The year started with the publication of John Abbott’s book Overschooled but Undereducated drawing on what the Initiative has learnt since its formation (as Education 2000) in the early 1980s. With the General Election in England looming in May the Initiative used its Parliamentary Briefing Paper to urge politicians to embrace the new thinking about the brain, and how humans learn, so as to bring about that long overdue transformation of pedagogic practice aimed at giving young people an ever-greater involvement in, and responsibility for, their own learning.

As the Coalition settled in during the late summer their policies seemed to be dominated by issues of governance (who should run the schools) and competition, rather than any serious attempt to reverse the perceived superiority of secondary over primary schools, or by encouraging the all-through 5-16 schools. Consequently in this new political climate it was decided that the Initiative should no longer spend time trying to directly influence politicians but rather to build up, across the country, a far better understanding of what such alternative methods of education would look like, why they were more likely to succeed, and how ordinary people can start to effect change.

Three of our most senior Trustees retired (including Christopher Wysock-Wright who started Education 2000 in the early 1980s, and David Peake who has been Chairman since 1993). John Senior, formerly Head of Community Affairs at Rio Tinto, and a Trustee for several years, has been appointed Chairman. Four new Trustees have been appointed: Richard Hornbrook, formerly Chief Executive of the Chelsea Building Society, Peter Mountstephens, a well known Primary head who is Chairman of the South West Primary Heads Association, Dr Johanne Grosvold, a Lecturer in the School of Management at the Bath University and Caroline Wijetunge, a freelance copywriter. They are being assisted by, amongst others, Lorenzo McLellan, a recent Graduate from Bristol University in Philosophy and French, and Dale Stafford who has run her own company providing a range of training resources and programmes.

Believing that the strength of the Initiative is the powerful and well-articulated case that the book and supporting papers make for far-reaching pedagogic change, the Trustees also recognised that we have only a loosely connected network of supporters (drawn out of the nearly 1,000 lectures given in the past ten years, and in many parts of the world). Many of our strongest supporters have a clear sense of what the Initiative is about, but lack the knowledge of what to do about it. To help rectify this the Initiative has produced a three-page description of what the Initiative is about. It is a powerful document and is available on the website.

The Trustees have decided to commission a graphic production company to work with us to produce an animated documentary graphic which, by focussing just on the argument in the first chapter of the book, will be able to give an overview of what the Initiative’s ideas are in between four and five minutes. For those knowledgeable about such matters they will already know about the animated documentary called “The Story of Stuff”. This is a good illustration of what we are seeking to produce.

The graphic will be placed on our website and as many links as possible created to attract the largest possible audience. Immediately this animated documentary graphic would help those of our supporters who regularly comment “I have read the book from cover to cover, twice, and so believe in what it says yet I get totally frustrated by not being able, myself, to explain it properly to my friends. Please can somebody help me do this better”, by enabling them to use such a video to back up their own explanations. By utilising the best of modern methods of communication this graphic should be able to do this splendidly. The more widespread the graphic is used the more other people will turn for more ideas to our website.

Of course only a fraction of the Initiative’s ideas can be covered in one such video – we have already identified a further dozen videos that could be extracted from the content of the book alone. Producing such graphics is expensive and we will have to use the first one to attract sponsors to fund the production of subsequent videos. These will provide an incomparable tool for extending the Initiative’s ideas. These videos will each invite questions and comments, provide suggestions to what individuals and organisations can do next, and then direct enquirers to specific parts of the website.  Each video is likely to cost between £10,000 and £15,000.

The graphics are the first of three projects to support the Initiative’s strategy. The second project will be to establish, in the middle of 2011, a Conversation between some 15 or 20 especially invited men and women, each with a wide and appropriate background, to consider what kind of education do the people of this country want for what kind of a world. Some readers will remember that John Abbott once linked this to a subsequent question – “do we want our children to grow up as battery hens or free-range chickens?” The second project will inevitably feed off the ideas generated by the graphics, and vice versa. This Conversation is likely to require start-up funds of £15,000.

The third project is still tentative and involves attracting those 17 – 18 year olds who are already interested in the possibility of becoming teachers and are anxious to take an appropriate gap year between school and university. The Initiative is having discussions with various groups in British Colombia, Canada where the ideas of the Initiative are best being implemented, about a scheme which would split such a year into two parts. They would act as student teachers working with some excellent teachers in the Gulf Island School District to the south of Vancouver Island, supported by an extensive programme run through one of the universities in introducing them to all the research involved in the “grain of the brain”. The second part of the year would be spent in a school in one of the developing countries in Africa or elsewhere. They would then return after such an inspirational year to study for three years at university in their particular chosen subjects but this experience should lead them to be far better prepared for a postgraduate teacher training experience. The immediate start-up costs for this will be between £10,000 and £15,000.

