If young people are to be equipped effectively to meet the challenges of the 21st century it is surely prudent to seek out the very best understandings from current scientific research into the nature of how humans learn before considering further reform of the current system.

An analogy: we humans have been using our brains to think as long as we have been using our stomachs to nourish our bodies. We think we understand both processes well -- they are both a matter of common sense. Yet, with the breakthroughs in the understanding of diet in the last 30 years, we are eating better and now live longer. This analogy is useful when we look at the brain and the opportunities that now present themselves to expand its capabilities. We are now in a position to understand the brain's adaptive functions -- learning -- far better.

Researchers in the 1990s have uncovered a massive amount of evidence in the cognitive sciences, and in neurobiology, evolutionary biology, evolutionary psychology, and even archaeology and anthropology which shows us in great detail how it is that humans actually learn. We now can see why learning is much more than just the flip-side of good teaching and schooling. Much of this evidence confirms what many people have always intuitively thought; learning involves far more than schooling. People are quick to recognise that many successful public figures were either school failures or removed themselves from formal schooling at an early date. Conversely many successful people in school seemed to have disappeared without a trace.

Why? Not surprisingly, long-term studies, such as exist, show that the greatest predictors of success at University level (I know of no research over a longer period of time) are: 1) the quantity and quality of the discussion in the child's home before entering school; 2) the amount of independent reading regardless of subject matter which the child did for itself; 3) the clarity of value systems as understood and practised; 4) strong positive peer group pressure; and 5) the primary school. Still further down the list is the secondary school. Formal schooling is only part of what fires up the inquisitiveness in a child's mind.

Children's learning is the most natural and innate of human skills; humans are born to learn -- that's what we are better at than any other species. As a result of brain imaging technologies researchers are now able literally to watch learning occur as specific patterns of brain activity within the brain light up on a computer screen. The unprecedented clarity that this technology reveals about brain function is causing scientists to revise many of their earlier assumptions about how individual learning actually takes place. These findings have undermined the behaviourist metaphor of the brain as a blank slate waiting for information. The brain is now seen as a far more flexible, self-adjusting, biological metaphor -- the brain as a living, unique, ever-changing organism that grows and reshapes itself in response to challenge, with elements that wither through lack of use. The mass of evidence that is now emerging about learning and brain development has spawned a movement towards educational practice which confirms that thinking skills (meta-cognition), as well as significant aspects of intelligence, are learnable.

The prestigious Santa Fe Institute noted in 1995, in a collection of essays entitled The Mind, the Brain and Complex Adaptive Systems, the mismatch between emerging learning theory and dominant educational practice when they wrote, "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." These new understandings about human learning and the brain question the long-term effectiveness of plans among many governments to place increasing emphasis on the role of the school and the classroom in young people's learning.

Most school reform movements have been within the existing paradigm of pupils/teachers/schools, whereas what is now needed is that out-of-the-box thinking which starts more broadly by focusing on the brain's ability to learn and how we become evermore effective humans. Only then can we think about how to develop and nurture appropriate learning environments.

We are who-we-are in large part because of our species' evolutionary experience over millions of years. Those experiences are firmly encapsulated in all of our brains, with each of us carrying all those predispositions that previous generations found useful to their survival. The work of the Dartmouth cognitive neuroscientist, Michael Gazzaniga, shows that life is largely about discovering what is already built into our brains. He warns that "all the ways that human societies try to change minds and to change how humans truly interact with the environment are doomed to fail. Indeed, societies fail when they preach at their populations. They tend to succeed when they allow each individual to discover what millions of years of evolution have already bestowed upon mind and body."

Evolution, we now understand, has provided humans with a powerful toolkit of predispositions that go a long way in explaining our ability to learn language, cooperate successfully in groups, think across problems, plan for the future, and how to empathise with others. Predispositions provide individuals with a whole range of skills that enable them to relate flexibly to their environment. Yet, because for most of human history Man tended to live in relatively small groups, these skills have to be developed collaboratively as very few people ever possess all these attributes. The speed with which our predispositions evolve seems to be incredibly slow, and it is thought there have been no major changes in the last 30,000 years.

