Once, when on a family walk, my then eight year old son suddenly asked, "Daddy, how do little children learn to talk?"

I paused just a moment too long in composing my reply.

"Dad," he said impatiently, "I think that's an easy question. I bet you'll give me a long and complicated answer!"

"Thus, the task is not so much to see what no one yet has seen, but to think what nobody yet has thought about that which everybody sees." -- Schopenhauer

Education, so politicians in many lands are quick to claim, is at the top of the political agenda - the number one item. That's easy to say, but what does being number one actually mean?

There is a paradox here because for most people education seems a strangely boring topic. Search a bookshop and you are likely to find the education section in some out of the way corner. Most of the books on the shelves will be of little general interest. Few are promoted as best sellers. This is strange for 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 as well as philosophy, pedagogy and religion. In fact there is so much about learning that it seems impossible to keep up with the research.

What is happening? Is it that education, as previously understood to mean schools, is simply being sidelined? Has education ceased to be about learning? Is school "dead?"

Let me tell you a story about how another new set of ideas once changed well-loved and established ways of doing things.

During the Second World War the American government was much impressed by the performance of the two Cunarders, the Queen Mary and the Queen Elizabeth. Each transported thousands of troops so fast that no German U-boat could catch them. The war over, the Americans resolved to build an even better liner, the S.S. United States, which in time of military need could carry even more troops, faster, than its British counterparts.

The United States first sailed in 1952. She seized the Blue Ribbon with a speed of 40 knots and so cut the travel time between Southampton and New York to just under 84 hours.

In the 1960s, the United States was taken out of service; her engines removed, she was hauled off to a port in southern Turkey and lay, rusting, for a quarter century.

Why her sad demise? It was simply that the de Haviland brothers had built a commercial jet aircraft, the Comet, and BOAC started to operate this across the Atlantic. The jet aircraft - a totally new technology - cut travel time to New York to a mere eight hours. The days of the glamorous Atlantic liner were over forever.

The United States was the most brilliantly conceived ship of all time. She was made redundant by a totally new form of transport, made possible by a convergence of new technologies. The dynamics of travel were changed irrevocably. Heathrow replaced Grand Ocean Terminal at Southampton. More people now fly the Atlantic in a day than a Cunarder could transport in a year. That's a paradigm shift.

We must focus on these new understandings about learning if we're to see in education reform massive opportunities, rather than still further problems. Within the last 10 to 15 years, medical technology - Positive Emission Tomography, CAT scans and functional MRI - has enabled us to "see" brains working. Instead of studying dead brains splayed out like cold porridge on a dissecting table, we can actually see the incredible way in which, for instance, memory is distributed to many different regions of the brain, and how it is reconstructed on demand. Be you a creationist, an evolutionist, or a bit of both the scale of this is awesome.

Then there are the technologies of Information and Communication which we have lived with for 20 years, but whose real significance for education is still to become apparent.

Just as a jet engine could not propel an Atlantic liner at 600 miles per hour, neither can these new discoveries fit comfortably into school systems designed when learning was seen as dependent on instruction. Or when a curriculum worked at the speed of paper and pencil. At the risk of being over-dramatic, they simply blast it apart.

Three thoughts about learning.

"It is, in fact, nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry; for this delicate little plant, aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom; without this it goes to rack and ruin without fail. It is a very grave mistake to think that the engagement of seeing and searching can be promoted by means of coercion and a sense of duty." -- Albert Einstein

The first by a German Jew who fled his country in the early 1930s. As a child he had not spoken until he was four, nor did he read until he was seven. When asked years later why this was, he observed dryly that he was still trying to work out the correct question to ask!

Yes, it was Albert Einstein. By present day standards the young Albert would have qualified for special educational attention!

No two people learn in the same way.

"The method people naturally employ to acquire knowledge is largely unsupported by traditional classroom practice. The human mind is better equipped to gather information about the world by operating within it than by reading about it, hearing lectures on it, or studying abstract models of it." -- Roger C. Schank & John B. Cleave "Natural Learning, Natural Teaching: Changing Human Memory" in The Mind, The Brain, and Complex Adaptive Systems, 1995

Now a statement from the Santa Fe Institute - perhaps the home of the world's greatest assembly of Nobel Prize Winners.

