Do this, not to make the task of the teacher easier, but to develop a pedagogy that genuinely empowers youngsters from the youngest ages to take responsibility for their own learning. Treat them like young apprentices. And what was the secret of apprenticeship? It was to give the youngsters such a good start that progressively they needed less support from the master. “Jack is as good as his master” was the ultimate statement of success. Once Jack had made his “masterpiece”, a project entirely of his own construction that was as good as any professional could create, he had learnt to combined in himself the roles of both teacher and learner. That is the process which is deeply seated within the human psyche. That’s why the learning species find it so insufferably demeaning as it gets older to be sitting in classrooms for too much of the time. (Slide 24)

And what of the rest of my rule of thumb… does this mean classes of thirty-six at the age of eighteen? Of course not. Successful apprentice learners should expect to spend three-quarters of their time at that age working on their own, or in teams. Probably that would mean group tutorials of eight or nine students for about a quarter of the time, in their last year of schooling.

Here is the revolution that we need, a revolution that has been waiting to happen for nearly fifty years. (Slide 25) It is a revolution that has faltered badly in recent years, despite the billions of pounds invested in so-called innovations. Right now we seem to have got to the worst of all possible worlds… we have produced an overschooled but undereducated society.

Let me give you one more necessary, but unpalatable, observation. Young people spend three quarters of their waking hours outside school – thank goodness! However, those ‘out-of-school’ experiences have become ever more constrained and unexciting because the adult world has become so preoccupied with its own well-being that it no longer wishes to give up quality time to act as mentor to the young.

The need for intelligent, thoughtful, informed and caring mentors able to inspire and enthuse young people within the greater community is every bit as great as is the need for teachers of the highest quality in the schools. It’s not one or the other – it’s both. Most of us, including politicians, just don’t understand that. (Slide 26) “What we need most to improve the quality of our learning is more contact with adults other than parents and teachers”, said a group of seventeen-year-olds in England some years ago. “We know what our parents think, because we’ve heard it every day for years. We’re slightly suspicious of what teachers say because they’re actually paid to say that. What we want to know is what do other adults think… and we don’t meet very many of those”.

Once we fully understand the biological nature of the learning species we will significantly change the practice of schooling, and an adult population will come to recognise that the education of the young is just too important to be left to the teachers (however good they may be) to do on their own. The Learning Species will never fit comfortably in schools as we know them, and we should not leave schools to function in their present way any longer. The youngest members of the Learning Species deserve better from us for, knowing what we now know, we no longer have the moral authority to carry on doing things the way we did. All of us have to change. (Slide 27)

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