I like the Groucho Marx line that he didn’t want to be in a club that would accept people like him as a member. In 1988 I left the education club and started The Learning Connexion. Actually I would have stayed in the club if it hadn’t insisted on taking me away from what I wanted to do.

TLC arrived on the planet at a time when New Zealand established a sort of parallel universe for independent providers. We were able to be our own club.

In the early days we were guided entirely by the fact that people thrived in our workshops. We had no business plan and no commercial ambition. The energy came from the excitement of teaching. Maybe this is what people mean when they say that teaching is a vocation. I’m not saying that the money didn’t matter – we’ve always had a fierce determination to pay our bills and earn our income – but we saw financial success as a by-product rather than a goal. The importance of money was to enable us to do more of what we needed to do.

It took a long time before we developed a clear understanding of what was happening. We stumbled upon a ‘thinking preference profile’ and found that our students (then a mere hundred or so) were clustered in a very unusual way.

It was a revelation. We knew immediately that we were working with the lost tribe of education. We had discovered a bias which was different from all the usual suspects like race, gender and wealth. It was an indication that education heavily favours those with a ‘left mode’ of thinking – the logical, organized people as opposed to the feeling/imaginative.

More recently we realised that we’re not just dealing with a lost tribe; we’re focused on a neglected dimension of learning that has immense importance for creativity in every field. The most significant indicator is the research led by Robert Root-Bernstein showing the connection between the arts and Nobel Prize-winning scientists. If you consider our cluster as part of a jigsaw puzzle it looks like the second diagram. It’s not so much a lost tribe as a missing part in the mystery of creative thinking. Rather than being outside the ‘education club’ TLC is drawing attention to the fact that we’re all in this together. It’s time to open the doors and collaborate.

Jonathan Milne