Note: the ideas in this speech are developed much further in the Initiative's Policy Paper which is available as a PDF file.

Politicians in many lands are quick to claim that education is at the top of the political agenda. What does that mean? For most people education seems a strangely boring topic. Search through Chapters and you are likely to find the education section in some out-of-the-way comer. Few of the books on the shelves are best-sellers.

Yet there is more material now about the nature of human learning than at any previous time. It's found in books all over the shop - in cognitive science, neurobiology, evolutionary psychology, cultural anthropology, information sciences, management studies, economics, philosophy, pedagogy and religion. There is so much about learning that it seems impossible to keep up with the research.

Why, therefore, do we have a "crisis" in education? Is it that all teachers, in every country, have suddenly started to underperform? Or is it that teachers, administrators, departments of education, ministers, prime ministers have simply failed to move into the rest of the bookshop to study what is now known about human learning?

Humans are born to be intelligent, to learn. Our brains give us our superiority. Each brain is an example of the most remarkable, complex organism in the entire universe.

We each have more neurons in the brain than all the trees in all the forests of both North and South America combined. More significantly, we each have more synapses, or potential neural connections, than all the leaves in all the forests throughout the world!

Over millions of years of evolution, natural selection has favored those members of our species who have developed brains best able to relate and adapt to their immediate environment - to learn. Strong evidence suggests that our brains have not changed in essential form in 30,000 years. About 100,000 years ago, when humans started to talk, our brains started to grow. This increased the size of our skulls.

Every other mammal delivers its young with its brain virtually fully developed. But if the human were to do the same, women would have to carry their babies for 27 months! Evolution compromised. Humans deliver babies at nine months with brains only some 40 per cent fully formed. Here's the magic.

The human brain comes equipped with a whole series of intellectual predispositions to learn incredibly rapidly from our environment. Providing, that is, they are properly stimulated at the stage immediately after birth.

A Hunger to Make Sense

"Learning is a consequence of thinking"(David Perkins, Smart Schools, 1992.) This is a simple and profound truth. Thinking - not simply instruction.

When I was about 10 years old, my parents employed a man to do odd jobs. Old MacFadgen was a brilliant carver. Each Friday, after finishing his work, he would show me the little wooden figureheads he had made. I became hungry to do the same thing but he told me if I wanted to learn how to carve, I'd first have to learn how to sharpen a chisel. So for several weeks, I learnt to sharpen chisels. Next, he produced some strange bits of wood with very contorted grain. He told me I had to learn how to work the grain of the wood, and for weeks that is just what I did. One day, he told me I was ready to start carving and he let me go. By the time I was 13, in a boarding school, I was quite a good wood carver.

In those days, you could not go to university without Latin and my Latin teacher was even more bored with Latin than I was. I failed Latin three times and had six weeks to go until I could take the exam for the last time. Meanwhile, I had been chosen to represent the UK as a schoolboy woodcarver at an international exhibition. My morale soared and then crashed: woodcarving was not recognized by the school.

If I was a better woodcarver than anyone else, why couldn't I learn Latin? The simple answer was that I wasn't in charge. That afternoon I went to my Latin teacher and explained that I would not attend class but would teach myself. For six weeks, I memorized vast chunks of Caesar's Gaelic War, Virgil's Aeneid.

I passed Latin, but six months later I had forgotten most of it. However, I still woodcarver That is because learning has to do with a hunger to make sense of something. The whole brain, including the emotions, has to be engaged. We all have such stories that taught us that learning and schooling are not synonymous. Our neural structures and our inherited predispositions predate formal schooling by at least 29,500 years!

I love the excitement of learning; I delight in the company of active young minds working things out for themselves, but for years I was frustrated by the institutional hurdles that get in the way of learning. I was so uncomfortable as a head teacher that in 1985, my conscience wouldn't let me continue to preside over a system I didn't believe in anymore.

Connecting the Known and the New

Several years ago, I defined learning as "a reflective activity that enables the learner to draw upon previous experience to understand and evaluate the present, so as to shape future action and formulate new knowledge" (Learning Makes Sense, 1994). Learning is about making connections between the known and the new. It is a highly reflective activity involving personal and continuous improvement.

Are our schools places that encourage reflection? Do young minds formulate hypotheses that link a study of history with the issues of global warming or economic instability? Because that is what the world will need. Powerful, connected thinking. If not, we will have failed disastrously. That's why I entitled my speech "Battery Hens, or Free Range Chickens?" Cleverness will never be enough - our world needs creativity, and the ability to think holistically and ethically.

