This article springs from a presentation by the Initiative’s John Abbott in Winona, Minnesota in 1998.

Winona (a Native American word meaning “first-born girl-child”) is situated on a stable part of the Mississippi River flood plain where the river flows in a broad channel between impressive craggy bluffs that separate the states of Minnesota and Wisconsin. On a sunny day, it is a glorious place, and the drive from the Lacrosse, Wisconsin, airport along the river is renowned as one of the most beautiful in the Midwest; bald eagles constantly ride the strong air currents, and powerful tugs nudge long lines of barges. This is real Huckleberry Finn territory.

“We first heard of the Initiative several years ago,” said Randy Schenkat, Director of the Winona Council for Quality, “when I read the Education 2000 book, Learning Makes Sense. Since then many of us in the city have seen the thesis which this sets out – reversing an upside down and inside out system – as being the organising principle we need to adopt if we’re to make life in Winona, which is already a fine place to live, an even better preparation for young people facing the uncertainties of the twenty-first century. We have to go beyond good schools to create a community that uses all its resources to challenge the imagination and creativity of young people. ”

Like scores of other places, Winona has been working out how to start this process. At an early stage a small delegation, led by the City Manager, visited the offices of the Initiative in Reston, Virginia to discuss plans for a possible visit by John Abbott, the President of the Initiative, to Winona. More than 20 city organisations – including state and private schools, the chamber of commerce and the university – formed a sponsoring body, and a media program was devised. Many preparatory meetings were held.

A month before the public presentation to some 680 citizens in the Winona State University theatre, the local paper, the Winona Daily News, ran a full-page interview with John Abbott. In response to a question about what, fundamentally, the 21st Century Learning Initiative is trying to do, John explained, “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…. 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… 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?”

When asked how a community can accomplish that goal, John answered, “It actually means living with your children…only parents can do this sort of thing. The child who comes to school excited about what’s going on in the world around them, the child who feels that life is exciting, is the child who makes a lot of sense out of school. ”

The editor asked about John’s experience with other communities like Winona. John discussed his years as a school principal in the UK, the development of Education 2000 and the experience of the city of Leeds, which was one of the original participants in the Education 2000 approach to community involvement in learning. Referring to another participant city, John said, “we had a marvellous 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 it 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. ”

Just before the presentation the newspaper ran a further full page article entitled, “Winona Gets Together to Talk Education.” The paper published the graph (available on the Initiative website) illustrating the clash of present educational arrangements with the progression of normal human intellectual development. They added their own explanation of the significance of this, which is interesting. It reads: “The 21st Century Learning Initiative’s primary argument for fundamental educational reform rests on the idea that young children (A) require the most support from the educational system. If given appropriate attention at a young age, they can and should become learners who require fewer, not more resources as they get older (B). However, current practice puts the fewest resources at the disposal of the students who need the most. The line labelled “C” represents the present trend of spending as children grow older, while the line labelled “D” represents the trend of class size, which presently decreases as students should need less, not more, individual attention.”

The article went on to ask just what is the problem in the context of Winona? The author explained it like this. “The industrial model of education, the model for primary and secondary education the western world has used for the past century, doesn’t work in a world that left the industrial age decades ago, critics argue. An ever-increasing pace of change has made the ability to learn far more important than any particular skill set. ”

Butch Walz, a local businessman and lifelong resident, is quoted as being “immensely impressed with the expertise and commitment of Winona’s teachers. But he is concerned that the organisation in which they work is so cumbersome that they don’t have the autonomy to create the best learning atmosphere possible. It’s the processes that get in the way and not the people, Walz says. ” (emphasis added)

“Schenkat agrees that the key to keeping pace in education is not centralised planning from the state – or any organisation – but more autonomy and decision-making at the classroom level. ‘We’re not going to change things for kids much until we make schools more learning organisations for teachers,’ Schenkat said. ”

The article continued: “In an interview last month, Abbott offered a disclaimer: He isn’t coming to Winona to hand the community a blueprint for learning. He’s coming to Winona to participate in a long-term effort to reinvent learning – to create systems that value and encourage learning, that honour both teachers and learners and that help the community become better able to participate in and drive change rather than reacting to change with systems that don’t work as well as they once did.

Schenkat told the paper that “he hopes Abbott’s visit can help broaden the community’s definition of learning. ‘I also hope he tickles adults to be thinking that learning is happening all the time in their workplace. It (learning) is happening all the time, and we need to recognise that it’s happening in our adult lives. ‘”

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