We live in remarkable times. The technology used to send humans to the moon, a mythical idea for most of human history, now fits in our back pocket, we use it to share pictures of cats and yell at people on the other side of the world.
The poorest people in America now have access to more information than Bill Clinton could get when he was President.
A friend of mine who suffers from cluster headaches had brain surgery a year or so ago. Germans from the internet operated on his brain with gamma rays, when they’d finished we went out for lunch. True story.
With all this amazing technology, the human brain, in all its inventiveness, has not yet devised technology more complex than itself, and the most complicated interactions we will ever have is with other humans.
And this, the most difficult, inexplicable, troublesome and important facet of our lives is the only thing we do not routinely learn from experts.
If you want to be a nurse, a teacher, an internet gamma ray brain surgeon or a forklift driver, someone who already knows how to do it properly will teach you. The more difficult the task, the longer you have to study it, the more formal your education will be, and the more people will be involved in your learning.
Learning how to deal with other people though, is something not taught by experts, it’s mostly taught by parents, who also learned their skills from their parents, who learned from their parents, and so and so on.
From infancy we are watching the people around us, absorbing their interactions, speech, body language, actions and reactions, and learning from them to develop our own responses and expectations to people close to us and people we barely know.
We know abuse and violence is intergenerational, but it’s usual for the recorded family history of such things to go back more than three, maybe four generations. The unrecorded history could well go back a thousand generations.
The result of this is that even by the time we go to school, many patterns of behaviour are already laid down. Responses to fear, aggression, affection, authority, indifference, they’re all learned in babyhood and refined by reactions to our reactions. And they echo across the rest of our lives, at school, at work, at home, with friends, all of those learned behaviours become the pattern of our relationships to other humans.
If the things we have learned are unhelpful, or even dangerous, to ourselves or other people, it is difficult to find somewhere we can learn new behaviours. The older we get, the more difficult that becomes.
Which is why it’s so odd that ideas like teaching respectful relationship skills in schools is so revolutionary.
It’s possible to live a successful life that requires no significant interaction with technology, mathematics, science or history, but it would impossible to do so without interacting to some extent with other people, it is our most necessary skill. And yet we leave this skill to chance, to the hope that the people who care for us in infancy are able to teach us respect, compassion, compromise and empathy. Where that fails, in the most egregious ways, we assume the solution lies solely with the person who has failed. But we would never expect that someone who has never been taught science should be responsible for learning to solve quantum mechanics without help.
Horrible bosses, abusive relationships, toxic friendships, bad parenting, rude customers and all the other ways we damage ourselves and others in our interactions with people are in some way related to the behaviours and skills we’ve learned (or failed to learn).
Applauding the Victorian government for introducing the basics of such lessons for children isn’t really enough. It may not be a cure all, in fact it probably won’t be, but it’s surely a step in the right direction. At the very least to present an alternative to children who may not even be aware of the lessons they are learning is a good start.
The next and most obvious step is to expand it into the national curriculum and hopefully end up giving it the same focus we give to all the other skills we expect our children to learn.