It's sobering isn't it? All that money we put into classrooms when "the method people naturally employ to acquire knowledge is largely unsupported by traditional classroom practice." We learn best from experience, through interaction with real time situations.

Now look at my third exhibit.

"If each of you went forth with lanterns and spent a lifetime searching, it is unlikely you would find an educational system that truthfully served its culture. Why is that? we might all ask. Part of the problem, I suggest, is that we teachers tend to see education as a stand- alone discipline, rather than an integral part of a greater endeavor. We tend to define this discipline narrowly and happily burden it with our own rules and theories." -- Sir Jeffrey Henry Prime Minister, The Cook Islands UNESCO, 1992

Geoffrey Henry is the only Prime Minister I know who is also a primary school headteacher. If you live in the Cook Islands in the middle of the Pacific it's perfectly possible to do both jobs well!

I like his analogy of going out with a lantern to search for a perfect education system. "We'll never find one," says Henry, "because education does not, never did, stand in isolation from the rest of life."

I want to focus on this Greater Endeavour Henry talked about because that is the world our children experience. Here we have a problem. I don't believe we can bring children up to be intelligent, in a world that appears unintelligible to them. That sounds harsh. Let me explain.

"The world has 358 billionaires and their combined assets exceed the total annual income of nearly half the global population. If this continues, the rich-poor divide (at individual and country level) will produce a world 'gargantuan' in its excesses and grotesque in its human and economic inequalities. Economic decline has affected 100 countries, home to 1.6 billion people, a quarter of the world's population. Eighty-nine states were worse off in income terms that a decade ago; 35 have suffered a deeper fall per capita than that seen in the 1930's." -- The Financial Times July 16, 1996

My first quotation comes from the normally dispassionate Financial Times. Read what it says. 358 people (about half the number in this room) have assets which exceed the earning capacity of half the world's population. It's a shocking thought. Of course there have always been rich and poor, but two things have changed.

The gap between rich and poor has got bigger [both within countries and between countries]. The average American CEO earns about 70 times as much as the average wage earner. Don't be complacent; the gap in the U.K. is second only to the United States. Note this: half the world's population is living on less than $2 (£1.25) a day.

Easy access to television means that the poorest of the poor can daily see just what it would be like to be rich. (And technology won't necessarily address the problem of inequality).

Recently I have seen abject poverty in Africa, in Southeast Asia, and in parts of South America. The emptiness in those people's eyes is terrifying. Increasingly people world-wide are getting ever more angry. They question just why it is that our generation have let this differential grow so rapidly. Young people are starting to ask of our sophisticated investment arrangements, "Is it really true that you, the older generation, have mortgaged our long term future, for your immediate pensions?"

Now my second quotation.

"Today, it doesn't take much intelligence to realize we are in the midst of a global epidemic of institutional failure. This next decade and maybe the one after that will be the two or three decades that people will look back to over a thousand years and say 'that was the melting pot." -- Dee Hock Founder and CEO Emeritus of VISA Wingspread, July 1996

You won't recognize Dee Hock's name. He shared his thoughts at a 21st Century Learning Initiative Conference but, more importantly, he invented VISA, the revolutionary form of electronic money transfer which took the "waiting out of wanting."

Dee challenges us to think in more connected ways. "You ain't seen nothing yet," he warns, "just think what's already in the pipeline for the next twenty years!"

For instance:

• What will be the implications of young women finding it easiest to fund their way through college by selling their fertile eggs at £20,000 each?

• What will be the implications of rising sea levels, global warming, ethnic cleansing, or HIV positive rates of 50 percent and more in African countries?

• What will happen to the market economy when we're all so satiated with goods that we can't bear the thought of another CD?

• Or what are the long-term implications of Viagra on an aging population?

These are all issues which are already starting to surface. In reality, those who must deal with such problems are currently sitting in desks in our schools, listening perhaps to our tired out solutions of years gone by!

