Student Conferences BC February 2012 John Abbott, President The 21 st Century Learning Initiative...

Student Conferences BCFebruary 2012

John Abbott, President The 21st Century Learning Initiative

It’s Your World to Shape, Not Just to Take

Presentation 1

“The task is not so much to see what no one has yet seen, but to think what nobody yet has thought about that which everybody sees.”

Schopenhauer, 1788-1860

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

A

What do you think you see?


Candlestick or faces ?

Going from one way of seeing things to another is the starting point for significant, irrevocable change in the way we humans understand how things work

Theory of ‘Paradigm Shift’ : Thomas KuhnThe Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962)The 21st Century Learning Initiative -

www.21learn.org

The Troubled World of 2012• There are now two and a half times as many people on the Earth’s surface as

when I was born just before the outbreak of World War Two.

• At the most recent count, about 7,000 people (One hundred millionth of the world’s population) owns more than over 3 billion people, (just under half the population).

• 80% of humanity lives on less than $10 a day.

• The richest 20% of the world’s population receives 75% of the world’s income while the poorest 40% receive only 5% or the world’s income.

• Of the world’s largest 150 economic entities, 95 are corporations (63.3%). Wal-Mart, with revenue of $287.99 billion, is the largest corporation on the planet, and ranks number 22 on the list. The United States is the world’s largest economy with a total economic output in 2004 of $11,667,515,000,000.The 21st Century Learning Initiative -

www.21learn.org

A

David Suzuki, internationally renowned geneticist and environmentalist, born 1936...

...believes that “human intelligence and foresight got us into our present pickle by enabling us to invent such efficient ways of exploiting Nature that our population growth went into overdrive. Now human intelligence and foresight are all we can rely on to see us through the tight bottleneck we are fast approaching – that narrowing chasm where far too many people are faced with far too little food and, very possibly, far too little air. The 21st Century Learning Initiative -

www.21learn.org

“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%”

Ronald WrightA Short History of Progress (2004)


A

We each see the world from our own perspective.


And did those feet in ancient time.Walk upon England’s mountains green:And was the holy Lamb of God,On England’s pleasant pastures seen!

Here is mine: my parents grew up in middle England in the 20s and 30s

I was born as Britain went to war with Germany and bombs fell near my home

B


History experienced across the Generations

My recent ancestorsB

My adolescence, and the development of a Broad Mind

“The essential skill is to develop the ability to learn. However you can’t learn how to learn without learning something. It is much easier to measure what you have learnt than it is to measure how you learnt it... Examination results alone don’t prove that you can think straight.”


Derek Pitt, Teacher in the 1950s of A Level History and English, a keen musician and student of Medieval Art – and cricket coach

“The roots of civilisation are twelve inches deep; discuss” (Oxbridge Scholarship question)

B

The problem for pupils if teachers can’t make their subject live

A critical incident: failing Latin O Level three times I came close to jeopardising my chances of going to University, but years before I was taught to wood carve by an old sailor.

Being selected to represent England at an International exhibition of Woodcarvers six weeks before sitting the exam for the fourth time gave me so much confidence in myself that I decided to go to any more Latin lessons and simply taught myself by a massive act of memorisation. In six weeks I gained 89% in the exam having previously never got more than 21%... But a month or so later, I couldn’t remember much of the Latin but learnt that I could do more for myself than I could by relying on the system.


B

University, and the enthusiasm to create a better world

Rhum expedition 1959

Gometra expedition 1962

University Maiden Eight 1961

B


“The ideas that talents are lent for the service of others and not given, and that knowledge brings humility and a sense of involvement in mankind, are just as necessary correctives to the arrogance of a meritocratic in a highly technical world as they were in Hugh Oldham’s day (1514), and without them the School’s record of academic success would be indeed alarming.”

P.G MasonHigh Master


Manchester Grammar School, 1965

“Dare to be wise”

B

From leader of expeditions to being a Headmaster


B

So began my search to understand human learning

B


The human race is the planet’s pre-eminent learning species – it is our brains that give us our superiority, not our muscles.


