Latest / The BIG Home Ed Conversations | Home Education / State of Mind: Mental Health and Education. Guest Episode - Dr Chris Bagley

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State of Mind: Mental Health and Education. Guest Episode - Dr Chris Bagley · The BIG Home Ed Conversations | Home Education

0:20
Hello everybody, welcome to another episode of the Big Home
0:24
Ed Conversations. My name is Kelly Rigg.
0:26
I'm a home educating mom of two and a qualified mindset and ADHD
0:29
coach. I'm passionate about supporting
0:31
parents and neurodivergent families as they navigate
0:34
children not OK at school and ultimately then the transition
0:37
from mainstream schooling into home education.
0:39
What began as honest, heartfelt talks around the coffee table
0:42
has now grown into a space where hundreds of listeners now tune
0:45
in for real, unfiltered conversations about alternative
0:48
education, mindset, and educational philosophies.
0:51
We cut through the noise and focus on what really matters to
0:53
home educating families. We are coming to the end of what
0:58
has been Season 5 of this podcast and it has been so
1:02
interesting covering all the different subjects with our
1:04
kids. And I think what's been really
1:05
nice as we've gone along is that our sponsors, Drew, has really
1:10
helped me to capture an awful lot of the amazing things I've
1:13
done with my children. We've covered all kinds of
1:15
topics from things like journaling, processing, feelings
1:19
to protest and social change. We've still got our episode on
1:22
security and privacy and online safety coming up.
1:26
Really interesting subjects that otherwise I might not have
1:29
picked up and done with my children.
1:31
Not necessarily kind of intentionally anyway.
1:33
They might have come up with drips and drabs, bits and pieces
1:35
here and there, but they've been really fascinating, giving them
1:37
a while. And I think ultimately we need a
1:41
way sometimes to keep track of all the amazing conversations we
1:45
have with our kids, all the incredible topics we cover.
1:48
And Strew as an online home education logging app is on my
1:51
phone. I can take photos, I can add on
1:54
more information and kind of write up what we got to do.
1:57
I can add tags for the different subjects.
1:59
It then has an AI that's optional.
2:00
You can use it or don't use. You can toggle it off.
2:03
But it has got this lovely AI assistant that can then analyze
2:05
what you did and then show you some of the actual areas of
2:09
development that you've covered that maybe you haven't even
2:11
thought of. Ultimately, all of this
2:12
information boils down to a place that when it comes to
2:15
needing to hopefully not, but probably one day having to write
2:19
out reports for our local authority.
2:22
I am able to pull ideas back from my brain that is now in an
2:27
app instead of my actual brain. And actually get some images and
2:30
some text that helps to explain all of the incredible stuff that
2:33
we've been up to. And, and be able to give good
2:36
examples anyway of how they're meeting their literacy and their
2:39
maths and geography and history and all those things.
2:42
In our case, fairly naturally and eclectically as we go along.
2:45
Not following a set curriculum, but ultimately allows us to kind
2:48
of pull it all together and see there's an amazing broad picture
2:51
of things we've done. So if you are looking for a way
2:54
to do that, it's such an incredible app.
2:55
It's developed by a home educating mum and her brother.
2:58
So if you're interested, give it a go.
3:00
Use our code big home ad to make sure they know where you came
3:03
from. Today I am joined by Doctor
3:06
Chris Bagley. So this is a great episode and
3:09
it's bit of a bonus one. We'll be back with our usual
3:11
topics for our last episode of the season next week with our
3:14
security, privacy and online safety episode.
3:16
But I invited Chris on after speaking with him after a
3:20
conference we both attended and spoke at.
3:22
I loved his talk, it was really fascinating.
3:25
It's all about the evolution of humans and education way back in
3:29
caveman times and how we've stopped seeing humans a certain
3:33
way and started to really categorize and put people into
3:36
boxes and develop these really controlled systems of education
3:39
that ultimately don't match what our human needs typically are.
3:45
And the conversation that you're about to listen to is just
3:48
fascinating. So Chris is an educator, A
3:51
psychologist and author. He's recently written States of
3:54
Mind with his co-author, B Herbert, and basically he has
3:58
created such an incredible concept that basically winds
4:02
mental health, consent based education, diplomacy, and
4:07
opportunity for young people to actually speak their mind and
4:09
conceptualize their education. How do they want to be taught?
4:12
What kind of opportunities do they want to see?
4:15
And honestly, it's just been such an incredible conversation.
4:18
So let's crack on and get to it. Hello Chris, Thank you so much
4:28
for coming and joining me today. We are really excited to have
4:31
you on. We obviously do the odd bonus
4:34
episode with different guests and things, and I just really
4:37
love all the work that you're doing.
4:38
So do you want to very briefly tell people who you are and the
4:43
space you're in and what you're up to, and then we can crack on
4:45
with our conversation today? Yeah, absolutely.
4:49
Hi, everybody. My name is Chris Bagley.
4:51
I'm currently educational psychologist, musician, author,
4:58
don't like to pitching myself into one thing or another.
5:00
I don't think that's very helpful and that's maybe
5:02
something we'll touch on today in terms of how that's mirrored
5:04
within our society. And in terms of my role now, I'm
5:09
doing a lot of work with University College London with a
5:12
social enterprise called States of Mind, which I Co founded with
5:15
a brilliant woman called B Herbert.
5:17
And essentially what we're trying to do is reconceptualize
5:23
and actually enact different ways of conceptualizing
5:26
schooling, mental health, and how human beings, adults and
5:30
young people engage with the world in ways that are much more
5:33
fruitful and involve Co construction and really
5:36
authentic participation with adults and young people working
5:39
together. And it's all come really from a
5:44
career working with young people.
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Started off as a cricket coach. He's a lot of sport, sort of
5:49
melded myself into the role of a teacher, which didn't feel
5:52
comfortable to me at any point, to be honest with you, for five
5:54
years and then decided that I wanted to explore the depths of
5:58
it more, was to coin the phrase. An.
6:09
Interesting experience to unravel some of the systems and
6:13
have the space as an academic now at least part of the time,
6:17
to do the reading and really deeply unraveled some of the
6:21
systemic and institutional issues that we experience whilst
6:24
also starting something outside of an academic, academic
6:27
institution, which is states of mind where we're not getting
6:29
closed by any of the status quo narratives that you have to sort
6:33
of follow whether you like it or not.
6:35
So there's a real freedom of states of mind that has allowed
6:37
me and colleagues and particularly young people to
6:40
explore some really interesting topics and to ask difficult
6:44
questions, speak truth to power and prod some systemic change.
6:50
Maybe we can, that would be nice.
6:51
But basically, yeah, it's it's been a really interesting sort
6:55
of 1213 years. And at the moment there's lots
6:57
of really interesting stuff going on.
6:58
So I feel quite hopeful. Yeah, I feel hopeful too,
7:02
actually, and I think sometimes I always feel like I'm a little
7:05
bit on my own in that. But I do actually see the
7:08
government are annoying all the right people right now, people
7:11
who have got some real function behind them and are actually
7:14
wanting to make change happen. And I'm quite looking forward to
7:18
seeing what the next 10 to 20 years does in the education sort
7:22
of world and how we start treating our young people.
7:26
I think we're really, really quickly starting to recognize in
7:29
most of the neurodivergence kind of community, home education,
7:32
alternative educators, there's a lot of us are starting to go,
7:35
wait, hang on a minute. Why aren't we talking to our
7:37
young people about how they want to be educated?
