A Remedy for Wandering Minds: Lessons from Ibn Sina — Epoche B2
Dear Omar, I have been thinking since Thursday about what you said — that the children can manage twenty minutes of football but not eight minutes of a page. I no longer think the problem is the page. I think it is the way we have arranged the room, and I want to put the case in writing properly, because it rests on a book you have not read and on three experiments I had to go and look up before I trusted my own argument. Who he was, and which of his books I mean You know Ibn Sina mainly as a physician, and so did I. Abu Ali al-Husayn ibn Sina, who lived from about 980 to 1037 and whom European writers call Avicenna, wrote the Qanun fi'l-Tibb — the Canon of Medicine — which was still being set as a medical textbook in Italy six hundred years after his death. That is the reputation. But he also wrote a short treatise on the running of a household, the Kitab al-Siyasa , which is not a medical work at all. It belongs to a genre inherited from the Greeks: advice on governing oneself, one's income, one's wife, one's children and one's servants. In its section on children he writes at some length about how they should be taught, and almost nothing he recommends is what we are currently doing. Sebastian Günther's survey of medieval Muslim writing on education sets Ibn Sina's remarks beside those of al-Ghazali and Ibn Khaldun, and what struck me is how practical all three are — they read like people who had been in a room with actual children, which is not true of everything we were given at the training day in March. One thing to say plainly before I quote him at you: the treatise assumes a boy being prepared for a trade, and the reasoning is about the household's interest as much as the child's. I am not adopting his purposes. I am borrowing three observations that seem to me to survive the change of purpose. His three points, and what each one costs us First, that a child should not be taught alone. He argues for the group school over the private tutor, and his reasons are practical rather than sentimental: children in a group imitate one another, compete with one another, and are embarrassed in front of one another. All three of those are engines that run without a teacher operating them, which is exactly what you want when there are two of us and fourteen of them. Now look at our room. We have fourteen children and we have arranged them into fourteen separate silences, each with a book. Not one of the three mechanisms can operate, because none of the children can see what any of the others is doing or how far along they are. We have built a private tutorial and then put a crowd inside it — we are paying the costs of a group, in noise and distraction, and collecting none of the benefits. Second, that the teacher must watch what the child is actually suited to. Ibn Sina's advice is to observe the child's aptitude and steer him towards it, rather than deciding in advance what he is going to be. Think about Yusuf. We have given him the same storybook as everyone else for a year, and he reads two lines and looks out of the window, and we have written 'poor concentration' on his sheet three terms running. He also drew the whole irrigation layout of his uncle's farm on the back of the register, from memory, with the pipe widths marked. That drawing took him most of an hour and he did not look up once. So the sheet is wrong. That is a boy who can concentrate; we have simply never once given him anything to concentrate on. Third — and this is the one I would change first — that study must be broken by rest and by play. His argument is that a mind held at one task without interruption becomes dull rather than trained, and al-Ghazali makes the same point more sharply a century later, warning that a child forbidden to play and pressed to study without pause will have his heart deadened and his cleverness spoiled. We run ninety minutes with a single break for juice. What the modern evidence adds to the third point I did not want to rest a change to our timetable on an eleventh-century intuition, however sympathetic, so I went looking for whether anyone had measured it. Two findings are relevant, and they are not the same finding. The first is about attention simply running down. In 1948 Norman Mackworth reported an experiment designed for the Royal Air Force, whose radar operators were missing targets on long watches. He sat people in front of a clock with a single pointer that jumped once a second, and occasionally made a double jump, which they had to report. The task is trivial for a minute and brutal for two hours. What he found is that the proportion of double jumps detected fell sharply during the first half-hour and then stayed down for the rest of the watch. The decline is now called the vigilance decrement, and the important part for us is where it happens: not at the end of a long session but early in it. Ninety minutes is not a long session by our standards; it is three of Mackworth's half-hours laid end to end. The second finding is about what to put in the break, and it changed my proposal from 'let them rest' into something more specific. Roediger and Karpicke, in 2006, gave students prose passages to learn and then divided them: some reread the passage repeatedly, others read it once and then took repeated free-recall tests on it with the passage taken away. Tested five minutes later, the rereaders did better — which is what everyone expects, and is why rereading feels like the efficient thing to do. Tested a week later, the ordering reversed, and not by a little: the group who had reread four times recalled about 40 per cent of the material, and the group who had recalled it from memory three times retained about 60 per cent. Retrieving something is not a way of checking that you learned it. It is the thing that makes it stick. That is why I want the middle ten minutes to be talking and not resting. What I would like to try next term, none of which costs anything Twenty–ten–twenty. Twent