Why Being Reasonable is Detracting from the Experience of School

I enjoy most things that Rory Sutherland, vice chairman of the Ogilvy & Mather group of companies, has to say. His ideas and opinions on the world of advertising are not new any more, but they continue to be relevant, particularly to the experience of school.

One of the central ideas that Sutherland often speaks about is the fact that classical economics continues to be preoccupied with reality and rationality. In doing so, it overlooks the fact that most of the time we value things, not because of what they are but because of how we perceive them.

“Our experiences, costs, things, don't actually much depend on what they really are, but how we view them.”

Famously, he gives the example of the Eurostar train between London and Paris, which a few years ago invested 6 million pounds in reducing the journey time by 20 minutes. His point being that for 0.01 percent of this money they could have improved the usefulness and enjoyment of the journey far more. Humorously, he continues:

“For maybe 10 percent of the money, you could have paid all of the world's top male and female supermodels to walk up and down the train handing out free Château Pétrus to all the passengers. You'd still have five million pounds in change, and people would ask for the trains to be slowed down.”

The reason why we focus on things like journey time, Sutherland suggests, is that we tend to favour rational, numerical, spreadsheet-driven ideas, rather than solving the problem psychologically. In the case of the Eurostar, we focus on efficiency (i.e. time) over experience.

We could take this conversation in multiple directions, but before I return to the question of school, it reminds me of something else I read recently about the invention of time itself.

Time, as we know it, is an extraordinary pattern that, since Galileo in the 16th Century, has brought order and structure to our journey as a species. Today, the orderly, rational progression of numbers on a clock face helps us, individually and collectively, measure what is past and frame the future. 

Only a few years after Galileo's invention of the pendulum clock, the fifteen-year-old son of a Swedish biologist and physician Carl Linnaeaus (1707-1778), wrote a thesis on an improbable and inspired invention of his father’s: a flower clock to measure time in bloom.  As Maria Popova writes:

“Immersed in the lives of plants around the clock and across the year, Linnaeaus grew fascinated by the variation in different species’ relationship to time… He discovered that different flowers open and close at different parts of the day and night, not at random but following a strict pattern. Nothing was known then of circadian rhythms or of phytochrome and cryptochrome — the photoreceptor proteins that make this photoperiodism possible. Linnaeaus seemed to have found nature’s own clock partway between mystery and mathematics — a glimpse of some deep truth in the mirror of beauty.”

Popova concludes later on that Linnaeaus’ solution to the problem of time was “a poetic gesture rather than a scientific one.”

And, perhaps, this is where the insights of Sutherland and Popova come together and help us consider the possibility that the future of school may not always be best served by taking the path of reason and efficiency. School, after all, is not a game of numbers, even if we've sometimes been lulled into thinking that learning should be linear, driven by regulation, standardisation, and the accumulation of points along the way. 

The genius of Carl Linnaeaus, it can be argued, is that he was able to step away from what others already knew, to come up with something so unusual, so remarkable, and so beautiful that we suddenly see our world from a new and almost magical vantage point; understanding better the relationship between time, the natural world and their connection to our star.

Surely, this is the kind of experience of school, as a playground of ideas and exploration, that we'd all love to believe will one day be the norm; a place where we can see economic value in beauty, not just utility; a place where students can imagine and create the future in ways that move beyond conceptual models and ways of thinking that no longer serve us well, least of all bring us joy.

There are some schools that are closer to this than others. But it begins by giving up on the idea that the experience of school is best served when we favour “rational, numerical, spreadsheet-driven ideas” in favour of those that might just get us closer to where we want to be.

Photo by Noel Broda on Unsplash.