The Education 2000 Trust is pleased to make this formal policy presentation to the Government's Policy Unit on Education. This proposal is guided by our practical experience gained through working with nine community projects in the United Kingdom, one of which dates from 1986, and through research arising from the work of the 21st Century Learning Initiative, which is partly sponsored by Education 2000.

The Education 2000 Trust is a charitable foundation concerned to create a less dependent and more vital, enterprising and creative society through strengthening people's confidence in their ability to learn, so as to be adaptable and flexible. The aim of the Trust is to demonstrate how significant improvements in the performance of young people could be achieved by mobilizing the full resources of the community, the power of new technology, and the most recent research on effective learning.

The 21st Century Learning Initiative is a transnational assembly of some 60 leading researchers, policymakers and educational innovators from, currently, 12 countries united in their determination to find the most appropriate ways of applying the new understandings into the nature of human learning (emerging from around the world in disciplines as diverse as neurology, cognitive science, pedagogy, information communication sciences and systems theory), which can then be used to develop more effective forms of education and schooling.

As its name suggests the Initiative's essential purpose is to facilitate the emergence of new approaches to learning that draw upon a range of insights into the nature of the human brain, the functioning of human societies, and learning as a self-organizing activity. Members of the Initiative believe that at all levels society is undergoing massive economic, technological, social and political changes that challenge traditional values, beliefs and institutional arrangements.

Education 2000 believes that through merging a better understanding of research into the nature of effective human learning with best practice from around the world it is possible to develop new models of learning better equipped to handle the needs of post-industrial societies. By taking what we now know about human learning and applying it on a whole systems scale (larger than a single school, but less than an LEA) it is now possible to release the higher order thinking skills and the expertise that the knowledge society demands.

New models of learning that could deliver such expertise would work on the basis of the biological concept of weaning - giving very young children plentiful help and direction, and then reducing external assistance progressively as children master more and more skills so discovering how to manage their own learning before leaving full time schooling. This will require far smaller classes within primary education and the development of styles of teaching that develop the pupil's ability to work on their own. Subsequent changes in secondary education would involve far more emphasis on structured independent learning through support from technology and community. Such learning policies would be highly "brain compatible."

I) THE ISSUES

For more than a decade Britain has assumed that its education system needs reform, not re-design. Our problems, we have thought, could be solved by getting the system to work more efficiently; work harder, not smarter, has been the guiding metaphor. Consequently, Britain has been largely uninvolved with the wider world's research into the nature of effective learning that challenges the underlying principles of a system we simply take for granted.

• The study of learning, until recently the preserve of philosophers and psychologists, then of cognitive scientists, has now broadened to include the biological nature of learning processes developed by neurologists and others through the use of functional MRI and Cat Scans. Such technologies now make it possible actually to watch the specific patterns of activity within the brain light up and move around on the computer screen. The unprecedented clarity that this technology reveals about brain functioning is causing scientists to revise many of their earlier assumptions about how individual learning actually happens.

• The generalized conclusion is that "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 reading about it, hearing lectures on it, or studying abstract models of it."

These understandings raise serious questions about the viability and sustainability of current educational arrangements.

• Formal schooling world-wide is largely the creation of the last 100 years. Its achievements have been immense, and it has been widely replicated around the world. Yet, for all its achievements, it is eventually limited by the technology of the classroom, formal instruction, uniform stages of progression, prescribed knowledge, and a curriculum of self-contained bits.

• The needs of the emerging knowledge economy go far further than the industrial economy that preceded it by requiring that young people possess, in addition to a range of basic skills (numeracy, literacy and an ability to communicate), personal competencies such as the abilities to be self-starting, quick-thinking, problem-solving, risk-taking individuals who can operate in collaborative situations. Young workers need the transferable skills of the "quizzical craftsmen;" the ability to go beyond their own expertise and thoughtfully evaluate new domains and problems. Such skills and attitudes are more naturally developed in the rich, collaborative problem-solving and uncertain world of apprentice-type learning (not to be confused with 20th century industrial apprenticeship) than ever they can be in the formal classroom with its inevitable emphasis on tasks, schedules, measurable results and manageable disconnected activities.

II) A STARK CHOICE

Social, economic and technological changes in recent years have posed two direct challenges to formal schooling; 1) the need to move from relatively precise skills - the trained specialist - to the skills of adaptability and enterprise, and to do this not simply for the few but for the majority; 2) the declining sense of community, of family, of inter-generational dialogue, and the fractionalisation of employment have reduced the opportunity for intrinsic motivation (informal learning). As the fibre of the community has deteriorated, societies have found it less contentious, and politically expedient, to pass an ever increasing responsibility for the experience of young people to the schools, rather than to reassess its own social priorities.

