The 21st Century Learning Initiative - Antalya Symposium: Turkish Private Schools Association...

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

Antalya Symposium: Turkish Private Schools AssociationRebuilding the Education System

“Overschooled but Undereducated: the conclusions

of the 21st Century Learning Initiative”

John AbbottPresident of The Initiative

Supporting documentation for this discussion can be downloaded from the Website: www.21learn.org

27th January 2010Antalya, Turkey

merhaba


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From Headmaster to Director of The Education 2000 Trust

...Home

...School

...Communityand technology


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The 21st Century Learning Initiative

The Initiative's essential purpose is to 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.

We believe this will release human potential in ways that nurture and form local democratic communities worldwide, and will help reclaim and sustain a world supportive of human endeavor.


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“...Going with the grain of the brain”

and

“…Adolescence is an opportunity, not a problem”


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This lecture is an English

interpretation of that

opportunity, but does not

represent the recent views

of the British government.


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Up until 1988 England had probably the world’s least centralised education system, but...

“First it was the Conservatives who toldus what to teach, then Labour told us how to teach.”

Since 1988 a micro-managed system.

40% of newly-qualified teachers leave within 3 years, while the average teacher lasts just under 10 years.


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Nationally administered examinations show a continuous improvement in results.

England has some of the best schools in the world, but OECD league tables show that the country has fallen from 4th place in Science to 14th; from 7th place in Literacy to 17th, and 8th place in Mathematics to 24th.

Of the 75,000 children qualifying for free school meals only 189 gained 3 Grade As at Advance Level whereas just one independent school, Eton College, gained 175.


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In the UNICEF Well-being of Children’s Report (2007) the U.K. came bottom out of 22 nations.

Yet England is a prosperous country, for all its problems.

The Spirit Level; Why more equal societies almost always do better (Wilkinson and Pickett, 2009) showed that levels of clinical depression (running at 20-25% per annum) are highest in those countries with the greatest disparity between the income of the rich and the poor.


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Research from the Kellogg Foundation, conducted in the State of Michigan (1997), into the predictors of success at the age of 18…

…compared the relative influence of family, community and other factors upon student performance. Amazingly it concluded that factors outside the school are four times more important in determining a student's success on standardized tests than are factors within the school. The most significant predictor was the quantity and quality of dialogue in the child's home before the age of five.


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Rebuilding

the

Education System

(thoughts to share with the Turkish

Symposium)


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When the Holy One created the first, man, He

took him and led him round all the trees of the

Garden of Eden and said to him:

Behold my works, how beautiful, how

splendid they are. All that I have created, I

created for you. Take care, therefore, that

you do not destroy my world, for if you do,

there will be no one left to repair what you

have destroyed.

MidrashEcclesiastes Rahhah


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A lecture in four parts:

1.How evolution has created the human brain.2.How cultural assumptions have shaped, and reshaped, the way humans learn.3.The conflict between what is good for children, and the demands of a modern economy.4.“Knowing what we now know we no longer have the moral authority to carry on doing what we used to do.”


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MEANDER... To follow a winding course; to wander aimlessly.

A MEANDER (geographic term)... A bend in a winding river, resulting from helicoidal flow.

HELICOIDAL... A movement of water like a corkscrew, eroding from one side, and building up on the other; a natural process of adjusting to constantly changing conditions.

The Danish Nobel winning Physicist, Neils Bohr, understood this as he remonstrated with a PhD student... “You’re not thinking, you’re just being logical”. HELICOIDAL THINKING ... is dynamic; instantly reacting to changing circumstances. Over hundreds of thousands of generations the human brain has come to work in such a natural, dynamic, meandering way.

This lecture will be a “meander”... taking ideas from one place and building them up in another in response to changing circumstances, so creating new meaning.


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The Creation StoryAn ingenious narrative compresses the age of the planet into the six days of the Biblical creation story (David Brower).

In this scenario Earth is created on Sunday at midnight. Life in the form of the first bacterial cells appears on Tuesday morning around 8:00am. For the next two and half days the microcosm evolves, and by Thursday at midnight it is fully established. On Friday around 4:00pm, the microorganisms invent sexual reproduction, and on Saturday, the last day of creation, all the visible forms of life evolve.

