HMC St Andrews 5th October 2011

The 21st Century Learning Initiative www.21learn.org

www.born-to-learn.org

Based on my book...

Overschooled but Undereducated

Knowing What We Now Know...John Abbott

V.E. Day 1945

A quality education is like a three-legged stool which can balance, on any surface however rough, providing the legs are the same length – home school and community

“I call a complete and generous education that which fits a man to perform justly, skilfully and magnanimously all the offices , public and private, of peace and war”

John Milton 1642

“No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main...And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

John Donne 1624

“The roots of civilisation are twelve inches deep”; discuss

1957 Suez Crisis

Conscription, National Service

Mock Oxbridge Scholarship PaperAutumn 1957

‘In our concentration on academic performance we lose sight of our main business of educating human personality.’

(TES September 1959)

‘All considerations of the curriculum should consider “how best to use subjects for the purpose of education... rather than regarding education as the by-product of the efficient teaching of subjects”.’

(Sir Phillip Morris, 1952)

Island of Ulva, 1962

Island of Ulva, 1962

“If you are born on a mere speck of land in the middle of the ocean you quickly discover

how things work, and why people do as they do. Learn that lesson well, and you are equipped to become a citizen of the world.”

“The idea that talents are lent for the service of others and not given, and that knowledge should bring humility and a sense of involvement in mankind, has to be the necessary corrective to the arrogance of meritocrats, for without this the School’s record of academic success would be indeed alarming.”

P.G Mason, High MasterManchester Grammar School, 1965“Dare to be wise”

Citizen of the world?

The Headmaster, 1972-1985Alleyne’s School,Stevenage, founded 1558

After a couple of years...“You have more pilot projects in this school than there are aircraft in the RAF, and they are all looping separate loops – where do you think you are going?” (Chairman of Governors)

“The trouble with secondary schools is that they only understand teaching and don’t understand enough about how children learn. Until you get this right nothing much will happen.” (Primary Head)

At the heart of the educational process lies the child. No advances in policy, no acquisitions of new equipment have their desired effect unless they are in harmony with the nature of the child, unless they are fundamentally acceptable to him.

Bridget Plowden, 1967

“... explore the Secret Garden of the Curriculum”

THE GREAT DEBATE 1976

“... explore the Secret Garden of the Curriculum”

THE GREAT DEBATE 1976

THE GREAT EDUCATIONAL REFORM BILL 1988 (GERBIL)

In 1993 a Minister apologised because “the early architects of the whole system built into it too much bureaucracy, and too much convolution”

Pedagogy, and how humans learn

It was only in the mid-1970s that evolutionary studies and psychology come together, largely as the result of the work of Sir John Eccles (Nobel Prize winner, 1965) and his two key books - The Physiology of Synapses (1964), and Evolution Of The Brain : Creation Of The Self (1989).

“The complexities of our minds and bodies bear witness to a long history of subtle adaptation to the natural world by our innumerable ancestors. Literally every child is born with a mind and body that recreates the imprint of the history of our species.”

Neural Darwinism, or the grain of the brain

“A scientist is supposed to have a complete and thorough knowledge at first-hand of some subject, and therefore is usually expected not to write on any topic of which he is not a master...

Professor Erwin Schrödinger, What is Life? (1944)

Synthesis

I can see no other escape from this dilemma (lest our true aim be lost forever) than that some of us should embark on a synthesis of facts and theories, albeit with a second-hand and incomplete knowledge of some of them – at the risks of making fools of ourselves.”

