Humans are built for adaptability – this is the reason babies are born so little-formed (compared to a baby horse, say), so that they can adapt to the environment they are born into.

In times of change, our young people need to be at their most adaptable, developed with all their innate capacities so they can adapt to an emerging culture that they themselves will largely shape.

The best way for this to happen is for cultural transmission from adults to the young be strictly based on legitimate teacherly authority.

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Active Open-Mindedness (AOM) is a cognitive stance that we need to take to avoid believing or behaving foolishly. It is the main defence against ‘parasitic processing’ – a negative spiral of thoughts and conclusions that leads us away from the most rational interpretation of events.

To put the concept simply: be ready, willing, and able to change your mind about things by clearly defining what evidence would prove you wrong and actively looking for it. It is a way to try and avoid the various in-built biases that we have – which are no more than short cuts to allow us to make decisions more quickly and with less cognitive effort – but which can easily trip us up.

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From the age of about 18 months, intrepid toddlers begin the process of learning how to: have an idea, initiate a project, follow through, complete the project, and celebrate. Think toddler pushing a stool up to the kitchen bench, climbing up to the cookie jar, struggling to get the lid off, taking a cookie, climbing back down and then eating the cookie with great satisfaction.

If such a capability is not learned as we grow up then, as adults, we can struggle to get things done. A single element, or any combination, of the five steps may be missing and the project is unsuccessful or unsatisfying even if completed.

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‘Relevance realisation’, according to the cognitive scientist, John Vervaeke, is the process that underpins our cognitive capacities, is the basis for insight, which, in turn, is an essential component for creativity, one of the key twenty-first century skills.

You can see relevance realisation taking place in the youngest of children and, Vervaeke claims, the state of ‘flow’ (where we are wholly engrossed in an activity, and time passes without our noticing) is a ‘cascade of insights’.

What has this to do with teacherly authority?

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