Just do it! Remembering the thrill of making and doing

by Guy Claxton

Embracing the thrill of risk-taking

‘Tombstoning' is jumping off cliffs into the sea. It was quite popular last summer, especially amongst teenage boys. It is skilful and dangerous - that's the point. Kids who do it will tell you there are two payoffs.

One is you get respect for being brave. The other, as 16-year-old Jez explained, is that "just for a second you forget all the boring bits of your day and feel free. When you jump off, your mind goes clear; and then you hit the sea and you feel so alive." Tombstoning hurls you into the present and gives you a brief holiday from self-consciousness and self-doubt - from thinking. The downside risk - paraplegia or worse - seems to be worth running.

All the research on so-called ‘student voice' shows that young people like to do challenging things. They like to do them together, so they can chat and argue and challenge each other as they go. They like to have some say over what, when, why and how they are learning and exploring. They like to do things that matter to someone - that haven't already been worked to death by countless generations before them. And they like to do things that have a tangible outcome, whether that be a goal, song or daring performance.

They will put in hours of hard work and ingenious experimentation to get those outcomes. Thinking and discussing in the context of a worthwhile challenge - no problem. What many of them don't enjoy is sitting, listening and writing, hour after hour, to other people's timescales and agendas.

Practical versus academic learning

We live in a lop-sided educational culture, which has taken the valuable skills of thinking and writing and turned them into the only officially-esteemed game in town.

Thus losing the sympathy and engagement of thousands of young people whose preference and strengths lie not in essay-writing but in making and doing. Blindly perpetuating Descartes' Error, we have shrunk our idea of intelligence into an obsession with abstract reasoning - as if the invention of the scalpel meant we no longer needed spades, nor could esteem the pleasures of digging; as if the skills of the surgeon somehow outweighed the craft of the gardener.

Making and doing are high forms of knowing and thinking. As Richard Sennett has shown in his wonderful book The Craftsman, the glass-blower, the farmer and the product designer are engaged in activities that are no less cognitively complex - no less interesting - than those of the scholar or the politician.

Imagination, knowledge and critical reflection are woven throughout the process of making, and of trying to make better. The carpenter finding and working with the grain of a piece of wood is being as genuinely, intricately intelligent as a barrister uncovering and working with the grain of a jury, or a teacher inventing a new way of presenting a tricky topic to a class.

Practical learning is actually more demanding than academic learning because it requires more than thinking, knowing and explaining. It requires strong powers of observation and the ability to know who and how to copy. (Imitation is not cheating; it is a sophisticated mode of learning). It requires the ability to visualise and mentally rehearse practical possibilities (as top scientists and sculptors do). It means knowing how to practise intelligently rather than mindlessly. As Sennett puts it, ‘thinking and feeling are contained within the process of making'.

Practical learning and physical skills are not just for those who cannot ‘hack it' academically. Thousands of civil servants derive deeper satisfaction from - and invest more of their learning power in - the gardening or cooking they do at weekends than the meetings they chair during the week.

Heavyweight TV presenters heave a sigh of satisfaction as they pull on their waders to go fishing. Head teachers can't wait for the chance to go trekking in Chiang Mai, Thailand, and vice-chancellors miss no opportunity to don their wetsuits and spend wonderful hours getting cold and wet on their windsurfers.

Yet somehow, despite these self-evident satisfactions and endless pleas for ‘parity of esteem' of academic and vocational learning, and the proliferation of qualifications and courses that attempt to blur the distinction, practical learning continues to be seen as something simple and second-rate.

Replacing the tedious chore of thinking with doing

We should not let the idea of ‘preparing young people for the future' mislead us into focusing too much on activities that rely on screens and keyboards - and the small movements of eyes and fingers that these require. 

We are evolved to be physically active creatures. Just as our digestive systems are designed to work better when gently stimulated by walking and stretching, so our minds are designed to work well in the context of our physicality.

Most people think better when they are moving about. Once the fascination with the internet wears off a little, the future will be as much about human-scale making and doing as about Wii and websites - as much as it ever was. And helping teenagers remember and value the thrill of physical achievement might help with the obesity problem too.

If schools and colleges - and the word-based examination systems that drive them - were not so obsessed with Knowing and Telling, and more interested in the complexities of Making and Doing, there might be less need for young people to risk life and limb to escape the tedium of endlessly thinking about things (and being required to ‘reflect' on everything).

If educators deeply understood that the kinds of practical things that many young people are good at, and like doing, are as cognitively demanding and as aesthetically subtle and richly human as maths and English, they, their employers and their societies, would benefit hugely.