These young people will need all the Wits they can possibly muster. Nouce, you call it here in the North - good old robust Common Sense. They'll need Wisdom too; just to be clever won't be enough. They'll need Imagination, Vision and Determination. If ever it was true that it was not so much what you learnt in school that matters, but your ability to learn how to learn that matters, it is now. These youngsters will have to be very, very Tough; Enterprising as well as Compassionate. They'll have to do far better than we have done.

There's no escaping the challenge of this Melting pot - it's already bubbling, and the fuel is in the fire.

Shifting gears.

The human race is the planet's pre-eminent learning species - it is our brains that give us our superiority, not our muscles. Why, therefore, do we have a 'crisis' in education? What has gone wrong? In our search for new ideas, what lessons from our past might we have forgotten?

Just why is it that we speak about a crisis in education? Too often I hear commentators in many countries claiming that their teachers have gone soft; that they now need tightly defined, teacher-proof curricula, and performance related pay, to energize them. Curious isn't it? Is it that all teachers, in every country, have suddenly started to underperform? Or is it something more profound?

Is it that teachers, administrators, Departments for Education, Ministers, even Prime Ministers have simply failed to move into the rest of the bookshop to study what is now known about human learning?

Ponder this. Humans are born to be intelligent. We have the most remarkable brains. Each of them, literally, an example of the most complex organism in the entire universe.

The scale of the brain is mind-blowing. We each have more neurons - the on-off switches in the brain - than all the trees in all the forests of both North and South America combined. That's not even the most significant fact. We each have more synapses - potential neural connections - than all the leaves in all the forests right across the world!

Well, our ancestors have been around for a hell of a long time. We are, as it were, at the leading edge of evolution.

Why? Over millions of years (of evolution), natural selection has favored those members of our species who have developed brains best able to relate, in each generation, to their immediate environment, in other words, able to learn. That's what humans are all about - learning.

In your brain you have inherited all those useful adaptive systems - different forms of intelligences; preferences for seeing things in a masculine or a feminine way; preferred learning styles; peripheral as well as focused perception; inherited preferences; the ability to deal with wholes and parts simultaneously; to work collaboratively as well as independently, and so on. These predispositions combine in different ways in each of us.

Strong evidence suggests that our brains - our very minds that make us who we are - have not changed in essential form in 30,000 years. "You can take man out of the Stone Age, but you can't take the Stone Age out of man," stated the Harvard Business Review in late 1998.

A 100,000 years ago, it seems humans started to talk, and we haven't stopped gossiping ever since! Our brains started to grow, and that in turn increased the size of our skulls.

Here is the problem; every other mammal delivers its young with its brain virtually fully developed. If the human were to do the same you women would have to carry your babies for 27 months...and the infant would never get down the birth canal.

So evolution compromised. Humans deliver babies (often with great difficulty) at nine months with brains only some 40% 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 (age) immediately after birth which, in our distant past out on the ancestral savannah, was most critical to our survival. Hold on to that concept of Predispositions.

(Insert Bone Graph) A bone pressure plaque from Blanchard, France, dating from about 30,000 years ago. The sequential phases of the moon have been engraved from observation over two and a quarter months. Nothing comparable for the next ten thousand years has been as yet uncovered. It is the first known conceptual performance of Homo Sapiens. -- Sir John Eccles. Evolution of the Brain, Creation of the Self

Some years ago archaeologists digging in the South of France uncovered a 30,000-year old Stone Age encampment. Amongst the artifacts was the shoulder blade of an ox, and on it were these inscriptions. The archaeologists could make no sense of these...they were neither a tally, nor a pattern, nor any recognizable form of writing.

Then one of them noticed the moon. Something in its shape caught his curiosity. In three days he had worked it all out. Here on this bone was a lunar calendar complete with 72 observations...made something like 1500 generations back. One of our common ancestors (statistically we would each be related to this person) 30,000 years ago had the intellectual curiosity to watch the moon, night after night, and then transcribe those movements, at scale, onto the Stone Age equivalent of a back-of-an envelope! I'm stunned by the implications of that bone!

