Slide 1. It is a pleasure to be invited to share with you my fear that the English (and by this I largely mean the Anglo-American) model of education, by not challenging historic assumptions, and by failing to keep up with the latest research on how humans learn, is becoming progressively upside down and inside out.

‘Upside down’ because it overemphasises the importance of secondary; ‘inside out’ because it overplays the role of the school and minimises the importance of home and community.

I will rest my case on the need for a better appreciation of the relationship between the pre-pubescent brain and that of the adolescent. My book “Overschooled But Undereducated” elaborates on this.

2. “Knowing what we now know,” I will argue, “we no longer have the moral authority to carry on doing what we have always done.” As people with responsibility for today’s adolescents we each need to pause once in a while and consider how we got into this privileged position.

3. It may be hard to recognise your speaker in this photo of me climbing up the beach on VE Day 1945, but that is where my story starts! Events conspired to give me an almost idyllic childhood.

4. You may not think so in this view from my bedroom in the vicarage to which my family moved early in 1946. Portsmouth was then recovering from the Blitz, it was exhausted by the war, and inundated by Displaced Persons. Adaptability and finding novel solutions were our survival skills. An older generation determined to escape from the horrors of war, were generous in their treatment of youngsters such as myself.

4a.There was the retired Hydrographer Royal who taught me about making maps in the China Seas, and whose geometric instruments his widow later gave me.

4b. And Mrs. Purse (excuse the Miss Marple stand-in!), the widow of a former missionary in China who taught me to paint, and thrilled me with stories of sailing in junks on the Yangtze.

4c. And old McFadgen, a former stoker in the Navy who taught me to woodcarve, and whose chisels are still one of my most precious possessions.

5. A quality education, I very early intuited, was like a three-legged stool, which balances the emotions, intellectual rigour, and social relationships – the home, school, and community.

6. In January 1953, ration book in hand, I joined the 350 other boys – mostly boarders – at St John’s Leatherhead. Amongst the staff, I encountered a mixture of the war-weary and the idealistic. One of the former was so awful that I only succeeded in passing O Level Latin by boycotting his lessons, and teaching myself. But in the man who taught us both A Level History and English I encountered someone who started me thinking in a joined-up way.

7. Never quite sure if the lesson would be about English, History, Medieval Art or Music, he challenged us to think about the context of every idea. Studying the English Civil War he took us inside the minds of the protagonists by studying the poetry of John Donne and the letters of John Milton.

8. The middle ‘50s were an exciting time to be a teenager. Coming up to 16, two of us hitch-hiked to Scotland and I was enchanted by my first sight of the Hebrides. The whole trip cost less than £4, and I prided myself on getting from Edinburgh, around the North Circular and down to Portsmouth in 14 lifts and 15 hours.

9. Those peaceful, purposeful times were nearly shattered by the Suez crisis of 1957 and the possibility that we would be conscripted into the army. (Note the jingoistic headlines of those newspapers….England still thought it was the policeman of the world). Wanting to ensure that we knew what we might be fighting for, that same History/English teacher set us a mock scholarship question: “The roots of civilisation are twelve inches deep. Discuss.” I’m still struggling to find an adequate answer!

10. I got to university and fed on all the experiences it had to offer.

11 In a T.C.D certificate of education great play was placed on ‘educating human personality’ and stressed that a quality education was more than just subjects.

12. In my second year I organised an expedition of fourteen year olds to the tiny island of Ulva. I was intrigued with the beauty of the island and the excited inquisitiveness of the youngsters. I later discovered that, 250 years before, another 14 year old, Lachlan MacQuarie, son of the clan chief, had climbed those same hills

13. (add portrait of MacQuarie). Turned off their land in the 1770s by sheep farmers, the young Lachlan joined the army, served in the American War of Independence, and was eventually posted to the colony of New South Wales as its governor. He had to sort out the chaos that had prevailed for the previous thirty years. He was eminently successful.

14. When asked years later how he did it, he reflected back to his childhood on Ulva, and wrote, “If you’re born on a mere speck of land…..you become a citizen of the world.”

15. In 1965 I went to teach at MGS where Peter Mason had set out what he saw was the challenge to the successful grammar school, by warning against the arrogance of the meritocrat.

16. Promoted quickly, I was appointed Headmaster of the 16^th century Alleyne’s grammar school in Stevenage, the very term it started to become a comprehensive school. As the youngest secondary head in the country at the time I threw myself into the task convinced that my enthusiasm would make up for the limitations of my experience.

It didn’t.

17. “You have more pilot projects in this school than there aircraft in the RAF, and they are all looping separate loops – where do you think you’re going?” asked my Chair of Governors. A local primary head was brutally frank. “The trouble with secondary schools is that they only understand teaching, and don’t understand enough about how children learn. Not until you get this right nothing much will happen, so give up a week of your time and come and sit on the floor of my reception class, just listen, follow what’s going on and don’t talk too much!”

18. I accepted the challenge and, as a secondary teacher with precious little experience of primary education, and not yet having children of my own, I found it an intriguing and salutary experience. Nothing much will happen, Lady Plowden had written ten years earlier, “until [education] is in harmony with the nature of the child nothing much will happen.  That head teacher was right…..I might have known a fair amount about teaching, but didn’t know much about what children did with the ideas that teachers put out.

19-20. Jim Callaghan, the Prime Minister, was equally confused about education in 1976 and in his Ruskin College speech invited the general public to explore what he called “the Secret Garden of the Curriculum.” Many heads took offence at what they saw as political meddling and refused to be involved in what Callaghan had intended to be the “Great Debate”. Taking such a stand-offish position provided just the opportunity for Kenneth Baker nine years later to override professional judgement and impose a National Curriculum. Why such confusion?

21. I have now to take you away from the provincial concerns of England. Working totally separately from any Ministry of Education, or university department of education, a number of neural biologists and cognitive scientists around the world, in their search to understand Artificial Intelligence, went back to Darwin’s assertion in 1859 that the very structures of the brain were as much a product of evolution as any other part of the body. As such, they argued, the brain must have preferred ways of working. A key figure was Sir John Eccles, an Australian.

