| 
Readers
of recent progress reports will know of the efforts the Trust has made
to move the Initiative from an extended form of ‘virtual’
organisation, existing both on the website and through literally hundreds
of lectures and training programmes, to something of an Institute with
a real physical presence. An actual place to which the very many thousands
of people who follow our work so closely could actually visit, study the
Initiative’s papers, prepare their own presentations, browse through
our library of more than 5000 books, meet and talk with other people,
and generally learn how they can better perform their leadership role
of being “responsible subversives”. The search for a suitable
partner in this work has taken us down a number of interesting avenues
– with two universalities, with an Order of nuns, and with another
research centre in the west of Ireland, but for various reasons each of
these has failed to materialise.
At a recent meeting of the Initiative’s trustees in London it was
decided that no more time should be spent looking for a partner, but rather
that we should go ahead on our own. This is a considerable act of faith
since, while we have the basic funds to meet the cost of leasing a property,
we have now to move forward and mount a significant fund-raising effort
to enable us to develop these facilities to the full. Within a few weeks
of now (mid-June) we hope to be able to announce that we’ve procured
the lease of a significant suite of offices in the middle of the old Roman
city of Bath in the west of England, a World Heritage site with some of
the world’s most spectacular Georgian buildings.
The accommodation will enable us to consolidate the present three parts
of the Initiative’s operations – Letchworth in Hertfordshire,
England, Washington DC and Virginia, and the President’s own office
which is already in Bath. The facility will contain, in addition to offices,
two rooms set aside as libraries, and two more rooms for private study
and discussion. For the first time in several years the Initiative’s
very extensive facilities will be open for public use.
Not until all the legal issues have been completed will we be able to
announce the location, but as soon as this can be made known, it will
be announced on this website.
Following this progress report is an Executive Summary of the Development
Proposal. From this it will be seen that we will shortly be seeking a
capital sum of £350,000, whilst also seeking to collect a further
£1m to eventually enable us to purchase our own property.
At an early stage the Initiative will be seeking to appoint a fulltime
Office manager / Research Assistant to the President. As soon as sufficient
further funds become available we will be looking for a person to develop
the trust’s resources in ways that help to generate further income.
Following that, we will be looking for a research assistant, a website,
manager, a second secretary and hopefully will have the facility also
for one or two interns.
Immediately the president, John Abbott, would welcome suggestions of possible
sponsors or donors. Please do act on this if you can.
Other
news. The Initiative is two thirds of the way through a most significant
training programme for the Head teachers of Birmingham, and hopes shortly
to be starting further such programmes in two other English cities. In
September there is to be a two-week tour of Canada, with programmes set
up in 4 or 5 separate locations. During the autumn further training programmes
will be run in Nigeria and probably in the Caribbean. There will be follow-ups
to conferences conducted earlier this year in Japan and Australia, and
in July John Abbott will be addressing the annual conference of the North
American section of the International Baccalaureate. Several other courses
will follow in Canada later in the year, and into early 2005. The extensive
range of lectures in Britain continues all the time.
Perhaps the biggest input of energy over the past 18 months has been on
John Abbott’s third book, which it is hoped will be published before
Christmas. Originally entitled Both Sides of the Coin: reuniting thinking
with doing, it has now been re-titled Master and Apprentice:
reuniting thinking with doing. It is a major work that incorporates
all the issues the Initiative has worked on over the past 5 years, as
well as material from the two earlier books. Currently an early draft
of the book can be downloaded from the website on a PDF file. Shortly
this will be replaced with the soon to be printed text. Its publication
should be most timely. In England, as in many other countries, there is
an ever increasing weariness with government imposed top down programmes,
which now seem to be delivering ever fewer “improvements”
for an even greater investment. One day, soon, it has to be realised that
the best investment that can ever be made in education is to train teachers
so well that they can decide what is the best way of developing teaching
programmes that work best for their children. As with all of us –
teachers, students, pupils, responsible members of community – when
we feel we’re in charge and are being respected, we have an amazing
array of ways of working things through for ourselves.
Can I draw your attention to several other things recently placed on this
website?
