Stop the world, has been the age-long plea, I want to get off.

Sometimes amid all the confusion what seems to be very little thing suddenly stands out.  Such things, or ideas, chase around our minds, looking for a suitable link to make with other thoughts.  There is no time to deal with them now, but you feel they are too important to be ignored, they excite you, and they could be the missing link in your own thinking.

Two evenings back, reading through one of my favourite quarterly journals – Human Givens – I came across a quote from Plato made some two and a half thousand years ago.  I give it to you to ponder over the course of the holidays:

“Those who think they are too smart to engage in politics are punished by being governed by those who are dumber.”

The second was a cutting I had taken from an article in the BA High Flyer magazine ten years ago, entitled The Mystery of Creative Families.     I don’t know who wrote it.  Something in that article, however, stands out very powerfully now, a decade later.  It reads:

“A stream seems to run through creative families.  Such children are not necessarily smothered with love by their parents.  They feel loved and wanted, and are secure in their home, but are often more surrounded by an atmosphere of work and where following a calling appears to be important.”

Think on that one as well for, as the Initiative has said so many times, “however good schools may become they can’t do it all on their own” and “a balanced education involves home, community and school as equal partners.”

* Desiderata, taken from mid 17^th century Latin as meaning something desired, something worth working to achieve.

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Flippant as this remark may sound the question posed in this Review about whether there could or should be a secondary school in Larkhall has forced a number of local residents to go further and ask BANES to give full consideration to the exciting possibility in Larkhall of eventually joining the three Church of England schools – infant, junior and St Mark’s Secondary – that already exist virtually at the same location.

If we don’t look at the whole of a youngster’s schooling then we won’t be able to think beyond the Irishman’s conundrum.

In the context of today’s rapidly changing world, it seems to us that formal schooling has now to start a dynamic process through which pupils are progressively weaned of their dependence on teachers and institutions, and given the confidence to manage their own learning. Using the opportunity to consider the role of the secondary school we would like to work with the Authority and go further to create an all-through school able to offer a continuous and seamless process right through from the age of five to sixteen. Such a form of education would enrich the whole of BANES by showing what could be achieved when this is delivered by teachers who have both a technical subject knowledge and considerable expertise in pedagogy and child development. Such an all-through school would have a unique opportunity to redirect the more generous resources currently assigned to older pupils, and so front-load the system that all children would be prepared to take ever more responsibility for their learning.

To rupture a child’s schooling at the ages of seven and eleven does considerable harm to some pupils, but to continue treating all young people at sixteen and above as school pupils is to so “go against the grain of the brain” that it wears out schools, and turns off the youngsters themselves. We concur, therefore, with the proposal that it would be best for the post-sixteens to pursue further courses in schools or colleges which, by extending the principles of cognitive apprenticeship, offer courses that ground rigorous theory in practical experience. Through the use of distance learning programmes they should broaden the concept of learning far beyond the walls of the institution.

Sited in the very middle of the thriving community of Larkhall such an all-through school would more than attract the numbers of pupils needed to maintain what currently is seen as an 11-16 school. Eventually we would believe strongly that such a school would be under pressure from large numbers of pupils wishing to move into it from other parts of the city, rather than losing such numbers to other schools as it does at present.

We totally endorse the BANES vision that “all children and young people (should be) fully prepared for life in the 21st century.” We believe that this can be more effectively achieved by the primary and secondary schools working together with the full and enthusiastic support of the community.

We appreciate the need to reduce the number of surplus places and to create, in each school, units which are both socially and economically viable. We are pleased that the Diocese wishes to maintain the St Mark’s site for secondary provision. Specifically we believe that the provision of a properly structured all-through 5-16 school in the middle of Larkhall would not only significantly raise the academic standards of the pupils but would also greatly increase the social capital of that community to the benefit of everybody.