7:39
Why aren't we focusing on core skills and helping them to
7:42
develop them themselves as their own individual person and their
7:46
own individual abilities over our agenda and what we think
7:50
that we they should be doing when we're basing our knowledge
7:52
on the current day and what we've had to live through?
7:55
And actually, that's significantly in the past.
7:58
I was having a conversation with someone yesterday in a waiting
8:01
room somewhere. He's a guy who's been in
8:03
technology and computing his entire life.
8:05
He's in his 70s now and he's like, when he was younger,
8:08
computers took up a whole room and now my Apple Watch has more
8:11
computing technology than that. He said sometimes it's just
8:16
insane how much has changed, but yet we stay stuck doing things
8:20
the same old way. A lot of which has obviously
8:23
been put into law and is actually kind of set kind of
8:26
policies and standards now that have to then be challenged in
8:29
order for them to be reconsidered and changed.
8:32
As you say, a lot of these institutions, even if they want
8:35
to do things differently, they're not allowed.
8:38
They have to do things the way they're supposed to do things.
8:40
And even if they don't agree with it.
8:42
And obviously we're seeing an absolutely cataclysmic amount of
8:45
teachers leaving the profession every single year, which tells
8:49
us an awful lot. And I think it's a shame that
8:53
the government aren't listening to that.
8:55
And I'm paying attention to some of these root causes.
8:58
But yeah, I think a lot of the work you're doing sounds really
9:00
interesting. And I'm definitely very well
9:02
aligned with the concept of actually listening to our young
9:04
people. And as a child LED kind of
9:07
eclectic home educator, I kind of try to follow what they want
9:10
to do over anything else. It is very important to me to
9:12
hear them and to know what they think is important to learn
9:15
about. Yeah, indeed.
9:19
And the states of mind, we're allergic to constructs like
9:23
people voice or youth engagement.
9:25
Because immediately then what you have is a sort of fake
9:28
listening exercise where young people are plunked in a room for
9:32
a certain period of time or asked to fill in the
9:35
questionnaire of some description.
9:37
And to me it's akin to an abusive relationship.
9:39
What comes out of that? So if your partner and you,
9:43
you're having a tricky time and your partner says to you, OK, I
9:47
really want to listen to you. I really want to take in your
9:51
advice, your thoughts, your insights about how this
9:54
relationship should continue and evolve.
9:59
And you've got yourself, you say all the things that are on your
10:01
mind. It's difficult, it's emotional,
10:04
you are vulnerable in doing that.
10:07
And then your partner leaves the house and goes, right, I've
10:09
really listened to you there. And then they go to work and
10:11
they come back and everything's the same.
10:14
Nothing's changed. There's been no evolution at all
10:17
that would be seen as very problematic, but that's what we
10:20
need to children all the time. And the school system has very
10:25
little wiggle ring or permissive capacity, or to put it that way,
10:30
to do anything other than those fake listen exercises.
10:32
And when we worked with young people and we asked them, for
10:34
example, about when you've had an opportunity to consent in a
10:39
school climate or when you've had an opportunity to exert your
10:43
agency, you get these very tense, very awkward and
10:49
emotionally challenging silences.
10:53
And they start to realize that they've never consented.
10:57
They haven't had any choice over what they learn, when they
11:00
learn, how they learn, who they learn with, how that learning is
11:03
evaluated, etcetera. But because they're so
11:07
conditioned by the system in which they live, it's like to
11:11
have an abusive partner who makes that person think that
11:14
it's their fault and that the relationship isn't going well
11:16
and they pretend to listen and when they come back changes.
11:19
So it's a very problematic relationship you often find
11:22
between schools and young people.
11:24
And this isn't because teachers are evil people, teachers
11:27
generally. And I used to be a teacher, lots
11:29
of my friends are teachers. My mum was a Senko.
11:32
They want to help, they want to support young people, they want
11:35
to help them to thrive and flourish.
11:37
But when the institutions are so deeply entrenched over, I would
11:40
argue, thousands of years, it's very difficult for educators to
11:46
not use those pupil voice youth engagement approaches whereby
11:51
listening isn't authentic and it isn't participatory.
11:54
And that's what you get is young people harmed by the process of
11:58
fake listening rather than empowered.
12:00
So it's actually worse is the way the young people communicate
12:03
to us. They say they would rather just
12:06
the system be honest and say we don't care what you think.
12:10
We can't listen to you. It's not permitted than to go,
12:13
yes, we are going to listen to you and we are going to take
12:15
your agency into account and we are going to try and lean into
12:19
your interests and aspirations because that's just false.
12:23
It's masquerading. And teachers know this as well.
12:27
You speak to teachers who are doing these listening exercises,
12:30
and some of them will drink the kool-aid, which makes sense,
12:34
right? To get through the day, you
12:35
might have to convince yourself that this is a really helpful
12:38
participatory exercise, but it isn't.
12:42
And if you speak to any young person about how much control
12:45
they've perceived over what happens to them, and I use the
12:48
word happens to them deliberately there, they'll tell
12:50
you that they don't have any. And that particularly disturbs
12:53
us when we started doing our states of mind and we
12:56
essentially did what we thought was a really legitimate
13:00
listening exercise with hundreds of young people in the South
13:02
London borough. And the way we did it was
13:06
sitting down and just starting with how are you and letting
13:10
them talk. And then we built states of mind
13:12
on the back of that, essentially.
13:14
So we went, OK, what are these young people saying that they
13:16
want? And when they started to express
13:18
to us what they wanted and how they wanted mental health care
13:21
and education to evolve, then we started thinking about what that
13:24
could look like in practice and started trying to seek support
13:28
and buy in from some really brave and courageous senior
13:31
teachers who are willing to take a risk and let us come in and
13:34
work in a very different way. Yeah, it's been, it gave me
13:38
goosebumps. You sent about the concept of
13:39
consent. And I think when we are training
13:42
our young people to not question, not speak up, not ask
13:47
for what they really want or need and believe that if they
13:50
aren't doing well, then it's their fault.
13:52
And if they aren't able to keep up with it, then it's their
13:54
fault. That is so unhealthy and I know
13:58
we have for like it's sort of most, most home educators
14:01
probably just agree off the officer anyways.
14:02
Not necessarily new thoughts there, but it is worrying when
14:06
we actually consider it from the concept of consent and and how
14:09
we actually kind of see how that could play out in their lives as
14:12
well in terms of their future relationships with work with
14:14
their partners, with their children themselves.
14:18
Absolutely. When you send about that kind of
14:19
concept of like people drinking the Kool-aid, I know as somebody
14:23
who got good grades at school, didn't necessarily enjoy school
14:27
as an environment, but I got good grades, I went off into the
14:29
world. I 100% believed that I would be
14:33
successful if I continued ticking the boxes, continued
14:36
impressing the people around me, did everything I was told, never
14:38
rocked the boat. Just got through it.
14:40
And it was about 5 or 6 years ago now, maybe about 7 I suppose
14:44
that I suddenly just woke up. I think it was someone
14:46
explaining the concept of diet culture to me and the way that
14:50
it's marketed and how many people are making money off of
14:52
my insecurities that it suddenly made me go, wait, hang on.
14:55
And I started looking at stuff and before I knew it, I was a
14:59
unschooling home educator is. Yeah.
15:02
Yeah. An urge to buy my own chickens.
15:03
Like we all reached the point eventually, I think if we're
15:05
doing any kind of self growth work, we realized that a lot of
15:08
the messaging that we have got in our minds has come from a
15:12
lifetime of brainwashing, essentially.
