Authentic or realistic?

The four intersecting dimensions of my life interests and my work are: culture, education, sustainability and digital. This makes it tricky to define my offer within a world of work that can be highly specialised. Moreover, each of these four dimensions are big, multivalent categories and, what’s more, they are all contested. To simplify, the contestation can be seen in  binary: The meanings people become attached to for each of these terms are either ‘authentic’ or ‘realistic’. By this attachment to meanings, I mean the differing ways we see potential for world-making, or change, restoration or salvation in these dimensions. People with an attachment to authenticity prefer to define these dimensions as organic, inclusive and emergent. Those with an attachment to ‘realism’ prefer to define them as ordered, limited and institutionalised. So to give examples for each:

Meanings of ‘culture’
Authentic: symbolisation or patterning that arises from and distinguishes groupings of people, especially those that share a habitat.
Realistic: institutions and practices that nurture, protect and extract value from the most iconic or valued outputs of cultural groups, or individuals.

Meanings of ‘education’
Authentic: The acculturation of people by drawing out novices through parenting or training, by modelling skills and wisdom.
Realistic: Institutions and formal practices which provide authority to deliver a curriculum and accredit pupils on its reception.

Meanings of ‘sustainability’
Authentic: Ensuring that we can meet the needs of the present without jeopardising the ability of future generations and other life forms to meet their own needs.
Realistic: Sustaining institutions  (e.g. family or business) through measures such as austerity, resilience and environmentally sustainable practices.

Meanings of ‘digital’
Authentic: Emergent technologies, access to which should be a common good and which in turn enable the spread of common consciousness.
Realistic: Technologies that are implements of control and desire, enabling institutions to spread messages, gather knowledge and make money.

Most of us live with both sets of meanings because if we didn’t co-operate with institutions, we’d find it hard to make a living. Even many institutions want to combine both, to potentialise learning or culture or technology as much as they can for the common good, while also needing to maintain their authority, limits, brand and revenue. The dream is to do both as successfully as possible. As a consultant, I find myself in an interesting position, navigating the two paths of realism and authenticity, trying to help organisations fulfil the dream of doing both successfully. I suspect that where there is conflict in any organisation it is centred on the crossroads of these two paths. Personally I’m drawn very much to an authentic path. My dream is that the authentic becomes the new reality. That adds an extra challenge in working with my colleagues in Flow, not because they don’t have a similar attachment to authenticity, but because in working with clients, we have to share and acknowledge the demands on them in surviving in our institutionalised world.

Seeing hope in an urban planet

This is a summary of a talk last week at the Royal Geographical Society by Alex Steffen, followed by a conversation with Ellen MacArthur. It was a big crowd in a formal space reminiscent of a RSA lecture, with not much time for audience questions, but it was still worth the night-time outing and missing my dinner. Alex Steffen is known for the Worldchanging website which he archived last year to concentrate on writing and speaking. He is a very fluent speaker with a good line in neat fresh aphorisms. For speed, I’m documenting in short what he said, as he said it, rather than analysing and commenting. Imagine quote marks round what follows, with the caveat that it’s not verbatim. Also you’ll have to picture some great images.

Our problems are systems problems so the tools we have now won’t solve the problems. We only have silo tools, in a culture of bounded rationality. We think the way things were are the way they’ll be. We don’t want to switch our investments. We’re too attached to ‘sunk cost’: we’ve spent $2 on one thing so we have to stick with it even if we’d get a $10 return elsewhere. We think we can put off until the future what will affect us in the future. We’ve been overly optimistic about the problem. The 350 movement is a good thing. But there are two problems with it. One is that we’re nearly at 400 ppm already. The other is the exponential rise of the impacts of concentrations of emissions – we’re releasing methane as well as CO2, and the more the forests are drying and burning the less able they are to sink the gases. We have no means to deal with these exponential curves. Prudent action is to avoid getting into these curves in the first place. The typical response to the 350 initiative is to say ‘that’s not realistic’. But is it more realistic to go ahead and melt the icecaps? What we think of as normal doesn’t match up to the reality so we have to rethink what we mean by realistic. What we thought of as renewable resources, such as land and oceans, are no longer renewable as we’ve strained them too much.

