Being an English academic working with researchers outside the United Kingdom offers me the opportunity to relate British events to what is happening in other countries. Distance certainly lends a sense of perspective, if not always enchantment!

"In a global economy knowledge is everything. It is the country which knows how best to educate it's young people that will compete most successfully in the global marketplace," claim politicians in many lands. International competition is obviously intense. We all want, it seems, the same thing.

Defining this "thing" clearly is hard, and its essence elusive like quicksilver. "What you earn depends on what you learn," claims President Clinton. On Thursday, April 9th, in The Independent, Chris Woodhead, the Chief Inspector of OFSTED, battled with Seamus Hegarty, the Director of the National Foundation for Educational Research, to prove that most educational research was a waste of money. We, the English, it appears to Mr. Woodhead, know what we have to do - the only thing is we have to do it harder, more efficiently, and in a more closely prescribed manner.

Yet, on The Independent's previous page, a report on the Committee set up last year by David Blunkett to advise on "Creativity and Cultural Education" questioned such simplistic solutions when they asked, "How do you manage to tap students' creativity in an education system which is consumed with the very basics?" This is a critical question, especially as critics have seen earlier attempts to develop creativity among Primary School students as being responsible for a perceived fall in standards.

The answer, as Mr. Woodhead argues, lies in moving beyond simply more research in the "sociology of education." However, Mr. Woodhead should be advised that such research is just a tiny corner of a very large body of research --- much of it international and most of it not by educationalists ---highly pertinent to his responsibilities. He should look well beyond the box of the sociology of education at the emergent research on human learning. Professor Ken Robinson, Chair of the Creativity Committee noted that "the most interesting and ground-breaking research is happening where archaeology meets science, and where music meets sociology." It's happening through synthesis.

Research findings into the biology of learning from cognitive science, neurology, developmental psychology and the evolutionary sciences tell us that if we want young people who are able to think across boundaries then the primary purpose of education should be the development of transferable skills. Transferable skills are defined by cognitive scientists as those skills which can easily be transferred across new domains of knowledge and disciplines. Now, at a time when the half-life of useful scientific knowledge is thought to be less than seven years, we are slowly coming to recognise that it's not so much what you know when you leave school that matters, as what you understand about how to go about solving novel problems.

In a world of continuous change, the ability of individuals to plan and implement their own learning without external direction is the key to success. Research from cognitive science and developmental psychology show that learning is nothing if it is not a deeply reflective activity in which every new idea is internalised and used to refine, or to change, or to upgrade, earlier, more naive understandings. This intrinsically driven learning gives children a greater sense of mastery and control and is what leads to successful life-long learning. Learning is a consequence of thinking.

To understand the relationship between basic skills and creativity, we have to face the old hoary conundrum of transferability, and before doing that it is critical to appreciate the subtle difference between two key concepts which are too often confused in the public mind - Specialisation, and Expertise.

Recent work by two Canadian cognitive scientists (Bereiter and Scardamalia), further extended by the findings of neurologists and systems thinkers shows that a specialist, by working within the well-defined parameters of a specialism "knows his subject from the top to the bottom." A specialist knows all the rules, all the tests, and all the possible combinations and formulae. His authority rests on the depth of his knowledge, and is uncluttered by the need to assess extraneous influences. A specialist exudes a confidence in his/her competence - in some this comes through as arrogance. Discussion with such people is often difficult for they know all the answers or are just not interested. Where their specialisms fit in a bigger picture does not trouble such a person, for that is essentially unquantifiable, imprecise and highly uncertain; there are no rules for that kind of thing, so these are questions best left unanswered.

A caricature perhaps, but the world has come to be fearful of specialists for, in some hard-to-define way, we sense they are just not "real". They "think the world apart", and that gets us into trouble and makes us schizophrenic.

"Experts," in contrast, "tackle problems that increase their expertise," whereas "(specialists) tend to tackle problems for which they do not have to extend themselves (by going beyond the rules and formulae they accept)," argues Bereiter and Scardamalia. "Experts," Bereiter and Scardamalia have observed "indulge in progressive problem-solving, that is they continually reformulate a problem at an ever-higher level as they achieve at lower levels, and uncover more of the nature of the issue. They become totally immersed in their work (flow), and increase the complexity of the activity by developing new skills and taking on new challenges."