"The test of a successful education is not the amount of knowledge that a pupil takes away from a school, but his appetite to know and his capacity to learn. If the school sends out children with the desire for knowledge and some idea of how to acquire and use it, it will have done its work. Too many leave school with the appetite killed and the mind loaded with undigested lumps of information. The good schoolmaster is known by the number of valuable subjects he declines to teach" (Sir Richard Livingston, The Future in Education, 1941).

These thoughts illustrate the historic tension - is education about content or process? The pendulum has been swinging rapidly from side to side. Political positions continue to be staked out. But neither polarity is good enough.

The challenge is to better understand metacognition - how we can make thinking visible and consciously direct our multiple learning strategies. This will give us the key to transform education. We really can learn how to learn, with a clarity that was not possible even five years ago.

Learning How to Learn

To achieve this synthesis, we have to study five key issues:

1. The biological nature of learning
   • the brain of the developing fetus
   • the brain of the young child
   • the brain of the adolescent
   • brain plasticity
2. The science of the learning
3. Construction of knowledge
4. The impact of new technology
5. The nature of home and community.

Each issue is highly significant, but only when we consider them all do we find the design brief for a new model of learning. The future belongs to those countries first able to synthesize findings from these disparate subjects. Therein lies the opportunity for genuine innovation.

Pregnancy and the Developing Brain

"There is no period of parenthood with a more direct and formative effect on the child's developing brain, than the nine months of pregnancy leading to the birth of a full term baby" (Marion Diamond & Janet Hopson (1998), The Magic Trees of the Mind).

A child's brain is most malleable to external influence during the last three months of pregnancy. Maternal well-being in the third trimester influences the way the neurons begin to work together in the fetus more profoundly than at any other stage in life. The mother who becomes over-stressed risks developing a chain reaction of micro-chemical imbalances that could inhibit a child's neural development in ways that require months of expensive schooling to compensate later.

The argument about breast-feeding producing a greater range of essential nutrients is well-known. Far more significant may be the baby's emotional need for long periods of mother-baby contact to trigger early brain growth. Not for nothing do the young baby's eyes first come to focus at 13 inches - the normal distance between a baby at the breast and a mother's eyes. Emotional well-being may be more important in developing general intelligence than early intellectual precocity.

The clearest operation of predispositions is in language development. Every human baby is born with the ability to form basic grammar and word sequencing, and to make about a hundred structured sounds, which, in various combinations, can be used to create every letter in each of the earth's existing 6,000 languages. Learning language, a child subconsciously draws upon some 60 of those structured phonemes. And the brain is very economic. Those phonemes not needed are "pruned" as early as the age of four, and pruning is completed by the age of six or seven. That's why some people are unable to reproduce certain sounds in another language.

Learning is a delicate balance between genetics and the environment. If we are to develop a science of learning, we have to understand both better.

We are finding molecular answers to things that happen in the brain. By failing to provide young children with supportive and nurturing enviromnents in which they can develop their predispositions toward social, collaborative and team-building skills, young children's brains react with astounding speed and efficiency to the violent world they experience around them, rewiring trillions of brain cells that literally create the chemical pathways for aggression. Aggression, rather than conciliation, becomes the action of first response. (Ronald Kotulak (1996), Inside the Brain).

Social skills such as empathy exist as powerful latent predispositions. If the environment is not conducive to their development in any one generation, the brain simply reshapes itself to those skills that are "helpful to survival." This is not simply a moral issue. It has a biochemical base, which, once reversed, is far more difficult to "switch back." We should be worried.

Adolescence is currently seen as a "problem" in western society: an excess of hormones leaves the rapidly maturing child unaware of his new physical strength, and confused as to how to direct it. Earlier cultures directed this energy in ways that developed skills on which the community's ongoing survival depended. This also ensured that young people learned and practised what was seen as appropriate social behavior.

Work on the neurological structure of the adolescent brain is beginning to show how these networks draw upon the young child's earlier dependence on external support. Without support to develop the earliest basic skills, young people just can't cope with adolescence.

Recent work on cognitive apprenticeship helps us to understand what our brain expects to do naturally. Successful learners need to know the significance of the sub-task to the whole job, and require time for a new structure to consolidate. Learners need to talk to put the task into a larger context. Whole-hearted engagement in a task - where the level of challenge is poised just above the learner's level of current competence - enables them to reach a stage of highly efficient brain functioning that psychologists call "flow."

Traditionally, learning followed a strict weaning process. The more skills a leaner mastered, the more responsibility the learner was given for utilizing them. Intellectual weaning based on normal human development goes from a heavy dependency on external support to an increasing autonomy in adolescence. But if the opportunity offered by the various predispositions is not seized when children are very young, then they simply can't handle the hormonal and other changes of adolescence that crave increasing independence.