22. In the late 1980s (just as Baker was setting out the national Curriculum – which is ironic) – this thinking came to be called Neural Darwinism. The clue to successful human learning, they postulated, lay in fully understanding “the grain of the brain.”

23. This work was based on creating a synthesis across many fields of study. We in the West love the easily achieved certainties that we can find in Reductionism. Synthesis is far more speculative and difficult. But as Schrödinger noted in 1944, without such a synthesis “we will be lost forever.”

24. With every year that passes creating such a Synthesis becomes more difficult as academic disciplines subdivide into more and more specialised subcomponents. In the past fifteen years the Initiative has collected several thousand books and research studies, most of which contribute to this.

25. Two of these have the capacity to create a whole New Paradigm for Learning. Fritjof Capra (2002), by adopting  a statement made by the philosopher and politician Vaclav Havel that “Education is the ability to perceive the hidden connections between phenomena”, showed that the brain is predicated as much on its ability to draw things together as it is on reductionism. Matthew Ridley (2003), by a brilliant reversal of the phrase that had dominated university departments of education in the 60s and 70s of “natureversus nurture.” He showed that nature is only revealed vianurture. This was the great breakthrough. Inherited predispositions count. for little if not have released by appropriate nurture.

26. Because our brains prefer pictures and joined-up stories to abstract theory, I will change pace and take you into the emerging world of seriously intentioned animated graphics which are social networks’ equivalent of parables – simple stories with profound meanings

27. What a reversal! Adolescence is not an Aberration – something that should not happen, an unpleasant period of awkwardness from which children should be protected. Rather it is through being “crazy by design” adolescence is actually a critical evolutionary adaptation that is essential to our species’ survival Take a look at a second animation.

28. No child is a blank slate when it first comes into school, for his or her mind has already been powerfully shaped by the dominant assumptions of the society into which it is born. Take a look at this third animation.

29. We live within a culture where our everyday activity is shaped by producing more than we need. And on a day to day level life for many is becoming ever more boring…a word frequently used by children. Boredom is a wearying state created by dull, repetitious or tedious studies. The first recorded use was by Charles Dickens in Bleak House was only in 1852, the high point of the Industrial Revolution. Evolutionary psychology notes that an unengaged adult human is unique amongst the animal species in having no reason for being.

30. Ecologically we live within a ‘closed system’ of a depth of some twenty miles from the top of the stratosphere to the depth of the deepest mines, stretched around a globe with a 35,000 mile circumference at the equator. It really is true that “no man is an island entire unto itself”. If one part is too greedy the rest suffers; if the perceived gap between the rich and the poor gets too great most of us start to feel miserable; if one of either the Old or the New economies so upsets the climate we will all freeze, or all burn up. With two and a half times as many people on the earth’s surface today as the day I was born in 1939 we have ever less living space.

31. Only a fifty/fifty chance of survival? If this is simply because we are becoming too clever for our own good what would you say to the students in your school next week? Let me make it more personal……. this may just last out our time but what of your children or grandchildren?

Facing reality is hard, ignoring it is immoral.

32. We have manufactured a world almost unfit to live in. What is education doing to reverse the process?

33. More than a dozen years ago I was summoned to explain my argument at the Policy Unit in Downing Street.

That is something really quite awful.

34-35. But as someone whose career and personal sympathies span both the maintained and independent sector, and who has had the opportunity of studying the history of the period very carefully, I have to say that the responsibility for this dreadful state of affairs rests squarely on some of your most revered predecessors.

It goes back to 1869 when W E Forster, setting out late in the day to create a national system of schooling proposed using the endowments of some 3,000 old schools to form a nationwide scheme for teacher education. A handful of your predecessors having already used their endowments to create the new boarding schools were infuriated. They effectively hijacked the control of their local endowment funds, challenged government to prevent them, and at the same time founded HMC in 1870.

You were born in a spirit of conflict with a struggling national system of education.

Their refusal to support teacher education seriously impacts to on English schools to this day, perhaps best illustrated by the experience of today’s Finland where only the highest qualified can become teachers, and whose pupils constantly stand at the top of the OECD tables (see this month’s Smithsonian Institution magazine).

Unable to fund a national scheme for teacher education, Forster went ahead and established a national network of School Boards. Within thirty years the School Boards were educating more than half the country’s children, often taking them through to 16 and 17. The rapid popularity and achievements of these Schools outraged your predecessors who saw in the widespread education of those above the age of 14 something that trespassed upon their own privileged preserve.

So, in 1902, after a most heated and virulent debate (in which your predecessors lobbied most strongly against the School Boards), Parliament eventually prohibited the raising of taxes to fund any public education above the age of 14. Secondary education became the virtual preserve of the public schools and the few remaining grammar schools. In 1939 only 18% of fourteen year olds were in school – the second lowest proportion of any country in Europe.

36. There are other shadows still stalking in the wings. In 1944 the former Headmaster of Harrow, Cyril Norwood, together with the classically trained civil servants in the Ministry advised Butler that the only way to administer a national system of education was to divide it, as had Plato, into three tiers – for those with gold, or silver, or iron in their blood. Realising that national finances could only provide for one additional year of schooling, these classicists argued, was to take three years off the elementary school and so create a four-year secondary system. Norwood expected this would make 11 the age of transfer in the state sector so keeping it structurally separate from the Common Entrance at 13 ½.

A whole lecture would be needed to explain how this left state primary schools for the past 70 years struggling to fit an appropriate primary education into 6 years rather than the previous 9, and how – perversely – this has led to far too many secondary schools simply becoming too large for anyone’s good.

37-38. We must question another aspect of Arnold’s innovation. It was part of his genius that he offered his educational philosophy within boarding schools that very specifically offered parents the opportunity of being rid of their troublesome adolescents. In the socially-mobile latter part of the 19^th century this became a winning combination.

It was sort of still working when I went away to school in the early 50s. As I said earlier I greatly enjoyed and benefitted from my experience at St John’s. But in later years I began to realise that as much as I loved St John’s… of Leatherhead, its people, and the county of Surrey beyond I knew virtually nothing. Worse still, I started to lose contact with my own brother and sister. It was, I think, the same for my friends from Epsom, Hurstpierpoint and Harrow. We had all grown up in delightful bubbles cocooned from the world around us.

