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 Effect2 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 and

the sort of questioning techniques the tests use? And before you declare that it must be schooling, the sorts of 3-Rs type learning to be found in schools have not shown any significant increase and have even shown declines. What’s more, the biggest gains have taken place at the lower end of the intelligence scale with the higher end remaining pretty much the same. In other words, all over the world stupid people are becoming cleverer. (Although, in the UK, this growth in intelligence of young people peaked in the 1980s and has held steady since then. I don’t know about you but I get a warm glow from being part of such a peak.) What’s more, if you extrapolate backwards, according to controversial professor Arthur Jensen,3 Aristotle would have an IQ of -1000. So, here, as we have seen elsewhere, the whole idea of measuring intel-

ligence in a meaningful way is a very tangled web. That said, it still seems to be the most consistent way of roughly saying – this child is ‘intelligent’. Which brings us back to genes. No-one has yet discovered an ‘intelligence gene’ (although Ridley does point out that one gene that does seem to play a part in IQ contains a repeating code that always begins with the amino acids isoleucine and glutamine or, to give them their standard abbreviation, IQ). But there do appear to be genetic factors at play. For example, there is a correlation between brain volume and IQ of around 40 per cent. Having a big brain doesn’t guarantee you are a genius but it starts to tip things in your favour. Yet environment still plays a part with studies of twins showing it to be around the nice and non-confrontational 50-50 mark. But there are other factors at play too, as research shows that how well you inherit your parents’ IQ depends on your socio-economic status too. If you’re middle class or well off, your environment doesn’t make much difference to the brainpower you were born with. If you’re poor, that poverty outweighs practically any of the IQ-related potential you were born with. Think about the implications of that at a national level – where should

governments be targeting their resources if they want a ‘cleverer’ population? But also think about it with regard to schools. What can you do to work with the poorest families in your catchment area to help to try and make a difference and, if you are in a secondary school, why are you waiting until they come to you at the age of 11? On the subject of age, throw into the IQ pot too the research thrown

up by New Scientist in July 2009 showing that, as we progress from childhood through adolescence to young adulthood the part genes play in the variation in our intelligence changes too.4 As children it can account for 40 per cent of this variation, as adolescents it is 55 per cent and as young adults it rises to 66 per cent. But, as we have seen, being born that way doesn’t mean you need to stay that way. Research shows that you can

tap into the brain’s wonderful ability to be moulded, its plasticity, and make a difference, with researchers finding that the biggest gains in IQ tests were in individuals who had the lower scores in the beginning. Again, what does that mean for where governments at national level and schools at community level target their resources? The brain’s yearning to be great, stifled by both genetic and environ-

mental factors in our most needy young people, can be addressed if we can be bothered to do so. How? Well, apart from specific training in how to use our brains, a curriculum that actually responds to the needs of the individual will help. Research from Robert Planin from King’s College in London quoted in New Scientist found that these genetic differences are even greater when everyone endures the same curriculum rather than one that is better matched to the child’s natural strengths and abilities. Our challenge, then, is to strive to match the curriculum to children’s natural abilities with a special focus on those currently struggling the most. Which brings us back to multiple intelligences, which, as a theory, may

have its detractors from a scientific point of view but has a powerful role to play in what I call the ‘dumbing up’ of learning – giving more people access to the knowledge that is there rather than dumbing it down so only those with good IQ scores – those who have high logical/mathematical and verbal/linguistic skills – can access the pure knowledge. As an example of what I mean take the example of a young man I met who was working as an IT technician at a further education 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.