Learning and the Brain: Wide rivers and barren fig trees

"It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society."

- J. Krishnamurti

A young Irish-Catholic priest embarked on a mission to the Kalenjin peoples of Kenya. Having been trained in "community development," he was eager to put his knowledge into practice. After a few days among the Kalenjin, he called a meeting with the men of the tribe. He spoke optimistically about improvements they could make, shared resources he could leverage from contacts back home and encouraged them with the idea that many of their problems could be solved.

After a period of silence, an elder tribesman spoke. "Why is it, for you Europeans," he asked, "that your only response to a problem is that you want to solve it?" The priest listened, perplexed. "A problem is an invitation to self-transcendence. And if all you do with the problem is solve it, life will just give you another problem." The elder sat back down.

Between our ears is an incredibly powerful problem-solving machine, divided into two hemispheres. Though the hemispheres function together, they do so in slightly different ways. In short, the left hemisphere sees the world through a technical lens - it looks to solve problems immediately. The right hemisphere, however, sees the world through a broader lens, one that amplifies the connection between all things and seeks understanding.

We need both, but in a healthy society, the left hemisphere serves the right. Currently, we are living in a world dominated by left-hemispheric thinking. We scramble to fix symptoms while failing to deepen our understanding of root causes.

Here is a parable to illustrate the point:

Two fishermen cast their lines from the banks of a wide river. Suddenly, one notices several young children being swept downstream, unable to swim and screaming for help. They both jump into the river to rescue the children (left hemisphere), but they soon realize that no matter how hard they try, they cannot reach them all - and more keep coming! Finally, one fisherman realizes he must go upstream to discover why these children are falling into the river in the first place (right hemisphere).

In education, we are understandably focused on the drowning children we can immediately save, though we are easily overwhelmed, and in our desperation we yell absurd things at the flailing children like "try harder" or "be more disciplined" or "try Jesus" (James 2:15) as they float past. Worse, imagine if the fishermen, instead of rescuing the children they could, began arguing about how the children should have learned to swim. Now, let's imagine that in this parable, there are guns, beer bottles and smartphones floating in the river, too, and the desperate children grab hold of them. Would we blame them? Do we blame a drowning victim for grabbing hold of anything nearby? Of course not. Instead, we might echo Jesus' words: "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do" (Luke 23:34). Drowning children will desperately cling to anything they believe might save them.

When problems arise in education, most of us react with left-hemispheric solutions - better parenting, new technologies, tighter discipline, improved grading policies, God in or out of school, change in curriculum, higher pay for teachers, school choice. None of these are bad ideas - each contains some level of truth - but they are incomplete. Some solutions work in the short term, but they are not transformative because they address symptoms rather than the disease.

"Fixing" schools will not solve our children's ills because children do not grow up solely in schools but in an ecosystem influenced by economics, politics, religion, culture, media, narratives about history, misinformation, etc. As Pat Conroy said, the water is wide. For example, in Sumter, 27% of children under 18 live in poverty, and in S.C., 44% of all families either live in poverty or are considered ALICE (asset limited income constrained employed), which means they're one crisis away from catastrophe. Our left hemisphere may react with immediate solutions. But we should be asking, is the problem a failure of employers to pay living wages? of education? of politics? of growing inequality? of inflation? of consumerism? of rapacious greed? of individualism? of absentee fathers? of religion? of substance abuse? of poor choices? of a lack of a "work ethic"? Answer: all the above.

Jesus tells the parable of the barren fig tree in Luke 13:6-9: "A man had a fig tree planted in his vineyard, and he came seeking fruit on it and found none. And he said to the vinedresser, 'Look, for three years now I have come seeking fruit on this fig tree, and I find none. Cut it down. Why should it use up the ground?' And he answered him, 'Sir, let it alone this year also, until I dig around it and put on manure.'"

We are a generation that is used to discarding things when they don't seem to be working: "Cut it down. Why should it use up the ground?" You can hear this sentiment in the voices of those who want to end public education because it is "failing," for example. Addressing symptoms can look like progress, but it is false progress. And so, we fracture again and again, and the junkyard piles high with our refuse - for example, consider how many underperforming private/charter schools exist in our state; these institutions were once the immediate solutions to "failing" public schools (disclaimer: As an independent-school leader, I believe a healthy ecosystem of private, charter, public and home schools can exist).

To reference the quote above, we are now "well-adjusted" to this unhealthy cycle, which keeps us busy with immediate suffering (i.e., the drowning children) and pessimistic about the future (i.e., the drowning children continue to float downstream).

Schools should not be compartmentalized and given sole responsibility for failing students; schools are a reflection of the broader ecosystem in which we live. Until we shift our thinking beyond immediate problem-solving and toward deeper systemic understanding, we will continue pulling children from the river without ever addressing why they are falling in. The real challenge is not just to save them but to stop them from drowning in the first place. That requires the hard, dirty and necessary work of examining the roots, going upstream - and taking responsibility for what we find there. And if we do, that is when we will experience the "self-transcendence" the Kalenjin elder described.

Kaneft is the headmaster of Wilson Hall in Sumter.