Articles by John Abbott

It is a month since the Election, and the new coalition government is beginning to shake itself out. Last summer the Initiative issued a Briefing Paper for Parliamentarians on the Design Faults at the Heart of English Education. Each MP had a copy and so shortly will all recently-elected Members.

It is an ages-old question; are humans predominantly competitive or collaborative? If we can be both what conditions how we behave from moment to moment?

It is nearly forty years ago that, as a newly appointed Head, an older colleague gave me a piece of priceless advice. “Divide the morning’s mail into two piles, the urgent and the important. Immediately deal with the important and leave the urgent until later in the day when you will probably find that somebody else has sorted it out.”

By using the life story of Peter Puget to illustrate the relationship of prepubescent learning to the nature of the adolescent brain, I may have lost interest of those readers with no affinity with the Pacific Northwest.

“When I told my 16-year-old son the title of your book,” said a teacher in Manchester ten days ago, “he responded with uncharacteristic enthusiasm, ‘that book must have been written just for me. That’s why I’m so frustrated. Endless hours of schooling seem to be giving me little preparation for the world I think I live in.’”

Of all the animals in the woodland surely it is the deer that most excites human imagination? A peaceful herbivore, the deer’s survival over aeons of time has depended on its ability to sniff out danger, and then to run off to safety faster than any other creature. Over millions of years it has developed the sleekest and most powerful combination of bone structure, muscle and tendon so making it a veritable icon of animal fitness.

Like many others in recent weeks I have become something of a ‘party policy watcher’, comparable to those who watch the fascinating antics of dolphins so as to try and understand how their brains work. As the General Election gets ever nearer, the behaviour of these policy wonks seems to have become ever more erratic, eccentric and represents apparently hopeless organisation behind the scenes.

Like many others in recent weeks I have become something of a ‘party policy watcher’, comparable to those who watch the fascinating antics of dolphins so as to try and understand how their brains work. As the General Election gets ever nearer, the behaviour of these policy wonks seems to have become ever more erratic, eccentric and represents apparently hopeless organisation behind the scenes.

In the first three years of the last decade I struggled, amidst a diary full of speaking engagements and numerous conferences, to write a book with the title of Master and Apprentice: Reuniting thinking with doing. It was a good book, the MSS of which I still turn back to when I need to reclaim parts of an argument, but the publisher found it too long and, in his view, “too broadly based, requiring too much additional thinking on the part of a reader.”

Last evening’s (8/2/10) BBC’s Newsnight report on the Swedish Private (for profit) School system prompts the question as to whether any other country can teach English schools how to improve, without the English first rigorously and honestly analysising what is the essence of their educational predicament. Contrary to what I suspect their glossy Party Manifestos will say shortly there is no one panacea that can deal with the numerous, yet inter-related, problems which have placed English education in a difficult, unpleasant and often embarrassing situation.