The plans for the three projects are now well underway. The Initiative will post regular updates about all of this on the website, and more directly to those who have provided the Initiative with your most appropriate, personal, email addresses.

There are, we know, a number of people who could, in a variety of ways, help us promote either one, two or three of these strands and we would dearly like them to identify themselves to us by contacting John Abbott directly. Some of that help has to be in developing a network of like-minded people, by encouraging the dissemination of the ideas, and part in helping us find the essential funds to make all this happen. If you know an idea, or a contact, or a source of funding please do let us know as soon as possible.

Should you feel that you yourself can help fund the work of the Initiative, we have set up a donation page on our website which you can find at the following link:

http://www.21learn.org/donate

While this may seem a big agenda the Initiative believes it to be highly appropriate to the opportunities we can take, and the challenges that have to be accepted. A further update will be issued at the end of January, and we expect to send you the first animated documentary graphic at the end of February, just in advance of it being posted on the website.

Related posts:

1. The End of SATs for 13/14 Year Olds
2. The Initiative publishes a blog
3. Suggested Reading List 6: Education for What

The UK’s position in the rankings for educational performance (8^th December 2010) will continue to remain “stagnant at least” as long as successive Ministers fail to appreciate that they don’t control all aspects of children’s lives. A balanced education is as dependent on what a child experiences informally in the home and the community as it is upon what can be gained from learning within school. Mr Gove, and the rest of those of us living in these islands, has to understand that, however good a school may become, by its institutional nature it can’t provide everything that a child needs as it seeks to grow into adulthood. We all – parents, grandparents, employers as well as employees – should be as shamed by the latest PISA results for allowing our concept of education to have become so dangerously narrow. Surely Mr Gove’s time would be better spent appealing to the latent enthusiasm to be found throughout this land  to help all children to grow up better, rather than developing ideological policies that, directly or indirectly, split communities still further apart.

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Janet Lawley, a long time fellow of The Initiative, has just written a most interesting observation on this article which it is my pleasure to publish. It is longer than my usual blog but that it is because it is so worthwhile reading. It goes as follows.

This article explores why so many no longer like going to work. Like most people there were mornings when I wanted to be seduced by a warm duvet, a good book, a sunny garden or the distant hill but my work brought me far more than a monthly pay cheque and I suppose I was lucky My family believed that life was about more than enjoying yourself; we had a duty to serve, talents which allowed us to be of service and the challenge was to develop those talents and find a fulfilling career, sharing your gifts and making life better for others while knowing the pleasure of a job well done. Nothing less than your best was ever good enough but that did not mean coming first or even near the top. With only a very moderate income, my father was a chauffeur and my mother a primary teacher, we lived a rich, varied and very happy life. Work was enriching and carried out at home, in the community (for the church Christmas Fair for example) or for neighbours as well as for your living – much more than for a wage.

The Oxford English dictionary begins its definition of Work “the application of energy to some purpose”. It can mean ‘achievement’ or ‘an accomplishment’ and the suggestion that it is just a means of earning money comes a long way down the extensive list. It is a job which is a piece of work done for hire or profit. I was lucky to teach when there was room and time, and indeed an expectation, that individuality, creativity, thinking for yourself was what it was about. A summer as a student stacking shelves in a supermarket in Torquay was a good way to enjoy sun and sand and the sea. There was plenty of space for thinking there, even for a temporary student. I tried new displays, new arrangements, new combinations of goods, invented and made a simple trolley. On another summer experience I worked in a cafe and designed a pre-computer spread-sheet to make the cashing up process simpler and transparent. Plenty of opportunities.

