I tagged along on my son’s school camp.
The school had asked for volunteers to help out in the kitchen, and I put up my hand. Not because I relished the idea of cooking for a large group but because I was curious. There’s a hint of secret men’s business about a boy’s only camp. Male bonding in the bush to toughen up urban sissies more at ease in the warm glow of Facebook than huddled around a campfire. What were they going to do to my urban sissy?
So there I was chopping potatoes, and over the next few days I helped produce pancakes and lasagne and hot dogs and berry crumble and bacon and eggs - and all in industrial-sized portions. When you’re a 13-year-old boy, food is important.
If the point was to break through the comfort zone, the point was made, at least with this novice in the kitchen. But the boys were taken through their paces too.
They hiked, honed compass skills, put up tents and learned how to survive in the bush. They shared cabin chores and observed the rules of community (if you ignore the smuggled smartphones).
We glimpsed them mostly at mealtime, when they descended on us like lion cubs on kill. Happy and outdoors-tired, they tripped over each other to the food line. As a cure for all the ills of modern city life, I had to admit it seemed to be working.
But it’s only once the patient is prepped that the operation can be performed, and that happened on the final night, when one of the teachers, Paul, invited the boys and us to a storytelling.
We gathered in a circle in the near-dark and Paul told how he had been in the pub with a friend, Brian. Brian was oddly scratching at his toes and Paul asked what was the matter. That’s when he heard Brian’s story.
How he had been a two-year-old in London during the blitz; how his parents had left him asleep while they went down the hall to visit neighbours. How, while they were gone, a bomb all but destroyed their flat.
Brian’s parents had almost given up hope when after three days a sniffer dog found him in the rubble. The flat had flooded with water from a broken pipe, rats had come with the water, and they had been gnawing at the little boy’s toes.
And every now and then, 73 years later, Brian finds himself absentmindedly scratching his toes.
When Paul had finished telling the story, he introduced a guest who had been sitting unnoticed in the dark. It was Brian. I glanced at my son. His eyes were fixed on the white-haired man.
Paul asked if the boys had any questions for Brian. One asked what he thought of them playing World of Warcraft. Brian said he didn’t think much of it. Another asked what sort of dog had found him. Even in the half light you could see the old man’s eyes were wet. It was a little brown dog, Brian said. “That’s all I know.”
While the second world war is part of the history curriculum, you won’t find Brian’s story in any textbook. But just as nourishment is more than food, education is more than the mere transfer of information from teacher to pupil (too often for the sole purpose of getting high marks on narrowly-focused standardised tests).
Going off-campus for those few days, and off-script from an overly prescriptive curriculum, was like opening a window in a stuffy classroom, a window onto how to engage students. And it gelled with what the research is finding: the best teachers use active participation, independent discovery, surprise, and stories.
Piaget and Montessori both knew the aim must be to bring out a child’s innate potential to add to knowledge given, not just regurgitate it, and stories can do that.
History educators are borrowing from the Harvard Business School’s case method to get students to recognise competing historical narratives to enhance their own decision-making skills. Given an account of an actual moment in history – such as Brian’s – students are prompted to weigh up moral choices; how things could have been done better in the past, and how they would do them better now.
It’s much harder to do that with a textbook relying on an accumulation of facts to achieve objectivity, than with a story placed in historical context.
Stories stick in the mind as they stir the emotions, and education through stories can move students to action. In W.B. Yeats’s words, it “doesn’t fill a pail, it lights a fire”.
My son and his classmates are growing to adults in a culture that demands perfection, but that night they were given a glimpse of human vulnerability and a far-from-perfect world. It didn’t add to their assessment for the year, but it was the sort of lesson that can light a fire. And help turn a boy into a man.