C

The 21st Century Learning Initiative

“The Initiative will facilitate the emergence of new approaches to learning that draw upon a range of insights into the human brain, the functioning of human societies, and learning as a community-wide activity.”

Washington DC 1995 onwards

C



Over 800 lectures…

…in over 40 countries

The Descent of Mankind

Studies in genetics suggest that the split with the Great Apes occurred seven million years ago. At twenty years to a generation that is three hundred and fifty thousand generations ago, at a minute a generation, this is equivalent to the minutes we are, on average, awake for in a year.

In all that time the genetic structure of us humans differs from the Great apes by less than 2%.

Stone Age Man, on this scale, appeared 60 hours (two and a half days), while Modern Man, Homo Sapiens appeared some thirty hours ago, in Africa, or equivalent to one and a half days ago.

C

Each of us is a result of all that evolution.The 21st Century Learning Initiative -

www.21learn.org

From the time at which our species came out of the trees and began to walk on their back legs, this produced a problem for females as the birth canal couldn’t expand without her losing the ability to be bipedal. The problem was exasperated as the human brain began to grow, so forcing the skill to grow. Every other mammal gives birth to its young when their brains are at least 95%


complete, but humans are forced to drop their babies extraordinarily prematurely at, in effect, the four month stage (should the foetus remain in utero for a full term, pregnancy would last for 27 months...and the baby would never get out).

C

Mothers and babies need protection for years – hence the need for long term bonding.


C

The growth of synapses during the first 6 months


Not until the child is about three years old does it’s brain reach 95% of structural completion (that does not mean it has finished its growth - far from it for further development involves removing part of the young brain to enable it to become more complex)

C

“Tell me and I forget; show me and I

remember; let me do, and I understand.”

Confucius, 551-479 BC


How do we learn?C


Probably the earliest representation of intellectual thought was the bone uncovered in France some 15 years ago, covered with a series of images that archaeologists and astrophysicists have identified as the phases of the moon over a number of nights as observed from that latitude 32,000 years ago (c. 1,600 generations back.

C

Babylonian Mathematicians 5,500 years ago (c. 270

generations ago)

The mathematics of space:

60 seconds to a minute,60 minutes to a degree,360 degrees to a circle...


C

Polynesia

...together with their understanding of the different ocean currents containing waters of significantly different temperature and shoals of different kinds of fish. The skill to do this is something modern man can only wonder at...

Apparently the islands of Polynesia began to be colonised some 1500 years ago by people who navigated entirely on their ability to use the stars as a chart...

C


Evolution in BrainUntil the early 19th Century the very best estimate of the age of the earth had been made in the mid 17th Century which had calculated from the book of Genesis that the earth had been formed at 4pm on the 22nd October 4,004 BC. Findings in geology in the late 18th Century suggested that it really had to be several million years ago.

Sixty years later in The Origin of Species, Darwin said, “it is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent. It is the one most adaptable to change.”

Biology at the time lacked any technology that enabled it to study the structure of the brain at a scale which could show synaptic development. But Darwin guessed, “psychology will be based on a new foundation, that of the necessary requirement of each mental power and capacity by gradation (evolution). Light will [then] be thrown on the origin’s of Man and his history.” The 21st Century Learning Initiative -

www.21learn.org

C

Discovering the origins of human thought and behaviour

Any serious consideration of ‘evolution in brain’ did not enter psychologists’ thinking until the early 1970s (when I studied Education in the mid-sixties there was absolutely no reference to the brain). Not until the invention of PET scans and latterly functional MRI in the late 1970s onwards has the study of cognitive processes been open to visual comprehension.