• Faced with the dilemmas this creates governments in various lands have attempted to define ever more closely what is taught within school, and have started to assume either that informal learning is largely insignificant, or that such learning as takes place in the community can be inappropriate. Not only, therefore, have schools to teach the basics during that 20 percent of a child's waking time between the ages of 5 and 18 spent within a classroom, but increasingly they are being required to substitute for what, in a healthier society, would be provided by a range of community and family functions.

• Consciously or unconsciously, not only in the United Kingdom but in an ever increasing number of countries, a stark choice is beginning to emerge on how best to prepare children for the opportunities and challenges of the 21st century. The choice is this: 1) either schooling becomes ever more extended, prescriptive, and all-encompassing of young people's lives (from several months after birth through to adulthood, and in greater isolation from the community), and increasingly expensive or, 2) countries learn how to take the emerging insights into the nature of effective human learning and use them to define new structures for education that incorporate both formal and informal learning, and which accept the necessity to transform both school and community.

If the skills the British need to be productive and socially cohesive - creativity, enterprise, purposefulness, collaborative working styles and community responsibility - are far more effectively developed through a fundamental redesign of the education system, based on a better understanding of learning then we should attend to these issues as a matter of national priority. Especially would this be so if we could achieve breakthroughs in student engagement at little if any added cost through a redistribution of current resources.

III) A SUMMARY OF EVIDENCE TO GUIDE INNOVATION

Medical and cognitive sciences, new technologies and a vast array of pedagogic research is helping us to better understand the brain and how it grows; the mind and how it shapes itself; intelligence and how it expresses itself; and the significance of collaboration, diversity of learning styles, and continuous learning within organizations. These findings include:

1. Neurology challenges the metaphor frequently used in recent years that sought to compare the brain to a linear computer in favor of 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. Insights from the evolutionary sciences are starting to show how brain function has evolved over eons of time in ways that equip every new-born child with a kind of biological "power pack" of potential social and intellectual predispositions. Predispositions are best described as encoded sets of processes, ways of thinking, or of doing things which, through a set of mechanisms and processes as yet only partially understood, represent a set of inherited "appropriate practices" which are transmitted from generation to generation. Whether or not these are used within a specific generation depends entirely on the environmental challenge and other intrinsic motivations. Predispositions open up like "windows of opportunity" at stages of life which evolution has found are the most appropriate to the individual's development. If not used at that stage then the window closes, the easy option is lost, and the brain grows in a different way.

2. Human babies are born with an innate ability to learn language (any language) through "immersion" in the first four or five years of life. They have particular predispositions to learn social and collaborative skills by seven or eight and, we suspect, to carry out calculations shortly thereafter. We have evolved big brains so we are able to talk a lot, share ideas and develop fields of knowledge in common. With use our brains grow. Despite our dexterity with language we still seem to think in pictures - hence the significance of stories. We understand immediate crises better than long-term problems. We have at least seven forms of intelligence that help us make sense of our environment in different ways.

3. The brain is adept at handling a variety of situations simultaneously. This makes it possible for each of us to react, moment by moment, to our immediate environment whilst also thinking about a number of abstract matters, while at the same time keeping ourselves alert to peripheral activity. The brain handles this complexity through several layers of self-organization whereby vast interconnecting networks are established; it is as if the brain is constantly "re-tooling itself" to work effectively in new and emerging situations. Once established, traces of these networks appear to survive almost indefinitely, and are frequently used as solutions to new problems. It is these earlier traces that give the brain its ability to build new ideas.

4. The process of learning has passed from simple self-organisation to a collaborative, social, problem-solving activity much dependent on talk, practical involvement and experimentation. We work better collaboratively than alone. We endlessly imitate people we respect. Unless we are able to form strong emotional bonds with relatively few people when we are young, it is probable that most of us will find larger, more loosely structured groups difficult to relate to. We relish the feeling of being part of a team. We are endlessly adaptable but, it seems, only up to a point. Driven to live in ways that are utterly uncongenial to our inherited traits simply drives people mad.

5. The nature of adolescence; while as yet we know relatively little from neurology about the changes to the brain that take place at puberty, numerous studies from cultural anthropology show that earlier cultures exploited these changes in ways which thrust increasing responsibility and accountability onto the rapidly developing young adult. Adolescents with a task and a purpose are a resource of great value both to themselves and to the community. Adolescents who are bored, listless, uninvolved and unimaginative are both a threat to themselves and a statement that the culture they are living in lacks appropriate structures for the induction of its young into adulthood. In good measure their dissatisfaction with school reflects a schooling at odds with the brain's natural function.