I like to think of that guy - whoever he or she was - as the archetypal teacher, sitting on a stone by an open fire surrounded by kids who would have joined in the simple, but ever so profound, question "What does it all mean?"

That's the essence of my talk.

"Learning is a consequence of thinking." It's a simple and profound truth. Repeat it to yourself in the Council Chamber when you next debate the institutional arrangements for education! Thinking - not simply instruction.

How do you learn? What was your most powerful learning experience?

Here's my story. When I was about 10 years old my parents employed a man to do odd jobs. Old MacFadgen had served his apprenticeship as a carpenter in the Navy in the 1890s. Once he qualified, though, the Navy didn't need any more carpenters. So he spent his entire career shoveling coal into the boilers of battleships. One thing kept him sane. In his free time, he would go up into the shadow of the gun turrets with little bits of wood and his chisels and whittle away to his heart's content. He was a brilliant carver.

Each Friday evening, when he had finished his jobs, he would show me these little wooden figureheads he had made all those years before. I became hungry to do the same thing. "If you want to learn how to carve, you'll first have to learn how to sharpen a chisel," he said. I nodded, and for several weeks I learnt to sharpen chisels, which is not an easy task.

Then he produced some strange bits of wood with the most awfully contorted grain. "You'll never learn to carve unless you know how to work the grain of the wood," he said. And so for weeks that is just what I did. Then finally he said, "I think you're ready to start carving now." Then he let me go. By the time I was 13, I was quite a good wood carver, and then I went off to a conventional boarding Public School.

Woodwork, never alone carving, was not on the formal curriculum!

In those days you could not go to Oxbridge without Latin. My Latin teacher, however, was even more bored with Latin than I was. He spent all his time telling us how he had won the war single-handed in his silly little tank in the African desert! I failed Latin three times. I had six weeks to go until I could take the exam for the last time. If I failed I would not have got to University, and I wouldn't be here now.

Then the school carpenter, a menial employee not entitled to enter the common room, came and congratulated me. "You have been chosen to represent the UK as a schoolboy woodcarver at an international exhibition at Olympia," he said. My morale soared, but then it crashed, because woodcarving, unlike debating or rugby, was not recognized by the school.

If I was a better woodcarver than anyone else, I rationalized, why couldn't I learn Latin? The answer appeared simple - I wasn't in charge. So that afternoon I went to my Latin teacher and explained that I wouldn't come to any more of his lessons. I would teach myself. For six weeks nobody knew what to do with me; but that didn't matter. I memorized vast chunks of Caesar's Gallic War and Virgil's Aeneid. Night after night I lay awake testing myself on conjugations and declensions. And of course I passed Latin. Six months later I had forgotten most of it...but I still woodcarve!

You see learning has to do with a hunger to make sense of something. The whole brain, including the emotions, has to be engaged. If you separate emotion from intellect you court disaster.

I told that story - and you each have your own stories - because early in life I came to realize that learning and schooling were not synonymous. Our neural structures and our inherited predispositions predate 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 powerful learning. I was so uncomfortable as a headteacher that in 1985 my conscience wouldn't let me continue to preside over a system that I didn't believe in anymore.

Learning is that 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. -- John Abbott (Expanded in The Search for Expertise)

Several years ago I tried to define learning. Read this. Sherlock Holmes never, ever walked into a room and saw everything. He only saw what he was looking for.

Learning is about making connections between the known and the new. It is a highly reflective activity that is about personal and continuous improvement.

Are our schools places that encourage reflection? Do young minds formulate hypotheses that link a study of history with, say, the issues of global warming, with economic instability, with matters of equity and sustainability as well as their own potential earning capacity - hopefully without having to sell their fertile eggs! Because THAT is what the world will need. Powerful, connected, thinking.

If not, we (ministers, civil servants and everyone) will have failed disastrously. That's why I entitled my speech "Battery Hens, or Free Range Chickens?" Cleverness will never be enough - our country desperately needs creativity, and the ability to think holistically, and ethically.

