This paper was prepared in July and August of 2004, and slightly modified in September, after meetings with several groups who suggested that it had a value as a general discussion document for audiences broader than I had originally anticipated.

English state schools have been so starved of money for so many years, especially money for capital development, that when the Labour Party promises (if it is re-elected) to increase annual expenditure from £30 billion in 1997 to £64 billion in 2007/8—with capital spending going up even more rapidly from £680 million in 1997 to £5 billion in 2005—a sense of euphoria naturally fills the educational air. At last, people say, schools will really be able to do it all. It’s bonanza time. Get out your drawing boards and put in for all you’ve ever asked for or dreamt about.

The English government’s approach to education has, historically, been piecemeal. Accepting as a “given” (which it should not) that there is a justifiable split at the age of eleven into a primary and secondary sector, the emphasis in Labour’s first two terms of office has been largely on the younger age group. Now the attention is shifting to the far more difficult task of reforming secondary education, a difficulty that England shares with many other developed countries; quite simply adolescents don’t fit comfortably into class rooms, and if they’re forced too hard to do so they lose much of their sparkle and creativity and don’t emerge from the system with the promise which had been evident in earlier years. This worries many people—parents, teachers, politicians, religious and community leaders. As a student of how the brain works and how humans learn, this certainly troubles me greatly. Meanwhile, as a token of its good faith, government has promised secondary education a massive £15 billion over the next ten years to replace all the old secondary school buildings. This is a huge amount of money by any standard, and it seems the politicians want the money spent quickly. They want some good photographs of their beneficence, for in our world pictures convince an electorate more effectively than words (and that in itself is a sad indictment of the education of earlier generations).

The English, it seems, are increasingly in favour of institutional solutions to complex, social problems. Which is strange for a country in which, historically, individuals used to take great pride in their own, frequently perverse, often idiosyncratic, but sometimes brilliant creativity. That England should now be so enthusiastic about extending institutional schooling is even stranger, given many an Englishman’s antipathy towards schooling when they were children themselves. Stranger still when research is just starting to become available to show the critical importance of those “open learning” situations only to be found in the emotionally-supportive environment of the home, or the naturally complex, unpredictable nature of the informal community. Stranger again to an historian who knows that great inventors, politicians, and shapers of public opinion have often been “the oddballs”, the children who did not fit comfortably into any form of institutional provision. Einstein, for example, didn’t start talking until he was four, or write until he was six. By current educational prescription the greatest scientist of his time would have been deemed in need of Special Education. Charles Darwin failed to qualify for a degree at both Edinburgh and Cambridge universities; Gregor Mendel, the founder of modern genetics, failed every exam to become a high school teacher in Austria; and Bill Gates was virtually withdrawn from formal classroom work at the age of 13. What was common to each of these, and the tens of thousands of other significant innovators, was that they found the world beyond the school fascinating, and had the time and opportunity to explore it, as have millions of other “ordinary” men and women.

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During the summer of this year, invitations to address conferences in a number of parts of the world have given me a special opportunity to observe how other countries are dealing with the enhanced expectations of education, and the apparent limitations of schooling. Oftentimes people have reminded me of the ancient words of Confucius: “Tell me and I forget; Show me and I remember; Let me do, and I understand.” Unless youngsters feel personally involved in the work they are doing the very best teaching in the world won’t get them past Confucius’ second stage, the “remembering” bit. That’s fine for passing exams, but it’s totally inadequate for an uncertain world where what youngsters really need is understanding. It’s only at the stage of understanding that youngsters feel equipped to deal with continuous and unpredictable change. That third stage takes time to consolidate and, critically, it involves being prepared to take risks, and then knowing how to correct your mistakes.

In Canada in later September a bright fifteen year old girl, participating in a two-day conference alongside two hundred people – mainly adults – commented; “classes are boring ‘cos we don’t have to think about what we’re doing. We’re just told to copy stuff down off the board, or from what the teacher tells us. It makes us lazy… in fact, sorry to say this, but it’s you teachers who make us lazy.” That this girl felt confident enough to make such a comment was in many ways a complement to what is well recognised to be a very good school board district… but to her young, impressionable mind, still not good enough.

Having lectured in recent months in Tokyo, Ottawa and Melbourne, Vancouver, Accra and California—as well as to a score or more of conferences in England, Wales and Ireland—I’ve heard the comments of literally thousands of teachers, administrators and community leaders. At an international school in Yokohama I heard teachers concerned that their curriculum (the International Baccalaureate which, by current English standards, is very broadly based) did not do enough to give pupils the insights, already available to teachers, that are coming from the bio-medical sciences about how human behaviour and psychology have been shaped by our evolutionary origins. What we need to develop, said those teachers, was a “Humankind Curriculum” for the students, something that would make it far easier for them to appreciate what does, and does not, make humans “tick”. In an equally impressive school in Melbourne, a school with very high academic standards, I was told that a major problem for them was that a number of their youngsters who, coming from very privileged homes, had so little “street experience” that the school had—quite literally—to teach pupils how to use the public transport system. Such pupils had deemed it beneath their dignity (and their parents’ assumed status) ever to use a bus or a train, and were frightened of doing so.

That Australian school’s response was fascinating. Over recent years the school has developed four small country campuses where pupils could experience life away from home and away from the city whilst still studying. I visited one of these in the old gold-mining town of Clunes, some 70 miles outside Melbourne. In its time it had been a boom town of some 30,000 gold diggers, but now only 800 people live around Main Street with its broad, but decaying, boardwalks and rickety wooden verandas. Every term (they operate on a four-term year) 110 pupils go to Clunes for ten weeks. They live in “houses”, each of which accommodates eight pupils. For a whole term, each house has to organise its own cooking and housekeeping, and the students have to organise their own learning, centring around just two subjects which they have to select for themselves—projects often linked with the environment, or subjects which require the extensive use of electronic technology to connect to worldwide databases. Their “teachers” are local people, specially trained for the job. Their “school” teachers are left behind in Melbourne. In a term, these pupils become an integral part of the Clunes community—they play in its football team, help with odd jobs, organise a crèche, go to the local church and join in community barn dances and the like. Months later some of the pupils persuaded their parents to take them back for a holiday in the town, which they felt was theirs; somewhere they could reverse the normal parent/child role and become the guides to their own parents.

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