But even that is not my prime point. So well marketed has the boarding school become that it has entered into the English psyche as being the perfect model of education.  Parents replaced by surrogate parents, tutors often overtly preoccupied with producing perfect pupils, rather than developing thoughtful and confident future adults… all within the warm embrace of the House as surrogate for community.

Maintained secondary schools seeking to attract more pupils to otherwise empty desks now try to present themselves as being able to do everything… which of course pleases hard-pressed parents too busy to create a stimulating home background, (and too nervous to risk anything as dangerous as letting their children hitch-hike to Scotland) and according to the latest calculations now fill their homes with £7.3 billion of toys and ingenious games of ‘painting-by-numbers’ which provide almost instants satisfaction but don’t stretch creativity sufficiently.   Schools have become very very busy places. Too busy to leave enough time for anyone, teacher or pupil, to really think for themselves. How Socrates would despair.

Remember St Augustine? “I learned most not from those who taught me, but from those who talked with me.”

And those of you whose once predominantly boarding schools find yourselves recruiting more day pupils, are you not now trying to squeeze that ‘broadly based’ curriculum you once covered in 7 days of 24 hours, into 5 days on only 8.30 to 5.30? No wonder your pupils look so hammered.

39. These questions demand urgent thought. We need to be much clearer about our vision.

For far too many years there has been talk of a crisis in education. The Statute Book is littered with regulations for ever more innovations which, because they were originally designed to deliver short-term benefits, have already disappeared into a murky past.

40. A highly energetic Secretary of State seeks extensive collaboration with your schools, on the basis, it seems, that there can be a one-way exchange of ideas. You with your specific backgrounds can, apparently, take on the running of new academies, a new interpretation of schools whose one clear distinction is that they will be free from the control of locally elected education officials. What, however, is not clear is how HM Treasury (through the office of the Secretary of Education) will monitor and hold someone accountable for the billions of pounds of public money that all this will involve. Many details remain to be worked out. Michael Gove is quite properly inviting your support, and it is only right that you should earn your charitable status by demonstrating the public good.

41. It is not the DNA that is at fault but the lack of the appropriate nurture to draw it out. Putting to one side for a moment how offensive this was to the large numbers of hardworking staff in maintained schools, working under conditions that I suspect some of you cannot really contemplate – means that there is a fundamental fault in his analogy , and I submit in current political expectations.

42. Let me give you an analogy. Both horses and donkeys can graze together in the same fields (I leave you to decide which species of equus you are!).

Should a racehorse on a fine spring morning take a fancy to impregnating a donkey there will be born neither a horse nor a donkey, but a mule. A mule, however, is a sterile creature that cannot reproduce. It is an evolutionary dead end. The Bible calls them asses.

43. A national education system, divided amongst itself, can never flourish.

44. It all comes back to the need for a national vision, something which unites all schools, and behind which most people could rally.

Related posts:

1. 13th Annual CiCe Network Conference, Dublin
2. Vancouver Pupil Conference
3. Richmond School District Conference

Related posts:

1. Battery Hens, or Free Range Chickens: What Kind of Education for What Kind of World (Full Speech)
2. Dr Jonathan Long, Principal, United World College of India
3. Ruining the Future Our Problem-plagued World as a Reflection of how Schooling Limits Reality-Based Learning

I have never heard a sound beating the air,
So fraught with the spirit of trouble and need of assistance,
As the sharp crack of the watchman’s rattle
Reverberating in the street at the dead hour of night.

Edward H. Savage 1865

As I write the New Year sales are underway. Exhausted shoppers stagger back to their cars trying to convince themselves that these were bargains that they couldn’t afford to miss. Within weeks their credit card statements will turn that buzz of retail therapy into the harsh reality of an empty bank account. Why, oh why, do we get into this mess time and time again?  What follows may help to explain this.

Some years ago I had the rare opportunity of spending a week in Tanzania observing members of the Hadza tribe who still practice a genuine hunter-gatherer economy in conditions that almost exactly reflect the way of life of our Stone Age ancestors some 60,000 or more years ago. They neither herd animals nor do they plant crops. They have no permanent villages, and only dry grass to cover the low huts in which they live. They own minimal possessions (other than their knives) and move from place to place for food – the self-rooting tubers of hanging vines, the fruit and berries they collect in season and – in about one day in eight – the meat caught by the hunters[1].

Significantly the Hadza have no facilities whatsoever to store anything. They share anything they find with everybody else around them. In such a way they manage to survive when other more sophisticated people would be wiped out by periods of drought and famine. As I wrote in my diary at the time “the questions foremost in my mind are just how like them are our behaviours all these generations later and, secondly,  how has the experience of our ancestors bequeathed to us brains pre-disposed to operate perhaps more effectively in their world rather than in the lifestyle of the 21st Century?”

One afternoon I was amazed to see what looked like a half-hearted attempt to grow maize. One of the older men explained, with obvious concern, that some Norwegian missionaries had persuaded several of the women to attempt to become settled agriculturalists. “Even though there is, in most years, insufficient rain to grow crops”, the older man explained, “the missionaries have given the women seeds and spades and shown them how to plant crops. Most years the crops fail”, said the older man, “but the worst of planting crops is that, when the crops do flourish, the people who planted them won’t share the harvest with other people. They say it is theirs because they planted it. What they don’t eat in one year they want to save for a bad harvest. They become selfish. It is breaking our way of life because it makes some people more powerful than others because they can bargain with things that previously had been owned by everybody”.

Here, in three or four short sentences uttered under the African sun by a man who had no concept of reading from a book, was an explanation of human behaviour that exactly replays what scientists understand as being the cultural evolution of the human race. As the eminent anthropologist Christopher Boehm said on reviewing the appropriate research, “the data do leave us with some ambiguity but I believe that as of 40,000 years ago, with the advent of anatomically modern humans who continued to live in small groups and were not yet domesticating plants and animals, it is very likely that all human societies practiced egalitarian behaviour and that most of the time they did this successfully”[2]. In other words our human-behaviour default position has changed over all that time from being naturally collaborative, to being innately competitive.

