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

before the child reaches the age of three you may as well cancel that place you’ve reserved at Roedean.
    As Bruer points out, there is a ‘misconception that early environmental stimulation or experience causes synapses to form. This … runs counter to the existing neuroscientific evidence. Rather, the research suggests that genetic and developmental programs, not environmental input, control early synapse formation.’
    So, nature, as opposed to nurture, has the upper hand in the early years. It’s not the wallpaper your parents buy, but the genetic material they give you that will count in those early years. So, where do you come in as a teacher? Look at Bruer’s quote again: ‘genetic
and
developmental programs’. In other words, what you are born with and, not Classic FM on in the nursery, but the way good parenting and professionals like you work to develop young brains effectively and consistently over time. In the words of another neuroscientist Patricia Goldman-Rakic:
    While children’s brains acquire a tremendous amount of information during the early years, most learning takes place after synaptic formation stabilizes. From the time a child enters first grade, through high school, college, and beyond, there is little change in the number of synapses. It is during the time when no, or little, synapse formation occurs that most learning takes place.
    In other words, as I keep saying, you are powerful, powerful professionals, directly influencing young people right down to the actual physical architecture of their brains. Some scientists are even suggesting that children are ‘hardwired’ to believe and trust adults from an evolutionary point of view. Beware, too, that because so much of what is going into their heads from what you say and do is working at a subconscious level, then, in the words of Dr Curran, ‘The child may never have an insight into what you have hardwired into their brain.’ Like a hypnotist, you
suggest
messages intoimpressionable young minds through your every word and deed, messages that are the building blocks of that child’s sense of self-worth and their self-image. And because this is a subconscious process, the child’s self-esteem never really knew what hit it. That’s why you need to know about brains, neural development and your role in it. And why you need to watch out for the things that just aren’t true.

Chapter 10
Your hands in their brains
    Just when you thought the whole ‘nature v nurture’ debate had quietened down along comes the concept of epigenetic theory and it kicks off again. Epigenetics is all to do with the way genes can be reprogrammed by cultural, maternal and environmental influences and, although you, as a teacher, may have no input with regard to the ‘nature’ element of the equation, you need to be aware of the effects of ‘nurture’. Not least because your actions actually change the very nature of the DNA of the children in your care.
    The truce between those expressing the view that our genes determine who we are more than our environment and those declaring, on the contrary, that it is our environment that moulds us into who we become, overriding our genes, the naturists versus the nurturists, was best summed up by science writer Matt Ridley when he wrote:
    No longer is it nature-versus-nurture, but nature-via-nurture.
    (Ridley 2003)
    To look at this properly we need to go back to the whole question of the very nature of intelligence, not IQ this time but the related concept of ‘g’. In a nutshell, ‘g’, 1 which stands for ‘general intelligence’ and was coined by statistician Charles Spearman who was a follower of the Francis Galton, we met in chapter six and a ‘fervent champion of heredity’ in Ridley’s words, is a way of summing up that special ingredient that is common to all the various intelligence tests. In other words, that special ingredient possessed by the child who seems to do well no matter what you throw at them.
    What’s more, there is something called the Flynn Effect 2 these days that shows that IQ scores have actually been rising significantly across the world. And no-one really knows why. Is it diet? Is it the increasingly enriched environments children are living in with access to various forms of media? Is it more experience in dealing with the sorts of questions andthe sort of questioning techniques the tests use? And before you declare that it must be schooling, the sorts of 3-Rs type