Everyday 200-250 thousand people are born in or move into cities. We are likely to become an entirely urban species. People will rise out of poverty. Cities are the leverage points where we can transform our world into a sustainable one, as cities become more the default mode for living. Many people think that climate change is just an energy problem. Thinking like that is the key to not solving it. Yes, we need clean energy but if it’s combined with ‘business as usual’ we’re still heading for collapse. When we switched from measuring footprints based on energy emissions to looking at our complete consumption patterns, it showed a massive increase in our footprints. We need to think about the whole system. It is possible on an ‘urban planet’ to imagine very different ways of meeting our needs. For example, thinking differently about transportation. The critical thing about this problem is not mobility but access, having what you need right there without having to travel. Vancouver has managed to increase urban density and reduce car ownership, and it’s a great place to live. There’s a phenomenon called Transit Leverage: If you don’t have a car but use public transit, you travel fewer miles because you plan your journeys differently.

Densification also has benefits for health: Fewer road deaths, less pollution, less obesity. There’s the longevity leverage: You don’t lose time when you walk in the long run because you eventually gain that time by living longer! Tentpole density is a model for understanding how urban density works – you gain access to benefits at the centres of density. The UK is about to see a big boom in urban density, so we should also see the benefits.

Retrofitting is very important. Buildings are a major source of emissions. Developers assume people want people big houses but actually, when asked, we want not space but comforts and smooth-running functions. We need to think about reskinning and rethinking rooms, including outdoor rooms. We should build to the Passivhaus standard, using insulation and natural light to heat and cool, not fighting off nature with air con and heating. Urban density helps by providing shared walls and shared systems.

Another tool is smart metering. There is the effect where a car with a fuel gauge has better mileage than one without. Measurement begets transparency, which begets comparison, which changes behaviour.

On ‘walkshed technologies’, our cities are like the internet before Google. We still compare places by going to them but we don’t need to anymore. We’re the last generation to know what it means to get lost as we now have locative devices. The most web-connected people have the most real world friends, are most likely to go out, explore and socialise because they have the ability to make more small and useful connections.

Some inspiring things that connected people have done or things that are now possible: The Earth Sandwich (two people putting pieces of bread on exact opposite points of the globe), the I-nap (your phone alarm goes when you get somewhere unfamiliar you want to get to), Endossa (a tiny mall, shops in boxes where you can feel the goods but then order them online and have them delivered) and Packstation (safe neighbourhood package delivery vendors).

On ‘surplus capacities’: We buy objects because of their capacities. The typical power drill is used for 2-20 minutes in its entire life. They have capacities to drill for 10,000 hours. We could use it for more things, but we don’t, so we could instead use tool sharing services. (Otherwise known as ‘collaborative consumption’).

On ‘post-ownership’: Access to something is better than owning it. We can now float in a cloud of available access. For example, we now have car piloting, where you not only share cars but leave them at your destination so you don’t have to pay for parking. We’re also seeing more temporary uses of empty space, for example with pop-up shops.

On ‘effective wealth’: Some forms of consumption add to your capacities but don’t add further monetary wealth.

On ‘vertical emulation’: Because of consumerist media, we now compare ourselves to the richest people we see in the media rather than the Joneses next door.

On ‘skin, skeleton & guts’ or longlife designs: We’re surrounded by stuff that already has one foot in landfill when it’s made. We need to use electronic devices where all the parts are visible, replaceable and reskinnable. or, for example, objects that are customisable into the shapes you want and then which decompose when not needed. Look at little bits, a growing library of pre-assembled circuits that snap together with tiny magnets.  We’re now seeing ‘recombinant manufacturing’ – fabricators and laser cutters, to make replacement parts. Thingiverse, for example, is recipes for making stuff with these fabricators.

Innovation zones are places where we can share these bits of equipment and this knowledge. Hacker spaces magnetise attention. When people work together they become ‘attention philanthropists’, working out together what needs doing most urgently and what works with what.

On ‘farmland preservation’: It’s important to keep food in production around cities. On ‘closed loop production’ – we need to channel city waste back to the wild and to farmland. We need to nurture ecosystem services, for example, we need to create ‘pollination corridors’ which are channels of wildflowers that bees and butterflies can surf along.

On ‘carbon sequestration’: It’s possible to imagine a city that takes back its emissions. We know it’s possible but in a world full of limits the only limit is time.

