Apparently brain agility is a major national topic this week. Could it be that with the continental heat wave a lot of people are sticking with the most available subject rather than being inventive and creative?
This morning The Guardian carried a feature on "How the US lets hot school days sabotage learning". [https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jun/10/hot-school-days-heat-learning-data-us]
"Human bodies react swiftly when they overheat.
"Blood rushes to the skin, trying to find cool air. Sweat seeps out of the skin and evaporates, dissipating body heat. But these processes have a cost: they reduce blood circulation, which means our most important organ, the brain, gets less blood.
"'And with reduced brain blood flow, we have reduced brain function,' said Tony Wolf, a researcher at Penn State University who studies how the body reacts to heat.
"In short, heat can lower our cognition.
"But it doesn't take a PhD to know this. Just ask middle school students."
Reference to middle school students is selection bias, of course, as middle school students ALWAYS apply their brains to the most available topic notwithstanding the level of heat or the level of creativity. We humans all tend that way but never more so than in the first third of the second decade.
This is The Guardian so there is a bit of outrage at the fact that classrooms are not all air conditioned: "It's not that we don't understand atmospheric effects or don't have technology to cool a room. ... We've known how to solve this problem for more than a hundred years."
Well, yes, but 100 years ago, or 50 years ago, there wasn't the common agreement that human beings should invariably be isolated from the natural creation. Schools and churches and houses were built without A/C as a matter of choice.
In those days they even had camping programs for children in which the sole bastian against God's creation was a single layer of canvas barely capable of diverting the fall of rain!
Today there is general agreement that artificiality is preferable to nature (except for occasional sightseeing visits to well managed parks or internet-mediated observations of critically endangered species). Songbirds should be silent before 7:00 a.m., eagles should not eat pet cats, floods should follow state zoning laws, and classrooms should be air conditioned.
Underneath the certainty about air conditioning is a presumption about time: Schools should hold classes at preset times according to a fixed calendar. Students should study a sequence of topics according to an established curriculum. Variations in light or temperature ought not to influence when or what or how they learn.
If it is dark, do not gather closer together and tell stories of the unknown; turn on the lights.
If the sun shines in, adjust the shades.
If it is cold, turn up the heat.
If it is wet, trust in impermeable barriers.
If it is dry, the water pipes must never fail.
Birdsong is an avoidable distraction. Backup alarms on heavy equipment are a tolerable annoyance as the water system is maintained.
In actual reality our common agreement is that we want to live and raise our families in an artificial world much poorer and less surprising than the one into which we were born. Our common agreement is that we want less than we are offered. We want less risk, less change, less challenge, less opportunity. We want to be poor and we want to decide in which ways to be poor.