The question which underpins the entire work is dramatically simple. Do we wish for our children to be “battery hens or free range chickens”? The metaphor is too striking and uncanny to pass by. Today’s draconian dependence on grades, targets, and ‘performability’ is desiccating the very soul of education, and incapacitating students’ potential for genuine growth into responsible adulthood. John Abbott leads us on an extraordinary journey through anthropology, pedagogy, evolutionary psychology, as far as recent breakthroughs in the field of neuroscience to show just why adolescents need so much more than good grades if they are to be able to develop the full gamut of mental competencies which generations upon generations of ‘learning’ has bequeathed to them.

Drawing on Professor Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences, he explains how children rely on a wide variety of predispositions to help develop their ability to deal with the world, and the unknown. It is variety, thus, which is key; and which, despite often (but not always) well intentioned policy, is missing from today’s schools. However, he is quick to explain that ‘variety’ is not to be achieved through the simple extension of the range of curricular classes on offer. More vital is a re-integration of community and family values into education, which unfortunately have been progressively dissociated with our conception of what a child’s learning should entail. This is not a blanket attack on all schools, as many are endeavouring, with exceptional zeal and integrity to embrace these views. What must change is the entirety of the schooling system itself, and with it the ingrained parameters which suffocate the hope of genuine change.

Most importantly perhaps, John Abbott does not simply leave us with our minds full and hands empty, but rather offers us the tools needed for such change to be made. A comparative view of the Finnish schooling system (which has established itself as the lodestar of educational policy and achievement), in combination with a detailed exposition of the ‘grain of the brain’ (how children actually learn) and a retrospective view of the succession of educational policy acts since 1870, show how Britain is more than capable of transformation. He calls for local ‘through-schools’, advocated originally by John Milton, eradicating the arbitrary rupture between primary and secondary education at the age of 11. Such schools would engage a vested interest from local families and communities, thus

re-establishing that sense of neighbourhood solidarity which is slipping ever more into obsolescence. John’s vision sees the young and the old revisiting that mutual exchange of knowledge and support which made Britain the very tour de force that propelled it to the forefront of the Industrial Revolution. Creativity to replace conformity. Discourse to replace monologue. The teacher must come to abdicate the assigned role of ‘sage on the stage’ to become rather the ‘guide on the side’, able to help pupils find their own path out of the battery cages they have for so long been confined to. In this way, able to exercise their ‘legs and wings’ they will develop the strengths needed to stand on their own as responsible and effective participants in an ever more rapidly changing world; and more importantly, they will be able to draw on these strengths to realize their own conclusions as to how to help better it.

Adolescence must be seen not as an abhorrence, but as a veritable opportunity. John Abbot explains how the neural wiring of the adolescent’s brain naturally dictates the cynicism and defiance which contests established convention and wisdom. It is this need to stretch beyond the established which has allowed mankind throughout history to stretch beyond the possible, and which has been the motor behind the growth of civilisation. It was the adolescent mind which drove our ‘teenage’ ancestors to migrate into the unknown as they escaped the ravages of the Ice Age, and reach new pastures which their parents thought inaccessible. We owe our survival to that relentlessly bold spirit of defiance, which is still amongst us today in our children, and which can still help us achieve the unachievable. As Wordsworth once wrote, “The Child is the father of the Man”. Let us learn from John Abbott the lessons of science and history, which teach us that above all else, we must learn from our children.

John Abbott calls for ‘responsible subversives’ to recognize the problems so adeptly articulated in his book, and to help implement the changes needed to overcome them. I lend my voice, unreservedly, to his appeal.

Lorenzo McLellan, 2010 graduate of the University of Bristol, with a first class honours in French and Philosophy. Lorenzo will be joining the 2011 intake for Teach First, a government backed independent charity seeking to address educational disadvantage throughout England. He will be teaching English at secondary school level in the London region.

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1. The Right Reverend Peter B. Price, The Bishop of Bath and Wells
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3. David Peake, Former banker (Chairman of Kleinwort Benson)

I agree with the Initiative – this is a book that urgently needs to be more widely read (given the way the election is going, it looks more essential than ever).   I’m doing my bit in my own small way – I have already bought the book for my mother (a teacher for 35 years) and a colleague, and have quoted from it during input sessions with trainee teachers – but if I can be of any use, I would be delighted to help.

