Iain McGilchrist’s Boyle Lecture looks at the implications of the human brain’s structure and modus operandi for our understanding of reality and our awareness of the divine. Here, I extend the argument by looking at the implications for education. I focus on schooling and the teaching of science and religion. In both science education and religious education, there is evidence for the development of a more balanced approach to teaching, with more right-hemisphere thinking being encouraged among learners. From a McGilchristian perspective, this is to be welcomed. At a time of increasing global fragmentation and the growing influence of post-truth movements, we need the next generation to be better educated, both with regards to the specifics of knowledge and more holistically, about what it is to be human and how knowledge might be used for the good of all life.
The word “polymath” is used quite widely, though too often said of someone simply because they know a lot about a wide range of subjects. Iain McGilchrist not only knows a lot about a wide range of subjects, he has made major academic contributions to a wide range of subjects. I say this not only as a compliment to him but because the exceptional breadth of his knowledge has meant that from a very solid foundation in neurobiology, psychiatry, and philosophy, he has been able, over the past twenty years, to erect a powerful argument that connects how the human brain is organized and functions to how we perceive reality.
Beginning with
One of McGilchrist’s points is that each of us needs both of these ways of attending to the world—we need the detail, but we also need the overview. To give one illustration of what can happen if one focuses only on the specifics, psychologists Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons (
As someone who has a natural tendency to focus on the specifics and not attend to the bigger picture, I had totally failed to spot the gorilla the first time I watched the video. I used to work at the Royal Society and have been told that the first time the video was shown to a group of Fellows, not only did none of them spot the gorilla, but when they were shown the video a second time, some of them flatly refused to believe it was the same video, preferring to believe that they were being lied to and that a second, doctored video was now being shown to them. That’s the left hemisphere in charge!
McGilchrist maintains that too many of us now live in societies where the balance between our left and right hemispheres has been eroded so that a somewhat sterile scientific materialism has come to prevail, with our left hemispheres in charge. This has clear implications for our apprehension of the divine. The left hemisphere wants to tie things down; the right can cope with ambiguity, with “both/and” rather than “either/or.” As McGilchrist points out in his Boyle Lecture, the sacred and divine cannot be reduced (as the left hemisphere would like) to a set of concepts. He cites Saint Augustine: “If you think you have understood God, it is not God that you have understood.” Unsurprisingly, McGilchrist espouses the apophatic tradition in theology.
My day job is as an educator, and I want now to begin to explore some of the implications of McGilchrist’s argument for school education, specifically school science education and school education about religion.
Readers of this article will have memories of their own school science education. Depending on the country in which you were educated and when this was, there will be some variation. But the core of school science education has, until recently, been quite consistent over time and varied surprisingly little between countries. I remember once watching a secondary physics lesson in Japan, where, even though my Japanese is mediocre, it was immediately clear to me when the teacher made a slip writing on the blackboard in a lesson on the equations of motion. I don’t think any of the students realized that something had gone wrong, through the teacher soon did. The point is that the slip was one not uncommonly made, and my many years’ experience of watching countless school science lessons in England enabled me immediately to realize what was going on.
Chances are that you remember from your school science things like Bunsen burners, the periodic table, Newton’s laws, photosynthesis, and so forth. Hopefully, such concepts will have been underpinned by some practical work. You may also have been introduced to something about “the nature of science.” When I was at school, this was called “the scientific method,” but the nature of science is a broader concept and tends to include not only the specifics of formulating and testing scientific hypotheses but more general issues to do with how scientific knowledge is built up and revised. In this, it is less beholden to a left-hemisphere-specific version of science. Indeed, the very notion of the revision of scientific knowledge (unless one holds that, remarkably, it is just now and only now that we have arrived at scientific certainty) suggests a more right-hemisphere approach to scientific knowledge.
Even more recently, school science sometimes looks at socio-scientific issues. Socio-scientific issues address questions like whether we should permit genetically modified organisms, how we can mitigate anthropogenic climate change, and how we should decide on the best balance between the range of ways of generating electricity. The point is that such questions cannot be answered by science alone. Other disciplines need to play a part—including moral philosophy, sociology, economics, and politics. It needs to be admitted that not all science teachers welcome this shift (
Even if one restricts oneself to science (rather than school science), there is much to be said for ensuring that it is more open to right-hemisphere thinking than is sometimes the case. For instance, in my own science area of biology, what has been termed “the new biology” is increasingly turning away from a narrow, linear way of understanding the natural world and towards a more holistic perspective (
A poor way of understanding, within a McGilchristian framework, the relationship of science education and religious education would be to envisage science education as being a matter for the left hemisphere and religious education a matter for the right hemisphere. I suggested earlier that school science education (and science itself) can benefit from taking account of both left and right hemisphere ways of thinking, and the same argument can be made for religious education (and religion itself).
There are some parallels between debates about the scope of school science education and debates about the scope of school religious education. However, there are far greater differences between countries when it comes to education about religion. In some countries, education about religion is prohibited, in some it is permitted, and in some it is mandated. England is fairly unusual in that religious education is mandated, but what is mandated in state schools is no longer solely the teaching of Christianity. Generalizations are difficult as, uniquely, there is no national curriculum for the subject of religious education; rather, the content is determined by Standing Advisory Councils on Religious Education (SACREs)—local bodies, of which there are more than 100, that are responsible for the authoring of “agreed syllabuses,” which can therefore take account of local circumstances.
Nevertheless, some generalizations can be made about school religious education in England. First of all, confessional religious education, in which the intention is to transmit and foster a specific religious tradition, is less common than was once the case. Second, children are far more likely nowadays to be educated about at least two “major” religions. Third, somewhat paralleling the growth of socio-scientific issues in science education, children are more likely now to be introduced to aspects of the sociology of religion; they will certainly be introduced to ethical reasoning, and not only from a scriptural perspective.
These developments in religious education, as with the developments in science education, have not, of course, followed directly from McGilchrist’s arguments. Nevertheless, from a McGilchristian perspective, they are to be welcomed. At a time of increasingly global fragmentation and the growing influence of post-truth movements, we need the next generation to be better educated, both with regards to the specifics of knowledge and, more holistically, about what it is to be human and how knowledge might be used for the good of all life.
The author declares that they have no competing interests.