15:15
Lots and lots of messaging that tells you that you need to do
15:17
this this way. If you don't learn it this way,
15:19
you won't be successful. And if you're not successful,
15:21
then you can't be loved and you can't have a great life and you
15:24
won't be happy. And it's dangerous.
15:27
It definitely builds a really unhealthy relationship with
15:29
learning with each other, with their relationships towards each
15:33
other and friendships. It's with themselves and their
15:36
bodies and how they function Like it's, it's scary actually
15:40
how much of an effect this this early period of life can have
15:45
when it is within an institutional environment.
15:48
And I think that is something which I worry about a lot, both
15:50
from my own experience and how much I'm still undoing, but also
15:54
for. Yeah.
15:55
I mean for children that I would frame it as a discursive echo.
15:59
I think is really interesting phrase that we're all marinated
16:02
in a discursive echo, whichever culture that we live in now, if
16:06
you're living in South America and the Amazon, the discursive
16:10
echo, the conversations and the negotiations and the narratives
16:13
around you are very different to what they are in alcohol to,
16:15
aren't they? And I always find it really
16:17
important and powerful to remember that that we're living
16:20
in a very unique time space where there are certain messages
16:24
that we internalize that begin to feel like universal truths
16:28
when they are entirely socially constructed yes.
16:32
So you know, the idea of what education should mean is
16:37
standards competing, strict accountability and punitive
16:42
behavior policing to people who don't follow the rules.
16:44
Those tenets. They're social constructions,
16:47
aren't they? But because there's no
16:48
conversation really about the fact that they're social
16:50
constructions and that they could very easily not be in
16:54
existence as be in assistance and through conversations and
16:57
dialogue, we can change the discuss about going.
17:00
It comes to feel, as you just said there, Kelly, as real.
17:05
And suddenly you're an adult and you've left school, you're
17:11
trying to climb the greasy career pole and you think that's
17:15
a way to happiness. So you know, maybe it is for
17:18
some people, but others that feels very limiting and
17:21
enclosing and not particularly liberating.
17:24
But if you're fed this idea that learning totally, So if you're
17:28
fed this idea that learning accumulates and success criteria
17:31
are metric based, what you're then going to do when you become
17:35
an adult is you're going to think that that's what counts
17:37
throughout your life. Unless you start to recognize
17:40
that this is not a universal truth.
17:42
This is a discursive echo and it's reverberating around us all
17:46
the time. But you can change that.
17:48
And I think that's what a lot of home educators do and people I
17:50
work with. You doing self-directed learning
17:53
or consent based learning or rights respecting learning or
17:56
the whole beautiful mishmash of different things that people are
17:59
doing. That conversation is on the
18:01
table, isn't it? And I think at states of mind,
18:03
that's what we've been trying to do in schools.
18:05
We've been trying to bring that sort of way of thinking about
18:08
the world into schools. Yeah, I guess what we've
18:11
demonstrated is that you can do that.
18:14
Yeah, and if you can disrupt those thoughts and start to like
18:17
once that echo has been disrupted, I suppose, and it's
18:19
now not reverberating, right and people are going wait, hang on.
18:22
There could be another way of thinking about this.
18:24
Oh my goodness. I can actually do it that way,
18:26
can't I? I don't actually have to get GCS
18:29
ES in order to be successful and an amazing person on a wait,
18:31
hang on. I could actually follow my dream
18:33
and go and do whatever I can actually make money doing
18:35
literally anything. Like once you start to
18:38
understand these things or start to actually see it.
18:40
And because of, I guess this is the first age or the first
18:44
couple of generations that have had access to not only the
18:46
Internet, but now AI and this incredible array of information
18:50
that we would not have had 20 or 30 years ago.
18:54
That we're actually able to talk to each other and hear from each
18:57
other and learn from each other. And the algorithm is so clever.
19:00
As soon as you start to think differently, it starts to go,
19:03
oh, you want to think differently?
19:04
Great. Here's all the people who are
19:05
thinking differently. And suddenly your world explodes
19:08
with ideas and ways of doing things.
19:10
And I think often, I guess the goal is to help young people to
19:15
not only see that there are other ways of thinking, but that
19:17
they're allowed to think differently and that they're
19:19
allowed to do it. Now, they don't have to be
19:21
adults to do it, and they can't actually start to stand up for
19:23
themselves. But I think one of the things I
19:25
noted down before this call is I can remember the standing up for
19:31
myself as a young person, the feeling of not knowing I
19:33
wouldn't be heard. That it didn't really matter if
19:36
I didn't like going to school or if I didn't like doing exams or
19:39
whatever, that I just had to do them.
19:41
And my goal was to impress everybody in my world.
19:43
And if I didn't, that I was probably going to disappoint
19:45
someone, to have them be mad at me.
19:46
I can remember how difficult it would have felt back then to say
19:49
no to my dad or to like, say no to know what I'm done with
19:53
school. I don't think it's good for me.
19:55
I want to do something else. Like, I think sometimes we
19:57
really worry about empowering young people to have a voice.
20:00
And that's definitely something in our society.
20:02
I think we really fear actually, it's young people rebelling
20:06
against this, everything that has been constructed for them.
20:10
But what are some of the reasons we see for that, do you think,
20:12
in our society? Why do we think we're so scared
20:14
of that? I think fear of uncertainty is
20:18
possibly the most driving cognition that human beings
20:21
experience now and in the past. And if you look at the way our
20:25
institutions have grown, they're all and increasingly so
20:30
obsessive about narrowing things down, labeling, diagnosing, and
20:36
pulling things through abstraction into these tiny
20:40
little groups so that it feels more certain.
20:42
But the problem with that is something that Barry Mason,
20:47
who's a brilliant family therapist, I'd recommend people
20:48
looking him up, he calls that safe certainty.
20:53
The problem with safe certainty and thinking you can measure and
20:55
quantify and enclose everything so that it's neatly packageable
20:58
and makes sense in a very logical way, is that that
21:01
doesn't work here. Things are really messy.
21:04
They're extremely complicated, and no human experience of any
21:08
kind can be reduced like that. It just can't.
21:12
So if you think about sort of the 19th century and this idea
21:16
that everything could be measured, and people like
21:22
Francis Galton, who started eugenics coined the word talking
21:27
about measuring IQ or intelligence in the same way you
21:31
measure head circumference, that's a slippery slope.
21:35
Now, head circumference is a pretty objective measurement.
21:38
I'm not saying we throw out all objective measurements, but the
21:41
idea that you can measure human intelligence, anything other in
21:45
terms of human experience using a standardized assessment is
21:48
quite insane. And then we have manual
21:51
propellin in terms of the psychiatric model that uses the
21:54
same principles, obviously grounded very much in racist,
21:58
ablest and sexist narratives. What we're seeing now is just a
22:04
massive proliferation of human beings being diagnosed, labeled
22:09
and closed within certain very specific externally applied
22:15
diagnosis. And you know, that happens in
22:17
schooling as well as it doesn't the mental health system.
22:19
So you have, you know, young people defined as low ability
22:22
because they're not good at writing.
22:24
Now, if you think about how narrow and ludicrous that is,
22:26
and high ability essentially means good at writing because
22:30
the whole school system is frankly literacy, isn't it?
22:33
And then you have obviously within.
22:35
The to communicate in a. Numeral amount of different
22:38
diagnosis and the ones that disturb me most, to be honest
22:40
with you, are the ones like oppositional defiance disorder.
22:45
And that's because I spent a lot of time working in the prison
22:50
sector. I should say that at the start
22:51
should my I've been an Ed psych in the prison sector and the
22:53
people referral unit sector and youth justice sector working in
22:56
youth funding teams for a quite a long time.
