Relearning learning: Educator John Abbott has devoted his professional life to a message that inspires fundamental change: "It takes an entire community to educate a child."

By Marc Wehrs of The Winona Daily News

John Abbott is worried about our children and our future.

But the president of the 21st Century Learning Initiative is an optimist, and part of his power for change in the way communities view education is his contagious enthusiasm, and emerging optimism that says communities have the knowledge, the power and technology to use the human capacity for learning to transform the world.

Abbott will be in Winona April 22 (1999) to help moderate and participate in a community-wide discussion of education for the 21st century. In an interview last week, he talked about the 21st Century Learning Initiative's mission to change the way the world views education, and about his own passion for learning.

Winona Daily News: What kind of experience have you had with places like Winona?

John Abbott: This is really where my life story started, because I was a principal at an English high school, and for a dozen years I tried every single trick in the business to try and bring about fundamental change. But then, progressively, one realized that schools standing by themselves can't do everything. You need a whole community behind you.

And so in 1985...we started by taking the town of Letchworth, which is a town of about 35,000 people in Hertfordshire, and said: What would happen if the people of Letchworth felt that nobody other than themselves would be responsible for sorting out their education system? What would happen if the state passed all responsibility down to a level as small as a town? And what would happen if enough resource was provided to give every teacher a significant amount of time over a period of years to retrain to begin to understand how you could open up the whole community as a learning resource for young people? And how teachers themselves could begin to change their teaching format so that in addition to getting children to understand subjects...(they could) get children to understand how they actually learned, what a successful learning strategy is?

And we were introducing that at a time which computers were first becoming available, and we went even further and said: "What would happen if we provided a computer to every seven children?"

And for three glorious years, we had marvelous experience of what Winona is now trying to do - the whole town coming together and saying nobody else is going to sort this out unless we do ourselves, and let's get behind all the schools, not just one or two, and work it with a program in which the teachers would see themselves not as teachers of a particular school but teachers of a whole young community.

WDN: What changed?

John Abbott: In the short run, the thing that changed was the enthusiasm of the pupils to start doing things that beforehand they had not wanted to do - because they (now) were living with vastly enthusiastic teachers. And that was the heart of it. We actually went right down the line and said (that) if you want exciting students, you want exciting teachers.

What made them exciting was the fact that for the first time in their lives the authority had been in a sense overridden. The powers that be...were actually saying you're so important that we will provide you with at least 10 percent of your time to be continuously upgrading your skills, the way in which you work with children. So that rather than saying retraining is something which is done after school on the back of an envelope, we're actually saying your professional development is so important we're putting it on the timetable.

And what went along with that were a whole series of individual programs, one of which meant that over a three-year period, two-third of the teachers spent three or four weeks shadowing people in other forms of employment so that part of the retraining program for teachers was that teachers had the opportunity to shadow other professionals and look at what other professionals were doing dealing with issues of change.

WDN: How does an individual school district move toward that model?

John Abbott: There are a couple or three strategies that are going to be very important. One is not to let people think you are going to be very important. One is not to let people think you are condemning what they used to do in the past because often what they did in the past was the best that they could do given the knowledge they had at the time...It's a question of saying what was good enough in the past, which really was good enough in the past, is not good enough into the future.

The second strategy, which is vitally important, is to bring everybody into an active discussion about what the issues are. People are talking and talking and talking until eventually people realize they've convinced themselves they can't just go on doing it the way they used to do it.

What happens to children in any one day (in traditional education) is the result of meeting half a dozen different teachers for three-fourths of an hour each, and unless each one of those teachers believes in what they are doing, then the experiences of the child is not going to be as good as people like myself are trying to get it to be. And so you do have to invest in helping people understand why change is necessary.

WDN: What, fundamentally, is the 21st Century Learning Initiative trying to do?

John Abbott: The absolute bottom line is learning - and learning being something very, very broad. It's a belief that you know how to observe something well enough that you can draw lessons from it in ways that you're going to feel better as a result of having done it.