John Abbott
Resident of Larkhall
3 Grosvenor Place, London Road, Bath BA1 6AX
President of the 21st Century Learning Initiative

Related posts:

1. Our Secondary Schools Don’t Work Anymore (Introduction)
2. Review: Schools for Thought by John Bruer
3. When Will We Ever Learn? Seeing Adolescence and Secondary Education in Perspective

This is an ages-old dilemma.  Eric James, the High Master of Manchester Grammar School not a mile down the road from Withington, had led the school through twenty tumultuous post-war years by developing just such a winning streak.  The school began to deliver more and better A-Level results than any other school in the country because, according to its critics, they simply cram them for the exams, and the Oxbridge interviews.  One man who claimed to have been much harmed by this academic forced-feeding was Michael Young, whose own experiences of schooling in England and Australia led him to write the bestselling book The Rise of the Meritocracy.  With their crippling sense of inferiority the English just loved this implied criticism of those they saw as ‘clever clogs’ and denigrated them as being no more than the ‘meritocracy.’  James was succeeded in 1963 (two years before I first met the boys who were to make up that Iran Expedition) by Peter Mason, a man with a less utilitarian approach to life, and education in particular and was affronted by the task of producing only a meritocracy.  Taking the opportunity of reminding Old Boys and present pupils alike of the essential social and ethical purposes of education, he wrote a Foreword to the history especially commissioned to mark the schools’ 450^th anniversary of its Founding by the then Bishop of Exeter, Hugh Oldham.  He wrote:

“The idea that talents are leant for the service of others and not simply given, and that knowledge brings humility and a sense of involvement in mankind, are just as necessary correctives to the arrogance of a meritocratic in a highly technological world, as they were in Hugh Oldham’s day, and without them the school’s record of academic success would be indeed alarming.”

Mason went ahead and civilised the MGS curriculum.  Considering the old ‘O Level’ exam, a mean test of a boy’s intellect, he actually narrowed the middle school curriculum, and reduced it from five years to four so as to put a greater emphasis on the Sixth Form which then became a three-year course.  Here, too, Mason left his mark by insisting that a quarter of a boy’s time had to be spent on none examinal General Studies, and Community Service.  Those members of the Iran Expedition were the result of such a philosophy of education.  It was, and is, as Withington I’m sure would agree, something for which all schools should strive.

But the moral imperative which generations before Peter Mason hankered after is now being swamped by a vision of education excessively focused on ‘a new economic imperative of supply-side investment for national prosperity’ (David Blunkett, 2001).  It is said that David Willetts, the new Minister for Universities, in his first dozen speeches since the Election has, on every occasion, spoken of universities as a preparation for employment and job creation and never once talked about universities equipping future generations to think straight so as to create people who will make good citizens.  Unless the next generation is challenged to dare to be wise then society is in great danger.

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Does this matter?  We shouldn’t simply dismiss this by suggesting that we are just not being efficient or dedicated enough, for if we really haven’t got time to think things through we are damaging ourselves.  Even more importantly, ultimately parents screw up their kids.

Let me explain.  Years ago I remember hearing that anthropologists had calculated that our Stone Age ancestors spent less than 20% of their time hunting, collecting food and cleaning out their caves.  For more than three-quarters of their waking time they just sat around, talked, and enjoyed themselves.  I saw that when I spent time observing one of the very last remnants of such people, the Hadza out on the Savannah in Tanzania who, poverty stricken as they were in terms of western expectations, appeared to have all the time in the world to tell stories, and teach their children how to repeat them.

Cognitive scientists tell us that the brains of tiny children are a wondrous bundle of neurological possibilities, bequeathed to them genetically by their countless ancestors as preferred ways of making sense of the world.  But, like a new computer operating system, they have to be activated by the challenge of being involved in the world around them.  Unchallenged, they simply lie inert, whole swathes of wasted neurological opportunities.  Human nature has to be activated by human culture.

Those Hadza parents, true itinerants who owned nothing (not even herds, crops, clothes or buildings) are in many ways quite excellent parents.  With no written language, and no one to write things down, everything that they value is recorded in stories, and every child internalises such a wealth of culture that, years later, they retell their stories, often fables, to their own children.

English toddlers are born with the same neurological software but, as noted in a recent study by Oxford University, many children today come to school never having been told a story at home.  And it is getting worse with two-thirds of teachers saying that it is worse now than ten years ago.  Children whose imaginations have not been tweaked by a ‘sitting-on-a-parent’s-lap’ culture of storytelling simply fail, almost at the first hurdle, to be creative themselves.

A month ago a study from Sheffield showed that one in five of today’s teenagers are so illiterate and innumerate that they are incapable of dealing with the challenges of everyday life.  In Stone Age times they simply wouldn’t have survived for they would have been pushed out of the cave as being an unnecessary burden on the rest of the tribe.

Later it was noted that many middle-class parents were too busy to take time out to be with their own children, simply enrolled them in so many out of school activities that they denied their children the opportunity to ‘go out and mooch around in the garden.’  Mooching is where  creative thoughts is born – as it was with Newton when hit on the head by an apple falling from the tree, and so subsequently formulated the theory of gravity.

