Naturally....

I was speaking to someone (in another organisation) recently who was refusing to be vaccinated on grounds that it's not natural.  He was in some distress as his job was on the line, and he was not sure what to do.  As I write, he has still not decided.  He wasn't asking for my thoughts or advice, but I think it's worth thinking this through, as there are some implications for some school issues.  I'm not thinking here about rational argument attitudes to risk, herd immunity or civic responsibility - but about our often unconscious attitudes to nature.

Image adapted from Diana Polekhina/Unsplash & Charles Deluvio/Unsplash.       Source

The idea that we should use not natural as a reason for action gave me reason to pause.  I was thinking about my own reluctance to lab-grown meat.  With its amazingly low carbon footprint compared with industrial farming methods, it may be one of our best solutions to climate change and it also avoid the risk of  colon cancer associated with eating red meat.  So why am I hesitating?  Perhaps I am also in thrall to the nature is good trope.   Of course, it is undoubtedly true that lots of natural things are indeed very good -  forests, beaches, love for our families, a good night's sleep.  It is also undoubtedly true that many unnatural things are very distressing - man-made climate change, pollution, oils spills, species extinction spring to mind there.  It is therefore easy to associate natural with good and unnatural with bad.

But it's equally easy to construct lists of bad natural things (high infant mortality, droughts, disease, earthquakes, natural poisons, some herbal teas) and good unnatural things (hospitals, education, sanitation, dentistry, electric power). And thinking about what should go on each list makes one think hard about what is or is not natural anyway.  Is violence or war natural? Are tools natural?  Is farming natural? How do we know?  And who gets to decide?

[The practice of eating meat bring this last point home powerfully.  For those of us who instinctively feel it's natural (I am one of them), Melanie Joy's 2001 book Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows is quite striking.  Dogs are eaten in some places, but are pets elsewhere; cows are eaten in some places but protected in others.  So what feels natural to some also feels very unnatural to others].  

 

All this means we need to be very careful about using it's natural or it's not natural as a justification for anything; at its worst, it's actually oppressive (boys will be boys, birds of a feather flock together).   So what might all this mean for schools?  

It's hard not to be sympathetic to the ideas that sitting in silence in rows listening to a teacher speak for hours on end is fairly unnatural.  It is.  But that's not why we have long-dropped such practices - it's because they don't motivate, they don't inspire, they don't inform and they don't develop the independent young adults we need.  That is, they are ineffective and should be dropped on those grounds.  On the other hand the equally  unnatural practice of sitting in one place, staring at a bound piece of shredded tree - that is, deep reading -  is to be encouraged because great good can come from it.  And the same thinking should apply to how we think about technology, language learning, sports, service work, expeditions,  academic disciplines, how we treat bullying, how we educate for consent, or a million other things.  Natural is not a helpful lens; but let me re-iterate for fear of being misunderstood; many natural things are vital for our children.   The question should be : Which ones?

Back to my friend and his anti-vaxx stance.  I am sure he's already heard all these discussions about natural before.  I've been wondering if the best way of framing things is to point out that the reason vaccines are effective is precisely because they trigger the body’s natural defenses using inoculated forms of viruses. Behavioural scientists Deleniv et al speculate that perhaps messaging like, 'stimulate your natural immune response with the vaccine' ...might be one of the keys to overcoming public fears that the jab is an “unnatural” and inferior solution to the pandemic.  I wonder if there are lessons here for us as educators.

Reference

• Deleniv, S., Ariely, S., and Peters K. (2021) Natural Is Better: How the Appeal To Nature Fallacy Derails Public Health Behavioural Scientist
• Joy, M (2001) Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows 
• n.a. Understanding the Appeal to Nature.  Effectiviology.