At recent conferences I had promised to put up a fuller Bibliography for people wishing to pursue further the issues raised in presentations. To publish such a list in itself is not difficult; I do this below, and have double-asterisked what I think could be the twenty most useful books to read.

But simply to leave it at this is not sufficient for those of you determined to so understand all this that you yourselves can make the case that (a) the whole purpose of education is give the learner the confidence not to remain dependent on teachers, (b) the present structure of schooling is upside-down inside-out, and (c) that the very nature of the curriculum in Western education has recently evolved primarily to enable young people to fit into a consumerist approach to life, rather than equipping them to develop an approach to their own lives which would lead to personal, global and ecological sustainability.
In 1994 Education 2000 published a booklet entitled “Learning Makes Sense; recreating education for a changing world”. This was the first attempt by the predecessor of the Initiative to show how economic, social and biomedical issues come together. A year later the 21st Century Learning Initiative was established and in 1996 we published what was ambitiously called “The Synthesis”. It was a bold attempt to do what I subsequently do in my lectures — namely to make as coherent a synthesis of all the recent writings on how the brain learns, and how humans function, as a group of some sixty people working over a year, could produce. Although it is now more than ten years old it is still worthwhile reading, especially for those new to all this material. It is available on this website as a PDF file.

Nearly four years later we produced a paper more related to the implications of this for formal schooling. This useful document — “The Policy Paper” — is also available as a PDF document on this website. Now, in 2007, it is still widely referred to by groups worldwide.

About the same time, responding to the comments often made at conferences — “This is particularly useful because you make things all the more understandable by setting them in terms of your own life experience” — I wrote “The Child is Father of the Man; How humans learn and why”. The aim of this was not so much to flood the world with my own experience, as to help readers appreciate that they probably each had life stories of their own to tell that would illuminate the way they were trying to explain the theory. That book, which has now sold more than 10,000 copies, is still available from the Initiative office in Bath for £15 inclusive of post and packaging.

A year later I and my colleague Terry Ryan wrote “The Unfinished Revolution; Learning, human behaviour, community and political paradox” as an attempt to draw all this together. Teachers and administrators have found this very useful. It is a serious read; it is challenging of much of what we currently take for granted, and makes excellent follow-up reading to a lecture. That is also available from the Initiative for £15 while in the United States and Canada it can be purchased from the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD) priced $25.95, and in Australia from Hawker Browlow Education (www.hbe.com.au).

In late 2001 I started to write a book aimed at making it easier for the general public to appreciate all these issues. As it grew it became an ever more ambitious attempt to combine theory and practice in a user-friendly way. It was entitled “Master and Apprentice; Reuniting thinking with doing”. Just as it was finished the potential publisher was taken over by another company. In seeking a new publisher I was persuaded to rewrite all this material, modelled on Martin Luther’s Ninety-five Theses of 1517. This became known as “Towards Finding a New Order in Education”. Eighteen months later, in the summer of 2006, this was finished. While many people thought that I should have persevered and gone ahead with the publication of “Master and Apprentice” in 2004, the later book “Towards Finding a New Order in Education”, is, at 100,000 words, more concise, and of more immediate use to current practitioners. Both of these are available, as extended PDF files, on application to the website organiser at this address. (This is necessary to do it in this fashion for copyright purposes).

However, neither book, as yet, does what I believe is really essential — produce a book that would appeal both to the general and the academic reader. That is the market I’m determined we should reach. It’s not a market which is at all well defined. Hardly ever has a book on education made it to the “best seller” section of a book store.

Consequently, I have recently (March 2007) set about distilling all this into a much shorter (and hopefully highly useable) book of 60,000 words which I hope will be published before the end of the year. This is to be entitled “What is wrong with Education: A guide for the perplexed”.

Into these three books has been put all the experiences of the Trust over a very full and exciting five years (much of which is contained in the various articles also to be found on this website). However only when this, my third attempt, is published will the Initiative have a book that is able to quickly guide readers in how to make full sense of the expanded bibliography, which in itself remains a distillation of the 6,000 books the Initiative has accumulated over the past twenty years.

In addition to the publication of this new book, an important further development of the Trust’s work will occur later this year (2007) when the Canadian 21st Century Learning Initiative, as supported by the Canadian Council for Learning, will set up a properly structured electronic, distance-learning website to be entitled “Responsible Subversives — Why Education isn’t Working; A guide for the perplexed”. This is a massive undertaking, well able to deal with the complexities of the user demand that we are aware is waiting to be satisfied. It will eventually contain direct tutorial support for those people beginning to take a serious interest in these affairs.