Around 1:30am on Saturday the first marine animals are formed, and by 9:30am the first plants come ashore. At 10 minutes before five in the afternoon the great reptiles appear, roam the earth in lush tropical forests for five hours and then suddenly die around 9:45pm.


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Shortly before 10:00pm some tree-dwelling mammals in the tropics evolve into the first primates; an hour later some of those evolve into monkeys. Around 11:40pm the great apes appear.

Eight minutes before midnight the first Southern apes stand up and walk on two legs. The first human species, Homo habilis, appears four minutes before midnight, evolves into Homo erectus half a minute later and into archaic forms Homo sapiens 30 seconds before midnight.

The modern human species finally appears in Africa 11 seconds before midnight, and in Europe five seconds before midnight. Written human history begins around two-thirds of a second before midnight.

Fritjof Capra, The Web of Life, 1996


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The Descent of Man

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. In all that time the genetic structure of humans has come to differ from the Great Apes by less than 2%.

Three hundred and fifty thousand generations is, at a minute a generation, equivalent to the number of minutes we are, on average, awake for in a year.

Before the Dawn: Recovering the lost history of our ancestors. Nicholas Wade


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The 2% difference:

Apes, humans and Boeing 747s


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“Learning about Human Learning” —

— The emergence of a new Synthesis

1) Philosophy, and later pedagogy2) Evolutionary Theory 3) Psychology (Behaviourism) 4) Cognitive Science (Metacognition) 5) Genetics and Neurobiology 6) Evolutionary Psychology 7) Values (philosophy, purpose); Nature

via Nurture


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Our bodies and minds are not of recent origin. They are the direct consequence of millions of years of surviving in Africa and adapting to the dramatic changes this continent has seen in the course of the last five million years. The way we interact today at a social and cultural level is in many ways the result of organisational skills developed by our hominid ancestors in Africa over millions of years.

Cradle of HumankindLee R. Berger South Africa, 2002


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African origins:the Stirkfontein Caves, to the Great

Leap Forward

From 3.5 million years ago to 50,000 years ago


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“You can take Man out of the

Stone Age, but you can’t take

the Stone Age out of Man.”

Harvard Business Review July/August 1998

Evolutionary Intelligence

"Human beings, together with all their likes and dislikes, their senses and sensibilities, did not fall ready-made from the sky; nor were they born with minds and bodies that bare no imprint of the history of their species. Many of our abilities and susceptibilities are specific adaptations to ancient environmental problems, rather than separate manifestations of a general intelligence for all Seasons."

John D. BarrowThe Artful Universe, 1996


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Neural Darwinism

Professor Gerald Edelman of San Diego gained his Nobel

Prize for work on the human immune system in which he

showed that, as a result of chemical interaction in the brain

transmitted genetically from generation to generation, the

human body is born with a vast number of specific

antibodies, each of which has the capacity to recognise and

respond to particular types of harmful viruses.

The immune system doesn’t just build new responses every

time a new threat appears – it simply searches its vast

repertoire of defence mechanisms built up in deep

evolutionary history until it finds an antibody that is

appropriate.


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In 1992 Edelman argued that human learning proceeds in a very similar fashion. Change in the brain occurs solely through the interaction of internal mental processes with those aspects of the environment that attract its attention. In other words the drive comes from within the brain, not outside.

It is rather like the way organisms respond to the rich layered ecology of the jungle environment. What happens in the jungle is the result of natural selection. All trees have the innate capacity to reach the sunlight; those that do so thrive and reproduce – the others simply die.


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Edelman argued that those genetic processes which have evolved since we parted company with the Great Apes, have created a human brain which is fully equipped at birth with the basic sensory and motor components that enable each individual to function successfully in the physical world.

An infant brain doesn’t have to learn how to recognise specific sounds, or the way a string of words forms a sentence, because such basic neural networks are operational at birth. We don’t have to teach a child to walk or talk... as each new challenge presents itself, the brain searches through its enormous repertoire of potential processes for that most suited for the purpose.

Not all individuals read these instructions as effectively as others, so not all adaptations are complete or affective.