6. 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 predominately 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.

Good as they are, however, our natural predispositions to learn are no longer adequate to the needs of the rapidly changing world around us. Ways have to be found of extending them so that we can "go beyond what comes naturally." This is the central issue of our time. It is called meta-cognition; the ability to think about your own thinking, and the development of skills that are genuinely transferable and not tied to a single body of knowledge, and so can be applied in different settings. It is linked to a form of intelligence that is becoming known as reflective intelligence. In a world of continuous change meta-cognition becomes a matter of survival.

There is now enough evidence about how learning systems can be developed to propose a significant rearrangement of current practice. The Trust calls this "Reversing an Upside Down and Inside Out System."

IV) HOW THIS EVIDENCE CHALLENGES CURRENT EDUCATIONAL ARRANGEMENTS

1. "The method people naturally employ to acquire knowledge is largely unsupported by traditional classroom practice," summarised the prestigious Santa Fe Institute for the Study of Complex Systems in 1995. They continued "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." Increasingly these findings are reinforcing age old beliefs such as the ancient Chinese Proverb "tell me and I forget, show me and I remember, let me do and I understand."

2. These findings help explain our natural predisposition to work in clearly defined ways. Natural systems of learning culminated in every known culture in some form of apprenticeship. Apprenticeship blended the development of practical and social skills in ways that effectively ensured that, by late adolescence, the young person was fully equipped for all aspects of adulthood. They were weaned of their dependence on others for instruction, but, importantly, viewed their future success as being dependent on their ability to share responsibility within the community. Apprenticeship "made thinking visible." It was about the development of expertise, not just specialisation. Continuous learning was, to them, essential to good work, and good work was an integral part of living.

   These attitudes and predispositions, it is now becoming clear from research into the nature of human learning, are part of our inherited make-up. A society may be inclined to ignore these, but individuals will always subconsciously return to them. In any generation such predispositions require stimulation to be activated. What a wise society has to do is to find those techniques that "go with the grain of the brain" so that they are able to extend "what comes naturally" into the mastery of ever more complex higher order skills.

3. Powerful research evidence shows a direct positive correlation between the experience of children from strong supportive families and communities, and high performance in school. The reason is simple. The search for meaning starts when children are very young. It is the children who are already anxious to make sense of issues that matter to them in their own private lives, who come to formal schooling ready to use whatever the classroom can offer them to help meet their personal objectives. It is not the other way round. The greatest incentive to learn is personal, it is intrinsic. That is why a caring, thoughtful, challenging, stimulating life - a life of manageable childlike proportions - in the greater community is so vitally important.

   That is why streets that are unsafe for children to play around are as much a condemnation of failed policy, as are burned out teachers or inadequate classrooms. As children need communities, so communities need the energy and vitality of children. Interaction between the generations, in a non-institutional setting (in real life), is critical for cultural cohesion and the transmission of values and ethics. As this generational bond tears so deteriorates the community.

V) THE KEY ELEMENTS FOR A NEW MODEL OF LEARNING WOULD INCLUDE

1. Learning starts at birth and is much influenced by maternal health from shortly after conception. Learning, therefore, begins in the home. Prenatal and early childhood health care are issues as critical to society as they are to the parent. Parenting is a biological necessity for the child who has no way of accumulating that wealth of intuitive understandings, cultural mores, and emotional maturity, unless he or she is cared for unstintingly over very many years by patient, well-meaning and determined parents or other significant adults. Care-givers in turn need support from other adults in the extended family who in turn require support from the greater community. The quality of the home life for very young children has to be a prime concern for a nation genuinely concerned with learning; if ignored, this is likely to lead to economic stagnation.

2. Critically, building a framework for learning which recognizes the weaning principle. All good parenting is directed towards giving the child an ever increasing set of competencies that gradually enable the child to act more and more on his or her own. Good parenting is essentially about "letting go," in the confidence that the skills learned in the past will be more effective in dealing with novelty, than would prescription. The same weaning principle has to be applied to the child's intellectual development. Schools, and parents, have therefore to start a dynamic process through which young people are progressively weaned from their dependence on teachers and institutions and given the confidence to manage their own learning, collaborating with colleagues as appropriate, and using a range of resources and learning situations.