Experts are quick to grasp the overall situation, rather than just focusing on one part. "Big issues" fascinate them. The American Professor of Education Howard Gardner defines experts as those who think about a concept by drawing on insights from several forms of intelligence.

Unlike the specialist's supreme confidence within a specialism (not much use when the walls of that specialism are falling apart!), the expert is essentially open to different disciplines and questioning, more aware of what he doesn't yet know rather than what is already known. Experts understand the rules but they also know how to reformulate them and expand them to fit new circumstances. These people are not afraid to link the sciences and the humanities.

Such people are rare and, unless Messrs. Woodhead and Hegarty appreciate the difference between expertise and specialisation, we may actually end up having even fewer experts in the future. Remember Professor Robinson's comment from April 9th that "outside education the real revolutions are happening in multimedia and the applications of new technologies. These are breaking down the barriers between disciplines. The scientists and technologists are developing the new technology, but artists and designers are pushing forward the applications and creating new opportunities." Unless we can create many experts, England will indeed struggle to compete in a global economy that prizes innovation and adaptability.

There is a solution to the Committee's dilemma. Creativity is essentially an aspect of expertise. Creativity can't be taught. You gain creativity through the experience of problem-solving within a specific domain, and then stepping outside and looking at this with a fresh eye; only then do you see things to which the specialist with his tightly defined rules and procedures is blind. That's when the young specialist starts to mature and begins to formulate the vision of the expert; expertise is a frame of mind that starts forming in the nursery.

While specialisation has become a feature of modern society, it is not, however, particularly natural to the human brain. The brain has evolved over the millennia to be a multi-faceted, multi-tasked organism predisposed to thinking about new data and ideas from various perspectives. This is where the findings of cognitive science join with, and expand, the research into the biological nature of learning and the functioning of the human brain. The brain works in terms of wholes and parts simultaneously. The glory of human learning is that it is essentially a complex, messy, non-linear process. The brain can, literally, do almost anything.

As Professor Robert Sylwester of Oregon writes, "Get rid of the damn machine model of the brain. It's wrong. The brain is a biological system, not a machine. Currently we're putting children with biologically shaped brains into machine-oriented schools. The two just don't mix. We bog the school down in a curriculum that is not biologically feasible."

Patterns and relationships, emotions, the need to make sense, intrinsic motivation, formal and informal learning - all of these are processed and developed in the most amazing interconnected and multi-layered ways which neurologists can now actually "see" in action through the technologies of functional MRI and CAT scans. These new findings are what makes the study of learning such an exciting thing, but they also warn us that a highly directive, prescriptive curriculum which "goes against the grain of the brain" will inevitably inhibit creativity and enterprise.

Please, Mr. Woodhead, take notice. For without deep, rigorous, cross-disciplinary thinking about the nature of human learning so many of your present reforms will give us specialists, not experts. In a knowledge society, where everyone has to be able to function at ever higher levels of thinking, it is not an early bifurcation between specialists and generalists that is needed, rather it is to take specialists beyond their comfort zones into being the "polymaths" that modern society requires, and in which the brain naturally delights. After all that is how our ancestors survived; only through peripheral vision did the single-minded specialist avoid being gobbled up by the predators of the past.

Watching so many current well-intentioned school-based innovations, I worry that England will again try advocating putting new linen patches onto old wineskins. Our classical education should tell us what a disaster that would be! Too much has already changed for us not to recognise that we have to deal systemically with the very institutions of learning themselves. Other countries are preparing to leapfrog the very arrangements that you are trying desperately to sustain. From an "offshore" perspective I'm aware of those countries who are preparing "to think smarter, not just harder". They are starting to grab at these ideas and develop strategies highly compatible with the natural functioning of the brain. They are preparing to leapfrog us...and they could do so relatively quickly. Their objective? Creativity and Expertise.

__________________________

21st Century Learning Initiative

http://www.21learn.org

mail@21learn.org