22:59
So those are the young people who don't fit into the system
23:02
and rather than us going, oh, hang on a minute, they are just
23:05
unique. And actually there's no such
23:08
thing. There's harmony without
23:10
difference. I think that's a really
23:12
beautiful way of framing. You can't have harmony without.
23:15
Difference. Musically speaking, let's think
23:17
about it as analogy, right? If you you can't have a harmony
23:20
in a musical sense without difference, the reason it's so
23:23
beautiful is you might have 5 people singing differently and
23:27
society is like that as well. Without difference, there's no
23:32
harmony. Without difference, there's no
23:34
beauty. But what we've done is we've
23:36
created, and we're all complicit in this to a greater or lesser
23:39
extent, a society whereby there's a very specific version
23:42
of normal that's being pushed and internalized through our own
23:47
conditioning. And then that idea that the
23:50
uniqueness and the difference are pathologies, illnesses or
23:54
abnormal abnormalities has become the way we're thinking.
23:58
And I think that that is devastating.
24:00
And the last thing I'll say on that is what it's leading to, I
24:03
think is what Sammy Tamimi calls people being framed as a failed
24:07
version of normal. Yes.
24:11
And that's a very disturbing way of framing it, but that's what I
24:13
see a lot of. I see a lot of young people who
24:15
are wonderful, bonkers, messy, convoluted, weird and wonderful.
24:21
But if they step outside of what is conceived by this absurd and
24:24
completely made-up version of normal, suddenly they have a
24:27
pathology and we need to start labeling as having an
24:30
abnormality or disorder. And it's, it's very dark, you
24:33
know, it's a real darkness at the root of our institutions.
24:37
Yeah, if there's something which actually I found myself puzzling
24:41
on a lot recently, is this kind of concept of that the amount of
24:45
people sort of recognize what we said, like one in three people
24:47
or something or autistic or something.
24:48
And by 2050 or maybe one in two or something, I was like, are we
24:51
just starting to understand that there is no normal that, that
24:55
the neurotypical image that we have created is actually a
25:00
complete falsity? Nobody can ever achieve it
25:03
because it doesn't exist. And actually so many of us have
25:06
said like, I don't know, I can't remember the last time I met
25:08
anybody who wasn't neuro divergent.
25:09
I'm confused. Like it just like it feels like
25:11
everybody I speak to, because once you've realized that you
25:14
have ADHD or whatever, or you are ADHD and it's difficult with
25:17
ADHD, it doesn't work perfectly in English language, but the,
25:21
the concept of being diagnosed as ADHD, I feel like I can spot
25:26
someone who is ADHD now within seconds of meeting them.
25:30
I can usually call it actually within a few minutes of having a
25:33
conversation with someone and often lend dates to them.
25:35
They'll go on to say that they are and I'll be like, no, I just
25:39
do it. And I don't know why, I just
25:40
know it, but I do now I can sense it and it's more just like
25:43
an intuitive understanding of the kinds of characteristics and
25:48
the way they tend to present themselves and all the rest of
25:50
it. And it's, it's really beautiful
25:51
in my way because I've quite enjoyed the fact that I can
25:54
relate to people very quickly as I'm starting to understand their
25:57
differences. I'm not.
25:59
I don't find it jarring or difficult.
26:02
I don't find it rude if people were more direct or if they
26:05
can't look at you or whatever the case may be.
26:07
Like. None of these things bother me
26:08
in the same way as they might have done 20 years ago.
26:10
And I had no idea what I was looking at and talking to people
26:13
about. And it would have felt strange
26:16
if anybody was different in any way.
26:18
And I love the fact that my community now is so vibrant and
26:21
rich of different people because it teaches me a lot.
26:24
It helps me to recognize so much in how I behave and how I might
26:28
parent and talk to my children and how I might engage with the
26:31
community around me. But yeah, I think it's just, it
26:34
is really concerning that in order to receive any kind of
26:39
compassion or understanding, I felt like I needed a diagnosis
26:44
to actually be able to say to people, this is this is what I
26:47
am. A doctor has confirmed that this
26:49
is how my brain works. Therefore, you need to actually
26:51
accept it, understand it now. And I can remember crying put my
26:54
heart out when they wouldn't diagnose my youngest despite her
26:57
significant struggles, because I knew it would mean that getting
27:01
access to support for her would be much harder in those younger
27:05
years when it's most formative and most important to be able to
27:08
get her some adaptations and support.
27:10
And obviously they're very lucky that they're home educated in a
27:12
sense I can provide entirely 1 to one designed life for them.
27:17
But they obviously only have so much expertise in understanding
27:20
that kind of area of people. Because I was raised to believe
27:23
that neurotypical was how we were all supposed to be.
27:26
And I think it's it is damaging having the labels.
27:29
I know that in the neurodiverse community, there's a big
27:31
argument that goes on around this in the sense that actually
27:34
it helps to explain without having to like, explain a lot
27:38
about yourself, people who maybe get the gist of who you are.
27:41
But in the same vein, we shouldn't need that in order to
27:44
be able to be compassionate to another or to accept one another
27:47
or to be able to actually understand that they're just a
27:50
person. Like, why do we need to be
27:52
segmented, as you say, and put in a box to them, be understood
27:55
and accepted for who we are? It's such a confusing thing,
27:58
isn't it? I think for people when they,
28:00
they're just trying to understand how to present
28:01
themselves in the world and, yeah, step outside of the realms
28:06
of what we've been told we should be and actually, yeah, be
28:10
accepted in some way. It's it's a difficult 1, isn't
28:12
it? Well, it is in our society as it
28:16
stands, it's very, very difficult.
28:18
You know, and I would obviously argue, I think you'd probably
28:20
agree with this, that all we have is narrow diversity.
28:23
There's no such thing as a typical person.
28:25
That is a completely scientifically illiterate,
28:28
ludicrous conception. The idea that there's a typical
28:31
person and then the diverted person, we're all different.
28:34
And I think the thing that's most disturbing, just drawing on
28:37
what you said there to me when I work with young people, is there
28:40
are very specific discriminatory elements to this, which I find a
28:48
lot and some listeners will be aware of, but maybe not.
28:51
So working in the youth justice sector, a lot, what I notice is
28:57
young people who've experienced a lot of trauma, a lot of either
29:01
neglect or physical abuse or other types of hardship will
29:08
often present as being hyper vigilant.
29:11
They'll often find it very difficult.
29:12
Many of them are living in care or have lived in care, foster
29:15
homes, etcetera. There's an enormous correlation
29:18
between, you know, people who are incarcerated and having
29:22
those profiles and they now have pretty much 100% of the time
29:27
have the diagnosis of ADHD. So that's one problem for me
29:31
because first of all, the evidence that ADHD exists in the
29:37
brain is extremely problematic. The evidence is very weak that
29:40
it exists in the brain and they get told something wrong with
29:43
their brain, which immediately means that the environmental
29:47
structures around them and not being considered.
29:50
And that young person then grows up, in my experience of working
29:53
with them, with a self fulfilling prophecy in them that
29:55
they just play out, which is there's something wrong with my
29:58
brain that isn't fixable. I'm messed up.
30:00
There's something to really disorder deeply about me that is
30:03
never going to be able to change.
30:04
And no matter what happens, that's it.
30:07
That is very concerning. And you get that also with
30:10
conduct disorder, opposition of defiance disorder.
30:12
And those two, the latter ones there, they're basically
30:16
psychiatric nonsense to explain when young people refuse to
30:19
conform for whatever reason. So conformities pathologize,
30:24
hyper vigilance is pathologized. So yeah, lack of conformities
30:28
pathologize and hyper diligence pathologize.