It's what you and I are doing all the time, but we're not actually aware that we're doing it. We're constantly trying to access what is going on around us and using that to improve ourselves. And that's really what people like myself are arguing that children are going to need for the 21st century, because the one thing that's pretty certain is that the world won't be the same in 50 years time as it is now. And it's the ability not so much to take the lessons teachers have taught them but the ability to take the processes they've learned and apply them in fresh circumstances. So the bottom line is how do you get young people to feel more and more confident they know how to do the learning part themselves?

WDN: How do we do that?

John Abbott: You'll see the word "weaning" comes in - that if we've really invested in children when they are at the youngest, below 7 or 8 when their brains are most malleable, those are the times in which children need to be able to develop basic skills to a very high level of competence so that when they get older rather than having more and more teachers, which is what currently happens in secondary schools with class size getting smaller, the exact opposite happens: that you give children so much support when they're very young that when they get older they have less and less support from outside and are held more and more responsible for working things out for themselves.

In a complicated society, people are not going to be able to function unless they have got good skills of reading, writing and arithmetic. This is just part of modern life. It means that you have to have that. On the other hand, I think many of us feel very strongly that just to teach those skills in isolation doesn't actually appeal very much to the young mind that doesn't see the logic in seeing those skills in isolation for everything else.

So what the initiative is saying is that the most important thing is at the very, very youngest age, and I am talking here about 2 and 3-year olds, they should live in an exciting environment - where people take notice of them, where people talk with them, where they encourage them to do things - so that the child becomes interested in the things going on around them.

And in the process of doing that, you are helping the child develop the calculation skills of arithmetic, you're helping the child to realize that they can extend their interests by being able to read something and therefore reading becomes something they want to do.

...So-called primitive societies are places where often adults spend more time with children that they do in the sophisticated societies of the West. And so part of the challenge of the 21st Century Learning Initiative is actually saying to people: Are you selling your children short by not giving them an interesting enough environment when they're so young that you're panicking at 6 and 7 saying they still haven't learned to read and write? How do we formally teach them to read and write?...because their interests haven't given them the desire to do it for themselves.

WDN: How do you get that message out?

John Abbott: One of the things that I think desperately needs to be done is to discuss these issues with high school students in their later teenage years so that they begin to understand that parenthood in the future means more than just cuddling toys and all the rest of it. It actually means living with your children. I think we have a whole generation of young children that didn't have that from their parents...Some shock tactics need to come into it, and part of the shock tactics are that actually only parents can do this sort of thing. The child that comes to school excited about what's going on in the world around them...the child who feels that life is exciting makes a lot of sense out of school.

The emotional component of parenthood is something we have to work on at all levels and groups of people. While adults may think parenthood is a bit of an option, as far as kids are concerned, good parenting is a biological necessity.

WDN: What are lifelong learners?

John Abbott: We're not used to getting people to say we have to be lifelong learners. Not too many people realize what "lifelong learners" means, but they do realize we'll never go through the rest of time without relearning something. Most of that relearning we're going to have to do on our own. We're not going to go off to college and do a Course 101 on some new skill. We're just going to have to find things out for ourselves, which actually many adults very much enjoy doing.

WDN: When Abbott was a boy, he learned wood-carving, through an apprentice-like relationship, from a mast. He tells the story that contrasts that with standard education practice.

John Abbott: At the age of 13, I went away to a boarding school, where of course nothing like woodcarving was done. And I was getting close to final exams, and I was failing Latin, and I failed Latin three times in quick succession because I was bored and my teacher was bored. And just when I was about to take it for the final time, the school carpenter came after me and said: "Congratulations, you've just been chosen to represent Great Britain as a wood carver," and my morale went rushing up to the ceiling, and then it crashed because I realized wood carving wouldn't count on the curriculum.

And so I turned `round and said if I can be the world's best wood carver, why can't I pass Latin. It's because I am not in charge. So at that moment I went to the Latin teacher and said: "Because I have to pass Latin, I'm not going to come to any more of your lessons. I'm going to teach myself."

It really is as basic as that.

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21st Century Learning Initiative

http://www.21learn.org

mail@21learn.org