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
Folder 3: 1993 – 1994
Learning Makes Sense through to the central thesis
Over the course of many lectures given between 1993 and 1994, the conflict between what Education 2000 was recommending, and the increasing pressure to work to the prescriptive requirements of the National Curriculum, encouraged the Trust to define learning as … “a reflective activity which enables the learner to draw upon previous experience to understand and evaluate the present, so as to shape future action and formulate new knowledge”.
A major presentation to the American Association for the Advancement of Science
Presentation on the changing relationship of home-based learning to class room instruction
The Central Thesis
Contrary to many a childhood memory, learning is not an alien activity which has to be imposed on humans; rather it is a set of instincts and predispositions as fundamental to the human condition as sex or survival.
A Report from 1995
A 1995 Report
The Initiative’s ‘New Synthesis of Effective Learning’
Based on diverse research in cognitive and neurological science available in the mid-90s
Dr Edelman’s Brain, by Dr Steven Levy, The New Yorker, May 1994
Fascinating, and Gerald Edelman’s first reference to Neural Darwinism
Learning Makes Sense
Our first publication, see enthusiastic review from the Sunday Telegraph
Some Recent Developments in Cognitive Science
While all children need both a body of knowledge and some basic skills to enable them to be functionally literate, a rapidly changing society demands that young people be able to rise above such rote, factual levels to think critically, and creatively; to be flexible, and spontaneously to be able to solve ill structured, ambiguous problems in areas in which they have little first hand information.
The Impact of Brain Research on Possible Structures of Learning
An incomplete, but most interesting paper, challenging the structure of schooling
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