Until finally the book is published, and secondly the Responsible Subversives website is functioning, the Initiative will have to leave it to the individual reader to find their own way through this rich array of resources.

**Abbott, J. and Ryan, T., The Unfinished Revolution: Learning, human behaviour, community and political paradox (Network Education Press, 2000, 1855390671)

Abbott, J., The Child is Father of the Man: How humans learn and why (The 21st Century Learning Initiative, 1999, 953716805)

Abbott, J., Learning Makes Sense, Recreating education for a changing world (Education 2000, 1994, 952444305)

Ackerman, Diane, Deep Play (Random House 1999, 0679448799)

Ainley, Patrick and Rainbird, Helen, Apprenticeship: Towards a new paradigm of learning (Cogan Page, 1999, 0749427280)

Badcock, Christopher, Evolutionary Psychology: A Critical Introduction (Polity, 2000, 745622054)

Barnet, Anne and Barnet, Richard, The Youngest Minds: Parenting and Genes in the development of intellect and emotions (Simon & Schuster, 1998, 0684815370)

Baron-Cohen, Simon, The Essential Difference: Men, Women and the Extreme Male Brain (Allen Lane, 2003, 0713996714)

*Barrow, John D. The Artful Universe, Clarendon Press (Oxford, 1995, 0198539967)

Barrow, John D. The Infinite Book: A Short Guide to the Boundless, Timeless, Endless (2005)

**Bereiter & Scardamalia, Surpassing Ourselves; An inquiry into the nature and implications of expertise (Open Court, 1993, 812692047)

Berger, Lee, In the Footsteps of Eve: The mystery of human origins (National Geographic Society, 2000, 0792276825)

Blum, Deborah, Sex on the Brain: The biological difference between men and women (Viking, 1997, 0670868884)

**Bogin, Barry, The Growth of Humanity (Wiley-Liss, 2001)

Bolby, John, Attachment (Basic Books, 1969, 0465005438)

Boyer, Pascal, Religion Explained: The human instincts that fashion Gods Spirits and Ancestors (Heinemann, 2001, 0434008435)

Brooks, Libby, The Story of Childhood; Growing up in modern Britain (Bloomsbury, 2006, 13978074758431)

Bruer, John T., Schools for Thought; The science of learning in the classroom (MIT Press, 1993, 262023520)

Bunting, Madeleine, Willing Slaves: How the overwork culture is ruling our lives (Harper Collins, 2004, 7163711)

Buss, David M., The Dangerous Passion, Why jealousy is as necessary as love or sex (Bloomsbury, 2000, 747539154)

**Caine, R. N. and G., Making Connections; Teaching the Human Brain (ASCD, 1991)

Calvin, W. H., How Brains Think: Evolving intelligence, Then and Now (Basic Books, 1996, 0465072771)

Campbell, Anne, A Mind of Her Own: The evolutionary psychology of women (Oxford University Press, 2002, 0198504985)

**Capra, Fritjof, The Hidden Connections; A science for sustainable living (Harper Collins, 2001, 0002570475)

*Capra, Fritjof, The Web of Life: a new scientific understanding of living systems, (Doubleday 1996, 0385476752)

*Csikszentmihalyi, Mikhaily, Becoming Adult; How teenagers prepare for the world of work (Perseus Books, 2000)

**Csikszentmihalyi, Mikhaily, Being Adolescent; Conflict and growth in the teenage years (Basic Books, 1984, 465006469)

Csikszentmihalyi, Mikhaily, Flow: The psychology of optimal experience (Harper Perennial, 1990, 0060920432)

*Cunningham, Hugh, The Invention of Childhood (BBC, 2006, 9780563493907)

**Currie, Elliott, Road to Whatever, The; Middle-class culture and the crisis of adolescence (Metropolitan Books, 2004, 139780805067637)

Diamond, Jared, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (Viking, 2005, 0670033375)

**Diamond, Marion, Magic Trees of the Mind; How to nurture your child's intelligence, creativity and healthy emotions (Dutton, 1998, 525943080)

Dworkin, R. W., Artificial Happiness; The dark side of the new happy class (Carroll & Graft, New York, 2006)

Easterbrook, Gregg, The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets better while People feel Worse (2003)

Eccles, John C., Evolution of the Brain: Creation of the Self (Routledge, 1991, 041503224)

Ehrilich, Paul R., Human Natures: Genes, Cultures and Human Prospect (Shearwater, 2000, 155963779X)

