AUT lecturer and author Welby Ings left school at 15, unable to read or write. Photo / Alyse Wright
With his first book, Disobedient Teaching, Welby Ings reshaped the way we think about education. In his new book, Invisible Intelligence, he tells Greg Bruce we’re thinking about intelligence all wrong, and why “love matters”.
The first thing Welby Ings wants you to know is that your child’s grades tell you nothing about their intelligence.
He should know. He couldn’t read or write until he was 15 and believed he was dumb, but went on to get a PhD and build a glittering career in academia.
Ings says he wasn’t dyslexic or lazy; he just processed language differently. He preferred to draw and make things than to write about them. Although he saw himself as a failure for failing to meet what the system deemed to be the “correct” pace of learning, he says his parents and two of his teachers refused to believe there was anything wrong with him. Their support prevented him from opting out. He went on to teacher’s college, then got a degree in design, and finally gained his PhD from AUT in 2005.
He is now a professor at AUT and has received a spate of awards including the Prime Minister’s Award for Tertiary Teaching Excellence, the NZ Government Award for Sustained Tertiary Teaching Excellence and the inaugural AUT medal for his contribution to learning and research.
In other words, Ings is now in the delicate situation of having reached the very pinnacle of a system he is deeply critical of.
He qualified as a teacher in 1976 and went on to teach in both primary and secondary schools but “fled” those environments where he was forced to test and score children by measures he didn’t agree with and “wriggled” his way into the corner of education where he no longer has to. Now, he supervises PhD candidates, who are given the greatest amount of time to develop their ideas and who receive feedback rather than grades.
“I taught woodwork in a class with 28 people. I know what that is, and I know that you can’t really do a good job. You can do an adequate job. You can help people, but the logistics are not right. You just can’t. You can’t do it.”
He rejects the accoutrements of traditional education: standardised assessment regimes, grading, pre-packaged “teacher-proof” curricula, streaming and milestoning.
“Don’t think that the comparative grades that come back from school are an adequate description of your child,” he says. “Don’t fall into that trap.
“Be very careful about milestones because every one of us is unique, and the milestones are there to systematise something. They’re not there to understand the complexity of the human being. They’re there to set up a system. And if your child doesn’t meet the walking deadline, the talking deadline, the spelling level, the maths computation ... They may not be flawed. They might just not be meeting that milestone. It’s not the only milestone. It’s not the only road.”
Ings suggests that rather than trying to make children into an ideal as defined by the system, parents should instead try to understand their children’s strengths and use those as building blocks.
“It’s what we call an appreciative approach. It’s not soft. It’s a strength-based way of looking at education.”
He says his new book is not a manifesto (“I’m too flawed to be writing a manifesto”) but he believes the goal of education is to “enable the most luxuriant growth from the seed of a human being”. To teachers, he says, you should “know the limitations of the system so well that you can work to the advantage of people who are in that system so you achieve as close as possible to the same thing”.
Ings describes himself as a “humanist” and learning as a “human endeavour”. He believes effective teaching is to be found inside human relationships. He says learning is “embodied and it’s social, and it’s emotional”. What it’s not, he says, is “cognitive mechanics”.
“It seems to me that the bottom line is that learning and the growth of learning is a human activity undertaken in close proximity between human beings.”
He doesn’t believe a grand redesigning of the education system will fix it, and neither does he believe in “reformist visions”. Instead, he says, he believes we should be “infecting the system with higher levels of humanity”.
In Invisible Intelligence, he writes of the importance of things that don’t get mentioned much in discussions about education, such as love.
“Love matters. When you are struggling as a learner, this love often feels like belief… You cling to someone else’s belief in you when your own faith is no longer strong enough.”
Besides love, he believes time and work are the other critical elements in an effective education.
Ings says now: “Of those three things, school is only well equipped for the last one: work. It’s hugely under-resourced for time and it’s under-resourced – I know it sounds strange – for love. Because that requires you to know somebody, and when you’ve got 28 people in your class, it’s very difficult, and that class is going to either change at the end of an hour or at the end of the year. It’s not fair to ask somebody to have that level of insight.”