Suddenly scientists saw in our ‘preferred ways of doing things’ strategies that in all probability have been shaped by the earliest experiences of mankind. The 21st Century Learning Initiative -

www.21learn.org

C

“Human beings did not fall ready made from the sky. Many of our abilities and susceptibilities are specific adaptations to ancient environmental problems rather than separate manifestations of a general intelligence for all seasons.” (Barrow, 1996)


“The human mind is better equipped to gather information about the world by operating within it than by reading about it, hearing lectures on it, or studying abstract models of it.” (Santa Fee Institute, 1995)

Now, in 2011, we understand... C

“Historical evidence is plentiful for the first couple of hundred years, then rapidly diminishes. At the 5,000 year mark visible records disappear altogether. At the 15,000 year stage humans began to settle down. Go back to the 50,000 year mark and it seemed that our slowly evolving ancestors started to show the first signs of modern human behaviour.”


C

Humans have been using language for more than 100,000 years. Children master most of the complexities of grammar with practically no explicit instruction from their parents. It is almost totally dependant upon extensive parent-child verbal interactions which provide an essential environment to unlock the inherited predispositions to structure sound in a meaningful way.

C


The invention of writing – the conflict between word and image


This book tracks the correlation between the rise and fall of literacy and the changing status of women in society, mythology and religion throughout history.

It contrasts the aural, right-brain teachings of Socrates, Christ, and the Buddha with the hierarchical and sexist forms that evolved when their spoken words were committed to writing, which led tot he ferocious religious wars and neurotic witch-hunts (about 5,500 years ago). While the benefits of literacy are obvious; this gripping narrative explores the dark-side, tallying its previously unrecognised costs.

C


Three different traditions

1) The Judaic-Christian tradition of self improvement, the Book of Ecclesiastes says, “of the writing of books there is no end, and much study wearies the mind” (approximately 800BC)

2) Platonic Thought proposed that philosophers and rulers were born with gold in their blood, warriors were born with silver in their blood and farmers and labourers were born with lead. He believed that nothing in a person’s life could change their status. (428-348BC)

3) The Roman belief in rote learning and the forcible injection of learning throughthe classroom

D

This began to change slowly


Roger Ascham, tutor to Queen Elizabeth I and a renowned classical scholar, sat down in Windsor Castle in the late 1560s to write the first book in English on education, called The Scholemaster aimed at correcting the faults of traditional Roman education.

Firstly, he urged cultivation of what he called ‘Hard-Wits’ rather than superficial ‘Quick-Wits’ of those whose memories were good, but who couldn’t work things out for themselves. “Because I know that those which be commonly the wisest, the most learned, the best men also, when they be old, were never commonly the quickest of wits when they were young.”

Secondly, he urged teachers to be more gentle with their students and warned them against what he called ‘the Butchery of Laten’ – go easy on the birch he was saying, for children who only learn because they are frightened, gain nothing.

D

Thirdly, Ascham urged that “in the attainment of wisdom, learning from a book or from a teacher is twenty times as effective as learning from experience because it is an unhappy mariner who learnt his craft from many shipwrecks.” Why this extraordinary explanation?“I was once in Italy myself, but I thanked God that my abode there was but nine days. I saw in that little time, in one city, more liberty to Sin than ever I saw in our noble city of London in nine years.”

Consequently Ascham piously defined the indisputable role of the school master as a censor of what their students should learn.


D

Behaviourism and JB Watson


JB Watson (1878-1958), denied that evolution has any part to play in the understanding of the human brain. It was all to do with the relationship between what a teacher put in, and what a child observed. He believed that learning should become something that schools did to you, and quality instruction as being infinitely more important than encouraging students to think for themselves. He believed that children’s minds were putty to be shaped by well-trained teachers... (the shadow of this thinking has deadened that imagination of millions of children and frustrated a large number of teachers).

D

Einstein disagreed profoundly

“It is almost a miracle that modern teaching methods have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of enquiry; for what this delicate little plant needs more than anything, besides stimulation, is freedom.”