**Elliot, Lise, What's Going On in There; How the brain and mind develop in the first five years of life (Penguin Press, 1999, 713992913)

Etcoff, Nancy, Survival of the Prettiest: The Science of Beauty (Little Brown, 1999, 0316643718)

Farnhan-Diggory, Sylvia, Schooling (The Developing Child) (Harvard, 1990, 674792718)

*Gardner, Howard, Unschooled Mind, The; How children think and how schools should teach (Basic Books, 1993, 465088953)

Gluckman, Peter and Hanson, Mark, Mismatch, Why our world no longer fits our bodies (Oxford University Press, 2006, 0192806831)

**Goleman, Daniel, Emotional Intelligence: Why it can matter more than I.Q. (Bloomsbury, 1996, 747528306)

**Gopnik, Allison, The Scientist in the Crib: Minds, brains, and how children learn (William Morrow & Co., 1999, 0688159885)

*Gore, Al, An Inconvenient Truth; The planetary emergence of global warming and what we can do about it (Rodale, 2006, 139781594865671)

**Greenspan, Stanley, The Growth of the Mind; And the endangered nature of intelligence (Addison-Wesley, 1997, 201483025)

Hamilton, Clive, Growth Fetish (2003)

Harris, Judith Rich, The Nurture Assumption; Why children turn out the way they do (Bloomsbury, 1998, 747548943)

Hart, Betty, Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children (Brookes, 1995, 1557661979)

Hauser, Marc D., Moral Minds; How nature designed our universal sense of right and wrong (Harper Collins, 2006, 60780703)

**Hersch, Patricia, A Tribe Apart (Fawcett Columbine, 1998, 449907678)

**Hine, Thomas, The Rise and Fall of the American Teenager (Avon Books, 1999, 380973588)

Holloway, Richard, Doubts and Loves;: What is left of Christianity (Canongate, 2001, 184195179X)
Jacobs, Jane, Dark Age Ahead (2004)

**James, Oliver, Affluenza; How to be successful and stay sane (Vermilion, 97800911900106)

Jamison, Kay Redfield, Exuberance: The Passion for Life 2004

Jolly, Allison, Lucy's Legacy; Sex and intelligence in human evolution (Harvard, 1999, 674000692)

Karr-Morse, R., Ghosts from the Nursery; Tracing the roots of violence (Atlantic Monthly Press, NY, 1997, 871137038)

Kohn, Alfie, Punished by Rewards: The trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A’s, Praise and other bribes (Houghton Mifflin, 1993, 0395650288)

*Kohn, Alfie, The Homework Myth; Why our kids get too much of a bad thing (Perseus Books, 2006)

Laszlo, Ervin, The Whispering Pond: A personal guide to the emerging vision of science (Element, 1996, 1852308990)

**Leach, Penelope, Children First; What Our Society Must Do - and is Not Doing - For Our Children Today (Alfred Knopf, 1994, 679421335)

LeDoux, Joseph, The Emotional Brain: The mysterious underpinnings of emotional life (Simon & Schuster, 1996, 0684803828)

Lewis, Stephen, Race Against Time (Anansi Books, 2005, 887847331)

*Lovelock, James, The Revenge of Gaia: Why the Earth is Fighting Back – and how we can still save humanity (Allen Lane, 2006, 139780713999143)

Low, Bobbi, Why Sex Matters: A Darwinian look at human behaviour (Princeton University Press, 2000, 0691028958)

McGrath, Alistair, Dawkins’ God: Genes memes and the meaning of life (Blackwell Publishing, 2005, 139781405125390)

McNeil, Daniel, The Face (Little Brown, 1998, 0316588032)

*Meier, Deborah, In Schools We Trust: Creating communities of learning in an era of testing and standardisation (Deacon Press, Boston, 2002, 807031429)

*Miller, Geoffrey, The Mating Mind: How sexual choice shaped the evolution of human nature (William Heinemann, 2000, 0434007412)

*Miles, Rosalind, The Children We Deserve; Love and hate and the making of the family (Harper Collins, 2004, 2550253)

Mithen, Stephen, Prehistory of the Mind, The; The cognitive origins of art, religion and science (Thames & Hudson, 1996, 500050813)

*Mithen, Stephen, The Singing Neanderthals: The origins of music, language, mind and body (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2005, 139780297643173)

National Research Council, How People Learn: Brain, mind, experience and school (National Academy Press, 1999, 0309065577)

Olson, Steve, Mapping Human History: Genes, Race and our common Origins (Houghton Mifflin, 2003, 0618091572)