As a self-described optimist, he believes all this is fixable and says the first thing that needs to happen is a change in the ratio of teachers to students. He also believes in using new and emerging systems to cut down on the administrative load so teachers have more time to be with students “growing the garden” instead of “counting how much fertiliser there is in the shed out the back”.
But is all this really necessary? Is our system really so flawed? Plenty of New Zealanders have excelled at school, got good grades and gone on to successful careers. Is it wrong for these people to hope for the same for their children? To them, Ings says:
“I’ve taught your kids. They come in here with their golden trajectory glowing behind them and they’re terrified. They’ve learned strategy. And when it comes to actually having independent thought, they’re afraid to take risks, they’re afraid to go into the unknown. They become disparaging as a defence, or dismissive, going: ‘That’s rubbish. I’m not interested in that’.
“They’re deeply injured. They’re some of the most difficult people to help heal. Because they have learned strategies to conform to an ideal of what intelligence is and it has disabled their ability to really think.”
Ings rarely talks about the economic value of education, either for the person receiving the education, or for the country as a whole.
In announcing the defunding of humanities and social sciences from the Marsden Fund earlier this year, Judith Collins, in her capacity as Minister of Science, Innovation and Technology, said the changes were being made to help “lift our economic growth” and said, “We are focused on a system that supports growth, and a science sector that drives high-tech, high-productivity, high-value businesses and jobs.”
Ings says New Zealand has a long history of electing business leaders to positions of power: “Too often we trust the leadership of a nation to people who have shown expertise in business. But a nation is not a business. It’s not a business. It’s much more than that.”
“When people would start using that language like ‘We fix it with growth’ or that the solution will lie economically, you go. ‘How’s that going for you?”
The point of Ings’ book is not to suggest that what our children are taught in school is wrong, but that much of value is not taught at all, and that, as a result, the system is failing too many people. Intelligence is diverse, he says, and we need to be careful about labelling things as problems when they are just signs of difference.
“Talent that looks very different is vulnerable. It’s vulnerable. And it’s vulnerable to systems that say it’s redundant talent.”
He says that more than a third of the PhD candidates he supervises are managing physical or mental health issues.
“These are brilliant, brilliant people. And they have risen inside this antithetical system called the Academy. They’ve risen and they are uneven. It’s part of their brilliance that they are uneven. An education for them is about knowing what you’re good at so you can work out how to most productively use what you have, so you know where the gaps are that have to be filled in and you can fill them with the minimum that’s needed to get them working.”
Great sportspeople succeed, he says, not because they’re excellent in every aspect of sport, but because they’ve used their strengths and filled in the gaps to achieve success in the area in which they’re strongest.
“They take an appreciative approach. And it’s interesting because we see it in very high-end performance stuff. We know it. Yet we don’t necessarily do it in education.”
Ings is primarily known as a teacher and thinker but he is also a designer, a filmmaker, a writer and a creator. He says he wants to leave something of value in the world, and he is very specific about what he wants that to be: craft. He is involved with, and attracted to, craft across many fields: thought, design, literature, furniture, film, music.
“And one of the reasons is that craft often lasts and craft can transcend momentary flickers of fashion. It can go beyond those things. So I try to leave behind crafted things, knowing that they are all flawed. They’re not ideals, but I’m proud of them.
“Everything I look at, I can still find the flaw in it. I can still go: ‘I should have cut that scene, that beat.’ I was reading something that I’ve written years and years ago and thinking, ‘Oh shit! That’s terrible! It’s terrible!’ And you go: ‘No, no, it’s not terrible. There are things that you’d change now…'”
Ings is trying to articulate something valuable about the idea of value, but it’s not immediately clear exactly what that is.
He tells a story about a moment a few years ago, when he was at a film festival in Scandinavia that was screening one of his films. At the time, he thought he was about to lose his job at AUT.
“The cinema screen there goes just beyond your peripheral vision, so you see the whole film with all your vision, and the sound was brilliant and I sat there naked in a room full of people on the other side of the world, knowing that they could see my imagination with all this exquisite clarity, and I was terrified and proud at the same time.”
This is of value, he says, “Because it reminds us of what we can be”.
What he doesn’t need to add: like a great teacher.
Invisible Intelligence by Welby Ings, published by Otago University Press, on sale July 24, RRP $45.
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