If young people are to be equipped effectively to meet the challenges of the 21st century it is surely prudent to seek out the very best understandings from current scientific research into the nature of how humans learn before considering further reform of the current system.
This article by John Abbott and Terence Ryan appeared in the Spring, 1999 issue of Education Canada.
In the United States the cliche “parents are a child’s first teacher” is often used to indicate the impact parents have on children’s learning. Yet, just as more of us are starting to fully appreciate the importance of parents in the learning process, parents are increasingly stressed to find the time to be with their children.
The President of the Initiative, John Abbott, gave the Keynote Speech at the 18th Annual South East Asia Teachers’ and Counselors’ Conference in Jakarta in late November. I, as John’s research assistant, had the good fortune to attend the conference with him, and this afforded me the opportunity to speak with many of the 800 delegates and presenters from international schools throughout the region. I quickly discovered people wanted to talk about what John had said in order to “make sense of it” in their own working and living environments, and subsequently these various encounters caused me to think anew what the Initiative was saying.
In a particularly interesting article Nicholson describes the evidence for new models of management that the scientific discipline of evolutionary psychology is now offering business. Evolutionary psychology has its roots in a convergence of findings from fields as diverse as anthropology and neuropsychology, and a number of its findings are controversial.
Prepared by Terry Ryan for the International Conference “Media and Education” in Poznan, Poland in April, 1998.
The past 15 years have witnessed dramatic changes to the face of capitalism, and these changes have had great implications on the way most people live and raise their children. This paper is a review of many of these changes and trends.
For more than a decade politicians, business leaders and educational leaders have assumed that their education systems needed reform, not re-design. On both sides of the Atlantic reformers have insisted that young people can be successfully prepared for the challenges and opportunities of the Knowledge Age by getting systems of education designed for the Industrial Age to work more efficiently and towards a higher standard. In taking this stance, much of the emerging body of research into the nature of human learning that challenges the underlying principles of the systems that reformers have taken for granted has failed to be fully appreciated.
Review of This is Biology: The Science of the Living World, by Terry Ryan. Published by The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Cambridge, Massachusetts (1997).