Just before the '44 Education Act, Sir Richard Livingston, then President of Corpus Christie College, Oxford, published a short book The Future in Education. Note this extract.

"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 that he declines to teach." -- Sir Richard Livingstone The Future in Education, C.U.P., 1941

It reads well, and has a high feel-good factor. But it contains the historic tension - is education about content, or is it about process? For too long the pendulum has swung rapidly from side to side. Political positions have been, and even now are being, staked out. Neither polarity is good enough. Here is the challenge which has brought me to where I am today. In the better understanding of Metacognition - that cumbersome word describing how we can Make Thinking Visible, and consciously direct our multiple learning strategies - is the key to the transformation of education. We really can learn-how-to-learn.

With the emerging convergence of all this research we can express this with a clarity that was not possible even five years ago.

To make such a synthesis we have to study five key issues.

Each issue is highly significant, but it's only when these are taken in their entirety that we find the design brief to move from the world of the Cunarder to that of the intercontinental jet.

The future belongs to those countries first able to synthesize the findings from these disparate subjects. There - on the edge of uncertainty - is the opportunity for genuine innovation.

This morning I can only deal in the barest outline with the biology of learning. However, when you leave this hall collect a copy of the recently published Policy Paper that unpacks the implications of all this. I urge you to read it most carefully.

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. The mother's emotions affect the fetus, and so do her general habits and the parents' physical environment. (Probably) half of birth defects are due to avoidable exposure to medicinal drugs, recreational drugs, alcohol, tobacco smoke, and toxic agents at work and at home." -- Marian Diamond and Janet Hopson The Magic Trees of the Mind 1998 The 3 bones of the inner ear are the only bones that reach full adult size by the sixth month of pregnancy - "Mozart in the womb." Malnourishment in the final trimester results in much reduced levels of intelligence.

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, for whatever reason, risks developing a chain reaction of micro-chemical imbalances which could inhibit a child's neural development in ways that, subsequently, require months of expensive schooling to compensate.

Babies do hear in the womb. Even ten minutes after birth, a child, whose father has consciously been talking in proximity to the mother's stomach, can distinguish its father's voice from that of another male voice. Be careful though...playing Mozart is one thing, but computers that claim to start an unborn baby "to think maths" are as yet an untested and potentially frightening phenomenon!

Those of you with teenage children. Don't be upset if they engage in apparent random acts of kissing! It now appears that, at a subconscious micro-chemical level, kissing is a biological way of assessing from the saliva of a possible partner their suitability for child rearing. And husbands who argue furiously with their wives when they are lost in some unfamiliar town...well, yes, you do each have different ways of forming spatial-understanding and different attitudes towards collaboration. By recognizing the sexes complementality, our ancestors developed survival strategies hundreds of thousands of years ago. Your husband is not really dumb - he's a man!

Key Issue 1.a "We have unequivocal evidence that breast-fed children are physically stronger than non-breast-fed children, that they have greater verbal, quantitative, and memory abilities as pre-schoolers and significantly higher I.Q. scores during their school years. This is due not simply to healthy substances in the milk, as many people assume, but also to the early mother-child relationship that breast-feeding implies." -- Karl Zinsmeister The American Enterprise May/June 1998

Think again about child rearing practices. The argument about breast-feeding producing a greater range of essential nutrients is well known. What may be far more significant however is the baby's emotional need for long periods of mother-baby contact in triggering 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 the mother's own eyes. Remember this - emotional well-being may well be more important in developing general intelligence than early intellectual precocity.

"Children master most of the complexities of grammar with practically no explicit instruction from their parents, although extensive parent-child verbal interactions obviously provide an important environment for the effective development of a language." -- Dr. Patricia Kuhl White House Conference on Early Childhood Development and Learning, 1997 "Thus, learning becomes a delicate but powerful dialogue between genetics and the environment: the experience of our species from eons past interacts with the experiences we have during our lifetime." -- Professor Robert Sylwester A Celebration of Neurons, June 1995

It is in language development that we see the clearest operation of Predispositions. Children don't form language skills accidentally. Every human baby is born with the ability to form basic grammar and word sequencing, and to make about a hundred structured sounds which can, in various combinations, be used to create every letter in each of the extant 6,000 languages on the Earth's surface.

