Love and Learning

Monkey cuddling with a cloth "mother surrogate" in Harry Harlow's 1960s experiments

A couple days ago, I listened to a 2006 This American Life episode dedicated to answering the question of whether or not love and attachment can be taught. It got me thinking about the nature of love and learning.

The episode opened with Harry Harlow’s well-known attachment experiments with baby rhesus macaques and wire vs. cloth “mothers”. At a time when psychologists and doctors consistently warned mothers of the dangers of offering their children too much affection, Harlow set out to prove that children need affection to thrive. Over and over, he showed that baby rhesus macaques preferred a soft, cloth “mother” with no milk to a wire mother with milk. Not only that, but he demonstrated that these babies would continue to desperately seek affection from a cloth mother which had been designed to literally hurl the babies away each time they sought to bond or cuddle. Leaving the ethics of the experiment aside for a moment, the babies were so eager for attachment that they would reject their baby friends in favor of the mothers who rejected them.

From this introduction, the episode moved into interviews conducted with Rick and Heidi Solomon, a couple who had adopted a son from a Romanian orphanage. Adopted at the age of seven and a half, their new son had never been outside a crib. Daniel, the son, recounted how he had no real memories from his early years, how he didn’t remember thinking any real thoughts. He did recall a window and recalled wondering why he should be inside when the world outside the window seemed so lively and lovely.

Daniel’s first birthday with his new family triggered a crisis. He assumed that his new parents were his biological parents who had left him without love or birthdays for years. He grew angry. The anger was so intense that a series of psychologists and psychiatrists could offer no real solutions. Eventually, Heidi's persistence and relentless love for Daniel led the family to try a form of attachment therapy that involved recreating the conditions that infants experience while attaching to their parents. At the age of 13, Daniel was cuddled on his parents' joint laps and fed ice cream with a spoon while they gazed into each other's eyes. Bizarrely and miraculously, it sparked a change. Daniel calmed, developed attachment and slowly began to love his parents. He began to trust that they intended good for him.

But Heidi did not begin to suggest that this was some technique to be widely applied. What struck me was how Heidi responded to the interviewer's questions: "Do you feel like you can teach love?"

"No. I don't think the goal was ever love. The goal was attachment."

"Do you feel like you can teach attachment?"

"I mean, I think you can work really hard to create an environment where you can form an attachment."

Teachers face the same, soul-wrenching test as parents do. The poet Goethe said that, "we really only learn from those we love". This love and attachment, so necessary for deep learning, cannot be mandated or generated through a set of mechanical techniques.  As educators, we are limited to working really hard to create a particular environment, a set of ripe conditions, in which love and learning and wild growth can take place. Like Heidi's, our commitment must be relentless.

This is not some warm and fuzzy notion of learning. Researchers are increasingly finding that social and emotional learning necessarily take precedence. Without an environment characterized by healthy attachments and a sense of security, a young person struggles with academic learning.

It's more than a little ironic that, even as we "discover" the importance of profound attachments to other human beings in relation to learning, we find the prevalence of online learning and technology-driven education growing exponentially. It's not a perfect analogy, to be sure, but there are reasonable parallels between the screen as the wire mother surrogate, feeding the milk of information, and the preferred cloth surrogate, offering at least an illusion of warmth and life. Of course, a real live rhesus mother offers both warmth and food, as do real live, committed educators. 

https://baristanet.com/2018/03/our-kids-our-screens-what-can-we-do-find-out-at-montclair-cooperative-school-lifelong-learner-series-3-20/

I'm interested in how to create the conditions for secure, appropriate, and healthy attachments between teachers and students, so that rich learning can take place (recognizing the boundaries of a teaching/learning environment, as opposed to a parenting environment). What kind of bond does a student need with a teacher? And, in a classroom of twenty students with a range of needs, what might it look like to differentiate our approach to forming these attachments? I suspect that primary teachers might have a lot to teach the rest of us...