30:31
And those are the more extreme cases.
30:33
But then you have a lot of other cases that I see with teams who
30:36
are much more able to access what we call academic learning
30:40
materials and go to university and things like that.
30:42
You're now experiencing an enormous proliferation in
30:46
seeking ADHC diagnosis as well. And the way I look at that is,
30:51
well, it's very paradoxical to say that for the month to make
30:55
myself feel, well, I need to be called disordered.
31:00
So that's interesting. And some people will say, you
31:02
know, it's an act of self compassion to get myself labeled
31:06
disordered. Well, you could easily argue
31:08
it's an act of self negative self judgement.
31:11
And this, these paradoxes are real and that, you know, I don't
31:14
have any answers. I'm just trying to explain how
31:16
I'd see young people conceptualizing these things,
31:19
and way I perceive it is we live in a society where difference is
31:23
so occluded, it's so blocked that the conversation now has
31:27
become so psychiatrist. And what again, time between the
31:32
calls, the McDonald's ization of the medical world and the
31:37
selling of various different psychiatric psychotropic drugs
31:40
to people based on spurious claims that it actually treats
31:45
things in the brain which they don't, That we've now got this
31:48
gigantic proliferation of young people desperately seeking self
31:52
identification or just doing that individually.
31:56
For me, it's it's a symptom of our society.
31:59
We're not looking at the environmental strictures around
32:02
young people and the difficulties that they're
32:04
experiencing that are unique to their generation.
32:06
So I can give you 5 of the young people I've been working with
32:09
over the last 10-15 minutes, climate anxiety.
32:14
They've been born into a world. They're told it's going to end.
32:18
Yeah, that's terrifying. I feel like I'm going to feel.
32:22
Very seen in the next few minutes.
32:25
Well, let's see how it goes, Kelly.
32:26
Yeah, so there's that one. There's, good Lord, there's a
32:29
school system that's increasingly narrow, so there
32:32
are very few vocational options. Now young people are having to
32:35
do A levels till 18 even when they're really not academic at
32:39
all. And there's very few options
32:41
available to young people who are not academically interested
32:44
or aspiring or able. That's A.
32:47
Big and there's huge judgement around taking vocational routes
32:50
as well. And if people decide they don't
32:52
want to participate in that, then actually they get deemed as
32:54
as stupid or incapable or unintelligent, and that's
32:59
absolutely diabolical in my opinion.
33:01
Yeah, and lacking motivation and this stuff.
33:04
And then there's other ones like because of the nature of our
33:08
economic system, I meet teens that you already know that
33:11
university is not going to get them anything.
33:13
And yet things they know that they need to study.
33:16
For example, you called out earlier studying AI, studying in
33:19
the online world, understanding surveillance capitalism.
33:22
How is that data being extracted?
33:24
Who's using it? What are they using it for?
33:26
How can I make are living online?
33:29
Because that's where everything's going.
33:30
I want to be a YouTube. OK, fine.
33:33
Being online is a new form of cosmopolitanism.
33:36
It's not nerdy anymore. It's cool.
33:39
None of that is allowed. So we now have a paper called in
33:42
from Impetus came out recently, which you might have seen, where
33:44
young people are now starting to look at schooling as a choice
33:48
rather than necessity. And some of them are just opting
33:51
to go in for bits and not others.
33:53
That's that's where we're heading.
33:54
And there's others as well. Like because of the way that
33:56
this is all evolving, the way that schools are having to
33:59
manage things because they can see it's not working because the
34:01
teachers are not coping, is that they're getting more and more
34:04
and more punitive. And the Mossbourne Academy,
34:06
which you'll be aware of, was particularly horrific.
34:08
But I've worked in schools that are pretty similar actually in
34:13
terms of having that what might be called hideously might be
34:16
warm, strict approaches or using slams.
34:20
Doug Lemons work sits listen answer, not track the teacher.
34:23
These are very normalized practicing schools and there are
34:26
many other factors Kelly talk about.
34:28
But if you put that all together, that's a pretty toxic
34:31
combination of reasons that young people don't have time,
34:35
space or permission to think about.
34:37
So of course they're going to turn the gun on themselves and
34:40
go. The reason I'm distressed is
34:41
because there's something wrong with me and that's what I'm
34:45
seeing more and more even in my career.
34:46
I'm only 44, I'm not that old. I've only been an EP for 12
34:49
years and I've seen that change. Now young people are going OK.
34:52
And one young person said to me recently, and then he read an
34:55
article about in a newspaper that the reason he struggled at
34:59
school is because he wasn't told he was disordered young enough.
35:04
And I remember speaking to him about that thinking you are a
35:07
very interesting, very charismatic young person and a
35:10
lot to offer. And the school system has told
35:12
you that you are low in worth over and again for years to the
35:17
point now where you the only explanation you have for why
35:21
you're distressed or word distressed, particularly as a
35:23
team, is that there's something wrong with your brain.
35:26
And that makes me feel very upset actually, because it's
35:29
just completely inaccurate. And I think this this kind of
35:34
accepting the kind of concept of building a world that is more
35:37
accepting of neurodivergence as a as a concept that we are all a
35:41
part of, that everybody is different, that every human
35:45
requires compassion. Every human might need you to
35:48
explain things a different way. Every human may need to be able
35:51
to move or fidget or may need to be able to access that education
35:55
with a book or a video or a live lesson or in some other way.
35:59
Like, and I say this to people a lot, the concept isn't often
36:03
about saying I am broken or I'm not capable.
36:06
It's actually that you've been taught to try and operate and
36:09
too often punish yourself to achieve the things that you want
36:12
to try and achieve. And that all the while we're
36:14
doing that and doing it for the extrinsic motivations, for the
36:18
benefit of other people's expectations of you.
36:22
A lot of that is all rooted in this concept of, as you say,
36:24
being broken, being wrong, being disordered or disabled.
36:28
Like I really struggle with the concept of being, of accepting
36:31
the fact that I would be considered disabled now because
36:33
I'm not disabled. And in many, many, many ways I
36:36
am perfectly capable and extremely like ambitious,
36:41
etcetera. I do struggle.
36:43
There are elements of this world that I massively struggle with,
36:46
but I don't necessarily see that.
36:48
I definitely don't see it as a me problem.
36:50
I do definitely see it as a societal expectations is so
36:55
wrong and really does need to shift and the best way I can see
36:59
of doing that is to be as authentic as I can and to just
37:02
show up and be super positive about it and encourage people to
37:06
do the same. And hopefully eventually it will
37:08
start to shift in the right direction.
37:10
But I, I completely agree with you that like that
37:12
disillusionment in the institution that the kids must
37:15
be feeling like we're getting mad at them for not wanting to
37:18
participate and they are so disillusioned, they cannot see
37:23
what point of them being there is at this point.
37:25
Like I was saying the other day about how our kids don't faked
37:28
being sick because there's no need for them to fake being
37:30
sick. There's they're like, if they're
37:32
sick, they're gutted because that means that they can't
37:35
participate in the fun stuff that we had planned to do for
37:38
our learning. And equally like if when we talk
37:41
about how you extrapolate that out into their adult life and
37:44
how that might show up is the fact that hopefully they'll
37:46
choose a job that they genuinely enjoy and find pleasure in doing
37:51
and super passionate about doing it.
