past is not gone. It is in the cloth. The cloth is impossible without it. And the women at the foot of the tree have not stopped, and the tree is still standing, and the well is still there with its white clay around the rim, and somewhere a thread is being added that was not there yesterday.

I think about them when I remember my grandfather in the lounge room, holding the cup just so. I think about them when I remember a particular walk in the bush with my daughter, the rules of the walk that became intimately attached to the twigs on the path, and the necessity of our attention and interaction with them, both of us counting, tracing, directing and being directed, dropping the twigs at just the right moment so the walk could continue. I think about them when a student stops, halfway through a sentence, because something has just occurred to him that has never occurred to him before, and he does not yet know that this is the most ordinary thing in the world and also the rarest. The cloth is being woven. The roots are being watered.

Feel it. It’s invisible. It’s there. It’s real, as real as anything you’ve known and held.

This is not on the scope and sequence. It cannot be. It is older than any sequence. It is what the women at the foot of the tree have been doing all along, and what every grandfather and grandmother in every lounge room has been doing, and what every parent has been doing, and what every teacher who has ever sat beside a child and listened has been doing. The roots are watered or they are not. The cloth is woven or it unravels. There is no third thing. There is no now and no future unless it’s tied to the past.

If we pay attention, we can use AI to reach back into the past. Any child’s voice, their actual voice, is back, their ideas and their mind and their urge to speak recombined as they always were. Any student, on any topic, can now produce a competent-sounding paragraph in seconds by speaking and having those words, the words we all have, and always had, turned into writing. Drafting has gone. No, actually: Drafting has changed shape. The performance layer of schooling — the bit we have assessed — has just been given away for free. What remains is the question schools have been able to avoid asking: does the child have anything to say. Not anything to write. Anything to say. The two are not the same and never were, but we could pretend they were while writing was hard. We cannot pretend any longer.

You cannot scope-and-sequence your way to a child with something to say. You can only water the roots. Day after day, classroom by classroom, in the small decisions about what gets attention and what gets silenced. A child who has been read to, who has been listened to, who has been allowed to be wrong without being marked for it, who has walked outside and noticed something nobody asked them to notice — that child has somewhere to start. That child is a thread in the cloth.

What are we asking of them. What are we letting them be. What are we allowing them to become. Whose cloth are they being woven into, and whose hands are at the loom.

Feel it. It’s invisible. It’s there. It’s real, as real as anything you’ve known and held. And it matters, because it’s always mattered, and all we need to do is remember.

Originally published at https://bevanholloway.substack.com.