*Palmer, Parker J., The Courage to Teach: Exploring the inner landscape of a Teacher’s Life (Jossey-Bass, 1998, 0787910589)

Palmer, Sue, Toxic Childhood; How the modern world is damaging our children and what we can do about it (Orion Books, 2006)

*Perkins, David, Outsmarting I.Q.; The emerging science of learnable intelligence (Simon & Schuster, 1995, 29252121)

Pinker, Stephen, How the Mind Works (William Norton, 1997, 0393045458)

Pinker, Stephen, The Language Instinct: The new Science of Language and Mind (Allen Lane, 1994, 0713990996)

Plotkin, Henry, Evolution in Mind (The Penguin Press, 1997, 713991380)

**Pool, Robert, Eve’s Rib: Searching for the biological roots of sex differences (Crown Publishers, 1994, 0517592983)

Postman, Neil, Amusing Ourselves To Death (Methuen, 1985, 413404404)

Postman, Neil, Building a Bridge to the 18th Century; How the past can improve the future (Vintage Books, 1999, 375701273)

*Postman, Neil, Teaching as a Subversive Activity (Penguin Books, 1969)

Postman, Neil, The End of Education, Redefining the value of school (Alfred Knopf, 1995, 679430067)

Putnam, Robert D., Bowling Alone; The collapse and revival of American community (Simon & Schuster; 2000, 684832836)

*Ridley, Nat, Nature via Nurture, Genes Experience and what makes us Human (Fourth Estate, 2003, 1841157457)

Ridley, Nat, The Origins of Virtue (Viking, 1996, 0670863572)

Robinson, Ken, Out of Our Minds: Learning to be creative (Capstone, 2001, 1841121258)

Rose, Steven, The 21st Century Brain: Explaining, Mending and Manipulating the Mind (2005)

*Sacks, Peter, Standardized Minds, The high price of America’s testing culture and what we can do to change it (Perseus Books, 1999, 0738202436)

Sax, Leonard, Why Gender Matters: What parents and teachers need to know about the emerging science of sex differences (Doubleday, 2005, 038551073X)

Schor, Juliet, Born to Buy: The Commercialised Child and the New Consumer Culture, Scribner (2004, 068487055X)

Schwartz, Geoffrey and Begley, Sharon, The Mind and the Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force (Harper Collins, 2002, 0060393556)

Shlain, Leonard, The Alphabet verses the Goddess: The conflict between word and image (Viking, 1998, 0670878839)

*Singe, Peter, The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of a learning organisation (Doubleday, 1990, 0385260946)

Small, Meredith F., Our Babies, Ourselves: How biology and culture shape the way we parent (Anchor Books, 1998, 0385482574)

**Strauch, Barbara, The Primal Teen; What new discoveries about the teenage brain tell us about our kids (Doubleday, 2003)

Tapscot, Don, Growing Up Digital: The rise of the net generation (McGraw-Hill, 1998, 0070633614)

**Tattersall, Ian, Becoming Human, Evolution and Human Uniqueness (Harcourt Brace, 1998, 0151003408)

Taylor, Laurie and Taylor, Matthew, What are Children for? (Short Books, 2003, 1904095259)

**Wade, Nicholas, Before the Dawn; Recovering the lost history of our ancestors (Penguin Press, 2006, 1594200793)

Waldrop, Mitchell, Complexity; The emerging science at the edge of order and chaos (Simon & Schuster, 1992, 671767895)

**Wells, Spencer, The Journey of Man (Random House, 2002)

Wente, Margaret, An Accidental Canadian (2004)

Wheatley, Margaret J., Leadership and the New Science: learning about organisation from an ordinary world (Berrett-Koehler, 1992, 1881052443)

Wills, Christopher, The Runaway Brain: The Evolution of Human Uniqueness (Harper Collins, 1994, 0002552752)

Wilson, Edward O., Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (Alfred Knoph, 1998, 0679450777)

*Wilson, Edward O., The Future of Life (Little Brown, 2002, 0316648531)

Wilson, Frank R., The Hand: How its use shapes the brain, language and human culture (Random House, 1998, 0679412492)

Winston, Robert, Human Instinct; How our Primeval Impulses shape our modern lives (Bantam Press, 2002, 059305024X)

Winston, Robert, The Human Mind and How to Make the Most of It (Bantam Press, 2003, 0593052102)

**Wright, Ronald, A Short History of Progress (Canongate, 2004)

Wyller, Arne, The Planetary Mind (MacMurray & Beck, 1996, 1878448641)

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21st Century Learning Initiative

http://www.21learn.org

mail@21learn.org