We Should Push Back Against the Trend for Blank Walls in Schools

I’m afraid I have a new low to report from the coal face of what remains of British state education: the current trend for blank walls in classrooms. Visiting a secondary school this week it slowly dawned on me that all the classroom walls and corridors were empty – great white slabs of roughly painted plasterboard. Initially I put this down to redecoration, until I realised it was deliberate. I asked the Head of English why: “The school is on a display diet. It’s a new initiative to prevent the children having cognitive overload.” What? I frowned. “When we are inputting information into the students it is essential they are not distracted and are instead in a receptive position to receive the input of information.”

In her explanation she was very confident this display diet was cutting edge educational practice and would particularly help the neurodiverse and those students who were easily overwhelmed. She used the language of software engineers and data scientists: treating children like a rapidly heating data centre that might melt or explode if too much data is pushed in.

I was naturally appalled and asked her what was wrong with inspiration and the attempt to furnish the mind of students with the great glories of civilisation? Again, using the language of science, she explained that the blank wall initiative is all provable thanks to the Cognitive Load Theory. And then by way of an aside, she said, “And in any case, what would make a good display in an English classroom? Words?”

Seemingly derived from research of educational psychologist John Sweller, Cognitive Load Theory concerns the ability of the brain to process information. There is a suggestion that working memory has very limited capacity and if too much information is competing for attention, learning will be impaired or outright impossible. With children now watching over 700 TikTok videos a day, it does seem like a good idea to create a classroom space that is calming and conducive to learning. I was once tasked with teaching a 17 year-old student how to debate while he was playing games on his phone – it was, naturally, an impossible task.

And yet, the whole approach seems off and inimical to the true pursuit of knowledge. The idea that children are like empty hardware drives waiting for a software input derives from John Locke. In his essay on Human Understanding he wrote:

Let us then suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas; how comes it to be furnished? Whence comes it by that vast store which the busy and boundless fancy of man has painted on it with an almost endless variety? Whence has it all the materials of reason and knowledge? To this I answer, in one word, from experience. In that all our knowledge is founded, and from that it ultimately derives itself.

The tabula rasa – blank slate – theory of humanity has been squabbled over for centuries with current thinking describing it as bunkum. Of course humans are not blank slates, we are comprised of our genes and ancestral evolutionary habits and, some would even have it, our generational trauma. The human brain is infinitesimally more complex than any computer and indeed any large language model (no matter what the AI grifters tell you). With that in mind, is it ever possible to simply upload or input today’s learning within a blank walled classroom into a blankly awaiting mind?

For the great glories of literature, art, history, science, philosophy and maths to be learned and absorbed, the student must experience that wonderful intellectual thrill that comes with understanding a new idea and knowing it to be true and important and useful. From the past, voices of the dead speak through words or music or pictures to souls of the young. This newly understood truth resonates, and the child wants to inquire into and explore this rich avenue of treasures. What sparks such forays into knowledge is very more complicated than a mere ‘input’ of information into an otherwise blank mind.

So let’s hear no more of blank walls. Instead, let’s encourage teachers to fill their classroom with replicas of Old Masters, maps, easy to read and memorise poems and timelines of British history. And for those STEM science subjects, let’s do more than rely on the periodic table: let children daydream in front of posters of the men and women who advanced science, space ships, viruses, human bodies, all muscle, bone and nervous system.

Children are not computers. We all learn through inspiration, through inquiry, through a tiny interest being sparked – often by an image, a piece of music, a scrap of text – into a lifelong love affair. As G.K. Chesterton said, imagination “is the most essential element in education”.

Joanna Gray is a writer and confidence coach.