by Brent Cameron

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.
BC 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.
JCP 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.
BC 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.
JCP 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.
BC 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?
JCP 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.
BC 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.
JCP 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.
BC 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.
JCP 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.
BC 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?
JCP 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.
BC 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.
JCP 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.
BC With the US being a world dominant power, it’s very hard to put an army together of gentle people.
JCP 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