Earlier this month archaeologists completed an analysis of the bones from a medieval burial ground and have concluded that, in the 1400s, men only needed to work for 159 days in the year to provide for their families.  Now, it seems, both parents have to work full-time to do the same thing.  While that is undoubtedly true for the least well-off in our society, is that really true for the rest of us?

Running too fast may well damage your health.  If so, ultimately it has to be our own fault.  But it is not fair on our children if we so get our priorities wrong that we deny them the time and space to grow up in ways which naturally suited the Hadza, more than they do the unfortunate child of today with its iPhone sitting on the beach while its parents socialise in the bar.

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“The biggest shake-up of education since the 1944 Education Act” proclaims the media while Mr Gove loses no opportunity to explain that this will revitalise the economy and strengthen individuals to accept greater responsibility for themselves.   We live, he and the Prime Minister tell us in most difficult times.

The 1944 Education Act was born in difficult times; conceived by an academic Tory in the midst of war, it was actually birthed by a former communist by then the first Labour Minister of Education.  Its tentative first steps were guided by a new Minister, George Tomlinson, a man whose own education had ended at the age of fourteen.

While Ministers and their civil servants were sorting out the minutiae for a national system of secondary schooling (England being one of the last countries in Europe to do this) a most remarkable man – remarkable in the sense that he saw nothing remarkable in what he did – set out to explain in everyday language to the eight million men and women whose children would attend these schools, just what kind of education they would receive.

John Newsom set out his thoughts in what became a truly successful bestseller entitled The Child at School published by Pelican at one shilling and sixpence (7 ½ new pence).  Newsom reminded his audience of the most basic of all facts that “children are, first and foremost, children, they are only school children second.”  Then he wrote “Education is ultimately a political issue, for it is concerned with a child’s relationship to the world both as a child and a future adult.  In other words, until you have decided what the relationship between man and God or man and other men should be, and what form of political economic society you would like to see, you cannot tell what sort of education a child should have.”

“This is where the difficulties begin,” warned Newsom for “much of English education is a medicine sold under a label that does not tell you what it is intended to cure.  We have prescribed the physic for diagnosing what the patient needs, and sometimes its magic bottle labelled Education.  Cure for all Ills can have disastrous results, like many medicines which are taken too liberally, or for the wrong complaint.”

The English are uncomfortable when forced to define abstract principles, especially about something so personal as our own, or our children’s education.  Some cling to the metaphor of filling an empty mug, others of a potter at his wheel while some prefer the gardener with his watering can.  “Not good enough,” said Newsom to his eight million audience as they sat down of an evening to consider their own children; “you need to go back to John Milton with his ‘oft quoted “I call a complete and generous education that which fits a man to perform justly, skilfully and magnanimously…”

Magnanimity was as interesting a concept to focus on for Newsom at the end of WWII as it had been for Milton as the Civil War raged around him and men fought to the death with their own sons.  Magnanimity means bigness of soul, generosity of spirit; it is about the moral courage which derides resentment, rancour or jealously.  It means developing personal strength so that you can support others.  It means going the extra mile.  Quoted by the humble, pipe-smoking John Newsom, it was about reminding parents that their children needed to grow up strong enough to develop personal courage, endurance, self-sacrifice, initiative, discipline and common purpose, as much in their private lives, as in their public responsibilities.  This was the Civil Society that the Puritans dreamed of, and which idealists in the late ‘40s still strove to create.  Why don’t we?

Newsom concluded “It is important to think a little about the purpose of education, before attempting to judge whether individual schools are doing their job properly or not.”  Over to you Mr Gove before you jump to too many conclusions based simply on objective statistics.  Magnanimity does not show up mathematically, but it is the essence of a responsible society.

See Chapter Nine of Overschooled but Undereducated

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What Cable and others struggle to explain is that a person who has spent time as an apprentice has something which is more than simply the sum of time spent in a classroom with time spent out ‘on the job.’  A successful apprenticeship means more than that.  Serving time with a real professional craftsman gives an apprentice something which the ancient Greeks called ‘gumption’ – an informed, shrewd, spirited resourcefulness.  To an apprentice gumption is critically important because in all things – be it the building of a ship, a company or a national constitution – the  ‘devil is always in the detail.’  If balked by a problem in one area, they back off, reassess the situation, and come at it from another way.  It is people with gumption that get things done.   England is in desperate need of people with gumption.