3. Changes within primary schools. To restructure pedagogic practices based on the weaning principle the formal school system and its use of resources has to be completely reappraised, and effectively turned upside down. Early years learning matters enormously; so does a generous provision of learning resources. The formal education system has to be redesigned broadly on a cognitive apprenticeship model. This will involve an eventual switch in resources away from much secondary and tertiary provision towards the primary sector. This has to be accompanied by new forms of instruction which from the earliest possible years make it obvious to the learners that, as they progress, they will be held ever more responsible for the development of those skills they already have, whilst being supported in higher order skills (how to reason, solve problems, and develop strategies for thinking ahead) only until such times that they can perform these themselves.

   The smallest classes and the greatest availability of teacher support should be with the youngest children. It is critical that this support is used both for the development of basic functional skills, as well as building the foundation for an approach to learning that gives the young child an ever greater sense of mastery over the skills which he or she can develop. As children are held ever more responsible for their own development (and effectively work much harder), an increasing proportion of their time should be spent working in non-classroom type learning environments supported by information and communication technology, and the greater community.

4. Secondary schools; seeing adolescence as an opportunity rather than a problem. Adolescence over the past 40 or 50 years has come to be seen as a problem in economically advanced societies, as opposed to traditional societies that have always incorporated this "energy" into activities that strengthen the tribe, community, etc. An excess of hormones not properly directed leaves the rapidly maturing child unaware of his or her new physical strength, and confused as to how to direct it. The problem has been exacerbated in advanced countries by the failure of primary education to give young people the mastery of sufficient basic skills as then to be able to work on their own. Consequently, that society is afraid - often rightly so - to extend to adolescents the necessary freedom to enable them to mature.

   Once the necessary changes have been introduced within primary education, and pedagogic practices developed that provide for a style of learning which get children to reflect more and more on what they are doing, then secondary schools should start merging these skills with the adolescent's enhanced physical strength, and intellectual maturity, to take on intellectual and community based responsibilities that progressively induct them into adult life. Adolescents would benefit enormously from being held accountable in this way, which matches the progression of adolescence towards the demonstration of masterpiece. In this way, the disastrous trend of more than a century whereby children have few, if any, direct responsibilities until they are past 18, and where youth is seen as a mixture of disconnected "theoretical learning" and extensive holidays, could be reversed. It would, as someone recently remarked, "result in children being exhausted at the end of term, not the teachers!"

5. "Home work" (learning outside of a classroom) has to be seen as important as anything that goes on in the classroom. It will be on the practices developed in homework below the age of 18 that people in the future will be dependent in managing their own life-long learning. As part of the weaning process it is vitally important that, as children get older, they are exposed to an ever-expanding array of technologies (and to people with time to spare who have high levels of technical expertise to share with them) with a consummate reduction in the amount of direct instruction.

   Technology removes the constraints of time and place, and provides individual access to information. Information technology, when used appropriately by motivated youngsters, does away with the need for the strong custodial control of formal schools. Additionally, technology can target learning to the specific strengths and weaknesses of the individual learner. At its finest, this technology replaces hierarchies of top-down controlled learning environments, and encourages the growth of non-institutional, ever-shifting networks of self-organizing learners.

6. Curriculum. The definition of an appropriate curriculum is dependent upon a clear understanding of the community's own sense of direction and values. The curriculum has to develop the skills of functional literacy, including the sciences and the creative arts, (without which no one can participate in an advanced society); its content has to cover a range of cultural issues necessary to understand its own tradition and mores, and appreciate the functioning of other societies, as well as understanding the operation of democratic processes in an increasingly technological and interconnected world. An integrated holistic view of knowledge has to be presented in order to ensure the development of just, equitable and sustainable societies.

7. Teachers. Historically secondary teachers have been seen as subject specific experts, and their learning needs largely met through their time on degree work in higher education. Elementary teachers have been seen more as learning specialists rather than as knowledgeable subject experts. This limits their ability to develop in young people a holistic, interconnected, socially responsible view of knowledge. Within current structures teachers perforce come to regard learning and schooling as synonymous, and many then become uncomfortable with the concept of community and parental participation.

   The conventional skills of elementary and secondary teachers now have to be merged, and arrangements made for their professional development in ways which help them to become highly effective and continuous life-long learners, so as to be able to accept their new roles.

8. Implications of this for the adult community at large. Society now has it within its power to educate all children in ways that would give them pride in themselves, and confidence in their ability to use their skills and talents in ways that are helpful to themselves and to others. Young people who are better equipped than previous generations to solve current as well as unanticipated problems. In short, young people whom adults would be proud to know, and enjoy working with.