By melding neurological discoveries in an evolutionary framework researchers can see how within a single generation the influences of millions of years of evolution mingle with the priorities of a particular culture. As was stated graphically by the Harvard Business Review in late 1998 "you can take man out of the Stone Age, but you can't take the Stone Age out of man." We are enormously empowered by an array of evolved predispositions which enable us to adapt to vastly different sorts of circumstances, yet these evolved predispositions inhibit us as well.

We have to be cautious to devise learning environments that take such predispositions beyond "what comes naturally," but the evidence is striking -- in doing this we must go with the grain of the brain.

That "grain" we can now begin to understand far better. The relationship between nature and nurture is well summarised by the English Professor of psychobiology Henry Plotkin in his 1996 book Evolution in Mind. Plotkin notes "nature has itself evolved. Nurture can only be fully understood in light of historical causes. Nature has nurture." This goes a long way towards explaining just why humans learn the way they do.

Harvard's Howard Gardner uses his theory of multiple intelligences to show that, deep within our minds, we have multiple survival strategies that include an ability to look at any situation from a number of different perspectives -- link this with the emerging understanding of how the neural structures of the brain grow, and we begin to get an understanding of how these different forms of intelligence enable each of us "to make sense of our environments in very different ways." These "different ways" are critical to our species survival, and help provide insight into the origins of creativity. The balance between emotion and logic, the role of intuition, and the relationship between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation are all part of the "complex adaptive system" that best describes the brain's ability to deal with the messiness of ordinary everyday life situations.

Now, consider what we know about the brain and effective learning in light of the many systems developed over the past 150 years to organise individuals within an industrial economy. Prosperity meant organising people into factories where their broadly based skills were not needed and very quickly in support of this school systems were built which emphasised functional transactional skills that only utilised a small proportion of each individual brain. Such underused brains had to find their satisfaction elsewhere, and factory owners were quick to replace intrinsic motivation with extrinsic reward. Our present "crisis in schools" partly relates to the collapse of the old factory system and the recognition that successful workers now have to have more than just basic skills and an amenable attitude, which is largely what was required of their parents and grandparents.

Things are now very different. As the Pulitzer Prize Winning author Daniel Yergin recently observed "companies are being forced to think differently...That means fostering a culture that encourages alertness, responsiveness, and flexibility, and the speeding up of the cycle time of processes and decisions. In the aftermath of 'reengineering' and restructuring, competitive forces now demand a rediscovery of employees and of the knowledge they command...The high-rise pyramids of hierarchical corporate structures are being transformed into the low-rise of the flatter organisation -- less bureaucracy, more teamwork, and a greater dispersion of responsibility, information and decision making." In short, we need people who are competent problem-solvers, creative, flexible and personally responsible for their welfare and the welfare of those in their family and neighbourhood.

Research from the evolutionary sciences show that these collaborative higher order skills and attitudes are indeed largely innate. Thus, with only a limited amount of stimulation at an early age (as would have been the case in pre-Industrial times) they quickly develop. Despite six, eight or ten generations of such limited demands being placed on our sense-making skills our genetic inheritance has not yet been modified a jot. Children are still born with latent predispositions, as it were, equipping them to take on the world. During much of this century formal schooling has struggled to provide appropriate simulation of real life situations. It has met inevitably with only limited success.

For those who have been able to succeed in abstract terms, there are as many for whom schooling has been a disaster because they are more practically orientated. Industrial society had no place for children in the world of adult affairs. Children were seen to be in the way. So we are stuck with a system which has progressively turned childhood into an ever more extended virtual holiday; in reality we have trivialised adolescence, by denying adolescents the opportunity of learning from their own experiences, and making them good processors of information provided by other people.

However, it is only very recently that researchers have come to understand this. Such learning theory that existed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was generally behaviourist - people needed rewards to do tasks; our brains were blank sheets awaiting instruction; and intelligence was dimly thought of as being completely innate and inherited. So, as England and its territories developed an education system for the masses (initially as much to keep children off the streets as to give them useful skills) so this rapidly came to reflect the industrial factory model.

When universities were asked to advise on the curriculum they did so by suggesting a highly reductionist model of learning. To such early educational experts the study of learning was a strictly academic affair. They measured what happened in classrooms when people performed abstract tasks, but they hardly ever deigned to study the calculating ability of an apprentice working on the job such as Benjamin Franklin, or a street trader on the Whitechapel Road in the East End of London.

