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

college in the Midlands. He had hated school and had pretty much failed at everything he had attempted. On arriving at the college where he now worked, he had been identified as having dyslexia and given the appropriate support. This included learning how to use non-verbal techniques such as Tony Buzan’s
Mind Maps
, moving away from what I call the ‘tyranny of syntax’. With the tools to overcome his particular neurological handicap, he was able to access the learning and excel in a way that he never managed at school. Failing his exams makes him look dumb but there are many ways to fail an exam. For this boy being dumb wasn’t one of them. Being expected to learn in what was, for him, a dumb way was what did it, that and a system dumb enough to do the same failing strategy over and over again and expect a different result. Yet he was the one who came out looking dumb.
    You are a teacher. You are one of the most powerful people in the world. You mould young minds. More than that, though, you mould young brains – literally. Your actions (or lack of them, remember we are often marked out by what we don’t do as much as by what we do) directly impact on the actual physical architecture of the brains of the young people in your care on an hourly basis. You are directly influencing the neurological structures of the future of the world.
    One of the aspects of neuroscience that most people seem to understand these days in my experience is that learning, at a very simple level, is the process of making and then strengthening connections between brain cells. As we experience new things, we make new connections. As we re-experience them and make sense of them, those connections become more stable, creating templates or Hebbian assemblies named after the Canadian neuroscientist Donald Hebbe who first identified this process. In this way we create a unique structure between our ears that determines how we respond to novel situations, how well we speak French, what happens when someone asks us a maths question, how well we perform on
Who Wants to be a Millionaire
and what we think of cheese. The brain is capable of making – and breaking – a million new connections per second and retains the ability to make new connections into old age despite the best intentions of daytime television. This process of constructing our neural architecture is matched, though, by a process of deconstruction known as neural pruning. This is the brain getting rid of the connections it no longer feels are necessary, a deliberate, inevitable pruning away of untapped potential.
    According to Ian Robertson in the wonderful little book
Mind Sculpture
, the seven-year-old’s brain looks and weighs pretty much the same as an adult brain yet there are around 40 per cent more synapses, the connections between brain cells, per brain cell in the child’s brain than in the adult one. This explains why, when you ask a young child to tell you what they did last summer, you are regaled with a 30-minute monologue full of the most excruciating detail about every last little aspect of their trip to the Dordogne. Everything is still linked to everything else at a synaptic level and when you trip the switch with your ill-advised but well-meaning question the whole lot is downloaded in one breathless, unstoppable mess.
    As we mature, both physically and neurologically, the brain has pruned away many of these spurious connections, which means we can get straight to the point far more readily (although I’m sure you could point to – or, if you are sitting in the staffroom reading this, point at – people for whom this is still not the case).
    What is the deciding factor as to whether a connection remains or is pruned away? You are.
    As Robertson points out:
    One of the main things which determines which synapses stay and which go is learning. Those synapses which don’t become connected to other neurons, through learning and experience, simply wither away in the great competitive free-for-all which is brain activity.
    (Robertson 1999)
    So, we have nature and nurture interacting with and influencing each other in various ways and to various extents depending on where we are born and who we are born to and this whole process contributing to the actual architecture of the brains we carry in our heads for the rest of our lives. What’s more we have education – you – right at the heart of this wonderfully complex web, capable of significantly influencing