37:53
And so actually they will also be mad when they're sick because
37:56
they can't go to that job because they need to actually
37:59
take a break and rest. Like hopefully they'll that will
38:02
kind of follow on with that kind of actually it's it's good to
38:06
rest when you're poorly. But actually I wish that I
38:08
wasn't. So it's like a lot of kids, the
38:10
things that I definitely felt as a kid that I was like, you
38:13
definitely pretend to be sick when you just didn't want to go
38:15
to your math test or whatever. You don't see that in home age
38:19
community, which is lovely. You see kids that are genuinely
38:22
fully engaged and wanting to be a part of it.
38:25
And so that sort of disillusionment in education
38:27
hopefully isn't as much of a thing.
38:29
But yeah, I found myself that as soon as like climate anxiety,
38:32
fear of things not being what we hope they're going to be in 20
38:36
years time, knowing that university probably won't get us
38:38
anywhere. I mean, I definitely had all of
38:40
that. I mean, that was what's actually
38:41
pretty quite scary is that, I mean, I'm 37, so I would have
38:46
been finishing a school approximately 20 years ago.
38:48
And that, I mean, that's scary enough in itself.
38:50
And it's no need to think about that number for too long.
38:52
But the, the idea there is that obviously if I was thinking
38:55
about that kind of stuff 20 years ago, then systemically we
39:00
have got a serious problem that has been growing for, we know
39:03
much longer than that. I mean, I did a talk, both me
39:05
and Chris met at the same conference.
39:07
So I was doing a talk myself on the concept of how our school
39:10
systems have changed and were created.
39:13
And the point of them initially was obviously they're getting
39:16
people to behave, getting them to follow authority that they
39:20
had chaos that people would like.
39:21
Thousands and thousands of people moving to cities.
39:24
Cities were being run terribly. People were angry.
39:26
They were starting to stand up for themselves.
39:28
They needed everybody to just behave themselves and get on
39:30
board. The best way to do that was to
39:32
educate on mass. It makes sense.
39:35
Like religious deference, all of it.
39:36
Like it all comes down to the concept of get everybody toeing
39:40
the party line and nothing bad will happen.
39:44
And I can understand to some degree that we have operated in
39:47
our kind of human society in this kind of idea that control
39:52
is the way that we achieve peace and tranquility.
39:56
That if everybody knows the rules and everybody behaves how
39:58
they're expected to behave, then we have a society that works.
40:02
But actually when we look back further in history, and
40:05
obviously your talk was really fascinating, that confidence
40:08
about kind of the concepts like Cavemen.
40:10
The way that they would have been operating is actually when
40:12
we look back at the idea of allowing people to be
40:15
individual, to develop their right ideas and understandings.
40:20
The innovation and general broad like educational knowledge that
40:25
humans have developed because of individual passion and drive
40:29
interest. We see comments from the
40:32
government around kids turning up at school not ready to learn
40:34
at age 4 because they can't sit at a table for several hours a
40:39
day and be OK about it. And I, and I couldn't help but
40:41
comment on that particular post by to our lovely Department of
40:44
Education saying if you can't get a four year old to learn,
40:47
that says a lot more about your school than it does about a four
40:49
year old. Because honestly, my current 4
40:52
year old at the time, could you stop her learning?
40:54
Could you hack? Oh my goodness, would she go to
40:57
sleep? No, she still had more questions
40:59
to go through before she could fall asleep.
41:00
That these kids are just so switched on.
41:03
They are paying attention. They want to know everything.
41:06
And I think if we've reached a point where we have got kids
41:09
opting out of a free education and something which is being
41:12
provided to them as a full time opportunity to to enhance their
41:16
lives and better themselves, supposedly if they are opting
41:19
out of that, there is a very good reason.
41:22
And, and it's really distressing me that actually we are seeing
41:26
it get worse and worse and worse.
41:27
And now obviously we're seeing this on the social media banning
41:30
and the banning of phones at school and the forever
41:33
restriction control, behave more and more punitive measures, as
41:37
you say, to kind of get kids to just do as they're told, as you
41:41
say, without actually taking the time to really say, well, why?
41:45
Why are they not participating in this?
41:48
Why are they so disillusioned? Why are they feeling like
41:51
there's just no point? Like what have we done wrong
41:55
that could possibly mean that they now don't want to
41:57
participate in that anymore when they would have started out?
42:00
Like we see parents all the time.
42:02
I mean, I talk to a lot of parents in transition from
42:04
mainstream into home education and just trying to break the
42:07
cycle to shift thoughts and get away from it all.
42:10
And ultimately that experience often is a massive like, but I'm
42:14
confused, like schools there for them.
42:17
And it's it should be great. Like this is what it's supposed
42:19
to be. And this is what we were sold as
42:21
it would be for them. And it's just not, why don't
42:23
they want to go? Why are they so anxious about
42:25
it? Like what's going on?
42:27
And a lot of what I have to explain to them is this is a
42:29
time you need, you need to listen to them.
42:31
You need to talk to them. You need to understand and show
42:33
them that they can trust you to advocate for them and to help
42:36
them because they know their voice is not being heard how it
42:40
needs to be. You have you have got to fight
42:44
because more parents need to be saying my kids not OK, and This
42:48
is why. And help them to stand up for
42:51
themselves as well. And show them that we're
42:53
listening because, yeah, this this disillusionment is
42:58
dangerous. Like it's, it's potentially
43:01
stopping generations of our young people being able to meet
43:04
the potential that they would have had and make the incredible
43:07
shifts and changes that humanity clearly needs in this juncture.
43:10
Like we grow and develop all the time, but yet we're stopping
43:14
them from using their own imagination and, and helping it
43:16
to go to the next place. And so many of them are so
43:19
passionate about the environment and the climate and animals and
43:23
deforestation and all of it. Like my 2 are just horrified by
43:26
some of the things that have happened in this world and want
43:28
to do something about it. And I encourage them to do
43:30
whatever they can. Like that we can go to protests
43:32
so we can write letters, We can do things.
43:34
But yeah, it's it still feels difficult to actually help them
43:37
to feel heard. Yeah, it does.
43:41
And that's one of the main reasons States of Mind took the
43:44
approach that we did, which is starting with a one year long
43:48
listening exercise to try and find out what teenagers are
43:50
saying. You know, by the time they get
43:53
to 1617, you've just talked about what happens age 4.
43:57
You have young people who are being expected to learn in
44:00
completely developmentally bizarre ways sitting still on
44:03
tables when they should be exploring.
44:07
By the time they get to 17 they don't have to do that anymore.
44:10
And we have to start sessions with a lot of silences and
44:14
awkwardness. So if we go in with a session,
44:16
for example, of a project called Breaking the Silence, which we
44:20
launched because we realized that young people had never been
44:22
asked about their understanding of school evaluation.
44:25
Really. So they're going to this thing
44:27
called school for their entire childhood.
44:29
There's been no attempt to sit down with them and help them to
44:33
think together about what that means, how their education is
44:37
being evaluated. And when you sit down with them
44:39
and you start asking open questions just to figure out how
44:43
they perceive the world and you start saying things like, you
44:45
know, tell me about what school is like for how you feeling
44:49
about how things are going. And that's those open questions.
44:53
They find it really difficult because they're not used to
44:55
being seen and heard. Their voice isn't used to
44:58
mattering really. You know, there are teachers, of
45:01
course, who move heaven on earth to really try and support the
45:06
belongings of their students. But in terms of actually
45:10
thinking over an extended period of time about their perspectives
45:13
on how the institution of schooling and cool evaluation
45:17
like Offset is affecting them, there wasn't any space.