Concluding with: A comparison of Czechoslavakia which invested in culture and tourism after the fall of the Iron Curtain, with Albania which invested in building 70,000 bunkers. Don’t build bunkers!

 

After the talk, Ellen MacArthur engaged Alex in a conversation which, interestingly, as he hadn’t mentioned it at all directly, focused on education. She referred to the experience of her own foundation in working in schools to help learning about a ‘circular economy’, asking him “what do you talk about when you go into a classroom?” His answer was that young people don’t really need to be told, that they understand more than we give them credit for, but that they feel disconnected from the ability to do anything. You have to encourage them to develop their passion. He said it was helpful to look at the generation gaps in perception as people in college now have never not learned about the environment as a pressing problem and that when young people express what they want to be doing, it’s always really visionary. However, even the best institutions provide no opportunities for them to realise their visions.

I suspect that his experience is of talking to students in relevant subjects in HE, whereas Ellen was referencing her own experience in schools where environment issues are not tackled politically, regularly or right across the curriculum. (There is also the language difference where ‘school’ in USA means college, and means compulsory education for children in the UK.)

I would have loved to hear a bigger discussion with Ellen and others about education but this wasn’t the occasion for it. Their conversation went on to cover issues about the directions that businesses must take, about the ‘sociopathic deliverables’ of our economy and about lobbying (or lying) for corporate interests and growth. I could cover much more, but I will just end on Alex’s final point: Environmentalists should stop using the term ‘growth’ to mean the ecocidal increases in energy and material use that we’re seeing now. Growth of prosperity is not necessarily a bad thing if it is managed in the ways he described in his talk. I totally agree with that suggestion: Too many debates between the ‘degrowth’ and ‘ecoinnovation’ camps are fights when they could just be working out solutions together. There is one non-sequitur in his talk that bothers me slightly, however, when he referred to the exponential curves of runaway climate change but next said that people will rise out of poverty. All curves are exponentially upwards, if global temperatures go up, access to resources goes down. What seems more likely is that some cities, where they have their local resource supplies really sussed and sustainable, and where they are least threatened by climate change, may see a rise in more equal prosperity.

The League of Pragmatic Optimists

Last night was the inaugural meeting of the League of Pragmatic Optimists (LOPO), founded by my business partner in Flow, Mark Stevenson. I’m really excited by the support for this movement, which is seeing chapters being set up in the UK and several places in the US. Yes, there are many other meet-ups to learn and talk about change and also a lot of activist groups with common cause. But LOPO is between the two. It’s a meet-up group that helps people take action in their own way. The common cause of LOPO is in its principles (which remain open to debate and change), which, in summary, are that you have to be optimistic in order to make the world better, not blindly optimistic but informed by evidence and critical thinking. The rules are simple: at each meeting you pledge to do something and by the time of the next you must have done (or begun) it. As you may know, I’ve struggled a lot with my own despair about the outlook for the planet and I’ve also struggled with Mark’s optimism project, working alongside him over the past few years. I believe that there is value in despair, that it is the necessary foil for optimism, and we’ve disagreed about that. I used to moan a lot as he bubbled with enthusiasm about sustainable innovations, with me saying ‘yes but’ perhaps a bit too often. However, I finally started to feel more positive about his passion for optimism when I took part in a really extraordinary event, led by Teo Greenstreet, Lucy Neale and Hilary Jennings, called The Case for Optimism. This helped me see the importance of capturing people’s passion and helping them get into flow when they are imagining change, or designing and implementing solutions, and not always be putting a dampener on it by voicing your fears.

That said, I do have two quibbles, which I hope can be addressed in future meetings.

The focus of this first event was very much on action to solve problems, but the big problem we face was never directly mentioned. The big problem is the breaching of several planetary boundaries and the fact that we are on course for a mass extinction event. I mentioned this to a participant, and he said that there are, of course, many other problems that need action. I’m not sure, really, that there are. No other problems for residents of this planet are unrelated to how we can live on this planet and to how we cope as it changes. The realm of possible solutions is limitless and embraces every aspect of our ways of living.