A child born in Sunderland this morning, taken to South Africa this afternoon and brought up by surrogate Swahili-speaking parents, would speak perfect Swahili by the age of five. Reverse the experiment and the same thing would happen. In both languages a child is subconsciously drawing upon some 60 of those structured phonemes. The brain is very economic however. Those phonemes not needed are "pruned" as early as the age of four, and this pruning is completed by the age of six or seven. That's why the Japanese find it so difficult to speak English.

Learning is an extremely delicate balance between genetics and the environment. We have to understand both better if we are to develop a science of learning, an appreciation of what Henry Plotkin calls "evolution in mind."

Key Issue 1.B We are now finding the molecular answers to things that happen in the brain that we could only grope with from psychology, psychiatry and sociology. By failing to provide young children with supportive and nurturing environments 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 by rewiring trillions of brain cells that literally create the chemical pathways for aggression. Aggression, rather than conciliation, becomes the action of first response. -- Largely based on Ronald Kotulak Inside the Brain, 1996

Social skills (Empathy) the ability to read other people's moods and respond accordingly, exist as powerful latent predispositions. But predispositions are, strictly, latent. If the environment is not conducive to their development in any one generation, that brain simply reshapes itself to those skills which 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 need to be worried.

In pre-industrial societies - from which we have evolved - the development of appropriate skills in young people was a matter of sheer survival. By studying such practices, and watching the concurrent neurological changes which medical science makes possible, we see an exact biological response to specific environments. Once a new skill was learnt that young learner was responsible for applying such skills to the benefit of everyone; the "payback" had to be immediate.

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.

Adolescence Adolescence is currently seen as a "problem" in Western Society; that excess of hormones leaves the rapidly maturing child unaware of its new physical strength, and confused as to how to direct it. While modern parents and teachers find adolescence disruptive, earlier cultures directed this energy in ways that developed those skills on which the community was dependent for its ongoing survival. In doing so it also ensured that young people learned, and practiced, what was seen as appropriate social behavior.

Without that support in developing the earliest basic skills young people just can't cope with adolescence.

As a young teacher at Manchester Grammar School I used to take some of my Sixth Formers to live with the nomads in Iran during the summer. I had a rare opportunity of watching 17-year-old Westerners interacting with nomads of the same age. One day the tribal chieftain as asked, "We are very honored to have these young Englishmen living with us. But we are confused. Why are they not with their parents learning how to run the family business? Unless young men work with their fathers how can they ever learn the wisdom of their elders?"

I found it a hard question to answer. Later that night one of the English boys came to see me. His eyes were damp. "That question really upset me," he said, "I know my Dad loves me, but I hardly know him. I know he works very hard to support us, but we hardly ever talk. It makes me feel as if I'm incomplete."

Hold onto that word, "Incomplete," when you think of adolescents. Adolescence is a problem largely of our own making.

Cognitive Apprenticeship: Modeling Scaffolding Fading Discussion ...a way of "going beyond what comes naturally." A form of intellectual weaning, that balances the rate of physical maturation.

For years when researchers studied learning, they sat patiently at the back of classrooms or stood on the corners of the playground. Rarely did they study learning in pre-industrial societies. Recent work on Cognitive Apprenticeship seeks to redress this; it helps us to understand what our brains expect to do naturally.

As did Vygotsky, Cognitive Apprenticeship identifies four stages. Firstly the successful learner needs to know the significance of the sub-task to the whole job. Like sharpening chisels and carving a figurehead. A man on a walking holiday in Italy recently saw two men working in a stone quarry. He asked each what they were doing. One responded in bored tones that he was "squaring this bloody lump of rock." The other smiled and said, "I'm building a cathedral."