It was a theme that had been taken up the previous year in a fascinating study by the geneticist Spencer Wells as he applied research in genetics to explain “The Journey of Man”[3]. That journey began, evidence from numerous genetic studies of existing populations now show, when the Ice Age moved out of the mountains to the north of Africa and turned virtually the whole continent into a vast tundra. Sixty thousand years ago this apparently forced just a few of our ancestors to risk all by daring to do the unexpected; they built rafts and floated off across hostile seas in the hope of finding warmer and more hospitable climates, while their parents, lacking such enterprise, slowly froze to death in their ancestral caves.

At this dramatic turning point in our evolutionary history the need for those early teenagers to grow beyond the clone-like learning that had kept previous generations of young people dependent on their parents’ knowledge, resulted in introducing into the genetic sequence of human maturation the biomedical change we refer to as adolescence. In a paper that I wrote in 2005 called “Adolescence; an evolutionary adaptation”[4] I explained that it is this rebelliousness of adolescence – the willingness to take risks and do the unexpected – that has been the driving force behind civilisation – adolescence is our unique species opportunity, not simply a threat to existing forms of culture.

Spencer Wells visited the Hadza some years later (by which time he was Explorer in Residence at the National Geographic Society in Washington and had helped produce the successful feature article about the Diaspora which described it as “The Greatest Journey Ever Made”[5]). This subsequently prompted him to write his intriguing – and deeply disturbing – “Pandora’s Seed; the unforeseen costs of civilisation” (2010). In this he explains how, when our ancestors created agriculture around 10,000 or more years ago “they had no idea of what other changes they were setting in motion”. In essence those early hunter-gatherer societies had blended the skills of the hunters with those of people better at building straw huts or telling stories; all members of the tribe had a status as contributors to the wellbeing of the whole. The move towards settled agriculture changed this and gave an enormous advantage to those whose attitude was “go out and get all that you can grab” and store it.

It didn’t all happen at the same time. Evidence from Çatalhöyük in Central Anatolia, thought to be the remnants of the earliest settlement that we could call a city, dates back some ten thousand years. That archaeological evidence suggests that in early urban life things remained pretty egalitarian – most houses in Çatalhöyük were the same size, and there were no large civic buildings suggesting a communitarian type existence of social equality. But slowly in the Neolithic period this began to change. “Agriculturalists with their relatively simple food supply and their view of nature as something that needed to be controlled rather than cooperated with, were sociologically pre-disposed to create religions with fewer and more powerful Gods – and Gods in their own right”, writes Spencer Wells.

So it was that the first person to plant seeds and wait around until they produced fruit (tenfold, fiftyfold or a hundredfold) and then keep their harvest in a safe place, gave our species what Spencer Wells calls transgenerational power – the ability to “effect events many generations down the line”. By making agriculture subject to human control this perturbed the balance of nature. Enhancing our food supplies meant that our distant ancestors were then free to explore new cultural possibilities, from fishing for salmon to hunting mammoths on the Central Asian steps, or creating beautiful artistic depictions on the walls of caves. Our Neolithic ancestors learnt new skills to suit the broader needs of society.

Over time humans have gone from living in “the original affluent society” with almost unlimited time to devote to seemingly idle activity, to becoming as of now a group of anxious worker-bees with endless, looming deadlines to meet. (Recent research suggests that the acts of hunting, collecting food stuffs and maintaining their huts took only 18% of our Stone Age ancestors’ waking hours). This process accelerated rapidly during the Industrial Revolution 300 or so years ago as benefits of specialisation became evermore apparent, and evermore people became detached from the reality of the work they were doing. People lost their identities as they started to merge with their machines so eventually “spending their whole lives performing repetitive tasks that, while wonderful at producing large quantities of standardised, inexpensive goods, robbed factory workers of their individuality and creativity”.

“All you have to do” wrote the prophet of what has become to be known as the Scientific Management of Work in the very early 20^th century, “is to give up your individual ways of working and do it my way, by my standards, at the speed I mandate and in so doing achieve a level of output I ordain, and I will pay you handsomely for it, beyond anything you might have imagined. All you have to do is to take orders, and give up your way of doing the job for mine”[6].

The immediate results of such specialised mechanical production were indeed impressive with productivity levels growing by between 20 and 30 per cent per annum. But what is good for the general economy may be appalling for the individual. A machinist gained prominence when he debated the theory of scientific management of labour with its creator, Frederick Winslow Taylor in 1914, and remarked before a packed audience “we craftsmen don’t want to work as fast as we are able to. We want to work as fast as we think it is comfortable to work. We haven’t come into existence for the purpose of seeing how great a task we can perform through a lifetime. We are trying to regulate our work so as to make it auxiliary to our lives”[7].

The extent to which Taylor was responsible for preparing the world for Capitalism is open to debate, but what is beyond dispute is that  scientific management has changed the relationship of workers to their workplace in a dramatic way. Another writer, Edward Mott Woolley, described a workshop before scientific management as follows: “Formerly, as in most workshops, the mechanics did a large part of planning how the work was to be done. They studied their blueprints and what operations were necessary … they hunted out the tools they needed … they drove their planes or lathes at whatever feed and speed they thought to be right”. By contrast in a scientifically managed shop Mott Woolley said “the workmen do no planning. Every detail of the job is thought out for them and put down in unmistakeable black and white. The character and number of cuts, the depth of each, the tool to be used, the speed, the feed, the time allowed if a bonus or premium is to be earned, the hourly rate if the bonus is not attained”[8].

Such writers reinforce what Spencer Wells writes in Pandora’s Seed about the unforeseen costs of civilisation, and look at the  implications for society when parents working in an industrial situation are so “dumbed down” that fathers no longer work in an environment in which their children can learn experientially alongside them. The rapid acceptance of the principles of scientific management shattered the aeons-old learning partnership between parents and children within a few short generations. Children were the greatest losers in this bargain, for parents who are not proud of their work often have little of practical experience to pass on along to their children. And, as I explained with Terry Ryan in our book The Unfinished Revolution[9] in the year 2000, Taylor’s influence quickly “extended to all American education from the elementary schools to the universities”. An English educational historian wrote of the early 20^th century, “it was the factory put into the educational setting … every characteristic was there, minute division of labour … a complicated system of incentives to do good work, an impressive system of inspection, and finally an attention to cost-efficiency and the economic use of plant”. The public started to create a new metaphor of the school as factory and the child as product.

