And a final example: On the wall of an adult literacy classroom I frequent there is a series of elaborate, handmade poster displays about homophones. One lays ‘there’, ‘their’ and ‘they’re’ out in detail. These posters seem to me more likely to threaten and confuse than enlighten or educate, but why? Perhaps it is because all three spellings are, of course, largely conventions and only one contains a common letter pattern. They are not homophonic as a result of anything meaningful – this relationship is chance and insignificant. The mind is being instructed consciously to consider inherently meaningless material, pure post-factum convention. Consciousness is being deliberately focussed where there is little or no real structure, pattern or understanding, no inherent meaning and small interest. Their presence on the wall, however, is a reminder that there is, or will be, pressure to learn these extraordinary things; there is threat in these posters. This is precisely the kind of material the conscious finds difficult to learn – very similar items closely juxtaposed but not related or differentiated by any meaningful structure or pattern. The mind finds no meaning onto which it may hang such spellings and will react by becoming anxious.

Directing consciousness:

And the nub of the debate, the practical centre of the argument, is that the teacher, or the learning situation, always directs conscious attention one way or another. The deployment of conscious attention is inevitable, though where and how is also often a neglected matter of choice. A teacher, or system, invariably sets up an educational situation such that students direct their conscious at particular subjects and in particular ways. It is inevitable. It is time we recognised this and examined its effects and how we might more deliberately structure circumstances better in the light of this. How to manage ‘attention’ better.

Perhaps we cannot direct our own conscious attention except wherever our unconscious tells us we must, but we can be told where to direct conscious attention by other people or by the structure of a situation. Teachers can, in other words, switch students’ consciousness in or out of particular situations; demand that attention be applied in this way or in that. We are so eager to ‘explain’ everything! So keen to show how! In some educational situations we specifically build in a requirement to invoke consciousness during the learning of such ‘explanations’, or to a meaningless ‘structure’, to direct consciousness at the assimilation of detail or convention and, perforce, away from seeking meaning. When we do this, we make such direction and application of conscious attention a part of the method itself. In the course of such learning, and as part of it, we learn to apply conscious attention to such items and in such ways whenever they appear and tend to do this ever after. In other words the direction of conscious attention can become a fixed part of performance as well as of learning. It may take years to recover; to bring performance back under purely unconscious control where it may belong. This may, indeed, never happen (e.g. ‘i before e is no help to me’ and see notes to chapter five).

My own analysis, in part subjective and in part derived from all the above, is as follows: Our unconscious knows all about the management of detailed data. It’s what it does all day. It exists in a sea of details – data washes unceasingly in from the world outside and continually back and to among its own banks and modules. Items of ‘information’ are mere details to be categorised, correlated and catalogued, so long as we have a framework of meaning within which they may be thus filed. This assimilation and management of data is a very easy and natural act for the unconscious, given a meaningful framework. Its strength is catching, categorizing, correlating and filing facts within meaning. We should not render this level of learning, data management, unnecessarily cerebral. What conscious mind finds it more natural to grapple with is perhaps the comprehension of broader ideas in meaningful patterns; conscious thought may be necessary for the understanding of conceptual structures and interrelations – the patterns and frameworks upon which and within which mere facts are very simply settled by the unconscious. Consciousness could be a mechanism allowing the unconscious to obtain an overall, contextualised view, perhaps a second opinion? Perhaps the unconscious deploys consciousness in order to reflect upon stuff? Maybe it uses its conscious partner to correlate minor concepts into broader patterns, into wider meanings?