Quibble two is related to quibble one. The room was very strongly in favour of the key message – that our society has suffered greatly from deficits of optimism and pragmatism. You could, in fact, make completely the opposite charge: That we are where we are now because of optimistic belief in unsustainable progress and an overly pragmatic empiricism that has denied the realm of ‘negative capability’. The crucial turn that we need is from exploitation to nurturing, levering the turn with both despair and hope, and both ‘unreason’ and pragmatism, together in helpful balance to combat cynicism and apathy.

Reflections on Shareworkers panel at ISEA2011

This is a brief reflection on my contribution to a panel in the ISEA2011 symposium at Istanbul. I was there thanks to the generous and trusting invitation from Charlotte Frost, who had never met me before but thought my tweets were interesting enough. It was a great opportunity to meet Charlotte, to meet Ruth Catlow from Furtherfield for the first time (ridiculously), to catch up with Dougald Hine and to get to know Jack Hutchinson and, mentioned only last because his presence was remote, Marcus Romer. It was also pretty wonderful to be in Istanbul for the first time, a city that combines excitement with comfort in equal measure. (Photos will soon appear.) Charlotte asked us to follow up by writing some reflections. I have been shamefully inadequate at the task due to the fact that my daughter has needed helping through school trauma and now I’m home schooling her.

My slides for the panel session can be seen here on Slideshare. And my notes for the slides are here on Evernote. (I tried to be digitally whizzy and collate the whole thing on Storify, but I just couldn’t quite cope with all this cross-linking and embedding, so I made a cup of tea and did a blogpost.) For those as short of time as I am, in a nutshell, I talked about what public art museums & galleries are doing and what they could do better to promote more participation and sharing between creative practitioners and the public. And above all, why they need to be doing it better. The reason for ramping up what they do is the context of a severe pressure on resources and growing instability of the economy-ecology. The ways they need to ramp up include much more open sharing of content, much more involvement of people in collaborative problem-solving and much more connection with people such as design activists.

After returning from Istanbul I gave a talk at the Museums Association conference, about how museums could contribute to wellbeing in the context of environmental instability, through a greater focus on the reality of our context and looking more to the future. Slides can be seen here and read more on the post Why we need happy museums. The conversations with the others on the ISEA panel had been very helpful for me to clarify my thoughts about the false opposition between social and environmental justice, affirming my belief in the importance of sharing between disciplines and of overcoming antagonism in order to work towards common goals. It also led to these attempts to visualise in diagrams the distinction between supporting the status quo and taking a positive but entirely radical stance in relation to economy, education and prosperity.

So often the best things to come out of conferences are from the conversations around food and between the sessions where you must dutifully listen. Absolutely true in this case, though ISEA was a great chance to see installations of digital art and hear more about art and technology from some very dignified and knowledgeable speakers.

Hannover principles and culture

Emma Wilcox sent me a link to the Hannover Principles on Design for Sustainability. I’d seen them before but forgotten about them. They are 11 years old now and have been very influential on architecture and design, with certain points such as ‘create safe objects of long-term value’ and ‘eliminate the concept of waste’ having great impact on design thinking. I was wondering whether the same spirit behind these principles could be applied to the cultural heritage sector, which has a complementary role alongside design. Whether cultural heritage organisations curate artefacts, knowledge, built or natural environments, they are all basically about stewardship and sustainability. Design is mainly about inventing things and places, and cultural heritage is mainly about conserving and teaching about things and places but, together, both sectors work towards enhancing the way we live with things and in places. Together, both sectors need to work towards ensuring that ‘enhancing the way we live’ is not about indulgence and greed but about living well with nature.

I remembered that I had written some principles in the Framework for Climate Action in Culture and Heritage. What I may do now is to revise these inspired by the Hannover principles. Both sets of principles are below.

The Hannover Principles by William McDonough

1. Insist on rights of humanity and nature to co-exist in a healthy, supportive, diverse and sustainable condition.

2. Recognise interdependence. The elements of human design interact with and depend upon the natural world, with broad and diverse implications at every scale.  Expand design considerations to recognizing even distant effects.

3. Respect relationships between spirit and matter. Consider all aspects of human settlement including community, dwelling, industry and trade in terms of existing and evolving connections between spiritual and material consciousness.

4. Accept responsibility for the consequences of design decisions upon human well-being, the viability of natural systems and their right to co-exist.

5. Create safe objects of long-term value. Do not burden future generations with requirements for maintenance or vigilant administration of potential danger due to the careless creation of products, processes or standards.