This late 19th century compromise between the scientific understandings of the day, the needs of industry, and the desire to give all children basic skills increased productivity and lifted standards of living most significantly. But this came at a cost. Deep down many children became deeply frustrated, with so much of their latent predispositions just untapped by the daily routine of instruction. The daily challenge of making sense of their environment had been replaced by a dull recognition of waiting to be told what to do and how to do it.

Societies now stand at a very exciting time in human history -- at an evolutionary cross-roads. Will we be able to capitalise on these understandings and reverse what is now seen as an upside down and inside out system of education?

Everything that we understand about our intellectual development suggests that below the age of seven or eight, particularly below the age of three, we are heavily dependent on external encouragement and stimulation to develop the brain in ways in which survival skills (the ability to collaborate and see across issues) develop. If such skills are not stimulated at an early stage then learning them later on is simply far more difficult. In late twentieth century terms the functional skills of reading, writing, and numeracy also fit into the category of survival skills. At an early stage of life every youngster needs to make great demands on adults if he or she is to master these basic survival skills. While adults may be ambivalent about their roles as parents and caregivers, to a child good parenting is utterly essential if their mental faculties and social skills are to develop.

The natural tendency of young people when they move into puberty is to reverse their dependency on adults. They want to be in control; not because they want to be bloody minded, but because all the hormonal changes going on within are pressing them to show that they can now use what they learnt earlier to become fully functional, independent people. If they are not equipped with the basic survival skills described earlier, then adolescents are desperately ill-prepared to deal with the physiological changes of adolescence and end up mentally, emotionally and socially adrift.

Now, consider the current model of schooling. In elementary schools in very many countries the largest classes are when children are very young; thus, when predispositions are at their most fertile we have children in classes of 30 or more. In secondary school we have ever decreasing class sizes which clash with the adolescent's increasing wish to be independent at about the age of 14 or 15. Many adolescents, for the most natural of reasons, get completely turned off by schooling at this stage because it simply does not seem real in comparison to the emotionally charged environments they experience away from school with their peers.

To remedy this upside down and inside out model of learning we've got to go back to the main line of the development of the human brain as was largely being practised before the introduction of the industrial model of schooling. Such a model of learning would be based on a set of arrangements that mirrors, as far as possible, the biological process involved in weaning. It requires the development of a pedagogy that emphasises the young child's mastery of a range of skills, and that child's embryonic but growing ability to take responsibility for directing their own work and realising that they'll be doing this for a lifetime. As early as possible the system must aim to get the child to be a worker. It is no longer enough for them to simply be recipients. As children get older their learning must be integrated into the broader life of the community with real tasks for young people to do, and real responsibilities for them to shoulder.

Elementary schools should provide classes for five year olds of no more than 10 or 12. Teachers should construct learning programs which combine -- in the child's mind as well as theirs -- an understanding of both content and process in ways which make children's thinking visible to themselves. This will significantly change the role of the teacher making it essential for them to model the very techniques of good learning that children will need for themselves. While good teachers will remain essential it is clear that successful learning for all will require substantially more than just the technology of teacher, chalk and talk. As a policy, investment in the technologies of learning should increase with the child's age.

Now let's briefly turn to the inside out part of the current model of learning. Young people spend no more than 20 percent of their waking hours between the ages of five and 18 in a classroom. However, within the community at large there are an ever increasing number of early retired people who are fit and strong and have many professional skills. At the moment they are largely wasted in terms of helping young people's learning. Immediately such people don't want to become teachers, but many would be interested in sharing their expertise with young people informally. These are just the people that adolescents need to be able to relate to -- almost surrogate grandparents. These people need to be recruited to work with young people.

If a formal education system starts with classes of 10 or 12, but limits overall expenditure to no more than at the present, that would suggest classes of 40 or more at the age of 18. But that need not be the case. If schools do their job properly when children are getting such intensive support in the earliest years then it would actually be better for them if, probably before the age of 16, little more than half their classes would be formally taught. For much of the time it would be more helpful to them if they learnt to work on their own, and accessed the rich learning resources that schools and community mentors would then be able to provide. Too much instruction makes young people too dependent on the teacher.

We now have it within our power to construct models of learning which go with the grain of the brain while at the same time reconnecting adults and children outside the formal setting of a school.

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21st Century Learning Initiative

http://www.21learn.org

mail@21learn.org