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3. Article written by Kevin Hawkins, Head of the Arusha campus of the Moshe International School, Tanzania

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John Abbott’s book is a significant contribution to education for a number of reasons.

John provides a context for our current situation and therefore our current potential for change. So often we are presented with reasons why things are so diminished. John gives us an astonishingly concise retrospective on why things are so and therefore how we can responsibly respond.
There is a scaled down, but not dumbed down, investigation into how we learn and why things are this way in evolutionary terms.
There is a triangulation of the above with the current science on sustainability and world futures to re-examine the moral imperatives that face us. Knowing what we know now we no longer have the moral authority to act as we have.
So as a headteacher I am provided with a concise and succinct analysis of why my guts feel the way they do. I have known for decades that political leadership in education is short-termist and that, metaphorically, we are required to plant hanging baskets when we are called towards forestry. John gives the research background, in just enough detail, to appreciate why we are in such an inappropriate place and what roads there are out of this morally questionable situation.

This book is nominally about adolescence but it deconstructs a wider topography and lays bare the essential agenda that we must all engage in if we are to find any moral purity in the essential task that education sets itself: to prepare the young of the tribe in the ways of the tribe to create prosperity and happiness in the future for themselves and for all.

We can’t go on as we have been: so what? That is the question John’s so eruditely stalks and lays before our moral and professional conscience.

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1. Nigel Coren, Headteacher
2. A Journey Towards an Understanding of Learning: A Headteacher travels with Education 2000 to the 21st Century Learning Initiative
3. Prof Charles Handy, formerly of the London Business School, and author of many books including The Hungry Spirit, The Empty Raincoat and The Elephant and the Flea

But what is truly exciting about this – and I am aware this is already the summation of over 20 years endeavour – is that it represents the beginning of a publishing programme building on this solid foundation. Here we have a chance to create a Building (or re-Building) the society of the future which is full of inspiration for a range of people – policy makers, professional and lay – as we strive to put the next pieces in place. Hugely ambitious but very exciting: hoping for giant leaps but prepared to acknowledge gentle nudges as well. Some components edging in the right direction whilst others herald major change.

When I was President of the Geographical Association in 2003 my Presidential address was concerned with this – the wow factor in the classroom, the sparks that lit the fire in the young mind and the desire for concerned teachers (in particular) to win back control of the curriculum and the control of their professional lives in order they could realise the ambitions that took them into the classroom in the first place.

Thanks for the terrific read, and allowing me this opportunity to really enjoy my job!

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At first I was surprised to see just how much of this book seemed to be comprised of history lessons, and I began to feel somewhat disappointed. I laughed when I was told in a later chapter not to feel this way. (or else I would join the ranks who are doomed to repeat history for not understanding it!) I was able to adjust my attitude once I realized that my disappointment stemmed from my having already read much about western education’s dismal recent past, and that this book actually offered some ideas about what to do to make positive changes. There are a heavy few chapters for people who are not keen on names and dates, but they are necessary in how they inform the chapters that follow.

While the differences between the Canadian system (systems really, as education in Canada is the jurisdiction of each separate province) and the British system are large, it is not difficult to make the necessary translations in reading the later chapters of this book. In fact, it is easy to see how Canada might follow some of Britain’s most frightening blunders, especially given the tendency that Canadian politicians have in seeing education as the cure for all of civilization’s ills. Despite some positive decisions in some provinces, at its heart the Canadian system is based on the same industrial, outcome-based model as is much of the rest of western world. What is different about this book is the suggestion that school should not become the stand-in for our broken families and our fragmented communities. Rather, those institutions need to be strengthened and recognized as the powerful places of learning that they are.

The author chooses wonderfully rich quotes that are so integral to the purpose of the book that it is hard to remember that they have been gathered from at least a dozen different disciplines and from across many centuries. The multi-faceted, complex ideas in this book are knit together in a way that makes it impossible to study education from the perspective of any single discipline ever again.

There are many verbal gems throughout the book, making it quite memorable and very readable. Even given the few heavily historical chapters, it is possibly the most accessible book on education history (that has anything to say) that I have read to date. I have no doubt that this book will draw a large and varied audience. I see it becoming the standard text for teachers-to-be and necessary reading for anyone taking Master’s programs in education.