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From a biological perspective learning becomes a delicate but powerful dialogue between genetics and the environment. The whole process is dynamic and continuous.

Such a model of our brain is especially intriguing for it suggests that a jungle-like brain might thrive best, not in classrooms designed so that teachers can deliver a specialised segment of a pre-determined curriculum, but by recognising that however good a class or a school may be, it can never be good enough to give children the width of experience and challenge they need to activate their phenomenal learning capabilities.

Our ancestors, after all, came from those jungles, not from something that resembles a shopping mall.


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Nature via Nurture


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"For human beings, nurture is our nature. The

capacity for culture is part of our biology, and the

drive to learn is our most important and central

instinct.

The new developmental research suggests that

our unique evolutionary trick, our central

adaptation, our greatest weapon in the struggle

for survival, is precisely our dazzling ability to

learn when we are babies and to teach when we

are grownups.“

The Scientist in the Crib: Minds, Brains, and How Children Learn , 1999


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Part Two: Culture


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Tell me, and I forget;show me, and I remember;let me do and I understand.

Confucius


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Chatal Hayek, Ur of the Chaldees, Babylonians and the Polynesians


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Ancient Teachers

Plato, the Athenians and the Romans


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Oh God, oh my God, how I suffered! What

torments and humiliations I experienced. I

was told that because I was a mere boy I had

to obey my teachers in everything. I was

sent to school. I did not understand what I

was taught, and was beaten for my

ignorance. I never found out what use my

education was supposed to be.


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“Classes are boring, ‘cos we don’t have to

think about what we are doing. We’re

just told to copy stuff down off the board

or from what the teacher tells us. It

makes us lazy… in fact, sorry to say this,

but it’s you teachers who make us lazy.”

Toronto Canada, August 2006


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I learned most, not fromthose who taught me,but from those who talked with me.


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St. Augustine6th Century


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The Arab World, Science, Mathematics and the Battle of Manzikert (1071)

Renaissance and Reformation

Roger Ascham (1570, The Scholemaster)

(1) “hardwits not quickwits”

(2) “spare the rod” and

(3) “in the attainment of wisdom learning from a book, or from a teacher, is 20 times as effective as learning from experience.”


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John Milton(Puritan philosopher, theologian and

parliamentarian)

“I call a complete and generous

education that which equips a man to

perform justly, skillfully and

magnanimously all the offices public

and private of peace and war” (1644)


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John Milton: the theoretical and the applied

“Though a man should pride himself to have all the

tongues that Babel cleft the world into, yet if he

had not studied solid things in them as well as

words and lexicons he were nothing so much to

be esteemed a learned man as any yeoman or

tradesman.”


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By the early 18th century England had developed a

robust tradition of making things well. It was this

practical creativity that was the greatest asset

England had ever possessed. No society in history had

ever reinvented itself so quickly, or so often, as did

England. Here was the finest balance between the

evolution of the internal mechanisms of the brain and

a manageable, but always challenging environment.

People had to act intelligently in everything that they

did, and the rewards were enormous.


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During the Industrial Revolution the English

became so busy making money that many of

their schools collapsed and, as mass

manufacturing techniques improved, so

unfortunately apprenticeships collapsed.

Charity elementary education was eventually

provided for the poor, and secondary

education (Public Schools) for the elite.

The collapse of the unity of thinking and doing.


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Adolescence – a return

to the biology of the brain

The findings of functional Magnetic

Resonance Imaging show the extraordinary

change in the adolescent brain from the

clone-like learning of prepubescent children,

to young people who can think for

themselves.


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Why is Hard Work Attractive?

“The reason does not seem to be that we are brainwashed as children or socialised into enjoying difficult things. It is more likely that we were born with a preference for acting at our fullest potential. Perhaps enjoying mastery and confidence is evolutionarily adaptive, just as it is adaptive to find pleasure in food and sex. In the development of the human nervous system a connection must have been established between hard work and a sense of pleasure even when the work was not strictly necessary. It is this connection that makes creativity and progress possible."

Becoming Adult; Csikszentmihalyi and Schneider, 2000


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Two of Csikszentmihalyi and Schneider findings are highly pertinent:


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•Students who get the most out of school - and have the highest future expectations – are those who find school more playlike than worklike.

