Prisons We Choose to Live Inside

by Doris Lessing

Another range of experiments is concerned with how children learn best in school. Some results go flat against some of most cherished current assumptions such as, for instance, that they learn best not when “interested” or “stimulated” but when they are bored. But putting that aside—it is known that children learn best from teachers who expect them to learn well. And most will do badly if not much is expected of them. Now, we know that in classes of mixed boys and girls, most teachers will—quite unconsciously—spend more time on the boys than on the girls, expect much more in scope from the boys, will consistently underestimate the girls. In mixed classes, white teachers will—again quite unconsciously—denigrate the non-white children, expect less from them, spend less time on them. These facts are known—but where are they incorporated, where are they used in schools? In what town is it said to teachers something like this, “As teachers you must become aware of this, that attention is one of your most powerful teaching aids. Attention—the word we give to a certain quality of respect, an alert and heedful interest in a person—is what will feed and nourish your pupils.” (To which of course I can already hear the response: “But what would you do if you had thirty children in your class, how much attention could you give to each?”) Yes I know, but if these are the facts, if attention is so important, then at some point the people who allot the money for schools and for training ...

think children should be taught about history not as is usually the case now, that this is the record of long past events, which one ought to know about for some reason or other. But that this is a story from which one may learn not only what has happened, but what may, and probably will, happen again. Literature and history, these two great branches of human learning, records of human behaviour, human thought, are less and less valued by the young, and by educators, too. Yet from them one may learn how to be a citizen and a human being. We may learn how to look at ourselves and at the society we live in, in that calm, cool, critical and sceptical way which is the only possible stance for a civilized human being, or so have said all the philosophers and the sages.

“It will seem to you many times in your life that there is no point in holding out against these pressures, that you are not strong enough. “But you are going to be taught how to examine these mass ideas, these apparently irresistible pressures, taught how to think for yourself, and to choose for yourself. “You will be taught to read history, so as to learn how short-lived ideas are, how apparently the most irresistible and persuasive ideas can, and do, vanish overnight. You will be taught how to read literature, which is the study of mankind by itself, so as to understand the development of people and peoples. Literature is a branch of anthropology, a branch of history; and we will make sure that you will know how to judge an idea from the point of view of long-term human memory. For literature and history are branches of human memory, recorded memory. “To these studies will be added those new branches of information, the young sciences of psychology, social psychology, sociology and so on, so that you may understand your own behaviour, and the behaviour of the group which will be, all your life, both your comfort and your enemy, both your support and your greatest temptation, since to disagree with your friends—you group animal—will always be painful. “You will be taught that no matter how much you have to conform outwardly—because the world you are going to live in often punishes unconformity with death—to keep your own being alive inwardly, your own judgment, your own ...