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The final chapter – still veering toward the apocalyptic – begins as follows: “Two competing stories, two narratives compete for our support. The stronger, more apparently attractive and certainly the most strident since the 1980s, is that life is improved by maximising your wealth … The second, upon which the future of the planet and the survival of the human race may depend, has emerged quickly over the past five years; it is about the need to adjust individual life aspirations so as to achieve ecological and social sustainability. These are very different narratives – the first argues for the rights of the individual, the latter for inter-dependence and community.”

The intervening chapters contain a plea for less selfish modes of life. The political commitment to collective values is informed by a career-teacher’s conviction that education has the power to redeem both individuals and society. Idealism and optimism are balanced against a measured pessimism about the malevolent influence of test-based schooling that answers to economic demands. To paraphrase, the need to compete with Johnny Foreigner is being imposed on the unequal institutional muddle of current education where (time, now, to quote) “the modern secondary is … a kind of holding ground in which the problems of adolescence [are] worked through” while fee-paying schools are “the ideal mechanism to create, and subsequently to perpetuate, class divisions”.

The lesson is that all current approaches are deficient because new knowledge about brain physiology and about evolution is being ignored. Meanwhile the pressures of post-industrial capitalism have adolescents demonised rather than celebrated and understood in the light of modern science and of older wisdom. Instead of schools “going with the grain of the brain”, there is a rush for accountable results that leads to widespread failure and distress. Further, this type of education as measured outputs is impeded by what is labeled an upside down inside out approach. John Abbott’s solution is to concentrate teaching energy and resources on all of the very young rather than a merely few of the older and very bright pupils. Highly staffed infant schools and lecture-based universities would be the new order. Those, very briefly, are the book’s lessons.

Lessons that are unlinked to experience or passion are a definition of boredom. Ask any adolescent. Throughout this book is a consistent story-telling metaphor, which tells of a writer and teacher who knows in his bones that a good story commands attention and will then, perhaps, make some of his lessons stick. “Stories,” John Abbott writes towards the end of the book, “give context to the problems of every day.” Stories deliver their themes and context by entertaining us, and this book takes its reader on a rumbustious tour of folly and progress with old-fashioned fables and modern narratives drawn from science, and from personal and social history and from an enlightening history of education.

Contemporary criticism has taught that we learn different things from the same book. Thus, I recall an entertaining account of how and why Babylonians defined time and space on a number base of 60; of how the author’s cramming for a Latin exam left him with a qualification but neither the understanding nor the enduring satisfaction that came from learning how to carve wood; and of Sir Richard Livingstone who, in the 1940s, suggested that children leave school at 14 to possibly return when they decide the sort of further education to best suit them. The book also chimes with my experience as a teacher This reader’s response is that it’s true to say that “levels of trust have fallen dramatically [and that] clinical depression has risen as people fill every moment with frantic activity.” I recall the frantic activity I felt bullied into when pretending to prepare lessons for some bogey-man inspector on whose judgments the fate of the world was meant to turn. But schools are nothing if not authoritarian. Nonetheless I was commanded, in effect, to forget story telling and instead obey an alien formula reliant on the business and military concepts of learning objectives, main activities, plenaries, assessment opportunities, aims and targets.

A good storyteller will command attention to elicit all manner of personal responses and Overschooled but Undereducated succeeds here. The we’re-all-off-to-hell-in-a-handcart planet panic rhetoric is overdone. However there is an incontestable case being put forward that our society moves too fast and that we have forgotten the virtues of a moral education through story-telling and a practical education through apprenticeships. These things evolved at a more considered pace than the latest government directive for lesson planning and this is a book

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Given that stories are the best way to learn I want to share one with you now. I will leave you to reflect upon the implications.  It is, of course, completely true.

Ofsted and the Magic Bean Stalk : Why not to be afraid of Giants

Once upon a time, many years ago, there was a headteacher who found himself sitting in a hot and stuffy conference centre listening to someone saying something important and which even made sense! (As you might imagine this was a very radical and new experience, directly equivalent to that delightful moment when Jack was given the Beans for the Magic Bean Stalk.)