6. Eliminate the concept of waste. Evaluate and optimize the full life-cycle of products and processes, to approach the state of natural systems, in which there is no waste.

7.  Rely on natural energy flows. Human designs should, like the living world, derive their creative forces from perpetual solar income. Incorporate this energy efficiently and safely for responsible use.

8. Understand the limitations of design.  No human creation lasts forever and design does not solve all problems. Those who create and plan should practice humility in the face of nature.  Treat nature as a model and mentor, not as an inconvenience to be evaded or controlled.

9. Seek constant improvement by the sharing of knowledge. Encourage direct and open communication between colleagues, patrons, manufacturers and users to link long term sustainable considerations with ethical responsibility, and re-establish the integral relationship between natural processes and human activity.

The Framework for Climate Action in Culture & Heritage 

1. However local our remit, we accept a global responsibility and perspective, aiming to secure social and environmental justice.

2. The survival of our own organisation is ultimately only important so that we can contribute to wider social and global challenges.

3. We interpret ‘sustainability’ not as the continuation of every initiative or preservation of every asset but the evolution of our services to meet environmental, cultural and educational needs as they emerge.

4. We must identify how our knowledge, practice and assets can best be targeted to the great challenge of environmental sustainability.

5. It is essential that we collaborate more with other bodies to share knowledge and resources, giving our time and ideas freely if necessary to bring about fruitful mutuality.

6. We need to make our assets even more accessible to aid urgent and pragmatic learning from them. This may involve increasing digital access to our culture and knowledge.

7. We should not delay in reducing greenhouse gas emissions across our operations, as this is only the first step we can take towards helping to sustain life on the planet.

8. We must model and enable imaginative thinking and practice, working optimistically and generously with creative people and ideas.

9. We must aim to think systemically to deal with the complexity of the situation, so that we can continually reassess our priorities.

10. We should work more closely with domains outside our own, including organisations involved in the natural environment, place-making, engineering, design and sustainable economics.

11. We should prioritise community engagement, and redefine our audiences primarily as ‘communities of interest’ rather than customers we only value quantitatively. This means that our audiences are groups of people, who share common interests in places or practices, who we must help to develop their understanding and solve problems.

12. We must see the prime rationale for our learning programmes as developing ‘smart capacities’ so that people can play an active role in democratic decision-making, cope with future challenges and maintain their wellbeing. We must emphasise participatory, non-didactic, challenge-based and enquiry-based learning approaches in order to develop these capacities.

13. In our interpretation programmes, we should drive towards contextualisation, so that artefacts and knowledge are more dynamically placed into an ecosystem of landscape, biodiversity and human economics and creativity.

14. In making decisions about our relationships with businesses, we should be scrupulous in considering environmental ethics.

Why we need happy museums

I was part of the Museums Association conference panel about the Happy Museum Project yesterday. Tony Butler, May Redfern and I gave three short presentations around the role of museums in promoting wellbeing in the face of global challenges. It was tricky to draw out the complexities of the issue in a short session and it closed with some useful provocations from the floor that could have done with more space, so this post aims to address them from my viewpoint. The three final challenges formed a tetchy chorus that Happy Museum points to a non-existent gap in practice and does not acknowledge the wealth of excellent community practice by museums.

May Redfern used her slot to voice typical challenges you might expect from client groups to a museum happiness project. I hadn’t digested this before being questioned from the floor, so I wanted to clarify my thoughts here. May drew on her experience in Castleford to point out that impoverished groups are more focused on more practical and long-lasting impact, and may not respond to what seems like either ephemeral fun or angst about the planet that only the affluent have time for.

In combination, there was an overall sense of challenge to the Happy Museum project, that museum people were unclear of its rationale and that disadvantaged audiences may not feel it matches their needs. Some couldn’t see the links between our three presentations, as I focused on the environmental context, Tony described the project overall and May challenged it from a social justice perspective. In later chats with participants, the need for clarity arose with queries like these: If the project’s aim is to engender happiness through work on rights and equalities, then museums have been doing it for years. If its aim is to tackle environmental challenges, which are pretty disturbing, then why call it ‘happy’? (To sugar a bitter pill?) Is it really about happiness or addressing harder issues?