Albert Einstein, 1889 - 1955

D


In the 1980s cognitive science, began drawing upon neurobiology began to undermine the claims of the behaviourists “Learning does not require time out from productive activity; learning is at the heart of productive activity”

Shoshana Zuboff, 1988


D

(Professor) Baroness Susan Greenfield


SUSAN GREENFIELD CBE is an eminent neurobiologist who was appointed Director of The Royal Institution in London in 1998. Since 1996 she has been Professor of Pharmacology at the University of Oxford. Her research concentrates on understanding brain functions and disorders, such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's diseases, as well as the physical basis of consciousness. She has also spoken out about the impact of social networking sites and the amount of time children and young people spend in front of computer screens: “By the middle of this century, our minds might have become infantilised - characterised by short attention spans, an inability to empathise and a shaky sense of identity,”

D

Adolescence

A Tribe Apart ?

E


We know that the human brain is essentially plastic, but it constantly reshapes itself in response to environmental challenges, but that it does this within the blueprint of the species’ inherited experience. There are three phases during the normal life cycle when the brain goes through extraordinary periods of internal reorganization - a kind of mental housekeeping. Experience during each of these phases becomes critical to how the individual brain is reconfigured to deal with the next stage of life.

Synaptogenesis


E

1993

Crazy by DesignWe have long suspected that there is something going on in the brain of the adolescent, apparently involuntarily, that is forcing apart the child/parent relationship. Adolescence is a period of profound structural change, in fact “the changes taking place in the brain during adolescence are so profound, they may rival early childhood as a critical period of development”, wrote Barbara Strauch in 2003. “The teenage brain, far from being readymade, undergoes a period of surprisingly complex and crucial development.


E

The adolescent brain is crazy by design.”

Becoming AdultFrom the earliest of times the progression from dependent child to autonomous adult has been an issue of critical importance to all societies.The adolescent brain, being “crazy by design,” could be a critical evolutionary adaptation that has built up over countless generations, and is essential to our species’ survival. It is adolescence that drives human development by forcing young people in every generation to think beyond their own self-imposed limitations and exceed their parents’ aspirations. These neurological changes in the young brain as it transforms itself means that adolescents have evolved to be apprentice-like learners, not pupils sitting at desks awaiting instruction.


E

2002

FlowNeuroscientists, together with psychologists and evolutionary scientists are starting to “show that youngsters who are empowered as adolescents to take charge of their own futures will make better citizens for the future than did so many of their parents and their grandparents who suffered from being overschooled but undereducated in their own generations.”

“Students who get the most out of school, and have the highest future expectations, are those who find school more play-like than work-like.


“Clear vocational goals and good work experiences do not guarantee a smooth transition to adult work. Engaging activities – with intense involvement regardless of content – are essential for building the optimism and resilience crucial to satisfying work lives.”

E

1997

Don’t Fence Me In – Cole Porter, 1934

Oh, give me land, lots of land under starry skies above,

Don't fence me in.

Let me ride through the wide open country that I love,

Don't fence me in.

Let me be by myself in the evenin' breeze,

And listen to the murmur of the cottonwood trees,

Send me off forever but I ask you please,

Don't fence me in. The 21st Century Learning Initiative -

www.21learn.org

E

There are very many others


E

So What Now?

Formal schooling, therefore, has to start a dynamic process through which students are progressively weaned from their dependence on teachers and institutions, and given the confidence to manage their own learning, collaborating with colleagues as appropriate, and using a range of resources and learning situations.


E

Subsidiarity

“It is wrong for a superior tokeep to itself the right of making decisions for which an inferior is

perfectly capable of doing for itself.”

E


The English Confusion


Perhaps best illustrated when David Blunkett, overturning the earlier English tradition that education was about the development of a child’s full personality, said, “... the work of the DfEE fits with a new economic imperative of supply side investment for national prosperity”.

All of which went back to the introduction of the National Curriculum by Kenneth Baker in 1988, subsequently tinkered with by Kenneth Clarke, John Patten, Estell Morris, Charles Clarke, Ruth Kelly, Alan Johnson, Ed Balls and now Michael Gove.