Recently, the English understanding of apprenticeship has been distorted in two ways.  Alan Sugar’s highly acclaimed TV show The Apprentice over-emphasised this as the skill of the entrepreneur, the key to financial success.  At the other extreme popular culture dismisses apprenticeship as a low-level form of training for plumbers, carpenters or electricians.  Both are simplistic.

In recent years cognitive scientists, synthesising neurobiological and biomedical research so as to understand just how the brain works, see in the processes involved in apprenticeship something which is extraordinarily ancient (‘ancient’ in the sense of a million or so years of genetically transmitted neural adaptations that create a predisposition to work/think in particular ways).  These processes are so well engrained in the structure of the brain, that scientists have coined the phrase “Cognitive Apprenticeship.”  Very simply, none of us learn something simply by being told to learn it.  We learn something because (a) we see somebody do something that we would like to do.  We are then helped to do this (b) when that person is able to break the task down into manageable subunits each of which we can take time to practice.  Such a sensitive mentor/teacher gives each of us temporary support (c) as we struggle to perfect the subtask.  Then as we start putting the bits together (d) the wise mentor slowly withdraws such external support leaving us to do more and more for ourselves.  Finally, (e) as with any apprenticeship, youngsters talk a lot as they pool their expertise.  Learning is essentially a shared, collaborative activity.

Vince Cable is right to stress the importance of apprenticeship.  The Coalition, if it is to achieve the radical transformation of English society for which it strides, has to realise that cognitive apprenticeship has a massive significance in almost all aspects of public life.  Mr Gove, for instance, has to put his energies behind pedagogic chance if he is to create children with a sense of spirited resourcefulness, and Mr Cameron has to remember that the best MPs are those who earlier earned their spurs, not in financial services, lobbying, marketing or television, but in the cut-and-thrust of local government.  Parliament is at its least effective when it is full of Members who have no personal experience of implementing its prescriptions at a local level for it is on the effectiveness of how individual councillors and members of society deal with the devilishly tricky detail that democracy depends.

In facing the challenges posed by cognitive apprenticeship the Coalition’s attempt to balance free-market principles with community responsibility and resourcefulness, it will face its greatest challenge in its attempt to build a more dynamic civil society.

Related posts:

1. Master and Apprentice manuscript to be made available
2. Master and Apprentice: Reuniting Thinking with Doing – Manuscript
3. Review: Master and Apprentice: Reuniting Thinking with Doing by John Abbott

The Briefing Paper opened with John Milton’s vision of what he called “a complete and generous education, that which fits a man to perform justly, skilfully and magnanimously, all the offices both public and private, of peace and war.”  Written in the midst of all the complexities and horrors of the English Civil War there can be no finer aspiration for what a state should provide for its children.  Will the new government of 2010, dealing as it is with mind-blowingly complex issues, be able to contribute such a sense of national and personal direction?

The Paper urged Members to consider the ages-old tension between nature (what we are born with) and nurture (being the way our surroundings influence the way we grow up).  It asks: Does contemporary educational policy simply react to symptoms, whist failing to address underlying design faults?  If the answer is ‘yes,’ how can future policy avoid such faults and build its programmes on firmer foundations.  Unravelling the relationship with nature to nurture, and then coming to terms with those misunderstandings from the past that colour contemporary judgements, is not easy.  Yet to fail to do this is to undermine new policies, and perpetuate underperformance.

The Paper asked Members a number of apparently simple questions:

• Why is schooling split at the age of eleven, and why is it that primary pupils generally enjoy their education, but secondary pupils don’t?
• Why, if the early years of education are so important, are secondary schools better financed than primary?
• Why, if education is so important, aren’t teachers held in higher regard?
• Why, given the significance in earlier gener­ations of adolescence as a “proving ground” for adulthood, does modern society treat adolescence as a problem, not as an oppor­tunity?
• Why, if one of the most significant indica­tors of future success is the quality of home life in the earliest years, are schools now expected to take on ever more of what until recently were the responsibilities of parents?
• Why are those aspects of schooling that children enjoy most called extra-curricu­lar, as if they don’t matter so much and are only informally offered?
• Why are Steiner and Montessori Schools so popular with professional parents?
• Why, in a largely secular country, are Faith Schools generally so popular?

Simple as such question may appear, the explanations are far from obvious.  They epitomise the deep dissatisfaction with English education that has existed for generations.

