Can there be any doubt that there is a crisis which requires us to seek for a radical solution and to ask searching and difficult questions. “Education for what?”, “What is to count as an educated person?” and other questions such as those posed below for example.

“What makes an effective teacher?”
An article in Educational Leadership concluded “An effective teacher thinks, reflects and implements, modeling for their students the ability to think and solve problems on their own.” But, in another piece from that same journal – “There is a disconnect between what we know about effective teaching and learning and the policies that govern them. As a result many talented and dedicated teachers try hard on their own to make improvements with little support or encouragement. These are the teachers we can least afford to loose.” A teacher working on an American Association of Science initiative writes “-I’m trying to teach so my students really get the key concepts. As a result I’m way behind. —– Had I used the old model of teaching I could have soldiered along never knowing how little my students actually knew.—- Seeing the truth of my students understanding is the start of my classroom reform efforts but if I don’t cover the syllabus——-?”

“How should we choose content that is worth knowing?”
Perhaps we should look at what is happening in Japan. This quote comes from the Washington Post. “To improve education by teaching less is a difficult idea for us to accept. But Japan is in the midst of just such an about-face.” The Education Ministry for Japan summed up the challenge, “For schools to decide or even ask what is needed on the basis of the children, has not been done before in Japan.” When the examination results for UK students were published in August an article entitled “The Poverty of Education” was published in the Guardian. It argued that schools and universities are becoming narrow and utilitarian. ” Education itself is August’s unexamined subject.” ” Our pedestrian, subject-based regime fails to see the connections between what it artificially divides.”

“How do children learn?”
“Of all the civil rights for which the world has struggled and fought —– the right to learn is undoubtedly the most fundamental. —– the right to have examined in our schools not only what we believe but what we do not believe, not only what our leaders say but what the leaders of other groups and nations and of other centuries have said.” (Du Bois in “Freedom to Learn”) “What do we test and when and how?” and “Who should set the standards?”. In her review of four books on Measuring Learning for Education Next, Lauren Resnick writes, “Poorly designed high school tests may undermine the raising of standards” and “The execution of the standards based vision is uneven in quality. —–In practice raising standards sometimes looks more like punishing teachers and students than serious educational work”. Phillip Schlechty, author of Shaking up the Schoolhouse, points out that the issue of standards in schools has become as much a political issue as a technical one. He continues ” One of the unfortunate consequences is that much of educator’s attention is now fastened on improving test scores and too little attention is paid on how to ensure that students learn. This is akin to business leaders worrying about how to get the profits up without worrying about the quality of the product. It has become a debate about tests not children.”

“What should parents do?”
“We can’t fix education until we fix families” is a headline from the Houston Chronicle. ” The crucial predictor of a child’s performance is the quality of the child’s family”, it continues. A child who comes to school with a sense of curiosity and an excitement about learning has a head start. The Kellogg foundation report has told us that factors outside the school are four times more important in determining the pupil’s academic progress than those in school and we know that children spend at least 80% of their waking hours out of school. A Harvard Graduate School study reported “for children in a family of four, living in poverty, an increase in economic resources of some 4,500$ a year over 3 years helped those children to score as well as those in families with twice the income.” An American parent with a child in an English school said “I’m sure you love your children but why don’t you enjoy them any more?”

“How can we recreate caring and child friendly communities?”
As the headteacher of a large and successful school until my retirement three years ago, I know that the best we can do within the present system is not enough to prepare young people for the changing, complex world they live in. Schools alone cannot make up for the ills of society and the crisis in childhood. They cannot finish the “Unfinished Revolution” with which the 21st Century Learning Initiative is concerned. The first of my two favourite quotes comes from England and Penelope Leach. “The spiralling strands of development to transform helpless new-borns into sociable and socialised small people are plaited into their relationships with known, loved and loving adults.” The second from Csikszentmihaly in the USA, “In all societies since the beginning of time, adolescents have learned to become adults by observing, imitating and interacting with grown-ups around them. The self is shaped and honed by feedbacks from men and women who already know who they are and can help the young person find out who he or she is going to be.” Too many adults do not find the time, perhaps because they have little support themselves.

A trip through some of the year’s statistics and articles has painted a picture of a crisis in schools and communities, a crisis in childhood and learning which has its root in the failure of communities and our reluctance to face the really difficult questions. It will take every one of us to support young parents, to value our schools and to trust our teachers, and to help the children around us to learn. Then adolescents can become young people whose exciting questioning and restless energy finds an outlet beyond their peer group and the kicking of cans around a shopping mall.

Janet M. Lawley, January 2002

Janet Lawley is a Fellow of the 21st Century Learning Initiative.

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