To the learner who knows where he or she is going no task is simply "basic;" it's all part of the greater endeavor. . Secondly apprenticeship recognizes that scaffolding is only kept in place until the new structure has had time to set, to consolidate. Scaffolding is only a temporary expedient.

A final point. There is a constant hum of conversation. Analyze that and you'll find only a little of this is transactional, most of it is circumstantial and a fair amount is simply amiable gossip - something that keeps the emotional wheels turning. This always seeks to put the task into a larger context. Whole-hearted engagement in a task - where the level of challenge is poised just above your level of current competence - enables us to reach a stage of highly efficient brain functioning which psychologists call "flow." At this point the brain works so efficiently that its consumption of oxygen actually falls so reducing those chemical by-products associated with stress that induce tiredness.

There is one continuous underlying theme. Traditionally the more skills a learner mastered, the more that learner was responsible for utilizing those skills. Learning followed a strict weaning process.

Look at this graph showing intellectual weaning based on normal human development. See how the Weaning Principle goes from a heavy dependency on external support to an increasing autonomy in adolescence. But note this. 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 adolescents that crave increasing independence.

Now pause and look at a graph showing the current use of resources in schools. Here the figures are given from an OECD report on Western education.

Historically it has been assumed that children of five don't need as many resources as young people of 18, or students of 21 or 22. Maybe they're just too young to know how to complain! Look at the way class size falls with age. Note that five year olds, whose normal comfortable peer group is between five and 10, are plunged into classes of 30 or so, and note that those adolescents we have talked about, struggling to express their independence, are in classes of 10 or 12.

Now put these two graphs together. Isn't the present system simply upside down? At the very moment when children would benefit from the highest level of support we leave their mental development largely to chance. 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. Look at the explosive convergence of these two lines...at the age of about 14 or 15.

Why have we allowed this to happen?

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

Think of those historic assumptions that underpin the distribution of resources that explain the earlier graph. These assumptions have been around for a long time. Look at them carefully; they are mostly outdated. As professionals living with these issues you, from day to day, seek to modify these. But, I submit, these are the assumptions that the greater community and politicians still make.

I, like many others, have tired myself out by trying to capitalize on many of the new findings about learning by placing these within the present system. They just don't fit; they collide head on. Not only is the system upside down, but in its failure to recognize the significance of informal learning within the community, it's inside out as well.

Time presses on. You will have to read the Policy Paper.

Let me move extremely briefly on to the topic of Information and Communication Technology.

Just as we are undoubtedly on the brink of new understandings about learning, so too are we on the brink of radical developments in technology which are so fundamental that they hold the power to alter, not merely our education system, but also our work and our culture. At its roots, however, 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, multi- media, digital network is discovery - the empowerment of the human mind to learn spontaneously, without coercion, both independently and collaboratively.

The new technologies are really no longer new. It's just that we have been so slow to see their real significance.

Two stories:

I started teaching geography in 1965. Plate tectonics, the creation of continents, was the hot subject of the time. For six weeks I shared my fascination with three separate classes of 17 year-olds. I covered many a blackboard with three dimensional diagrams, and my students spent hours copying all this out. I thought I'd done well until the BBC produced a two-hour documentary, "The Restless Earth". I was stunned. Here was everything I had covered in 6 weeks, and much more.

I asked to buy a copy. "No way," I was told, "it's far too expensive."

"But," I argued, "if we bought a copy then in future years I could run my three classes together, cover all the topics far more quickly and go away and do something else."

"My word, you are an angry young man!" responded the Head of Department, "Don't you realize the system couldn't cope."

Eight years ago we bought a CD-ROM system for our home. One evening my middle son called me to the computer. "Dad, you're interested in mountains. Look at these three video clips on the Encarta Encyclopedia. They're all about how mountains are made." He ran the program. A strange prickly sensation ran up my neck in a way similar to when I first saw "The Restless Earth." Here was everything I had sweated for over 6 weeks reduced to four and half minutes of carefully contrived video material. "If you are all that interested, Dad, I could stop the program every ten seconds and give you 27 printouts. Is that what you need?"

A profound question. Is that what students need? The question is still unanswered...because we are so unsure about how young people learn.

