Why Do I Need a Teacher When I’ve Got Google

sets out roles, goals and responsibilities, ‘not only will [the children] behave according to the new norms, but they will enforce rules on other group members’.
    Schools are, at one level at least, tremendously sociable places. Children are practically never alone and usually working with dozens of other children on the same piece of work or task at the same time. You have to exhibit a certain amount of team-working prowess when there are 1,500 of you all in the same building and all wearing the same uniform. And right from when we start school we exhort children to share – share the paints, share the toys, share the book, share the Bunsen burner, share the basketball, share the computer … . Yet there is a cruel irony in the fact that we force children to interact, but then measure them as individuals. They spend all their school careers made to share but when it comes to their exams, all that grinds to a halt and we say, ‘Right, you’re on your own now. And in silence!’
    While schools are sociable, schooling is a very solitary process, where you can have the highest levels of emotional intelligence and team-working skills and still fail or, conversely, succeed yet have all the social skills of the academic hall of fame board your name is etched on. In fact, this says something about the nature of schooling itself. Independent Thinking’s ‘tame’ paediatric neurologist (and I use the term ‘tame’ loosely), Dr Andrew Curran, quotes research he has come across that showed how 75 per cent of teachers, 85 per cent of GPs and 95 per cent of managing directors scored highly along the autistic spectrum. They have the IQ skills needed to perform well in school – high boredom threshold, ability to fixate on a single task for extended periods, good organizational skills and no real social life to speak of – which means they can revise for and sit exams. But when it comes to human interactions, some, not all, can be particularly lacking. The teacher who can’t look young people in the eye and teaches subjects, not children; the doctor who looks at his screenrather than look his patient in the eye and treats symptoms, not people; the managing director who looks someone straight in the eye and says with relish, ‘You’re fired!’
    In one of Malcolm Gladwell’s previous books,
Blink
, he describes research on GPs in the US who were, or were not, sued for malpractice (Gladwell 2005). What the research showed was that the decision on whether or not to sue the doctor depended on the extent to which the patient liked them. ‘People just don’t sue doctors they like’, according to a lawyer quoted by the author. In other words, their EQ saved them from where the GP-related IQ had let them down. This, and other such research, prompted Dr Curran and Independent Thinking to put a programme together for medical undergraduates which is in its third year, taking the trainee GPs through an EQ-training programme that runs parallel to their traditional medical training. We called it HiOP to see if anyone would ask what it stood for. Only one or two have. (Hell is Other People. After Sartre. But before Big Brother.)
    We all know doctors whose ‘bedside manner’ is exemplary, teachers whose ability to get on well with people changes lives for the better and bosses you just love to work for. So, we know combining EQ with IQ can be done. And it can also be taught. What, then, are you doing at your school to develop EQ in your children and your colleagues? What are you doing to be the embodiment of an emotionally intelligent adult? Some of your children may never have seen an emotionally intelligent adult. They’ve seen grown-ups but that’s not necessarily the same thing at all.
    Remember the UK research I mentioned above on gifted and talented students? This is how it closes:
    After innumerable hours of interaction and investigation with the individuals in this sample as they grew to adulthood, I had to conclude that many influences on happiness and success are like love – it is possible to say how it feels and what happens because of it, but there is no sure recipe to apply to others. For the rest we do have very clear information about what the gifted and talented need by way of support towards self-fulfilment – an education to suit their potential, opportunities to flourish and people who believe in them.
    Amen to that.

Chapter 7
Nothing is more dangerous than an idea when it’s the only idea you’ve