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

word. 4 We took our motivation from one of Proust’s shorter sentences:
    The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.
    The project was essentially a voyage of discovery from A to A. The whole point was to try to show how being curious can change everything, if you let it. Especially when you consider that, as a word, ‘curiosity’ has the same origins as the word ‘curator’ which means to look after. Curiosity is a survival drive within us all. If teachers tap into it, the battle for motivation in the classroom is half won. Whether it’s true or not I don’t know, but it has been said that Einstein’s mum used to ask him what questions he asked at school at the end of each day. I have repeatedly tried that with my three children over the years but they simply look at me gone out! Schoolis the place where you go to be the passive recipient of other people’s knowledge as far as their experience has shown them. Yet, research shows that three- to four-year-olds ask, on average, 3,000 to 4,000 questions in a year. What happens to the toddler’s question-posing mania? Does it get knocked out of him or her by education’s fact-giving mania? It doesn’t have to be that way. This is one of the reasons I love messing with children’s heads under the guise of
Philosophy for Children
. 5 For those of you who haven’t come across it yet,
Philosophy for Children
or
P4C
started with an American professor of philosophy called Matthew Lipman who realized that his undergraduates at Columbia University could tell him what Socrates or Descartes thought but couldn’t think for themselves. To do something to change this, Lipman put together a programme and a process, based around a number of children’s storybooks he wrote of differing levels of complexity, starting with five-year-olds. The process involved creating a ‘community of enquiry’ with children seated in a circle, giving the community a stimulus such as one of his stories or a poem or a picture or a song or whatever you think is relevant, and then garnering the
children’s own questions
. The group then address these questions in a careful and democratic way. It is a very powerful – albeit a little long-winded – process that creates some quite stunning insights into children’s thinking and was the origin of my
Thunks
, of which more later. What it does do is tap into that most powerful of emotions, though, curiosity.
    So, to what extent are you using emotions such as curiosity to get children thinking and learning in your classroom and
not as an optional extra
?
    And then there’s the whole idea of whether we should actually teach children how to be happy. Well, from a health and well-being perspective there seem to be lots of positive reasons for doing this, including research on longevity that found that happy nuns lived longer as did Oscar winning actors compared to those who were nominated but never made it. 6 Not to mention the fact that ‘gelotologists’ have found that laughing and generally being happy increases production of immune cells, drastically decreases levels of the stress hormone cortisol, decreases levels of epinephrine linked to hypertension and heart failure, releases natural opiates from the pituitary gland to help with pain relief, raises levels of antibodies in our saliva, produces the natural antibiotic enkelytin, helps combat pulmonary problems, eases respiratory tract infections, increases antibodies by 50 per cent after flu injections, increases quantities of ‘killer cells’ and accelerates the body’s anticarcinogenic response. 7 , 8 There is even research that found mothers who laughed a few hours before breastfeeding released a chemical into their milk that helped reduce the baby’s symptoms of eczema. 9 Laughter may also make you cleverer, as there is also research suggesting that its ‘biological function is to make brain operations more efficient’. 10
    Some may argue that teaching happiness is covered within school anyway under a general PSHE ‘health and well-being’ banner, but in his book
Happiness: Lessons From a New Science
, economist Richard Layard, the government’s so-called Happiness Tsar (or Baron Layard of Highgate as he is known to his New Labour friends) shows that he has more than an inkling of what goes on in the standard PSHE lesson:
    Regrettably, it is often taught by non-specialists even in secondary schools and its purpose is not