•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.

Flow, a term coined by psychologists to

describe that stage in the adolescent brain

when emotional and intellectual interest in a

topic combine in an extraordinary way to send

the learner into a kind of ‘fifth gear’ or

overdrive; a physiological change enables the

brain to work harder but, by using less oxygen,

achieve much more.


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“Daily experience shows that it is energetic

individualism which produces the most powerful

effects upon the life and action of others, and really

constitutes the best practical education. Schools,

academies and colleges, give but the merest

beginnings of culture in comparison with it. Far more

influential is the life-education daily given in our

homes, in the streets, behind counters, in workshops,

at the loom and the plough, in counting-houses and

manufactories, and in the busy haunts of men”.

Self-Help, 1859


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Gumption

• A willingness to break the rules, not because entrepreneurs are anarchists but because they feel the old rules no longer work well enough

• Single-mindedness: this is often difficult for parents and teachers to tolerate, but it's the key to how children develop expertise.

• Self-confidence: when children feel that they have become experts they then have the confidence to take risks.


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Part 3: Conflict; what is good

for children isn’t necessarily

good for the economy


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Tell me, and I forget;

show me, and I remember;

let me do and I understand.

Confucius

Apprenticeship was an education for an

intelligent way of life, a process by which

important practical information was passed

from one generation to the next. It was a

mechanism by which youths could model

themselves on socially approved adults, so

providing a safe passage from childhood to

adulthood in psychological, social and

economic ways.


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The Coming of the Factory System

While Adam Smith advocated in The Wealth of

Nations the development of industrial processes for

manufacturing he was fearful that, should this

happen, the earlier “alert intelligence of the

craftsman” would be replaced by factory operatives

who would be “generally as stupid and ignorant as it

is possible for a human creature to become.” In

other words, industrialisation would dumb people

down. Here was social meltdown on a scale never

before experienced or anticipated.


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Frederic Winslow Taylor

“the Father of Scientific Management”

"The primary, if not the only, goal of human labor and thought is efficiency; that technical calculation is in all respects superior to human judgement; that in fact human judgement can not be trusted, because it is plagued by laxity, ambiguity, and unnecessary complexity; that subjectivity is an obstacle to clear thinking; and what cannot be measured either does not exist or is of no value; and that the affairs of citizens are best guided and conducted by experts.”

The Principles of Scientific Management, 1911The 21st Century Learning Initiative -

www.21learn.org56

Scientific Management in the Classroom

The influence of Taylor rapidly extended to the American school system where Henry Pritchett claimed that a primary aim of education should be to prepare workers for their place in a manufacturing economy. In the United States the rhetoric of education reform shifted from the emphasis on preparing citizens for democracy, to showing that it was “more and more necessary that every human being should become an effective, economic unit. What is needed is an education system that is carefully adapted to the needs of the economy and prepare people to fit efficiently into the varying positions within a stratified, occupational structure.”


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The Faustian Bargain

"You do it my way, by my standards, at the

speed I mandate, and in so doing achieve

a level of output I ordain, and I'll pay you

handsomely for it, beyond anything you

might have imagined. All you have to do is

take orders, and give up your way of doing

the job for mine”, said F. W. Taylor.


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Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered

"Soul destroying, meaningless, mechanical, monotonous,

moronic work is an insult to human nature which must

necessarily and inevitably produce either escapism or

aggression, and that no amount of "bread and circuses" can

compensate for the damage done.

These are facts that are neither denied nor acknowledged,

but are met with an unbreakable conspiracy of silence -

because to deny them would be too obviously absurd, and to

acknowledge them would condemn the central

preoccupation of modem society as a crime against

humanity.“E.F.Schumacher, 1973


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“We are not blind! We are men and women

with eyes and brains ... and we don’t have to

be driven hither and thither by the blind

workings of The Market, or of History, or of

Progress, or of any other abstraction.”

(Schumacher)

(Are we really using our eyes and brains,

or are we pretending to be blind?)


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"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 for a teacher-

proof system of organising schools - that way we

can get a uniform standard."

Verbatim report of conclusions of presentationmade to the Prime Minister’s Policy Unit, Westminster

March 1996


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Democracy is the least imperfect way so far devised for

reaching decisions that concern the whole of society.