It’s important to distinguish between happiness as pleasure-seeking and what many, such as Martin Seligman, are calling Eudaimonia in a broad movement for positive social change. Wellbeing is achieved through action, mainly with the aim of living sustainably. Pleasure and fun are an important part of wellbeing but are not the goal of a good life. The Happy Museum is perhaps more about Eudaimonia than happiness (but then who’d want to use such an arcane title!) In working with non-thriving communities, it would be necessary (and normal) to foreground practical and positive actions towards thriving, addressing basic needs on a par with and through cultural engagement, rather than suggesting audiences should leave their troubles behind to have some fun, or perhaps a taste of high culture.

This project is really about questioning what we mean by happiness than promoting it. As Tony commented in the session, it is about building on existing good practice to address the question: Does a culture geared towards material wealth make us happy? I think he was right to say that the museum sector has not addressed this question overtly or consistently enough. The rationale for a serious rethink about the mission of museums is that we are facing unprecedented and worsening environmental (and therefore economic) challenges, the root causes of which are excessive consumption and use of fossil fuels. The project is taking a radically different perspective, not radical in the sense of asking people to smash capitalism or run for the hills, but in the sense of addressing root causes and seeing the big picture in order to improve quality of life.

The confusion about whether Happy Museum is about happiness or the environment is a symptom of the ‘splitting’ of issues in public discourse. I have at times been made to feel awkward for my green perspective. I think this is explained by the false opposition of environmental and social justice. When people challenge me they suggest that to tackle the planet’s problems is to trample on dreams and to care less about people than matters technical or numerical. Jocelyn Goddard commented that we should be more positive about progress made by museums on wellbeing and not fuss over semantics. This is right. However, I think there is always room for clarity on terms, to ensure discussion is not at cross purposes and to reduce antagonism.

At the end of my slot I asked: If a ‘wellbeing not wealth’ mission means your museum challenging the status quo, what are the risks to your museum? This wasn’t really discussed further, and I wasn’t sure if this was because people weren’t ready to be so radical or because they thought they were already doing work that was challenging enough. I asked it because I have often been told that such a radical stance would risk a museum losing funding, and individuals being seen as ‘out of line’. How does a Government-funded body place central to its mission work which undermines the credo of a Government to generate wealth, despite the cost to the environment and the poor (despite its sticking plasters of Big Society and Compassionate Conservatism)? I thought it might be helpful to spell out, with some diagrams on this link, how a radical stance is a profoundly positive one, in comparison to the status quo which is driving us all to unhappiness.

Gove and his MFLs

Michael Gove has announced at the Conservative Party conference (2011) that Primary Schools should teach Modern Foreign Languages to children from 5 years old, and that he is prepared to ‘pull all the levers’ to make this work, including extending the school day by one hour. Alongside this are other announcements, including more secondary-style subject-specialists teaching in primary schools. Stunningly, this seems to be a very popular proposal, with very little dissent across the political spectrum. Where it’s reported in the papers (online) you’ll see hundreds of comments of the likes of ‘though I hate to agree with Gove, I agree with him on this’.

I’m not against children learning foreign languages, just as I’m not against them learning anything else, except the techniques for violence of any kind. In fact, I’m very much in favour of learning about foreign and heritage languages and cultures, which can be done effectively through acquiring a language. However, I need to point out a few reasons why we can’t unthinkingly accept this proposal. This is an ideological proposal without due consideration of either the intrinsic motivations children might have or of any extrinsic rationale for increasing multilingualism by English children. Gove is mainly pushing the subsidiary argument here, that second language acquisition has neurological benefits transferable to other learning, but in comparing English schools to those in other countries, he is also suggesting that multiple languages are a requisite for national competitiveness.

Neither of these two arguments is proven or even sound. I’ve only just read the news reports and have not had time to research the issue to refresh my memory in detail, but I recall that the claim of neurological benefits of bilingualism have been proven to be unclear. Bilingualism only develops skills that are transferable to linguistic skills, not to other domains of learning. In other words, knowing two languages doesn’t make you deficient in either language (although there may be some reduced ability to pronounce naturally in one or the other).

More importantly, if we’re talking about schools, any neurological benefits could only apply to learning that is so effective that the results are equivalent to natural bilingualism. Such results require immersion, where other subjects are learned through the foreign language and where the context (e.g. migration) helps the children feel that their language learning is essential.

