The Half Light
On safety, learning, and what we lose when we iron out the unexpected.
The moon is just bright enough, I tell myself, and so the head torch — which I'd forgotten to charge anyway — I leave on the bench. Pluto and I venture out, along the gravel driveway, and head to the beach. We ease into the run along the road, feet steady, landing predictable.
The shift to sand brings dulled vision. All I can see are thin silhouettes: twisted trees washed up from the storm, Kāpiti Island emerging, the drifting coastline to the south. The sand is hard, ridgy. I can't see the shifts; I rely on sensing them.
Pluto is off, exploring the dunes, racing back. He is never uncertain, dark or bright. How does he know.
I notice I'm not uncertain either, out here in the half light. Something is navigating that isn't my thinking mind.
My gait has changed, I can feel it — more braced yet supple, predicting sudden unpredictable shifts in the sand. Running in these conditions is not about what I see and what's in my head. It's all about what I sense. Body before thought. I like this. Perhaps that's why I so easily convince myself to leave the head torch at home.
The drive to a standardised, knowledge-rich, structured curriculum, where no learning deemed important by its writers is left to chance, is also an approach to schooling that wraps the kids in safety. We remove threats, make sure they're supported. We believe in the power of exemplars and scaffolds, explicit modelling, learn-by-numbers task sheets, professional relationships. We hold their hands. We keep their learning safe. The learning happens thanks to us and the tightly controlled conditions we create.
But what if this is all wrong?
For what we create day after day in this conception of learning is a world where variation is ironed out; where the random and unexpected has no place. Kids only learn what we want them to learn, when we want them to learn it, because the experience is controlled, safe. And we breed dependency as a result.
I want you to feel safe in this world so I've ironed out the variables, we say. And I want you to learn this particular thing now. Don't worry, I've got everything under control. And so the kids hop on the learning treadmill. Make sure you take risks — well, safe ones — because that is how you learn, we say (as long as the risks are ones we’ve sanctioned). The teacher sets the pace most can cope with and the machine starts. Some pull it off with style. Some go through the motions. Some do as expected. A few wilt under the bright light. The teacher makes a judgement about performance, enters the data, and decides what to do tomorrow.
What assumptions are embedded in this world? That kids won't learn unless the adult is in charge; that learning needs to happen in controlled, uniform, predictable environments; that data about performance in these controlled environments is accurate and thus the most valuable type of information; that what they do on the treadmill is an accurate indicator of what they will do when they run outside.
These conditions — worlds stripped of randomness, characterised by uniformity — create fragile cultures and fragile people. While all seems well in these smooth worlds, one unforeseen thing upends it all. An unexpected word in an exam. A question that doesn't fit the scaffold. And then nothing is well. Taleb calls this the spectrum of fragility. We are manufacturing it, daily, at scale.
Running on a treadmill is not the same as running outside, in the half light.
I think of Pluto racing back from the dunes in the dark — never uncertain, never waiting for conditions to improve, confident in his ability to respond to what may come. I think of my own feet, braced and supple at once, making a thousand tiny adjustments I have no name for. Predicting sudden unpredictable shifts.
That is not a skill I built on a treadmill.
Aren't kids better off running outside? Where the wind can blow and catch them off guard. Where the threat of rain can push them, or transport them to another world. Where anything — just anything — makes the run different to what they imagined or even knew from the day before. Where one day's performance can't be replicated. Where what counts is their response to it. Where the daily variation makes the kid stronger.