E

The Political Dilemma

“Much to my surprise I can’t really fault your theory. You are probably educationally right; certainly your argument is ethically correct.But the system you’re arguing for would require very good teachers. We’re not convinced that there will ever be enough good teachers. So, instead, we’re going a teacher-proof system of organising schools for that way we can get a uniform standard.” Verbatim report of conclusions of

presentation made to the Prime Minister’s Policy Unit, Westminster March 1996

E



E

It has been the lack of real understanding about education and learning amongst teachers that has allowed successive governments to bully the profession. Teachers undoubtedly need to understand the theory of learning. Deprived of a real understanding of both pedagogy and policy they are simply parroting the latest curriculum directives.


E

The problem is one of Synthesis

Synthesis is the drawing together of ideas, whereas the essential Western tradition of education is reductionism – reducing complex issues to easily studied separate bits. The problem with that is that it becomes ever more difficult to see the Big Picture.Have you a mind big enough to get around all these issues and tease out the common threads?


E

Time is going by"The biggest crisis we are facing is a Crisis of Meaning. The tremendous social changes of the last 100 years have stripped modern society of that which gives us meaning be it in our roots to our ancestors, religions, spirituality, our relationship to nature...... Within this Crisis of Meaning our young people are facing a MORAL crisis - a crisis of values. Without these anchors young people no longer understand the value of perseverance, learning for learning's sake etc.. Instead our daily lives are filled with a pursuit of money and temporary ecstasy. Both of these goals are unfulfillable and result in a misguided frenzy in the pursuit of the next thrill, or in depression.

E-mail from Dr Rolando JubisPsychologist and CounselorJakarta International School, 11/11/00

E

“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

“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.

This has proved to be a summer of discontent; a season of social disorder and of fragile and floundering economic indicators.

The riots which have disfigured our cities, reports of which have reverberated around the globe, came in the wake of an endless procession of scandals. We have seen the erosion of confidence in our parliamentary institutions, our mass media, our police and our banks. Hardly an institution remains untouched. David Henry Thoreau once said that if we cut down all the trees there will be nowhere left for the birds to sing. At times, during these past few months, the chain saws have been merciless as the great oaks have been felled...

Lord David Alton, October 2011

...We are entitled to be sickened at the sight of a bleeding boy, attacked and robbed again by those who first appeared to have come to his aid; or the 67-year-old killed because he tried to prevent arson; or the 11-year-old brought before the courts and convicted because, along with thousands of other looters, he exploited the breakdown in law and order. But beyond our shock and anger we must also ask ourselves some deeper questions about the country we have made and the country which we want it to be.

If we do not heed this wakeup call and attend to the root problems far worse will visit us in the future. This will involve the renewal of our battered and compromised institutions and require us to reassess how we see ourselves as citizens and how we see our obligations and duties, our responsibilities as well as our rights. It needs two things: different values and a clearer sense of what promotes human wellbeing.

...fears that the ever-growing disconnection of the human race from the rest of nature is a “link that is not only being diminished, it is being completely eliminated for the first time in the history of our species. This is going to change the world in a horrible way: what kind of parents are these zombies going to grow up to be, if they grow up?”

Robert Bateman: painter,

conservationist, and

philanthropist (born 1930) ...


Upon this gifted age, in its dark hour, Rains from the sky a meteoric shower Of facts....They lie unquestioned, uncombined.Wisdom enough to leech us of our ill Is daily spun, but there exists no loom To weave it into fabric.

Edna St. Vincent Millay "Huntsman, What Quarry"The 21st Century Learning Initiative -

www.21learn.org

“There is a tide in the affairs of men which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune...”The 21st Century Learning Initiative -

www.21learn.org

“...But omitted, and the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and miseries...”


“... On such a full sea are we now afloat, and we must take the current when it serves -- or lose the ventures before us.”

William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Act 4, Scene 3


For further information:

Web www.born-to-learn.orgwww.21learn.org

Email [email protected]



Sir John Eccles, 1989Neurologist, Nobel Prize Winner, Cambridge

"I maintain that the human mystery is incredibly demeaned by scientific reductionism, with its claim in promissory materialism to account eventually for all of the spiritual world in terms of patterns of neural activity. This belief must be classed as a superstition... we are spiritual beings with souls in a spiritual world, as well as material beings with bodies and brains existing in a material world."