It is against this background that our new government needs to be equipped with a strategy that differentiates between short-term panaceas to deal with urgent problems, and the much longer term structural changes needed to build up whole generations of young people who know how to learn, who can communicate, collaborate, think for themselves and make decisions.  Only in this way will England so strengthen the younger generation that they will  have the energy and the wisdom to revitalise civil society.

Related posts:

1. A Briefing Paper for Parliamentarians on the Design Faults at the Heart of English Education
2. St Anne’s Academy, Victoria, Canada : Ministry of Education

The Initiative receives many fascinating emails, but few are as thought-provoking as the one from a seventeen-year-old English girl who had been at a discussion about Overschooled but Undereducated at the Mahindra United World College in India.  She wrote:

“The discussion turned out to be more informative about what education was like in each person’s country, which is understandable.  As there is high competition to enter our school, the students that are selected are from very strong academic backgrounds. Hence the vast majority have never struggled in school.  Except perhaps a few of us.  I happen to be part of that minority. Anyway the discussion was quite biased as to how important are good education systems, and how there is no problem.  I was upset hearing form so many people again and again how they had no problems with the system, and I feel so strongly that there is so many issues!

When I was in year 2 I remember wishing I could start again because I was so behind already and didn’t understand anything and thought it was because I was lazy.  Then in middle school I had to attend special needs classes, without anyone explaining to me I was dyslexic. All I knew was that there was a bunch of us who weren’t as smart as everyone else.  This made me feel really stupid.  Anyway, perhaps you are not interested in my life story but I just wanted to give you an idea why I feel so passionate about this!

After the discussion, I was ready to read the book.  I read continuously, and within two days I had finished the book – a world record for me as I hardly ever read because of my dyslexia (I really appreciate that it is written in simple English!).  There was something so reassuring, so warm and comforting about your book.  I really connected as I was going through an intensely stressful period; school is not everything and isn’t necessarily doing good.  Which is quite ironic because at UWC we are ‘taught to think as individuals and not told what to think’ so each person reflects on what they believe is important to them, e.g. starvation, global warming, politics etc. and then we discuss them, or simply just stick up for what we believe in. I found myself really believing that the education system was wrong, which made it harder and harder to sit still in class.

But I hadn’t a choice, I had to, or else I will be in trouble.  I did not really have much knowledge about the education system, and didn’t really know why I hated it so much, but knew it was much deeper than simply not liking my subjects or teachers.  I turned to art and submerged myself beneath it, forgetting about where I was.  It has helped a lot in getting through day to day life.  This school being very isolated on a hill in India and without any family, just friends and teachers, makes it very easy for one to forget important values in life. School and academics is given an enormous amount of importance, too much in my opinion.  It’s so easy to lose yourself here and think that the most important thing is getting top grades. Which is ridiculous. I especially suffered as I am not academic at all. So when I come across articles or books like yours it is so reassuring. So great to know that I am not mad and it is not just me in this world who feels overwhelmed by school.”

When I wrote back to gain her permission to quote this in my blog she replied, “Yes… it would also be great to speak to others who are going through, or have gone through, the same thing as me.  Then I still really don’t know what I want to do with my life, what I want to study and become.  I have been accepted in an Art School in London for a foundation course.  However, as much as I am passionate about art I am so drawn to education that I would love to be part of a movement to change education but I don’t even know where to start, how or what I want to contribute.”

Anyone who would like to contact Anna should let me know and I would forward their address to her in Mumbai.

Related posts:

1. An Organic View of Educational Change

The story as told in Genesis, arguably one of the oldest of all written records, suggests that all life is about competition – if the Jews were to inhabit Israel, first they would have had to get rid of Jericho.  Archaeological evidence from these early civilisations shows that these were very harsh places.  Thomas Hobbs, the 16^th century English philosopher, claimed that “the life of man [is] solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”  Later Thomas Huxley, known as “Darwin’s bulldog,” was largely responsible for over-emphasising Darwin’s conclusion that life was about “the survival of the fittest.”   Meanwhile Darwin, with very many other biologists through to this day, has shown that it is not the most powerful that survive, but those “most adaptable to change” by giving sustenance to mere aberrations and replacing the old status quo before dying off like the Dodo.