Modern society has come to tolerate this because of the very obvious economic benefits it provides.  They think that it makes good economic sense for experts to focus on a limited aspect of human endeavour and excel, than to have generalists spend their time as dilettantes moving from one task to the other as their interests suit them. Writing about the American retail industry in the 1950s one analyst, Viktor Lebow commented “our enormously productive economy … demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and using of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction, in consumption… we need things consumed, burned up, replaced and discarded at an ever accelerating rate”[10].

So the question has to be posed: is it to be the owners of ever more stuff that really makes us happier? Is happiness dependent on having the greatest bargaining power as was questioned more than 3000 years ago when the psalmist noted that the love of money is the root of all evil, or is it simply that as the evolutionary psychologist Robert Wright noted in 1994 that we have evolved to be an effective species, rather than necessarily a happier species.

Put that another way round. Maybe happiness from an evolutionary perspective comes from the satisfaction of having a justifiable pride in what you have achieved. Psychologists refer to this as a state of flow in which a total commitment to an idea makes the brain so excited that it achieves levels of output not otherwise possible. As other evolutionary and cognitive scientists seem increasingly to be implying, the highest levels of satisfaction are reached when we are utilising as many of the multiple forms of intelligence that our species developed over millions of years of evolution that we are empowered to do something that we really need (not just want) to do. It was what that machinist in Washington was arguing in 1914; individuals do not believe they came into existence for seeing how great a task they can perform, rather that they want to make the act of work auxiliary to the quality of their lives. It seems that we get the greatest satisfaction from feeling that we are in good relationships with what is going on around us. Do we live to work or work to live?

It was with such ideas in his mind that Spencer Wells returned to thinking about the Hadza as he prepared to write the last chapter in his book – “Towards a New Mythos”. Mythos is derived from two words, ‘mythology’ which is a spiritual way of viewing the world often preoccupied with received meanings about significant events (something that scientists will refer to as synchronicity), and ‘logos’, the world of words and accurate, objective definitions, something which is essentially logical, rational and precise. For many thousands of years human societies have  incorporated aspects of both (as did Archbishop Ussher when he used biblical accounts to calculate the formation of the world as being in BC4404) but in the past few centuries logos has come to the fore. Logic and rationality underpin scientific thought and “has provided us with the wonders of modern technology, and has led to unprecedented levels of wealth. [But] in its ascendency it has also, many would argue, led to the destruction of the old certainties that so many relied on to give their lives meaning”[11].

I well remember back in 2003 being taken by two of the Hadza early one evening to sit on the top of a low hill commanding a wonderful view of the valley below. These men weren’t hunting, they weren’t making arrows, and they weren’t obviously talking but in the most elemental form possible they were indulging in a daily act of silent reflection – call it, if you like, communing with nature. The Hadza, as with so many other early tribes, are totally happy to exist within nature, and not to struggle to master it. Their attitude to death exemplifies this; when a person gets too old to move around the near family quietly take their leave, place a vessel of water within the old person’s reach and simply walk away and leave them to dies. Months later they return and collect the sun-bleached bones from which wild animals have torn away the flesh, and quietly hide them in a cave or other sacred place. I once asked through my interpreter who actually owned the land; they found it difficult to give a clear answer because in the minds of the Hadza everything is owned equally by the spirits of the people who once lived there, by those who live there now, and by those as yet unborn who will live there in the future.

Such a sense of being part of a greater form of reality lead Chief Seattle in the Pacific North West America a century or more ago to remind the incoming settlers that “ we have not inherited this world from our parents but have been loaned it by our children”. It was why it was customary amongst the Pablo Indians in Arizona to require that the chieftain, before agreeing to implement any new law, should first consider what would be the implications of such a law over the next seven generations.

Spencer Wells writes nostalgically of how “to spend time living with the Hadza is to return to an ancient way of life, one where the term “self-sufficient” takes on new meaning…..They spend their evenings telling stories of recent hunts and ancient legends while sitting around a small fire, story lines punctuated with careful intonations, sound effects and jokes. In an odd way, it felt like returning home after a long absence”. I utterly agree. I too had made such a comment to my guide years ago to which he replied “I have escorted many travellers from different countries, and their reaction is always the same. Something deep inside them tells them that this feels like home. It has to be a deep-seated human instinct; after all, this was ‘home’ for perhaps 99% of our ancient ancestors’ experience…..which makes us just like the Hadza.”

But for most of us, living in the way the Hadza do is unimaginable.

“There is something else about the way people like the Hadza live their lives, something that seems to combine so many aspects of what it means to be human, making use of so many different skills. We may think of ourselves today as multi-taskers but in fact the jobs most of us carry out are remarkably focussed…..staring at a computer screen, sitting in meetings, playing professional baseball, or even driving a truck, means that our lives in the 21^st century are defined by a very narrow range of skills. Watching the Hadza forces us to rediscover a treasure trove of lost abilities.”

Be you born a Muslim, Christian, Jew or Buddhist, you were born into a culture that tried to find the most appropriate route around a maze of decisions and moral dilemmas that we will each face. Spencer Wells notes that the Catholic Church identified seven deadly sins: lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy, and pride. No less than four of these sins are related to greed, for greed was – to medieval Christians as to many Muslims – the cause of most of life’s problems, and probably still is. To Catholics and others of faith it is sin that separates the individual from his or her god, and from their neighbours as well. This is poisonous for it is not just the greedy man who suffers as a result of his greediness; as the Hadza know, and endless recent research on happiness has shown, it is not just being poor that makes you feel unhappy, what makes you deeply unhappy is to be poor when everyone around you is doing well.