SpiritualityF


"Mystical, symbolic and religious thinking all those ways of thinking that the rationalist would condemn as " irrational" - seem to characterize human thinking everywhere and at every time. It is as if there was some adaptive advantage to such modes of thinking that offers benefits that rationality can not provide. Perhaps the advantages that irrational, speculative, and religious beliefs offer through their ability to spur us to actions with positive consequences are significant enough to account for our propensity towards their adoption. Extraterrestrial robots who are completely rational might evolve very slowly indeed."

John D. BarrowThe Artful Universe, 1996

When I consider your heavens,The work of your fingers,The moon and the stars,Which you have set in place.What is man that you are mindful of him,The son of man that you care for him?Yet you have made him little lowerthan the angelsAnd crowned him with glory and honour.

Psalm 8: 3-5The 21st Century Learning Initiative -

www.21learn.org

What is Man?

The Spiritual Issue; Neil Postman, 1997

"We do not need to invent a story for our times out of nothing. Humans never do. Since consciousness began we have been weaving our experience of ourselves and of our material world into accounts of it; and every generation has passed its ways of accounting on.... The great revolutions and revelations of the human past, and I include the Christian revelation, have all been great retellings, new ways of narrating ancient truths to encompass a larger world.

My two favourite quotes: Galileo in the early 17th century said,

"The intention of the Holy Spirit is to teach how one goes to heaven, not how heaven goes.”

Three hundred and seventy five years later, Pope John Paul II said,

"Science can purify religion from error and superstition. Religion can purify science from idolatry and false absolutes. "

"The future sanity of the world depends on the coming together of two great disciplines that haven't spoken together for more than a hundred years - Biology and Theology".


State of the World Forum, San Francisco, 2001

"This is what we are about. We plant seeds that one day will grow. We water seeds already planted, knowing that they hold future promise. We lay foundations that will need further development. We provide yeast that produces effects far beyond our capabilities.

"We cannot do everything, and there is a sense of liberation in realising that. This enables us to do something, and enables us to do it very well It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning, a step along the way, an opportunity for the Lord's grace to enter and do the rest. We may never see the end result, but that is the difference between the master builder, andthe worker.

"We are workers, not master builders, ministers, not Messiahs. We are prophets of a future not our own".

Archbishop Oscar Romero, 1980

“The new middle-class world in which many American adolescents grow up is one that combines harshness and heedlessness in equal measure, a world which makes it very hard to grow up. It makes it all too difficult to achieve a strong and abiding sense of worth and all too easy to feel like a failure and a loser. It makes it all too easy to feel like an outsider, all too difficult to feel appreciated or respected for being who you are. It is a world in which it is treacherously easy for adolescents to trip up and break the rules but in which no one can be bothered to help them avoid tripping in the first place. Adolescence is rarely an easy time. But it need not be as hard as it often is in America.

The Road to Whatever, Elliott Currie, 2004

As I sit there the wind goes byNot moving anything.The clouds slowly move across the skyWith a feeling of departure.I’m lost, I’m lost in this dark deep place.I’m screaming from inside for it to go away.It’s too late.I stand with a sharp object in my hand.I feel I’ve been crying for years.My face reflects this, swollen and red.As I stand there motionless, I think: why stay?

1/3Lost by Anne-Marie, aged 18, Killarney, May 2004

I’ve hurt so many – even my own flesh and blood.The sky keeps movingI stay locked within the dark circle, and life moves by.I look at the object that lies in my hand.I slowly move it to my heart and press hard.I feel a sharp stinging pain but I continue.I continue to feel the sharp object penetrate my skin.The suddenly I stop. I think: I can’t, I can’t do this.I drop to my knees, open my mouth to screamBut nothing comes out.

2/3

I stay there, tears rolling down my cheeks, and a cleanknife lies by my side.I feel ashamed, yet disappointed.I wonder: why does life have to be so hard?Why do people have to feel so much pain?It’s so unfair, it’s so draining and confusing.I’m tired of fighting; I’m tired of fighting with myselfI just want it to stop.