9. Strategic and resource implications for such a new model of learning. While there is no limit to the amount of money that might be required to extend the present system of schooling, the alternative model outlined above could be self-sustained within developed countries through a significant reallocation of funds between elementary and secondary schools, and between schools and the community. Within developing countries, whose current arrangements are not so institutionalized, such new structures would represent considerable cost savings.

VI) POLICY PROPOSAL: THE CREATION OF LEARNING COMMUNITIES

1. The changes outlined in this proposal can not be handled piecemeal. The creation of learning communities - communities that have as their first priority the learning and nurturing of all its young people through the use of all its resources, both formal and informal - able to satisfy a range of social and economic expectations, requires a completely new way of understanding how young people learn how to learn, and are inducted into adult life. Learning is essentially a social, collaborative, problem-solving activity.

   Critically these new insights into the nature of learning require new "units of change," something larger than a separate autonomous school, but in all probability smaller than conventional LEAs, which approximate far more closely to what people define as their "patch." However educationally, or politically correct it might have been in the past to see learning and schooling as synonymous, this is no longer appropriate; it is learning and community that have to be interdependent, and around their needs new units of change have to be developed.

2. While there is no limit to the amount of money that might be required to extend the present system of schooling, the alternative the Trust is proposing could be self-sustained through a significant reallocation of funds between primary and secondary schools, and between schools and the community. Learning is not bound by the walls of an institution. If young people are to develop the skills and attitudes they will need it is essential to view learning as a total community responsibility. It is not merely teachers who can teach, it is not just pupils who need to learn, and it is certainly not just the classroom that is any longer the major access point to a range of knowledge, information and skills.

3. Such new 'Models of Learning' are, of their own natural volition, already going through a particularly difficult and painful birth process. Education 2000 believes that it would be prudent to facilitate and speed up this process as it should show how a more dynamic and flexible framework, unconstrained by many of the current regulations which simply extend the life of an already outdated system, could draw upon these new understandings of learning, and build on all the new technological and community opportunities.

   We now know enough about how effective human learning takes place, and have numerous examples of all this at small scales. So far no country has moved to create policy space to do this on a large integrated scale. This is what we are proposing.

VII) PROPOSED ACTION

It is proposed that a challenge be issued for half a dozen communities to volunteer as test communities, each of some 50,000 people over at least a ten year period. (Amounting to no more than .5 percent of England's total population) This would enable Britain to mount a national program, testing this in communities chosen to reflect their different socio-economic environments, in order to test various mechanisms, and give practical demonstration to the effectiveness of "turning the whole system Upside down and even Inside out."

Details of the exact redesign would have to be worked out by the members of the particular communities involved. The broad outlines, however, include:

• new relationships between young people and the adults in their communities, replacing the isolation from real life that makes current schools so ineffective;

• much greater investment in the personal, social, and intellectual development of young children; leading to

• assumption by adolescents and young adults of greater responsibility for their own learning and for contributing to their communities.

The proposed redesign should be based on five bodies of knowledge derived from recent research in the fields of neuroscience, cognitive science, anthropology, sociology, the evolutionary sciences, and related fields:

• knowledge about the biological nature of learning,

• knowledge about the relationship between thinking processes (meta-cognition), and the development of expertise,

• knowledge about how we construct our systems for learning,

• knowledge about the impact of information technology, and

• knowledge about communities organized around continuous learning.

New forms of continuous professional development for all teachers will be needed to sustain this. Funds would be required to stand the initial "cost of change," and the associated research and development costs. This is likely to amount to an average of an additional 10 percent per annum of those funds allocated to the educational needs of a particular community, averaged across the entire program.

Should such arrangements be widely replicated at a later stage they would not need the same support costs.

VIII) CONCLUSION

This proposal offers Britain a unique opportunity to begin developing and testing genuinely new learning structures based on the best understandings about human learning gleaned from around the world in ways which could eventually transform the current system.

It is now possible, through the development of new models of learning to help the majority of young people, rather than the gifted few, become successful learners who will then relish the challenges and opportunities of the 21st century. For such models to emerge the whole system must be changed significantly, and such change is not likely to happen of its on volition. If change were as simple as applying what we know, the researchers, educators, and policy analysts would have arrived at large dissemination plans long ago.

Radical new ways of education entail very long and hard pathways in order for change to be widespread. Without strong support and encouragement from Government it will be hard for such new models to define themselves. Without agreed waivers in advance to release communities from those regulations that simply perpetuate the present arrangements it will not be possible to develop new educational arrangements that focus primarily on learning rather than on schooling and teaching.

__________________________

21st Century Learning Initiative

http://www.21learn.org

mail@21learn.org