Yet Irena Grugulis reports “Little room for manoeuvre” in supermarkets today even in those tasks where skilled butchers or bakers are employed. All comes pre-sliced and pre-packed, dough frozen ready to bake. Almost every aspect of work for every kind of employee, from shop-floor worker to store manager “was set out, standardised and even scripted by the experts at head office”. The research paper for Skills, Knowledge and Organisational Performance (SKOPE) published Professor Grugulis’s research on August 3rd, 2010. She asks how far the low skills levels and limited discretion allowed to those at work can be reconciled with the so-called high-skill./ high-quality economy for which the country is striving to prepare its young people. The world we find around us does not seem to need large numbers of graduates. The principle task of many managers is “simply to encourage employees to greater efforts” to meet “very demanding performance targets over which they have little, if any, control”. The research finds things starkly different from the “product knowledge of exert assistants in France”, or “the wide-ranging skills of trained workers in Germany” or “impressive educational achievements of Chinese retail workers”.

Chakrabortty reminds us how far away that all seems from “the hi-tech grotto where people are free to exercise initiative and innovation” foretold by Charles Handy and Tom Peters. “Too much routine and control becomes hard to bear when you have the qualifications which entitle you to expect more” he writes. More skilled workers with decreasing influence over how to do their daily tasks seems a combination doomed to make going to work a daily grind. Official skills surveys show the proportion of workers believing that they have much influence over how their job is done has fallen from 57% in 1992 to 43% in 2006, with a job more about meeting targets or central criteria than anything else. Those feeling out of control include teachers, national health workers, lawyers and soft-ware engineers. One respondent to Chakrabortty’s article wrote “Your only responsibility is to follow corporate guidelines. It can only be called ‘mental circumcision’.”

In the UK the experts seem increasingly to be in the head office. The research in France and Germany and China found them on the shop floor. What is an expert, you ask? Though expertise is difficult to achieve without first becoming a specialist, it is much more than specialization. It requires the ability to think widely, looking for connections, seeing across boundaries and thinking in the specific and the abstract. It helps people of all ages and disciplines to break out of a set way of doing things, seeing new possibilities and it is the key to progress.

“We have got Freedom”, SKOPE’s paper number 95, July 2010, examines the claim that the Scandinavian social-democratic model better supports forms of work organisation which give employees higher levels of autonomy and control. In a comparison between teachers in Norway and in the UK it finds “Scandinavia is indeed distinctive with Norwegian teachers enjoying higher levels of job quality with a strong degree of autonomy, discretion and decision making influence”. Too many relatively low skilled, tightly controlled jobs in the UK led to the lowest levels of task variety and discretion amongst shop assistants, care workers, food processing operatives and call centre agents in a recent European five country study. To them must now be added professional jobs, hide-bound by bureaucracy, stifled by centrally determined targets, greater surveillance than ever before and a growing gap between professionals and senior management. Following specified performance criteria leaves UK teachers little time for variety or discussion or addressing the needs of the individual. Norwegian school guidelines are less prescriptive and focus more upon “outcomes” allowing more space for local decision-making. With local administration there is less inspection. “We don’t like it. We trust each other” said a representative from the Ministry of Education. The conclusion of the research? “Norway provides an example of an alternative way of managing, not based on low trust or requiring extensive systems of monitoring and control.”

In “Skills are not enough”, the PRAXIS paper of March 2010, Phil Brown calls this extension of Taylorism from manual work to skilled and graduate jobs, ‘Digital Taylorism’. He concludes that “in the UK permission to think” will be “restricted to a small group of knowledge workers“. The rest of the work will be turned into routine and farmed off to Eastern Europe or India. No wonder such large numbers leave teacher training and quit teaching after a few years. It is hard work constantly in the public eye, it is not yours to control and thinking is not encouraged. I was lucky to have taught when I did. Brown concludes “There is already evidence of an explosion in the global supply of graduate labour and some emergent countries can compete on both quality and cost”.

John Abbott has often called his lectures and courses “What kind of Education for What kind of World?” It is rare these days to stop to ask the big questions. If you have time to do so, (and if some of us don’t make time the crisis in education will not be solved however well intentioned the decision makers), begin by asking what kind of world we are preparing those young people for? To encourage self reliance, free thinking, creativity and innovation, to encourage further study to degree level for half the population and then to fail to value or respect or use those skills is to create a more disillusioned, instant pleasure-seeking generation where affluenza runs out of control and work is never understood as “The application of energy to some purpose”. We need experts who see across the boundaries and make connections and not just the specialists whose search for the perfect model has led us into a cul de sac where a one-size-fits all rulebook, with targets, is no longer about the exciting differences of places and communities and people.

Both Janet and I would be most interested in reactions to these ideas.

Related posts:

1. Cognitive Apprenticeship: Making Thinking Visible
2. Review: Master and Apprentice: Reuniting Thinking with Doing by John Abbott

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. 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