Upside Down and Inside Out

Based on current use of resources in schools, class size falls with age. The assumption seems to be that children of five don't need as many resources as young people of 18 or 21 or 22. At the very moment when children would benefit from the highest level of support, we leave their mental development largely to chance. Isn't the present system simply upside down?

Having failed to capitalize on the predispositions when they are young, we leave adolescents so ill-prepared to deal with their hormonal and other changes that we increase the level of staff support - in practice, we move into control mode. Why have we allowed this to happen?

The following historic assumptions underpin the current distribution of resources in education:

• Intelligence is largely innate, as is creativity.
• As children become older they needed more formal instruction.
• Learning is dependent on direct instruction and extrinsic rewards.
• Learning is strictly logical, objective and linear.
• Real learning is accomplished in formal settings, and is measurable.
• Learning is dependent on class time, and the technology of paper, pencil and textbooks.

These assumptions have been around for a long time and are mostly outdated. As professionals, you seek to modify them. But these assumptions are still made by the greater community and by politicians.

I, like many others, tired myself out working to place the new findings about learning within the present system. They don't just not fit; they collide head on. Not only is the system upside-down, but by failing to recognize the significance of informal learning outside of school, it is inside-out as well.

Information Technology

We are on the brink of radical developments in technology so fundamental that they hold the power to alter our education system, our work and our culture. This technological revolution puts learning and conventional education systems on a collision course. The traditional role of education has, for too long been predominantly instructional and teacher-moderated, but the essence of the coming integrated, universal, multimedia, digital network is discovery - the empowerment of the human mind to learn spontaneously, without coercion, both independently and collaboratively.

These new technologies are really no longer new. It's just that we have been so slow to see their real significance. A story illustrates this point.

My son Peter had been using a computer at home since he was eight. A few years ago, coming up to high school graduation, his teacher took him to one side and suggested that he stop using the word processor and practice writing out answers right the first time because that was how he would be marked in his exam.

Peter, very annoyed, wondered whether anyone understood. He said, "It's not simply that I write much faster with a keyboard; I just don't think in a straight line anymore. I'm always moving my ideas around as the argument develops."

He reassured me that he would do fine, but that the exam would not show the best he could do. He added, "Now I know why you do the job you do, but it must be so depressing to see just how slowly things change!" At Cambridge now, he is allowed to word-process essays for tutorials but not finals. They still have to be written in long-hand.

Battery Hens or Free Range Chickens?

Education is floundering for lack of really clear thinking. By default, we will end up in the world of the battery hens who hardly know how to stand on their own feet when their cages are removed. But those reassuring cages that support us now won't be around in 20 years time. The survivors will surely be the free-range chickens.

I believe we have it within our power to create a very different education system, one in which free-range chickens will flourish. By reallocating resources, investing far more in the education of the youngest children, we could build up pedagogy geared toward the creation of lifelong learners, increasingly accountable for their own learning and skill development.

Develop forms of teaching that constantly encourage children to become "reflective learners" - in reality, the full application of all we now know about metacognition. Plan for the weaning principle from the start. Give children so many usable skills when they are very young that, progressively, they only need "teaching" for those skills they have not yet acquired. Move away from assuming that every lesson has to be taught, that only teachers can teach and that the school can do everything. Take information technology seriously. Concentrate on word-processing for everyone in every subject.

The world of the 2l't Century will be about continuously managing your own lifelong learning. By 18, every young person needs to be already doing this. When the weaning principle is taken into account, the distribution of resources runs in sympathy with class size. If full and proper provision is not made for children and their families below the age of five, then society has largely missed out on the richest period of children's predispositions to learn. And the conventional pattern of higher education could change dramatically were the significance of the weaning process to be put in a context of lifelong learning. A radical idea, but still just common sense.

Will politics let this happen? Is there too much institutional inertia locked up in all of this?

We no longer have any intellectual excuse for not reversing an upside down and inside out system of education. Our challenge is to seize this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to redesign learning to go with "the grain of the brain."

For a more detailed version of Abbott's speech, including the slides, click here.

John Abbott is founder and president of the 21st Century Learning Initiative. This continues his work as a teacher and a headmaster, which he dedicated to developing techniques and environments that foster young people's confidence in their ability to be life-long learners. His most recent book is entitled The Child is Father of the Man: How Humans Learn and Why.

John Abbott's address was sponsored by the Canadian Alliance of education and Training Institutions.

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21st Century Learning Initiative

http://www.21learn.org

mail@21learn.org