3/3

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

John Milton1644

F


F

Dear Teacher,

I am a survivor of a concentration camp. My eyes saw what no man should witness:

• Gas chambers built by learned engineers;• Children poisoned by educated physicians;• Infants killed by trained nurses;• Women and babies shot and burned by high school and

college graduates.

So, I am suspicious of education. My request is this: help your students become human. Your efforts must never produce learned monsters, skilled psychopaths, educated Eichmanns. Reading, writing, arithmetic are important only if they serve to make our children more human.

Reproduced from TACADE, 1993

• Upside Down and Inside Out• A possible description of the assumption we

have inherited about systems of learning, namely, that older students should be taken more seriously than younger students and that the only learning that really matters is that which is formal. This presentation will call for these assumptions to be reversed in the light of modern understanding about how humans learn.

F


Guiding Questions

1. How do we create a sense of urgency to move theory around human learning to practice in our classrooms? What overarching structures need to change to facilitate this shift?

2. Paint us a picture of what a classroom that is reflecting this shift would look like. Sound like. For teachers and for students. How do we create such classrooms within our existing structures?

3. What are three things we should consider as we move toward having full-day kindergarten classes in our schools next year?

4. “Is education about content or process?” Could you expand on this idea?

5. How do we nurture the natural stages of development of early learners and adolescents? How can we embrace their appetite for adventure and ensure that we are not inadvertently repressing it at any stage?

Guiding Questions

1. 21st Century Learning became a common buzzword over the last year. How do you define 21st Century Learning? How does technology fit into your definition?

2. Could you expand on your ideas around the following:

“In a phrase, it is the collapse of civil society ... [that requires us to] start a dynamic process through which young people are progressively weaned from their dependence on teachers and institutions...”


‘It’s your world to shape, not just to take’

John AbbottPresident, The 21st Century Learning Initiative


Breakout Groups

1. Preparing young people to think about education in a very different fashion; developing the ability to think, communicate, collaborate and make decisions

2. Preparing ourselves to devise strategies that go with ‘the grain of the brain’; education as the precursor to a functional democracy

3. Building communities that accept responsibility to uses all their resources to support the development of young people; cognitive apprenticeship, and Subsidiarity

4. Helping society in general to understand the need to reverse an upside down and inside-out system of schooling so as to prepare young people more effectively to stand o their own two feet

5. ‘Ill fares the land, where wealth accumulates and men decay’ (Oliver Goldsmith); helping the next generations to live in a post-capitalist society.

Think communicate collaborate make decisions

Both social capital and democracy are slippery concepts. Democracy is particularly fragile and is forever dependent on an educated public being able to hold politicians to account for the small print of their highly-vaunted political promises.

Cognitive Apprenticeship. The development of our exquisite practical and theoretical skills goes right back into the mists of time when our ancestors learnt interactively as they struggled together to achieve common tasks. Through such intellectual processes a pre-disposition for cognitive apprenticeship developed in the human brain.

Learning together within the security of the family, before sharing and testing more complex issues within a larger community is what is most natural to the brain – a progression from emotional to inspirational and on to intellectual development. Cognitive apprenticeship is about making thinking visible. (Modelling, Scaffolding, Fading)

Subsidiarity: it is wrong for a superior body t hold to itself the right to make decisions that an inferior is already able to make for itself. Subsidiarity is not the same as delegation. If, as an adult or an inquisitive young person, you equip yourself to be able to do something, and then you are constantly overruled or micro-managed, you fast lose your motivation as control is taken away from you. Subsidiarity is what adolescents demand if they are eventually to become the functioning adults; deny the this opportunity and they fester.

“The day is not far off when the economic problem will take the back seat where it belongs, and the arena of the heart and the head will be occupied or reoccupied by our real problems — the problems of life and of human relations, of creation and behaviour and religion.”

John Maynard Keynes (1883 – 1946)

Student Conferences BC February 2012 John Abbott, President The 21 st Century Learning Initiative...

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