John Abbott was the speaker and he  said cunning and tricky things like, “children are individuals, learning has many styles, you should make it intrinsic and fun”  Then, as full consciousness returned the Headteacher said to himself ,”What is the National Curriculum doing for my school?” A tricky one this. Finally he arrived at the conclusion “not a lot.”  Oh, unless you include taking away our individuallity, the power to think and the ability to meet the learning needs of individual pupils. Then he thought, “Is that really what the government wants?
I might be better off with some Magic Beans!”

Then, in a whirl of activity the Headteacher re-thought what he thought a school should be.
He even discussed it with his staff,
even the teachers,
worst of all he discussed it with the pupils and parents!
It seemed that some strange and new thing was beginning.
“Good those Magic Beans”,

“Male menopause,” someone observed sagely.
But this Headteacher was strangely in motion.
He wandered and wondered and wandered.
Up and down the school corridors,
In and out of classrooms
Up and down the internet.
And all the time mumbling to himself “Good those Magic Beans, just the thing……”

“I want children to have a say in what they do,”
“I want them to be immersed in work, like a hobby”
“I don’t want to call it work….I want it to be more like play!”

And he didn’t stop saying it.
And it wasn’t male menopause (necessarily)
and he wouldn’t retire.

“We’ve got to fix this,” he said, spade in hand and looking for fertile soil.
And the strange thing was that many on his staff began to agree with him. And they too had the magic beans and the spades.
“Why can’t we have fun as well?” they asked. “Let’s be like children and play at our learning and be brave with exciting new topics.”
“You can!” said the Headteacher, realising that they now had as many Magic Beans as him.
“Will there be check lists and targets?” they asked darkly.
“Only if you want them” he replied in a strange and wistful way wondering if Leanardo Da Vinci had a learning objective for when he invented the parachute.
Anyway, just thinking it meant that Leonardo’s Bean Stalk was growing right down to the present. That was quite a bean.

After many trials and tribulations, (and lots of fun and thinking) a new school was born. It was still in the midst of an area of social deprivation. It was still made of the same bricks. The teachers looked much the same, and so did the pupils and parents. But there were green shoots everywhere, and rainforest leaves translucent green overhead. And there were magic thinking beans in every nook and cranny. Even in the staffroom. Even in the Loo where teachers were found discussing learning theory.

“IMD Group 4″ warned those from outside who knew about the magic spells of ‘Raiseonline’ and ‘Panda’ and ‘Performance Review, ‘ and the dreaded ‘Ofsted Monster.’ But not about how faerie stories really do come true…if you want them hard enough.

The new school shunned the National Curriculum with its closed questions and rigid expectations. “There’s no space for children in this” everyone said. They found something called The International Primary Curriculum. A curriculum full of excitement and practical things to do. They learnt about the Circus. And then one came to their field. MAGIC!
“Amazing what you can do when you think for yourself “. said the caretaker. ”You should be a senior advisor” said the Headteacher. “No” said the caretaker, “I like working in education too much.”
Year 4  found out about the planets. A topic on Chocolate followed. Then one on Transport where the children turned the school hall into an airport lounge and all went on holiday. (they were back in time for the parents to pick them up at three!)   What a good day that was!

And so it was that many children wrote things, and painted things and made things.
One glider went the length of the school hall. “Don’t fly it! It might get broke” one little girl warned. “But flying is what it’s for” said the teacher. “Like thinking is what your brain’s for” observed Megan our eight year old philosopher.
“Magic Beans, Magic Beans,” murmured the Headteacher  just as the hot air balloon nearly carried him away…

It was all so exciting. All the children came to school every day. Even when they were ill they bullied their parents to let them come in. ”oh just for the afternoon..oh go on mum”.  Kids today…I don’t know.

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Abbott and MacTaggart use their findings to show how society’s increasing concern about the well-being of adolescence is not to be rectified simply by more schools, ever more prescription about subject content, or more quantification dependent only on more examinations.  Rather the authors compellingly call for something much more subtle – a pedagogic shift from the earliest years through to university level, that progressively builds up a child’s confidence in his or her ability to learn, and work things out for themselves.  Even before the age of eighteen, children should be weaned of their dependence on teachers for instruction and quite simply learn to delight in the pleasure of so “doing it for themselves” that they readily and enthusiastically set out on a lifetime of self-improvement.