And it is not just the economists who believe that humans are an unequivocally competitive species.  Freudian psychology also stressed the competitive, harsh nature of life epitomised by the (supposed) universal reaction to challenge as being ‘fight or flight’ – you have to go all out to win an issue, or admit defeat before sustaining damage.  “But that”, said an Australian psychologist recently, “could only have been proposed by male psychologists, for women have the more subtle response of ‘bend or befriend.”  Meanwhile Behavioural psychologists and evolutionary scientists are beginning to note that there are very few entirely ‘male’, or ‘female’ brains.  Most of us appear to be somewhere on a spectrum.  In terms of our deepest instinctive reactions, it is not just women who think in terms of ‘bend or befriend’ or men who are limited to ‘fight or flight.’

In her fascinating book published last year, Mothers and Others; the evolutionary origins of mutual understanding, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy shows that the great evolutionary achievement of our species is the development of empathy.  Empathy is the ability to put yourself in another person’s position, and – critically – see yourself from the outside.  Hrdy writes “without the capacity to put ourselves cognitively and emotionally in someone else’s shoes, to feel what they feel, to be interested in their fears and motives, longings, griefs, vanities, and other details of their existence, without this mixture of curiosity about, and emotional identification with others, homo sapiens would never have evolved at all.”  The ability to learn from each other flows from enhanced mindreading and this has led to unprecedented advances in the realm of culture. This, with cumulative cultural knowledge in technology, has put our species on a totally different track.

In an even more recent book, The Empathic Civilisation, Jeremy Rifkin shows how recent discoveries in brain science and child development are forcing us to rethink the long-held belief that human beings are, by nature, aggressive, materialistic, utilitarian and self-interested.  The dawning realisation that we are a fundamentally empathic species has the most profound and far-reaching consequences for society.  In a celebrated review published in 2007 evolutionary psychologists summarised this as meaning “selfishness beats altruism within groups; altruistic groups beat selfish groups every time.”

Those learning structures that are moving towards a new empathic approach to education show a marked improvement in mindfulness, communication skills, and critical thinking as youngsters become more inwardly looking, emotionally attuned and cognitively adept at comprehending and responding intelligently and compassionately to others.  Civilisation increasingly depends upon mutual understanding; the world is too small a place for alpha males (and females) to ‘strut their stuff.’  That is the challenge to all of us, especially as we educate children for the world that is hurtling towards us.

Related posts:

1. Review: How Hardwired is Human Behavior?

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.”

That advice has guided me ever since.  It has never been easy.  Too often people in authority, including Prime Ministers and Headteachers, crave the publicity of the gallant trouble-shooter rescuing a venture at the last moment, while most often the problem would not have arisen if he or she had earlier concentrated on rectifying the root causes of the difficulty.

At first the telephone, then the fax, and now emails give us a continuous flood of messages and it is hard to put them in some kind of order.  The ability to decide what is important and what is merely urgent becomes an ever more pressing problem.  Not just for teachers, of course, but even more so for politicians as we get closer to the Election.

In August of last year the Initiative published a Briefing Paper for Parliamentarians on the design faults at the heart of English education, as a means of testing politicians’ policies in advance.  The Paper concluded with Ten Actions that would need to be taken.  They were:

One Parliament must take the lead in showing the country that the task of education involves far more than producing pupils able to pass exams.

Two Under too much pressure to improve examination results schools tend to develop superficial “quick wits” rather than the more robust, long-term “hard wits” which breed flexibility and adaptability.

Three How we are treated as babies and toddlers determines the way in which what we were born with can turn us into men and women capable of doing new things well, not simply repeating what earlier generations have already done.

Four Legislators must appreciate the evolutionary significance of adolescence, and provide opportunities for young people to extend their learning in a hands-on manner.

Five A far less content-prescriptive curriculum emphasising such skills as the ability to think, communicate, collaborate and make decisions is required.

Six Quality education is everything to do with teachers, not much to do with structures, and very little to do with buildings.

Seven While Britain prides itself on being a democracy it frequently forgets that such a fragile concept cannot flourish unless each new generation is well-nurtured in the affairs of the mind, and appropriately inducted into the responsibilities of adulthood, and the maintenance of the common good.

Eight It is not more money that is needed to transform English education, rather it is to reallocate those funds that are being spent now in ways that should go with the grain of the brain so as to radically enhance the quality of education, the life of children, and national well-being.

Nine All-through schools from 5-16 should be based on an extension of present primary school practice so as to restore the balance between school, home and community.

Ten For a democracy to be fully functional, the state cannot simply be defined in terms of a government that makes and administers laws in which individuals are then free to do their own thing.  Just to live within the law means very little; but to live within the law and have a sense of civil society, is to create a great place in which to live.

Do the candidates in your constituency recognise that these are the important issues, on which future policies have to be based?

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