“I am not advocating a return to a hunter/gatherer lifestyle,” states Spencer Wells, “ merely pointing out that we can learn something about the state of modern society from those ancestors”. It is not that many in society are unaware of those intrinsic social/economic/environmental tensions – from the Luddites in the early 1800s to Fritz Schumacher and the advocates of Small is Beautiful in the 1970s – onwards to today’s anti-globalisation and climatic change lobbies, there is an ever widening anti-material progress group. But coalescing in the mid 20^th century has been something more widespread and potentially extraordinarily dangerous – Fundamentalism. Fundamentalist Islam, as with fundamentalist Christianity, is increasingly dominating political debate (and bloodshed) around the world. Born of desperation and anger “and driven forward by charismatic leaders, fundamentalist world views provide a focus for people who feel left out of the modern world, offering an alternative vision of how life should be lived.”

Much to the surprise of most people these two groups, which seem to be absolutely in total opposition, have very similar origins – they fear, as with so many I expect of my readers – that greed is undermining our collective and individual potential to be good people.

Sayyid Qutb (pronounced SIGH-eed KOO-tub), an Egyptian author and literary critic became an active member of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood in 1953, an educational organisation devised to spread the teaching of Islam. Not a violent organisation initially, it became much involved in fighting the increasingly secular Egyptian society and Sayyid Qutb was sentenced to 15 years hard labour in 1954. During his time in gaol he wrote two books which became hugely influential in redefining Islam in a more aggressive form. In these he argued that it was time for Islam to reclaim its supremacy as a world religion, something that he said the Muslims had lost because they had surrendered to jahiliyah, or ignorance of God, because secularism had lead to its decline. He called for a holy war against corrupt secularism. Until Sayyid Qutb reinterpreted Jihad it had never been seen as a primary goal of religion. By reinterpreting Islam in the context of the modern world Qutb hoped that his work would lead to an Islamic revolution.

At the same time that Qutb’s views were receiving widespread attention in the Islamic world, many in America were feeling the loss of mythos (that “old-time religion”) in their own lives. “The social upheavals of the 1960s, with their rejection of traditional Christian family values, were a shock to many. The rise of Christian fundamentalism in the United States was, even more than the spread of Qutb’s scholarly works, an application of logos thinking to a mythos problem. Spencer Wells quotes Karen Armstrong as showing how in the 1960s and 70s 40% of American households tuned in to the preaching on the radio of Jerry Falwell and his southern Baptist exhortations.” The logos of modern technology was being used in a novel way to mobilise a conservative social movement, its goal being to return religion – mythos – to what they saw as its rightful place at the centre of society. This totally re-orientated the Republican Party away from its industrial and big business base and so elevated religion on the American political stage in a way it had never been before.

Al-Qaeda has taken Sayyid Qutb’s writing to its very heart and “much of Osama bin Laden rhetoric is lifted directly from his writing. The organisation’s recruiting materials bear no resemblance to the religion practised by the vast majority of the world’s Muslims.” Which helps to explain how the world has come into the frightening position in which we find ourselves today. Members of the American religious right killing doctors at abortion clinics; Al Qaeda members using bombs and hijacked planes to kill thousands in a global war against western secularism…..It seems like the inhuman acts of crazy zealots…..Crazy though it may appear from the outside, it is not insanity that drives terrorism in the fundamentalist world; rather it is their god-given certainty that what they are doing is morally just”.

It seems that the Jihadists are fighting less of a war against the West than a civil war for the minds of Muslim youth. Both movements, in trying to return to a past they imagine to be more pure, are using the technologies of the present to reach out to more and more people. Spencer Wells closes his description of the line-up of these two contrasting world views – that of mythos (that involves both fundamentalist Christians and Muslims) and logos (that involves both radical thought in unhappy alliance with pure materialism). He then challenges the adherents to various forms of mythos to talk to the proponents of logos and ask each other what fuels the flames of fundamentalism (religious, economic, or cultural). “Ultimately, fundamentalism can exist only in opposition to something else; it is a protest movement. If there were nothing to protest it would lose its raison d’etre”.

So why is all this of such interest to the 21^st Century Learning Initiative? It is quite simple. More than 15 years ago we first raised the question “what kind of education for what kind of world?” In the days of our species’ youth, so the Book of Genesis recounts, Cain killed his brother Abel. There may well be much significance in the one who was the murderer and the one who was murdered. If the interpretation that Spencer Wells puts on this account of human cultural origins is correct, it stands to reason that it was the man Cain who first planted crops and kept the harvest who killed his brother the nomadic shepherd, Abel. As our ancestors started to settle down, Cain believed he owned his crops and that Abel was an intruder.

So just what skills and knowledge do today’s young people need to take over the guardianship of the planet when we’re too old? Hopefully fratricide will not become too much of a problem but if the announcement in this month’s National Geographic (January 2011) magazine that the human population is just about to touch the 7 billion mark, we really must prepare ourselves for what might happen should war or a natural disaster such as rising sea levels, volcanic dust clouds or a pandemic send billions in search of new homes. Even more to the point and underlining the whole of this argument is the warning in today’s Guardian (7^th January 2011) that “ it is a fantasy [to believe] that growth will go on forever”.

Let the closing word go, not to Spencer Wells but to Rebecca D. Costa whose book The Watchman’s Rattle was also published last year. In her introduction she writes “In earlier times, ordinary citizens volunteered as watchmen to protect the welfare of their communities. They patrolled neighbourhoods, lighthouses, and important institutions, watching for early signs of danger. Surprisingly, these early watchmen never carried weapons. They carried wooden rattles that made a loud, harsh, clacking noise designed to summon help. The sound of the watchman’s rattle was an alarm – a call for citizens to wake from their sleep and quickly join forces against danger.”  These two books are “a plea to change the course of humankind by calling on the greatest weapon of mass instruction ever known: the human brain.” That is why the 21^st Century Learning Initiative believes this issue is so important.

John Abbott

10.1.2011

[2] Boehm, C. “Hierarchy In The Forest: the evolution of egalitarian behaviour”, Harvard University Press, 1999

[3] Wells, Spencer “The Journey of Man: a genetic odyssey”, Random House, 2002

[4] Abbott, J. “Adolescence and Evolutionary Adaptation”, 2005, available on the Initiative’s website at www.21learn.org.uk

[5] Shreeves, James, National Geographic Magazine, Washington, March 2006

[6] Quoted in Abbott, J. and Ryan, T. “The Unfinished Revolution: learning, human behaviour, community and political paradox” Network Education Press/Continuum, 2000

[7] ibid

[8] ibid

[9] Abbott, J. and Ryan, T. “The Unfinished Revolution: learning, human behaviour, community and political paradox” Network Education Press/Continuum, 2000

[10] Lebow, Viktor as quoted by Leonard, Anne “The Story of Stuff”, Constable, 2010

[11] This and subsequent quotes (unless otherwise attributed) come from Wells, Spencer “Pandora’s Seed”, Allen Lane, 2010

No related posts.