Democracy is also a fragile concept.

Critically the mass of the people must possess what the

ancient Greeks called “nous”, something today we would

describe as “applied commonsense”.

If the decisions to be made by the people’s representatives

are to be more than responses to whoever shouts loudest,

then the electorate need an education in their youth that

unites thinking with doing, the logical with the intuitive,

and which recognises the ongoing conflicts between a

private gain, and a public good.


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Part 4: “Knowing what we now

know we no longer have the moral

authority to carry on doing what we

have always done.”


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“Without knowledge and learning for its

own sake, humanity will deteriorate, and

will eventually create a species with high

practical capacity, perhaps, but with no

ability to think deeply and highly. The

superiority of the human species is in

their capacity for pure thought”.Halide Edip Adivar

Robert College Graduation Ceremony, 1940


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The Here and Now

"The mood of Western civilisation is Abrahamic; may we take this land that God has provided and let it drip milk and honey into our mouths for ever. Now more than six billion people fill the world. The great majority are very poor; nearly one billion exist on the edge of starvation… half of the great tropical forests have been cleared. Species of plants and animals are disappearing a hundred or more times faster than before the coming of humanity.

An Armageddon is approaching, but it's not the cosmic war and fiery collapse foretold in sacred scripture. It is the wreckage of the planet by an exuberantly plentiful and ingenious humanity… a global land ethic is urgently needed. Surely our stewardship is the only hope? We will be wise to listen carefully to the heart, then act with rational intention and all the tools we can gather and bring to bear.

E. O. Wilson, 2002


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“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 Wright

A Short History of Progress 2004

The most crucial location in space and time (apart

from the big bang itself) could be here and now. I

think the odds are no better than fifty-fifty that our

present civilisation on Earth will survive to the end

of the present century… What happens here on

Earth, in this century, could conceivably make the

difference between a near eternity filled with ever

more complex and subtle forms of life and one

filled with nothing but base matter.

Sir Martin Rees, President of the Royal Society 2003


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"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.“Dr Rolando Jubis, Jakarta, 2000


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John Milton

“I call a complete and generous education

that which equips a man to perform justly,

skillfully and magnanimously all the offices

public and private of peace and war”


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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.


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The Growth of the Mind, and the Endangered Nature of Intelligence

The assumption that there will be enough

reflective adults to maintain a free society is not

to be taken for granted. If the supposition I have

set forth in this book is true — that emotional

experience is in fact the basis of the mind's

growth — then the spreading impersonality and

family stress that pervade our society may well

be threatening mental development in a

significant number of individuals.

Stanley Greenspan, 1997


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So, 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.

The challenge now is for communities to begin building new organisations for learning that handle both the skills of the past and enable the understanding and coordination of constant change, life-long learning, diversity and complexity so as to prepare young people to participate in a vibrant and democratic civil society.


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Home, School and Community

"No curricular overhaul, no instructional innovation, no change in school organization, no toughening of standards, no rethinking of teacher training or compensation will succeed if students do not come to school interested in, and committed to, learning...

We need to look, not simply at what goes on inside the classroom, but at students' lives outside the school's walls."

Laurence Steinberg, 1997


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The Need for Exceptional Teachers

“If the dynamics of the system are too chaotic,

no learning occurs because there is not enough

stability to conserve information. If the dynamics

are too static, no learning occurs because no

change occurs in response to new information.”

The notion of learning at the “edge of chaos”

fits well with what learning theory tells us about

the conditions that maximize human learning.”

Stuart Kauffman, The Origins of Order


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If all this frightens you, remember Sir Martin

Rees:

“I think the odds are no better than 50/50 that our

present civilisation on earth will survive to the end of

the present century.”

If there is any chance that he is right, what skills will

the children in today’s Turkish schools need?


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So remember this:

We have not inherited this world

from our parents. We have been

loaned it by our children.Native American Tradition


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And recognise this:

There aren’t any great people out

there anymore — there’s only us.


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Over to you


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Teşekkürler ederim


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For further information:

[email protected]

Website: www.21learn.org

Email: [email protected]

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Fax: +44 (0) 1225 339133

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