45:19
So we essentially did that for a whole academic year when in
45:23
spend an hour and a half with the same cohort of young people
45:25
for a whole school year. And there's so many interesting
45:28
things that come out of that and little things that we didn't
45:30
expect, like taking them an entire term to get out of the
45:33
habit of calling me Sir. That's interesting.
45:38
You know, so the whole point of States of Mind is we operate
45:41
using what we call liberation dynamics, which is reduce power
45:45
imbalance between young people and adults.
45:47
Co constructing ideas about what research questions to ask, how
45:52
you explore them, who you need to speak to, how you generate
45:55
information, who to disseminate that to.
45:57
And we talk about building self-awareness.
46:00
And those are those questions I started with earlier, becoming
46:02
aware of yourself and how you interact with the world.
46:06
My favorite one, which limbs from what you said a minute ago,
46:08
Kelly, is this idea that comes from psychosynthesis, psychology
46:11
of disidentification, which is a wonderful idea that some of the
46:15
parents will, I think, be going through at the moment.
46:18
Which is this idea of having space and time in a set of
46:23
nested relationships to disidentify yourself from
46:26
systems that aren't working for you, that aren't serving you or
46:29
actively harming. And that's slow, sensitive work.
46:32
But what we learned is that teachers can do this work as
46:36
well. They just need to have the space
46:38
and permission to do it, and they have to go through this
46:41
identification process themselves.
46:44
And over that year was, you know, this is just one of our
46:46
projects. There's nothing special about
46:47
us. Everyone has the humane
46:49
potential to do this kind of work.
46:51
It's a shift in paradigm around what you constitute learning to
46:55
be and what you constitute education to mean.
46:59
But we did it in mainstream schools for seven years with
47:03
regular students and their teachers and it's really
47:07
transformative stuff. You know, by the end of this
47:09
particular project, we had young people expressing their ideas,
47:11
having spoke to ex office and inspectors, teachers, run focus
47:15
groups for students, interviewed academics, all that stuff.
47:18
They've then had a really clear sense of what school evaluation
47:21
could look like or what broadly speaking, education evaluation
47:24
could look like. And of course, they brought in
47:26
having done all this research does that are not in there at
47:29
the moment, like authentic student participation, like
47:33
concentrating on mental health and well-being, like actual
47:37
personal development, not what you get in schools at the
47:38
moment, which is personal development activities decided
47:41
by teachers and then put to shooters.
47:44
You can Co construct that as a young person themselves.
47:47
And they did awesome stuff like, you know, they presented at
47:49
conferences nationally, internationally, educational
47:51
select committees, they spoke to politicians.
47:54
And that didn't come through US doing anything special other
47:58
than just channelling our own unique and wonderful human
48:01
potential to work together and resolve confidence.
48:05
Yeah. And we just don't have that
48:07
idea, do we, in society at the moment, that we can do that
48:09
together? Not really.
48:11
No, there's a real, as you said earlier, that there's a real
48:14
kind of distrust and fear of the uncertainty that if we empower
48:18
young people to ask for things to be different than a, we've
48:23
got to put the effort into actually making it different,
48:25
which is always, let's face it, as adults, we, we like our easy
48:29
routes, easy carve paths and all that, that obviously to, to flex
48:34
and to be accepting of like different needs or wants in our
48:40
day. Like, for example, my, my
48:41
youngest absolutely will not go to bed until at least 10:00,
48:45
maybe 11 if I'm really unlucky. And she absolutely will not
48:48
leave me alone until I go to bed.
48:49
So there is no like that kind of like period of time that we get
48:52
told as that as parents, we're supposed to get at the end of
48:54
the day when our kids go to bed and you should get some alone
48:56
time and get to spend some time with your husband.
48:58
That doesn't exist for me. Which is lovely, but it's a
49:02
constant internal battle between wanting to force her to start
49:07
having an earlier bedtime whilst also trying to remember that I
49:10
do actually have to accept that she has never gone to bed any
49:13
earlier than 9 O clock and that's only when we've been
49:15
absolutely exhausted. And that she doesn't need to
49:18
actually be accommodated and allowed to be who she is.
49:20
And that if her brain is still working.
49:22
And so into the evening. I know friends who work better
49:24
in the evening and at night. That fine.
49:26
Maybe I should just be occupying her more during that window of
49:29
time. Whatever, right?
49:30
They're just like, give her some stuff to do.
49:32
But it's it's trying to actually understand that it is OK for
49:36
them to not operate within the strict rules and expectations
49:41
that we have of children that she does say no to me an awful
49:44
lot. And for the most part, it is met
49:46
now with a me looking at the ceiling being like, take a
49:49
breath. Just it's OK.
49:52
Can we find a way to compromise tiny lady?
49:54
Like, is there a way to move forward?
49:55
And so anyway, there's a lot of kind of these conversations
49:57
going on. It's like I understand that we
49:59
fear children being kind of underdeveloped, not having the
50:04
same cognitive understanding as us, not being able to properly
50:09
analyze all the data and be aware of all the things they're
50:11
naive. They they don't understand.
50:14
Like the stuff like the real world that we know and the
50:16
hardships that they're going to have to face.
50:18
They've got to toughen up and all this nonsense.
50:20
And I really, I disagree with so much of it because actually when
50:24
I do the kind of very self LED, like child LED kind of education
50:28
with my children, the subjects they choose and they're the
50:31
questions they ask. And the the last stuff like, but
50:35
but why are we just chopping all the forest down, taking away a
50:40
crazy amount of diversity and just planting palm trees?
50:43
Why, why are we doing that? That doesn't make any sense.
50:46
Like what about all the creatures that might have
50:48
evolved one day? And they're not naive.
50:52
Like that's not naivety. That's that's them saying this
50:56
doesn't make sense and they're right.
50:58
It doesn't. And we know this.
51:01
And yet the governments are still not stopping it.
51:03
Like it's like actually they are not the ones who are naive
51:07
really. And I think we need to start
51:10
definitely shifting this awareness and, and actually
51:13
remembering that they are fully formed human beings.
51:15
And whilst they might, yes, need more information or need an
51:19
opportunity to grow into an understanding around that
51:21
subject and to see all the different possible reasons why
51:23
that's happening and to, to come up with solutions that actually
51:26
could fundamentally work, compromises we can make and
51:29
etcetera. They are capable of that from a
51:33
much younger age that we give them respect for being able to
51:36
do it. And I think there's a lot of
51:37
people out there who are doing work on ageism.
51:40
And in some ways this is that as well as it's recognizing that
51:42
they are fully formed humans and they deserve a voice just like
51:46
anybody else. But I do think there's there's
51:48
some seriously powerful work being done here.
51:50
I'd love to know like as a last kind of touch, this
51:53
conversation, I suppose we could talk about this forever.
51:55
What are some of the things they ask to have change in schools?
51:57
Like what are some of the things that you have been able to
52:00
champion for them? Like what?
52:02
Or is the stuff that we can obviously share with people to
52:04
actually start enacting themselves or thinking about
52:07
they're listening to this? Yeah, well, I mean, we published
52:10
the book with the aim of, at least for some people,
52:14
demonstrating you can do this work in a regular school with
52:16
regular school time. You don't need to completely
52:18
reinvent the wheel, and you don't need a revolution where we
52:21
smash everything to pieces and start again because we don't
52:24
live in that well, do we? People have to have jobs at the
52:27
moment. There are ideas like universal
52:30
basic income and universal basic services and other ideas that
52:33
are being trialled and shown to actually work pretty well, which
52:36
might remove the need for sorts out jobs that are creating
52:40
conceived products we don't need etcetera, etcetera.
52:43
But at the moment we don't live in that world.