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

For the better part of the past 25 years I have crossed and re-crossed the Atlantic many times as I have studied the emerging research on human learning and the political initiatives to reform education being mounted in either country. I’ve written and lectured widely about this and known many of the people involved. Specifically for four years (1995-2000)I lived and worked in Washington DC leading a team of researchers in the biomedical and cognitive sciences seeking to establish (I use a woodcarving analogy) “the grain of the brain”. As the people Ravitch describes were developing their ideas in the States I was constantly cross-referencing these ideas with those being taken up in the United Kingdom.

During this time I have never ceased to be amazed at how those seeking to understand the operation of the brain seemed unable to make any impact whatsoever on those political think tanks that thought they, and they alone, could come up with solutions to underperforming education systems. I was never able to persuade those advising politicians that these problems had their origins in a misunderstanding about how children learned, and comparatively little to do with administrative issues of governance. So, in the course of studying t6his book I found myself constantly reflecting on the current situation in England amongst which I am frequently engulfed. This has changed the nature of this review to become more a reflection on her story, and the impact such policies have had in London.

* * *

Diane Ravitch is a Professor at New York University and Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institute, an academic with middle-of-the-road democratic political leanings, so it was rather surprising that George Bush Snr appointed her as Assistant Secretary for Education under Lamar Alexander in 1991. Progressively she became more and more involved in solutions advocated by the Republicans that centred on standard assessment procedures and advocating the principal of choice as the solution to apparently otherwise intractable educational problems. In her thinking, and those around her, anything emerging from the biomedical sciences about the grain of the brain appeared an irrelevance.

Ravitch has a scholarly, thoughtful and balanced approach – she writes with the assurance and authority comparable to a top English girl’s grammar school head teacher of years gone by. She goes back to the dream of using public education in 19th Century America to create a nation out of immigrants of many nationalities. She writes of the honest attempts to deal with the issues in that damning report in 1983 “A Nation at Risk” which, as it analysed America’s declining academic performance since the early 1960s, commented “if a foreign power had done this to us we would have defined it as an act of war”. Ravitch speaks of powerful innovation in New York and San Diego that didn’t quite turn out as expected; of George Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” that finally shifted the focus away from a broad and balanced education to an ever-increasing emphasis on tests, choice and accountability, and she concludes with a chapter on what she calls “the Billionaire Boys’ Club” – the extraordinary influence of the Gates and Buffet fortunes linked to the Walton family’s belief in the Walmart economic model of accountability as the assumed solution to all educational issues.

Ravitch concludes her criticism of educational policies over the past 25 years with two key statements. Firstly she declares uncompromisingly that “our public education system is a fundamental element of our democratic society”, whilst secondly she says “at the present time, public education is in peril. Efforts to reform public education are, ironically, diminishing its quality and endangering its very survival”. This is serious stuff. “Ms Ravitch…writes with enormous authority and common sense” wrote the New York Times, while another American commentator called her one of the “most important public intellectuals of our time”.

However there is another aspect of this story of great importance to both England and America but it is almost entirely missed in Ravitch’s account, even though she has an obvious affection for its creator, the former President of the American Federation of Teachers, Dr Albert Shanker, who died in early 1997.

She attributes the creation of Charter Schools (with what has become their English lookalike, namely Academies and Free Schools) to a speech that Shanker made in 1988. His idea had been that groups of teachers within individual schools should be allowed a “Charter” to experiment – for the good of the rest of the school and the District – with truly innovative ways of dealing with old problems. So dismayed did Shanker become by the way in which the first of these Charters were manipulated to undermine the very democratic basis of American public education that he totally withdrew his support from the Charter School movement in 1993. One detects, from the way Ravitch describes this 15 years later, she wished she had followed his example.

I first got to know Al Shanker when he and I were addressing a conference in Helsinki in 1987. He was a big man in every sense, an amazing polymath with a voracious capacity to absorb new ideas. In a speech to the Institute of Economic Affairs in London in about 1990 he warned against the dumbing down of teachers, saying “the more you trust teachers the thinner the rule book: the less you trust them the thicker that rule book becomes”. He went on, “the factory, rather than a moral, learning community – is the inspiration for the traditional school. When the factory was touted as the ideal organisation for work, and when most youngsters were headed for its assembly lines, making a mass public education system conform to the model of the factory may have seemed like a great achievement”.

Shanker was the only man I knew in America (I know of no one comparable in the United Kingdom) with the intellect and the sheer physical presence to master the findings of erudite research and expressed this with a clarity that had escaped everybody else. He was also able to draw research programmes together in ways that made more sense than when any one of the disciplines remained on its own. He contributed a weekly column to the Saturday edition of the New York Times. Even more remarkable, as a union leader, he forced the challenging nature of these ideas on his disparate union membership. By birth he hailed from Eastern Europe and subsequently used his immense influence to strengthen teachers’ ability in Poland and other former-Communist countries, to deepen an appreciation of democracy in countries escaping from Communism. In all senses Al Shanker was a colossus of a man.

He addressed Education 2000 in London in 1993, and personally introduced me to Howard Gardner (of multiple intelligence fame) remarking “if we closed schools today and asked ourselves how we could reinvent them to work for all youngsters, my answer would be: according to the ideas and models in Howard Gardner’s “The Unschooled Mind” – visionary yet practical, scholarly yet acceptable – his book is a stunning achievement”.

Shanker was more concerned to revitalise the practice of teaching, and the life of pupils, than he was to worry about issues of governance. He later wrote “the limitations of America’s traditional factory model of education have become manifest, and they are crippling. The traditional model of schooling is, therefore, incompatible with the idea that students are workers, that learning must be active and that children learn in different ways and at different rates”.

