Interview with Joseph Chilton Pearce
by Brent Cameron
Common ground: Archive : March 2005
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Brent: Joe, as you look back
over 50 years and four books on child development, I am wondering where you
are at today. What are you thinking and feeling now? Perhaps as a starting place
I can quote from the last page of your latest book, The Biology of Transcendence.
“A human nurtured instead of shamed, and loved instead of driven by fear,
develops a different brain and therefore a different mind. He will not act against
the well-being of another nor against his larger body, the living Earth.”
Joseph Chilton Pearce: I
stand by that. The word transcendence means the ability to go beyond
limitation and constraint and that’s what the biological system
is designed to do, provided nurturing and a safe base are given.
Over the past 50 years researchers showed us more about the real
development of children than we’ve ever known in history.
Ironically in North America our education system is specifically
going point for point against every single research discovery made.
Brent: From John
Taylor Gatto’s research into the founding and history of education,
he clearly states that education was developed as a vehicle of social
control to condition children for the work force. It was never really
about nurturing the human spirit.
Joseph Chilton Pearce: Indeed.
I think behaviour modification is behind it really. Even though
that might be outmoded up at Harvard it’s still the underlying
force in education. So you get a cultural conformity. Recently I
called it the conflict between cultural and biological imperatives,
the driving forces that we have within us to develop and the driving
forces in culture to make us conform to certain patterns and behaviour.
That conflict literally splits the infant child right from the beginning.
Brent: In our work
at Wondertree we notice a significant difference in the quality
of learning in children who are bonded and are living in nurturing
and open families. Their ability to learn is an entirely different
experience than somebody who is in conflict with themselves and
others.
Joseph Chilton Pearce: The
very nature of most of our educational system is that it sets up
the fear syndrome to coerce children into learning. The fear of
failure and constant testing, the very act of testing a child throws
them into a defensive mode at which point their brain really has
shifted its energy focus from the higher intelligence down into
the ancient reptilian survival defence brain. So testing in itself
is unfair because you never really get a working idea of where that
child is or what their capacities are. They themselves haven’t
accessed their higher intelligence in a state of defence like that.
Brent: Joe, I imagine
that you, more than anyone else, is responsible for introducing
the idea of the triune brain, and more recently the four-fold brain
concept to the world. Could you talk about the evolution of the
three-fold to the four-fold brain discussed in your last book?
Joseph Chilton Pearce: Recently,
at the Howard Hughes medical establishment in the mid-west, a powerful
big research centre, a group of geneticists and neurologists came
out with the following announcement. Through DNA tracing they can
prove that the older neuro-system of nature, the mammalian brain
and so on, were a long time building, taking more than tens of thousands
of years. However, the recent developments in the neo-cortex took
remarkably few years in an evolutionary time frame.
These scientists claim the human brain was added to at a very late
date and very quickly, that there wasn’t any of this random
mutation selectivity as proposed by Darwin, which works perfectly
well with the foundational older brains we have in our heads. They
claim it doesn’t work in relation to the human brain. I think
that’s a very interesting comment to come out from some very
sound scientific studies.
Research into the latest developing aspect of the human brain, the
pre-frontal lobes, has been going on for close to 20 years now.
It was only in about 1988 they discovered that the adolescent goes
into profound brain growth spurts in those lobes and that it isn’t
complete until about age 21. All this new research into the adolescent
brain being so dramatically different from either that of the earlier
child or the later adult has been brought up time and again in the
popular journals, like Time and US News and so on.
That’s very encouraging, because they’re pointing out
that the brain itself, especially its higher functions are in a
profound and rapid state of change and growth. This means the adolescent
needs a great deal more nurturing, empathy, understanding, tolerance
and care than at almost any other period in their lives.
This verifies the work of James Prescott many years ago at the
National Institute of Health. He said the adolescent is as vulnerable
and subject to damage as the little toddler first taking its steps.
Adolescents are taking their first steps into a new world with new
bodies and new brains in formation and new hormones and they need
every bit the care and attention and nurturing as the toddler.
Of course in North America we tend to treat the adolescent as public
enemy number one. We distrust and denigrate them. This is exactly
the opposite of what they need at this point in their lives.
Brent: That’s
an exciting message. It reflects on the situation here in BC. Our
government has just put increasing expectations on our teenagers
to graduate. Joe, when you are here April 1 and 2, I hope you are
able to meet all forty of the teenagers that our government is unwilling
to fund because they refuse to take the courses imposed on them.
They are some of the brightest and most talented young people I’ve
ever met. They would all be recognized as gifted if you understand
Howard Gardner’s ideas of multiple intelligences.
Joseph Chilton Pearce: Here
in the US, you can get all sorts of money if you come up with a
proposal for how to keep kids in high school. But, if you try to
get one penny for preventing the damage that’s being done
to them you can’t get any funding for that. High school is
one of the major places of cultural conformity and the price we
pay for it is pretty steep. That certainly doesn’t register
on government because they benefit from a compliant population.
We’ve got to get the message across to parents themselves,
because we can’t expect it from institutions.
By the way, I’ll be happy to speak with those teenagers.
One of the ideas that I will want to share with them, that I am
talking about everywhere, is the fact that teenagers are driven
by three factors that we never give them credit for.
One is a high sense of idealism. They become very idealistic as
early as 11 or 12. That’s part of the great brain change that
takes place following the shift between concrete and formal operational
thinking. They become very idealistic and look for models of this
new idealism in their culture and when you get to thinking about
the kinds of models we’re giving them, you shudder.
The second factor is the sense of hidden greatness. They’re
convinced that deep within they have a core of themselves that is
very great and that if people just realized how great they were
they would respect them. Of course, all we do is try to capitalize
on that and make them jump through our hoops to achieve success.