Such a shift in the relationship of teaching to learning, a shift indeed in the role of the teacher from instructor to learning mentor would, the authors suggest, reinvigorate the bringing up of children in home, community and in school.  The authors quote with obvious approval the statement made by John Milton the and at the time of writing being Chief Secretary to Oliver Cromwell in 1644: “A complete and generous education that fits a man to perform justly, skilfully and magnanimously all the offices, public and private, of peace and war”.

It is the sensitive renewal of such a grand vision of human learning that is the role of this book.  Canadians have heard almost as much about this as the English for Abbott has made more than thirty visits to Canada and, working with the Canadian Council on Learning, has lectured in almost every province, and in several of these many times.  Audiences have been fascinated; a trustee of a Toronto school once exclaimed after hearing the principle of Subsidiarity unpacked, “Ah, at last I get it; if this were to happen it would be the pupils that would be tired at the end of term, not the teachers!  And surely that’s how it should be?  Teachers should not be making it so simple for the pupils that it is the teachers who do the work, not the children.”

At another conference of four hundred Superintendents, attended at Abbott’s suggestion by forty high school students, one 15-year-old girl faced that grand and intimidating audience and said: “You teachers bore us.  You treat education rather like a pre-packaged TV dinner.  You tell us to go to the deepfreeze, pull out the appropriate package, read the instruction, take off the wrapper, perforate the cellophane, set the oven to the right temperature and then press the start button.  If we do that properly you’ll give us ten out of ten.  That is what is so boring.  What we would far prefer is to invent the recipe for ourselves, go out and find the ingredients, work out how to mix them and then how to cook them.  If the result was only just edible and you only gave us five out of ten we would feel proud that it was we that had actually made it, and then we would want to know how to improve it”.

At another conference on an island off Vancouver a 17-year-old boy confused, amused and deeply impressed a large multi-aged audience one evening by saying “Surely the reason parents have children is to help the parents grow up?”  The book gives a brilliantly articulated case for the involvement of children and adults working and learning together at all ages.

Such a book, and such a vision is what is needed in Canada (as no doubt elsewhere) to create the thoughtful, responsible wise people of the future.  The book is a rare gem, yet two groups of people may not agree.  Abbott and MacTaggart have set their task to draw together and synthesize key findings from a large range of research. Some specialists may feel disappointed that more has not been said about their own disciplines.  From an epistemological perspective, Abbott avoids the reductionism that would make it hard to see where we are going. That is why we find it so hard to see where we are going; there is perhaps an analogy to the financial crisis in the Fall of  2008 that had easily been foreseen by intelligent generalists, but was invisible to professional economic theorists.

The second group of people who may find this difficult are much like me, school principals, school administrators, administrators, policy makers and politicians.  We sit within, and on top of mighty organisations – schools, colleges, universities, think tanks and Ministries – each of which has become expert in evaluating itself against the criteria each sets for themselves.  We have come to see our jobs as keeping these organisations ticking over in the way each understands.

But suppose, just suppose for a moment, that Abbott and MacTaggart are right, and it is the very design brief for schools, rooted as it is in nineteenth century reductionist theories, and now littered with endless sticking plasters, revisions and accretions of the last hundred years, that has become problematic.  In that case everything else that is built upon it resembles a house built upon shifting sands

Those of us, and there are many, who have given our entire lives to trying to make a creaking system work, hate to have such a mirror held up to our own most sacred assumptions.  Yet progress is only possible if, once or twice in a generation, someone confronts us with an image in the mirror that makes us feel that we have grown old and stale prematurely.  We have to transform ourselves quickly, or surely we will perish.

This, therefore, is a book for those who can dare to be wisely subversive and remind themselves that “knowing what we now know we no longer have the moral authority to carry on doing what we were once doing”.

All I can do, as a Canadian and a person involved on the international scene, is to urge all my colleagues to read this most carefully.  Personally we have each to look very carefully into that mirror and ask ourselves whether, through not keeping our eyes wide enough open to what is going on around us, we have actually allowed ourselves to become part of the problem.  Once we recognise that we can then become part of the solution.  That will be exciting; uncomfortable, confusing and problematic but, remember this, “In times of change learners inherit the earth while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped for a world that no longer exists” (Eric Heffer).

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