The 21st Century Learning Initiative
Promoting a Vision, Knowledge, Experience and a Network
What price 'Intelligence'?
Response to Tony Little's book 'An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Education'
This short monograph was written by Neil Richards, a Trustee of the 21st Century Learning Initiative in response to the publication of Tony Little’s book, An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Education.
Battling for the Soul of Education
Moving beyond school reform to educational transformation:
The findings and recommendations of 3 decades of synthesis
Download from battlingforthesoulofeducation.org
Internal and web-based
Occasional Pieces: Teachers Good and Bad
Pupils can often be the best judges of the quality of their teachers – not necessarily immediately for who likes to be told that they are lazy, illogical or downright stupid!. It is only years later that we recall how, in often less than spectacular ways, those people who made us what we are. The […]
Occasional Pieces: Too Busy to Think
We know the feeling far too well; as deadlines press upon us we fail to see a new opportunity until it’s almost slipped away. That makes us nervy. Being nervy the brain ‘down-shifts’ into survival mode, and that makes us focus even more on the immediate task in hand. Especially is this so for people […]
Occasional Pieces: What Schools for What Future?
The question is apparently simple – what are we educating children for? Put figuratively, is it for a future comparable to battery hens, or is it about free-range chickens? If the former, which might seem to give a high return on input/output calculations, then such over-refined children (sorry, chicken!) can’t even stand on their own […]
A Journey Towards an Understanding of Learning: A Headteacher travels with Education 2000 to the 21st Century Learning Initiative
Janet Lawley describes how her work as a Headteacher has intersected with the efforts of Education 2000 and the Initiative over the past decade.
Component 4 : The New Economy’s Impact on Learning
Introduction The last decades of the 20th century saw countries around the world make the dramatic transition from closed, state-dominated, economies towards open, free-market, economies. The British Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, captured the scale of these changes in a speech he gave in the summer of 2000 when he noted, “Over the last […]
A ten point outline of the central issues raised by the 21st Century Learning Initiative in discussions with English political and educational leaders
1) What we mean by learning and the significance of life-long learning. A successful education involves both content and process; these are separate but inevitably connected. As content is more easily assessed it has received more attention than process. Effective learning means making connections between ideas and facts, not simply acquiring pre-digested theories and information. […]
Battery Hens, or Free Range Chickens: What Kind of Education for What Kind of World
The following is a version of the lecture John Abbott gave to the North of England Education Conference in Sunderland on January 7, 1999. This speech is very similar to those he has given recently elsewhere. The boxes represent the slides used during the presentation.
Policy Paper
The Initiative’s Policy Paper from November 1998 is the most detailed description of our work and is necessary reading for anyone interested the ideas and research accumulated by the Initiative. The document is available as a PDF file.
Upside Down and Inside Out: Why good schools alone will never be good enough to meet the needs of the 21st Century
This article written by John Abbott appeared in the January 1998 issue of the House of Commons’ Parliamentary Monitor.
The Synthesis
The Synthesis is based on the materials presented at the six international conferences the Initiative sponsored from 1995 to 1997. The Synthesis provides an overview of the values and main ideas that have been behind all the Initiative’s work.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.