John Bowlby - Attachment (1969) Howard Gardner - Frames of Mind; the theory of multiple intelligences (1983) Shoshana Zuboff - In the Age of the Smart Machine; the future of work and power (1984) Howard Gardner - The unschooled mind; how children think and how schools should teach (1991) Gerald Edelman - Bright air, brilliant fire (1992) Mitchell Waldrop - Complexity; the emerging science at the edge of order and chaos (1992) Caine and Caine - Making Connections; teaching and the human brain (1991) Christopher Wills - The Runaway Brain (1994) David Perkins - Outsmarting IQ; the emerging science of learnable intelligence (1994) Robert Wright - The Moral Animal; evolutionary psychology and everyday life (1994) John T. Bruer - Schools For Thought; a science for learning in the classroom (1993) Coveney and Highfield - Frontiers of Complexity; the search for order in a chaotic world (1995) Peter Senge - The Fifth Discipline; the art and practice of the learning organization (1990) Stephen Mithen - The Prehistory of the Mind (1996) Arne Wyller - The Planetary Mind (1996) Edward O. Wilson - The Future of Life (2002) Edward O. Wilson - Consilience; the unity of knowledge (1998) Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi - Flow; the psychology of optimal experience (1990) Henry Plotkin - Evolution in Mind (1997) Stephen Pinker - How the Mind Works (1997) Stephen Pinker - The Language Instinct (1996) Patricia Hersch - A Tribe Apart; a journey into the heart of adolescence (1998) Thomas Hine - The Rise and Fall of the American Teenager (1999) Meredith Small - Our Babies, Ourselves; how biology and culture shape the way we parent (1998) Susan Greenfield - Brain Stories (2000) Spencer Wells - The Journey of Man; a genetic odyssey (2002) Fritjof Capra – The Hidden Connections (2002) Matt Ridley – Nature via Nurture: genes, experience and what makes us human (2003) Spencer Wells - Pandora’s Seed; the unforeseen cost of civilisation (2010) Jared Diamond - Guns, Germs and Steel; a short history of everybody for the last 13,000 years (1998) Nicholas Wade - Before the Dawn; recovering the lost history of our ancestors (2006) Diane Ravitch - The Death and Life of the Great American School System; how testing and choice are undermining education (2010) Jonathan Sacks - Recreating Society; the home we build together (2007) Raymond Tallis - Aping Mankind; neuromania, Darwinitis and the misrepresentation of humanity (2011)...

A tiny selection of readings....

The Hidden Connections: a science for sustainable living Fritjof Capra (2002)

“Education is the ability to perceive the hidden connections between disparate phenomena,” a statement first made by the Czech philosopher and politician Vaclav Havel, and adopted by Capra as the ultimate explanation for the operation of the brain

Nature via Nurture: genes, experience and what makes us human Matt Ridley (2003)

Recent findings in the biomedical sciences show that it was totally wrong to see it as a struggle of nature versus nurture, rather it is the development of nature via nurture.

These two create a whole new paradigm for learning

“We are both empowered by the experiences of our ancestors, but we are constrained as well. Driven to live in ways that are utterly uncongenial to our inherited traits and instincts simply drives people mad”

Please click here to view animation one: Born to Learn

or visit www.vimeo.com/20924263

A model of learning is needed which would match exactly the neurological progression of the brain of the young child as it transforms itself into the adolescent brain. Adolescents, it seems, have evolved to be apprentice-like learners, not pupils sitting at desks awaiting instruction.

Please click here to view animation two: Class Reunion

or visit www.vimeo.com/25962693

If Matthew Ridley is right that we are as we are because of the way nurture interacts with our nature then a child coming into school already has his or her mind shaped by the dominant assumption of the society in which they are already a member.

Please click here to view animation three: Faustian Bargain (trailer)

or visit www.vimeo.com/29948790

“Our enormously productive economy...demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego-satisfaction, in consumption... We need things consumed, burned up, replaced and discarded at an ever accelerating rate.” quoted in ‘The Waste Makers’, 1960

On September 14th 2011, half a century later, the largest shopping centre in Europe – Westfield Stratford – was opened as the only gateway to the Olympic Park of 2012; in floor area it is 20 times that of St Paul’s Cathedral.

‘British family life is in crisis’ proclaimed the Telegraph last week. ‘It is parents who are to blame who by working like pit ponies to house our offspring,

feed them and keep them in with the latest digital cameras and micros scooters, it seems we have created a generation of miserable children who are wallowing in materialism. We spend £7.3 billion on toys in children's bedrooms, when what they really need is to play outside with friends and family.

“If civilisation is to survive it must live on the interest, not the capital, of nature. Ecological markers suggest that in the early 1960’s, humans were using 70% of nature’s yearly output; by the early 1980’s we’d reached 100%; and in 1999 we were at 125%.” A Short History of Progress, 2004

The Ultimate Ecological Crisis

Asked on 1st January 2000 what chance he gave the world of surviving the next thousand years, Sir Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal and later President of the Royal Society said; “I’m not sure about the next millennium but I think I give us a 50/50 chance of surviving the next hundred years. I fear that the speed of man’s technological discoveries is outpacing our wisdom and ability to control what we have discovered…”

When our first granddaughter was born a year ago, our doctor said with great pleasure “she has a 25 % chance of living to the age of 100”.

For her to do that we have to educate the next generation to bring technological knowledge and wisdom together.