But, they’re really talking about their own transcendence
that’s involved in that big shift of the brain that occurs
in adolescence.
Finally there’s a sense of great expectation, that something
tremendous is supposed to happen, and they wait for it right around
the next corner or the next hill moment by moment. They always gesture
to the heart when they’re talking about this because, literally,
their next stage of evolutionary development is in the offing.
Rudolf Steiner said the heart longs for this and if the young person
were opened to the heart it would teach us a new way to think, and
we’ve never thought of that before. But certainly the new
field of neuro-cardiology and all the discoveries about the heart
and the heart/brain connection make it perfectly clear what is happening
in that teenager.
It is apparent to me that these lines of research are contingent
on one another, and it all begins to focus on the teenage years
as such a critical period. As a culture we need to start and really
be attentive and careful with those young people.
Brent: I certainly
agree. One of our research projects about 10 years ago was with
a group of teenagers. For four years these young people were given
freedom, love and an opportunity to discover their life’s
purpose. The past 10 years have seen such a phenomenal growth of
intelligence and wellness and heartfulness in these young adults
that it’s been astounding. Currently a doctoral thesis is
being written to investigate these results. It’s been a phenomena
that we never predicted and seems to point to what you talk so eloquently
about in your books, the intelligence of the heart.
Joseph Chilton Pearce: One
of the things we find out about imprisoned teenagers, who are there
because they didn’t conform culturally, is that they can be
salvaged with so little effort by appealing to just the three factors
that I just mentioned.
Brent: Joe, these
three factors relate directly to the development of the latest evolution
of the human brain, the left and right pre-frontal lobes. Can you
talk more about this?
Joseph Chilton Pearce: I
think it certainly brings to mind the work of a hero of mine from
Princeton who died in 1994 named Julian James. His book The Origins
of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, is an invaluable
work and in there you begin to pick up the reason for the twinned
brains that we have through the higher third and fourth brain, and
why you would need that kind of division of labour. Exactly how
that works in the prefrontal cortex I’m not sure, but it reflects
exactly the same kind of division of labour you have in the neocortex,
the rest of the high brain. It seems to me that it does serve two
purposes – to maintain unity and communication and stability
and so on through the so-called right brain activity, and then the
adventurousness and the free aspects of the left hemisphere and
its capacities. You can’t have one without the other. They’re
sort of like creator and created giving rise to each other.
I think that holds throughout all these higher systems of intelligence.
The one works for wholeness and the other works for novelty. You
could say one works for the unvarying stability of the system and
the other for the variations that can easily lead to instability
but nevertheless are continually opening up new worlds and new possibilities.
I think you have to have both from the evolutionary standpoint of
the human.
Brent: If we think
about how science understands light, it’s either a particle
or a wave and it depends on how we measure it. Our two models for
light reflect our own duality of mind where the universe either
looks like a particle or a wave. In more general terms this duality
becomes content and process. The content is kind of the male hierarchical
perspective, and on the left side is the feminine, wave, nurturing,
process part. We really need a marriage between the two.
Joseph Chilton Pearce: This
in turn relates to Gaia and the whole theory of the Earth and the
current crisis that we are bringing about. There’s certainly
an importance for the return to the balance of the feminine that’s
involved in the whole ecological crisis.
It’s amazing how aware of this our young people are. The
teenagers, a lot of the high school students, are very much aware
that we’re damaging the living body of the Earth. Certainly
my daughter in college is painfully aware of all these issues.
All of this is trying to bring our society back into balance with
the feminine and there’s a great deal of resistance to the
idea that your teenage male needs empathy, nurturing, care, love
and so on. That’s anathema to the American idea of the macho,
competitive, driven male getting out there and winning his wings
and making his place in the world.
Brent: With the US
being a world dominant power, it’s very hard to put an army
together of gentle people.
Joseph Chilton Pearce: That’s
true. People who are nurtured don’t make very good soldiers
or competitive business tycoons. The idea that we’re not born
on this Earth for this sort of thing certainly negates the American
dream and the people in power right now.
This is a time of real crisis. The astonishing level of violence
and suicide in our children is simply a mirror of the crisis in
adults and our whole society. All we can do is keep addressing the
issue. If you want a brain system that functions and if you want
to breed true intelligence and brilliance in young people, nurturing
is the key. It also means establishing for them the safe space.
They must feel safe, protected and nurtured to open up and just
learn. Otherwise they’re using half their mental energy to
protect themselves and guard against the world out there, and the
other half to learn whatever they need to protect themselves. It
isn’t working, it hasn’t worked.
We need to think instead of building an educational system based
on nurturing every young person, giving them a feeling of absolute
safety and security. They thrive on a feeling that they’re
where they belong and that they’re loved and wanted. If the
schools were just switched to that simple idea we would see profound
results.
Brent Cameron is the founder of the Wondertree Foundation and the
Wondertree Virtual High and SelfDesign programs. Currently he is
working on his PhD at UBC and has written a book on self-directed
learning called SelfDesign that will be on book shelves September
2005. The SelfDesign Learning Community currently has 500 learners
working online across the province of BC and the Wondertree Learning
Centre is working with children 5 to 13 in Vancouver. www.wondertree.org
and www.selfdesign.org
Joseph Chilton Pearce has written many best-selling books on human
development. He has raised five children and over the past 30 years
given more than 2,000 public addresses around the world explaining
the latest research in child development to parents and educators.
He has blended together research into a comprehensive model with
a message that encourages everyone to love and nurture children.
His latest book is The Biology of Transcendence. Pearce will be
in Vancouver, April 1, for a symposium on the heart-brain connection
www.haven.ca
http://www.commonground.ca/iss/0503164/cg164_Pearce.shtml
Our constant curiosity
is key
to watching what’s being created.
~ David Moorhead |