Curriculum structures in England don’t allow for foreign language acquisition to fluency, even with weekly lessons over 5 or 6 years. If children don’t progress relatively quickly to competence, and have little contextual motivation, many will lose interest.  If Gove’s goal is that children should acquire a second language to competence, so that their languages can become economically useful at maturity, there would need to be major alterations across the full timetable, staff profile and teaching methodology in primary schools. As it is impossible to imagine that the majority of schools would teach wholly or partly through a foreign language, significant time would need to be taken from other areas, and this is likely to be to the detriment of physical, outdoor and creative activities. If Gove wants to extend the primary school day by one hour, formal learning will cut into after school arts and sports. If we imagine that 95 hours a year is extended from 5 or 6 years to 10 or 11 years of schooling, and then account for the factor of teaching yet more languages, this would take up approximately 1300 hours of schooling and still not achieve fluency except in a minority of children.

There is an additional concern about how this works through Secondary School transition. Again, if fluency is the goal, a particular language will dry up if it is not continued throughout Secondary school. However, it is difficult to see how there can be continuity of one key language for the same child through both the Primary and Secondary phases. In England, we don’t have the advantage of other countries worldwide who have English as the prime choice for a second language. We have no prime choice.

There is a common argument for the ‘critical period hypothesis’; the notion that the cut-off period for language acquisition is at age 12. This must be driving Gove’s push to introduce foreign language at age 5. It is indeed true that young children, because they have a pronounced capacity to absorb, repeat and imitate sounds, can pick up languages quickly. However, this doesn’t mean that adults are unable to acquire a language to fluency. New techniques have recently been developed to retune the mature brain to notice and recall what seem like alien sounds. Also, it may be misguided to attempt to teach a foreign language outside an immersive bilingual setting to young children. To learn an unfamiliar language without immersion, you need some maturity as a language learner and an ability to grasp the metacognitive dimension of language. (You need to understand that a word is a symbol, that a thing can be represented by more than one word, that meanings differ with context and so on.) In this formal setting, the younger you start the more likely it is to put a child off from language learning when they are ready and can actually see the need.

The particular flavour of this ideological push for multilingualism fails to acknowledge that an increasing number of children in England are already bilingual at age 5, yet their schooling encourages them to stop using their first language (Sylheti, Arabic, Polish, Urdu, Hindu, Mandarin etc etc) in favour of English. Some of these languages might be economically relevant for the UK but somehow these children, when resident as first to third generation immigrants, don’t fit the image of English native child representing the nation abroad.

When we assume that foreign language acquisition is an undeniable good, we are failing to consider the effort, and even pain, that children can experience in trying to learn. We’re also assuming economic benefits that are completely unpredictable if we are projecting 15-25 years into the future when these  primary children reach maturity. In that time, technology will very likely bring instant translation devices (as we are almost at that point now with instant translation of text online and vocal translation apps) and, in turn, we will see a greater homogenisation with English as a dominant language. Also, the impacts of climate change in and beyond that period will see forced migrations to more benign places such as the UK. The purpose of foreign languages in that context will be for peace-keeping and extracting knowledge for co-operative adaptation and conservation of heritage, in the absence of available translation technology.

I’m not projecting this future in order to be cynical or dismissive. I don’t want to be looking ahead to a future like this but my picture is based on the agreed projections that I believe we should acknowledge in planning future education. I’m projecting this way so that we can set language acquisition in a more appropriate frame.

I stress that I don’t want to be seen to be dismissing the learning of diverse languages out of hand. I would like to see children leaving primary school with much richer awareness of other countries, peoples, stories, words and meanings, but think this would be better achieved by greater emphasis on ‘global citizenship’, using technology to enable foreign exchange, and with more access to the music, poetry, art, ecological practices and ideas of global peoples. This should include helping children to greet others and use basic conversational vocabulary (‘my name is…’, ‘I live in…’ etc) in several languages. Aiming to attain fluency in a foreign language is another matter entirely and that should be a matter of family choice. If the child is already bilingual, they may prefer support to maintain their home language in school, rather than learning a third language, for example. Language learning, and schooling in general, should be personalised. Some children have strong aptitudes and motivations for developing language fluency, and local authorities should provide educational resources for this purpose, but the Government should not impose it as a requirement on every school for every child.