There’s a most interesting
review of the recently published book Growth Fetish that I warmly
commend. It can be found next to that other review of earlier this year
on The Dignity of
Difference. I would also suggest reading the paper prepared in
March for a conference on Adolescence held in British Columbia entitled
Lieutenant Peter Puget,
the brain of the brain and modern society’s failure to understand
adolescence. There is also an updated recommended Reading List
that is to be found here.
The next immediate step will be the publishing of the Initiative’s
complete set of some 600 slides, produced in a way that should make it
easy for people to download the appropriate slides as needed. When work
on this has been completed there will be a notice on this site. In future,
after each lecture, a list of all slides used will be posted on the site.
We hope shortly to publish two reviews of the new book Master and Apprentice,
one from Wales and one from Bali in Indonesia. We will also publish the
Postscript to the book as a piece that well sets the future thinking of
the Initiative.
John
Abbott
June 2004
Executive
Summary of the Development Proposal for The 21st Century Learning Initiative
The
21st Century Learning Initiative was established in 1995 to improve the
quality of young people’s learning through the better use of the
most recent research into how the brain works, how humans learn, and how
the brain is influenced by its environment. It is a transnational organisation
that owes its origins to the English not-for-profit Education 2000 Trust
(formed in 1983), the trustees of which were concerned that “the
present structures and methods of education are not responding to the
current and further rates of social and technological change”.
Between 1985 and the early 1990s the Trust pioneered the introduction
of computers into English secondary schools (at a rate of 1 to every 7
pupils when the national average was worse than 1 to 100). It pioneered,
through non-simultaneous electronic conferencing, what 4 years later was
to be provided by the Internet; it set up community support groups for
schools, and developed radical new ways of providing teacher development
programmes. The Trust was so far in advance of its time that there were
no government grants available, and so the trustees at the time supported
this entirely through private fundraising of some £9m over ten years.
All these ideas have since won such approval that they have become part
of government policy. However there is one critical exception to all this,
one thing that government has not picked up on, and it is so radical that
it undermines the real potential of those things that have now become
such a part of government education strategy.
And it is this. Every component of the Trust’s initial programme
was seen as a means towards weaning young people of their dependence on
institutional instruction, and giving them the confidence to find their
own solutions to problems that they saw as their personal responsibility
to solve. From the start the Trust, and more recently the Initiative,
has seen increasing evidence from the research it has undertaken to challenge
the current resource distribution in schools - whereby 18 year olds are
capitalised far higher than 12 year olds and 12 year olds more generously
than 5 year olds - as being ‘upside down’ and in government’s
excessive interest in what happens inside school, and not enough in the
community, as ‘inside out’. This perpetuates the English tradition
of over-teaching and the continuous preparation for exams. This has got
worse in recent years, so much so that pupils see themselves as being
under instruction right up to the age of 18 and not expecting to have
any creative role in their own learning. It is sobering that Britain has
the fourth highest level of 17 year olds dropping out of education amongst
all the industrialised countries.
This, the Initiative believes, is a disaster. It need not happen. During
the four years the Initiative was based in Washington DC it collected
an impressive armoury of research findings. In the year 2000 the Trust
published its first two books setting out how all this could be changed;
these books together have now sold some 16,000 copies. Working with only
a limited resource base over the past 4 years, the Initiative has been
amazingly successful in building up a much used website of all this material;
in delivering 4, 6 and 7-day training programmes; and delivering nearly
a hundred lectures a year around the British Isles, including more than
half this country’s Local Education Authorities (LEAs), and as far
afield as Australia, Japan and North America.
It is now time to extend this work by training sufficient knowledgeable
people able to explain the research and demonstrate its application in
a variety of situations, in ways that could eventually be used to shape
government policies. During the autumn of 2004 the various parts of the
Initiative will be centred on Bath, England, where sufficient space will
be available for the Initiative’s resources to generate income through
further training and research opportunities. To enable the high quality
staff to be appointed, and library and research papers to be accumulated,
the Trust needs to generate a capital sum of £350,000 and a building
fund of £1m, and to this end has produced a development plan.
John
Abbott
June 2004
__________________________
21st
Century Learning Initiative
http://www.21learn.org
mail@21learn.org
|