Educational impact of Frederick Winslow-Taylor

• David Wardle the English educational historian wrote, “it was the factory put into the educational setting... Every characteristic was there, minute division of labour... A complicated system of incentives to do good work, an impressive system of inspection, and finally an attention to cost efficiency and the economic use of plant”. That was in 1976

• “The National Curriculum sets the standards...all schools set targets and measure their performance. They can easily access best practice information. They have increasing opportunities for professional development. They are held to account through inspections and published performance tables.” That was said in 2001

• In 2011, you know all too much about the impact of league tables and teaching for the test.

• While successive Ministers of Education are pleased to reiterate that “the work of the Department for Education and employment fits with a new economic imperative of supply-side investment for national prosperity.”

“We can’t fault your theory. You are probably educationally correct and certainly ethically correct. But the system you’re arguing for would require very good teachers. We don’t think there will ever be enough good teachers, and so we’re going for a teacher-proof way of organising schools. That way you get a uniform standard.”

Downing Street Policy Unit, March 1997

• In 1869 W E Forster set out to create a national system of schooling and proposed using the endowments of some 3000 old schools to fund a national scheme for teacher education.

• This so antagonised a number of your predecessors that they founded this Conference to deny Forster these funds; they succeeded.

• Consequently you were born in a spirit of conflict with a struggling embryonic national system of education; this seriously impacts on English schools to this day (cf. Finland).

A simplified history...

• In 1870 a national system of School Boards was established across the country, based on local taxation, even though this was without any arrangements for teacher education.

• So successful were these schools that they antagonised both the Church schools and yourselves. Your predecessors were particularly concerned that such schools would infringe upon their almost exclusive interest in secondary education.

• By 1939 only 18% of 14 year-olds were in school – the second lowest proportion of any country in Europe.

There are other shadows...• Under the direction of a former Headmaster of Harrow, Cyril

Norwood, and overtly classically-trained civil servants, Butler was persuaded to define state secondary education, as had Plato, into thee parts – separating those with gold in their blood from those with silver and iron.

• With only sufficient funds to lift compulsory education form 14 to 15, Butler accepted his advisers’ Proposal that three years should be taken off the old elementary curriculum and transferred to create a four-year secondary system.

• It is known that Norwood, by agreeing 11 as the age of transfer, believed that he was keeping the independent and maintained sectors structurally separate.

• For the past 70 years primary education has struggled to achieve in six years what earlier it had done in nine.

Dr Arnold’s legacy• It was Arnold’s genius to link boarding education to a

revamped classical curriculum and so rid ambitious, aspiring Victorians of dealing with the problems of adolescence.

• Over the years boarding schools too easily became delightful bubbles cocooned from the outside world.

• Recently secondary schools have become increasingly busy places as they have taken on to themselves responsibilities for which they were not designed. Those of you in predominantly boarding schools, now recruiting ever more day pupils, are attempting to squeeze your originally broadly-based curriculum, once covered in 7 days each of 24 hours, into 5 days working only from 8.30 to 5.30.

• No wonder both you and your pupils can easily look so hammered!

If you continue to apply the wrong model of learning, for the very best of reasons, you will never get the results you seek...

As Einstein once remarked, “you will never solve a problem by using the same thinking that created that problem in the first place”.

Just what are we all about?

I would like to set you two questions – not to be answered this morning – but perhaps to be sent to me alter by email, not in any sense for correction, far from it, but to get all of us thinking together about what needs to happen

My first question is about purpose:

Are you preparing your pupils to be pilgrims (as in John Bunyan’s meaning in Pilgrim's Progress), or customers?

My second question is about process:

What kind of education for what kind of world? Are our children battery-hens or free-range chickens?

What, however, is not clear is how HM Treasury (through the office of the Secretary of Education) will monitor and hold someone accountable for the billions of pounds of public money that all this will involve. Many details remain to be worked out. Michael Gove is quite properly inviting your support, and it is only right that you should earn your charitable status by demonstrating the public good.

A couple of years ago Andrew Adonis caught the headlines by saying he wanted to borrow some of your DNA so as to improve the maintained sector.

It is the tragic consequence of 200 years of our history that the differences between the two systems are such that transfusion alone won’t work. What we need – desperately – is that deep dialogue between all involved in the bringing up of young people that aims at such a transformation of both parts of the system that we can happily and quite naturally then come together.

“I call a complete and generous education that which fits a man to perform justly, skilfully and magnanimously all the offices, public and private of peace and war”.

John Milton, in a letter to Dr Hartlib, 1642

www.born-to-learn.org

The 21st Century Learning Initiative - www.21learn.org

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