A second story. Peter had been using a computer at home since he was eight. Coming up to his GCSE, his very caring teacher took him to one side and suggested that he should stop using the word processor and practice writing out his answers right the first time. "That is how you will be marked in the exam," she said.

Later that evening a very annoyed, but articulate, son said, "Doesn't anyone understand? It's not simply that I write much faster with a keyboard; but I just don't think in a straight line anymore. I'm always moving my ideas around as the argument develops."

He grinned, "Don't worry, Dad, I'll still do okay, but the exam won't show the best I can do. It's really stupid. Now I know why you do the job you do, but it must be so depressing to see just how slowly things change!" Now, years later, and reading English at Cambridge, he is allowed to word-process essays for tutorials, but not in Finals. That has still to be written in long-hand.

Let me conclude.

Britain is floundering for lack of really clear thinking. By default we will end up in the world of the battery hens. Such hens hardly know how to stand on their on feet when their wire cages are removed. Dee Hock is surely right. Those reassuring cages that now support us won't be around in 20 years time...the survivors will surely be the free-range chickens.

I believe we now have it within our power to create a very different education system - one in which free-range chickens would flourish.

Look at this new graph.

Assume a constant level of expenditure between the ages of five and 18. Build up a pedagogy geared toward the creation of life long learners, starting at the youngest age. Develop forms of teaching that constantly encourage children to become "reflective learners" - in reality the full application of all that we now know about meta-cognition.

Plan for the Weaning principle from the start. That is, 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 the assumption that every lesson has to be taught. Stop assuming that it's only teachers who can teach; get older learners to be teachers themselves.

Provide 10% of the school budget for the continuous professional development of all teachers.

Create class sizes of 10 or 12 for children of five, and classes two or three times that size but taught for only half the time for 17 and 18 year olds. Recruit the community to provide a range of mentoring and support facilities. Expect at least a doubling in value-added from this strategy, if not a three or four-fold increase. Stop people from any longer thinking that the school can do everything.

Take information technology seriously. Don't try to be too sophisticated. Concentrate on word-processing for everyone in every subject. Ensure that every piece of writing, be it in chemistry, history or geography, becomes a lesson in applied communication skills; literacy should be cross-curricular without weakening the precious significance of individual disciplines.

All the time remember that the world of the 21st Century will be about continuously managing your own lifelong learning. By 18 every young person needs to be already doing this.

"Do you realize," gasped a Canadian when I unpacked this argument recently in Toronto, "that if this happened then it would be the children who would tired at the end of term, not the teacher!"

Now combine that graph of the weaning principle and place it on my hypothetical model for a new distribution of resources.

Note how the graph for Weaning now runs in sympathy with class size. Note how the resources for ICT and involvement of the community increase with the child's increasing need to be autonomous.

There are two areas from these graphs not yet covered by what I have said. That relating to the under-fives, and that involving Tertiary education.

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. At the Tertiary level the significance of the graph reflecting the weaning process, when projected further within the context of life-long learning, could change dramatically the conventional pattern of higher education.

There was an audible gasp as I made this last point to a group of eminent international educationalists at the recent meeting of the State of the World Forum convened by Gorbachev. "That's truly radical," said one, searching for words and scratching his head at the same time, "but, there again, it's just applied common sense isn't it?"

"You are probably intellectually right, you're probably even morally right," said a high official in the American Department of Education, "but politics just won't let this happen." There is too much institutional inertia locked up in all of this.

"That is simply not a good enough excuse any more," said another. "We no longer have any intellectual excuse for not reversing an upside down and inside out system of education. What is questionable however is whether we have the guts to do what now needs to be done."

In summary, ladies and gentlemen, that is the argument you will find explained more fully in the Policy Paper. Do you still believe we can get to the Promised Land by way of Southampton's old Grand Ocean Terminal, or will you join me at Heathrow's Terminal Four stopping first at the bookshop to pick up that essential reading!

I do so very much hope that you will.

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21st Century Learning Initiative

http://www.21learn.org

mail@21learn.org