52:44
So we do need spaces for young people to go and I guess the
52:48
things that they they're inquiring about and what they
52:51
want, there's probably about four or five things.
52:54
There's more, obviously Kenny, but I don't take the Mickey and
52:56
go on all day. So I think the first one that's
53:00
really abundantly clear whenever you speak to young people is
53:04
they want to be able to have spaces to talk about their
53:07
lives, their worlds in an unimpeded fashion without being
53:12
controlled in coerced from outside around what the
53:16
conversation should look and feel like, what topics are on or
53:19
off the agenda. And that's the only way they
53:22
perceive internally. I would agree with this that you
53:25
can grow as a human being and you can begin to understand
53:27
complex issues and know how to solve them together.
53:31
One of our projects called self ology, which came specifically
53:34
out of that real strong desire, which is completely ineptly
53:38
grounded in science, right? You look at any scientific
53:40
theory around self efficacy, agency, belonging, self
53:44
determination, they all will say that you need to do things that
53:50
make you feel intelligent, competent, and valuable in
53:54
spaces of deep connection with others, and that includes
53:58
talking about really difficult issues.
54:00
They felt that talking about their mental health, for
54:02
example, and this is a big problem with our system, more
54:06
brightly or broadly, is something you do in an external
54:09
clinic with someone you'd never met before.
54:11
He's a psychologist. We've completely flipped that on
54:14
his head based on what the young people wanted and just just the
54:17
general sense of what I guess we used to be able to do as a
54:20
society in previous generations when we didn't have these
54:23
professionals is you'd sit down together and we used to have
54:26
various rituals, festivals, different ways of coming
54:29
together to resolve that problems, to work through
54:32
difficult challenges we're experiencing emotionally.
54:36
We don't really have that now. We have a very much externalized
54:41
approach to mental health and well-being care where
54:44
professionals do that job and we don't think that needs to be the
54:46
case. We think that people absolutely
54:48
have the process to do that themselves with people who love
54:50
care and know them. So that's one.
54:53
Big grief. Like one thing that comes to my
54:55
mind, there is grief. It's like when someone dies, the
54:58
concept of a funeral is almost just a little bit kind of like
55:01
ritualistic. Now you have a funeral, you have
55:03
a quick chat, but actually then that person goes away and
55:07
they're suddenly alone again and everyone feels like they've
55:09
ticked the box, they've gone to the funeral, but actually, are
55:11
they checking in? Are they spending time with that
55:13
person? Are they letting them talk about
55:14
it? Are they bringing them food and
55:16
staying and hanging out and making sure they don't feel
55:18
alone? Like we're not, we're also
55:20
separated now. It's such interesting.
55:23
So that's the second set. It's this myth of separateness
55:29
that everything and everyone is separate from everything else.
55:32
And they didn't use these words directly.
55:34
But the way I read what they were saying and when we did the
55:37
work over the years and we went deeper into this, it became
55:40
clear that this is what they were getting at.
55:42
Is this idea that we are not all deeply connected to 1 and that
55:46
includes ourselves, human beings, animals and the planet
55:49
is causing untold harm and it's potentially species ending if we
55:55
don't change that perception that we can just treat other
55:58
things as objects or commodities that we can maneuver, work
56:02
around, extract from. And that includes each other
56:06
because this is our human relationships now become very
56:09
extractive. And, you know, romanticizing the
56:13
past. You've obviously done your
56:15
reading about the Victorian period.
56:16
It's not about romanticizing the past.
56:18
But we're in a position now where this idea of everything
56:20
and everyone being separate has become so deeply entrenched and
56:24
so powerful that people are now thinking and opting out of
56:30
working together more and more. I would suggest, and this is the
56:33
kind of things that young people were saying they were like, we
56:34
want opportunities to be able to work with each other, work
56:37
together more, work with adults more, and reduce the hierarchies
56:41
between one another. So that was a huge one.
56:44
And the third one is going to be very obvious to all your
56:46
listeners, which is they want agency, they want to be able to
56:51
have some control. So what happens to them?
56:54
They want to be able to have space to Co construct what
56:56
learning means, what success criteria for their learning is
57:00
from what constitutes a good person, etcetera.
57:03
I'd say those are the three main ones.
57:04
Kelly and I could go on, but hopefully that will resonate
57:09
with some of your listeners. And I think that's what we all
57:12
want as well. So that's another thing that's
57:13
just to finish what I was saying there.
57:15
But these are things that every human being wants.
57:17
Yeah, I've literally got in the corner of my monitor autonomy,
57:21
relatedness and competence. I must have gotten that from
57:24
somewhere. And so still they goes to sort
57:26
of do some research around and doing my coaching work.
57:28
This is that kind of that ability to yeah, it must, I was
57:32
must have been reading a great article about it.
57:33
I've clearly got it from somewhere.
57:35
But that kind of the concept of autonomy, being able to make our
57:38
own choices. If we don't have that, we don't
57:40
feel sustained as a human. We feel we don't need to feel
57:43
controlled for, coerced. We feel miserable, like if we
57:46
don't feel related to and part of a community, then we feel
57:50
lonely and then we can feel massive despair from that.
57:53
And I think we're literally having a conversation around the
57:55
concept of competence and how that one of my earliest memories
57:58
of competence is around getting 39 out of 40 on a spelling test
58:03
on repeat. Every time we did it.
58:04
I just couldn't get the last one and it was not good enough for
58:07
me until I got that forty. But the actually, how you
58:10
extrapolate that out into the world we live in is that
58:13
basically nothing I do now is ever good enough unless it is at
58:17
40. And it's, it has such damaging
58:19
effects into our mental health, our, our ability to connect and
58:22
relate to others, the judgement we, we offer each other and so
58:27
many of our young people and adults.
58:29
I mean, I feel it too, this, this separateness that you have
58:31
to work so hard to build community now and to keep people
58:35
in close and to actually create a family of people who you can
58:39
relate to. And when you are constantly made
58:42
to feel like if you can't quite fit that visual of what we were
58:47
being told was supposed to be. And I can see a lot of judgement
58:49
can happen amongst young people and did happen when I was young.
58:53
That bullying and that segregating and that feeling
58:55
like you're, you're weird, you're ordering on not included
58:59
well enough. That lack of inclusivity can
59:01
really start to ease away at you and stop you from feeling like
59:07
you can be a part of that community at all.
59:09
Yeah, there's a lot of work to be done here, but I know that
59:12
there's a gradual shift of people kind of looking to more
59:15
alternative provisions, asking questions around this,
59:18
considering home education or whatever they route, they go
59:22
down this idea of people recognizing, hang on a minute, I
59:27
am different. And actually, I'm OK with that.
59:29
I'm not sad that I'm different. The main thing I think is really
59:34
powerful is 1 sentence really, which is you can't have harmony
59:37
without difference. No.
59:40
I think that's such a beautiful sentence because it really makes
59:43
us acknowledge the fact that if we don't have diversity, we
59:49
don't have anything. No.
59:51
And the more we celebrate it and the more we respect it, have
59:54
compassion for it, the better it becomes.
59:58
I think this has been an incredible conversation.
1:00:00
Thank you so much for your time. Chris, if you if you like
1:00:02
everything we've talked about, he has a book, State of Mind.
1:00:06
Read it. I'll make sure I've linked it
1:00:08
into the description afterwards so you'll find it.
1:00:10
But I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day.
1:00:12
And yeah, I'm sure we'll have more conversations in the
1:00:15
future. It's been really interesting.
1:00:17
Thank you. Thank you very much.
1:00:20
Bye bye.