Shanker got me to read a remarkable book on transferable skills and the development of expertise, “Surpassing Ourselves” by the Canadians Bereiter and Scardamalia, and enthused me about the emerging studies in the neurosciences. He was the first to draw to my attention the article “Making Thinking Visible” about the significance of cognitive apprenticeship when linked to both psychological and neurological studies. In particular about the book by the Caines, a husband and wife team, “Making Connections: Education and the human brain” and then he got me into the management theories of Peter Drucker.

Then, as my informal and highly valuable personal tutor, he put me in touch with Seymour Papert and his work on children and technology, “The Children’s Machine”. Later he pushed into my hand a copy of Mitchell Waldrop’s “Complexity: the emerging science at the edge of order and chaos” (1992). He got me to meet David Perkins, Howard Gardner’s colleague at Harvard whose book “Outsmarting IQ: the emerging science of learnable intelligence” I found almost unputdownable. Then he told me of the new work by the cognitive scientist John Breuer, “Schools for Thought: a science of learnable intelligence” (1993), that finally convinced me that a synthesis of all these different disciplines was needed to provide the intellectual basis for what Al called “genuine school transformation”.
It was all this that propelled me to accept the invitation to go to Washington in late 1995 to set up the network of education thinkers and researchers that rapidly led to the creation of the 21st Century Learning Initiative.

By the time I reached America, however, Shanker was already seriously ill from the cancer which was to kill him two years later. When I started to draw many of these people together for six conferences at Wingspread in Wisconsin, a terrible rift was beginning to open up in the United States between those in the biomedical sciences enthused by what functional MRI and genetic studies might contribute towards a better understanding of the growth of the young brain and those psychologists and cognitive scientists who feared that biomedical research would appropriate the very funds that they had anticipated would come to them. Shanker, the only man who could have boxed a few heads together and forced the various scientists to realise that together they spoke with infinitely more strength than if they allowed themselves to split into sectional interests, was already dying. At his funeral held at American University in Washington there were nine speeches. The first seven were an enormous testimony to Shanker’s work. The eighth was from Al Gore, the Vice-President of the United States. It was brilliant. It seemed as if nobody could encapsulate what Shanker was about in a finer set of words, but then up spoke Bill Clinton by recounting a phone conversation he had with Shanker only days before his death and proved that he could do just that. How many of the warring scientists in that room would ever have both a President and a Vice-President of the United States contributing to their funeral eulogy?

* * *

By the latter 90s Shanker was no longer there to knock heads together. Gradually the row between the cognitive scientists and the biological evolutionary scientists was reaching boiling point. John Breuer (the cognitive scientist) launched his broadside of “The Myth of the First Three Years” in 1997 in which he staked the claim for a social and cognitive science as being the prime, if not the only way, in which human learning can be understood. Writing in “Educational Researcher” later that year he published a blistering attack entitled “Education and the Brain: a bridge too far”. Researchers have subsequently squabbled with such venom it was as if they were Reformation and Counter-Reformation theologians disputing how many angels could dance on a pinhead.

When ASCD had published my article in Educational Leadership “To Be Intelligent” in March 1997 it was later identified by “Psychology Today” as the one of the four most outstanding articles on cognitive processes published that year in the United States. That was fine but it was not sufficient. By basing part of my argument – as I believe Shanker would have done – on what was emerging from the studies of the developing brain as shown by Functional MRI scans and combining that with what other work had shown on cognitive apprenticeship, it seemed to those swayed by John Breuer’s apt quote to be indeed a “bridge too far”. Although I was invited to discuss my position with Dr Bruce Alberts, the President of the National Academy of Science, and its committee on developments in the science of learning (its report was published under the title “How people learn; brain, mind, experience and school”) my suggestion that issues of human learning went far beyond the walls of the classroom, and the theories of psychologists, were quietly ignored. How I needed Shanker to help back me up! The case I was making desperately needed somebody of comparable status to Shanker who was an acknowledged synthesiser able to comprehend how biomedical research could, and should, complement and extend the work of cognitive and behavioural scientists. The problem I and my colleagues were having was well articulated by Vaclav Havel (himself a poet, political activist and President of his country rather than a research scientist) when he said in 2000 “education is the ability to perceive the hidden connections between phenomena”. There were few in American academia who understood this, and perhaps also in England with the obvious exception of Professor Susan Greenfield soon to become Director of the Royal Institution.

In 1999 I tried to intrude this thinking into the ideas of Chester (Checker) Finn a close colleague of Diane Ravitch and President of the Thomas Fordham Foundation who was to become an early promoter of Charter Schools – but with no success. To Finn, as to so many others in England and America whose training was essentially in the behavioural sciences and the humanities, there was no obvious connection between synaptic malfunctioning which could only be seen under a high-powered microscope and the way in which people behave and think in particular ways.

Later that year I had to return to England, and closed down the Initiative in Washington, as our largest sponsors having declared that “we had gone too far” by describing the Western education system as “upside down and inside out” and by implying that this should lead to a reversal in the distribution of funds between primary and secondary education.

I found myself back in a country that seemed anxious to follow the political initiatives set up in the United States, but often with a time-lapse of three or four years. Bringing these ideas with me back into England I found myself in considerable demand as a speaker at endless teachers’ conferences – the English at this stage were fascinated by what I was saying. But steadily what was happening in America when I had left (and which Diane Ravitch so well describes) came to be repeated in England with a frightening predictability. As first a Labour then a Conservative administration pulled ever more authority away from the 140 or so locally accountable educational authorities, with its claim of giving every school more “freedom” – by “freedom” it seemed to imply escaping from local political control, yet tying themselves ever-closer to the mandarins of Whitehall, and the whims of the Minister. English education seemed caught up in a continuous flurry of disconnected initiatives which few understood. What, ever more people started to say, was education supposed to be about?

By 2007 Diane Ravitch was asking the same question. She now believes the problem goes back to the way in which the accountability agenda took over from the standards movement – in simple terms the emphasis on what could be measured replaced concern about what should be taught. How it happened at first sight seems to be a very American phenomena – but it’s not. It goes back to who the American people think they are, and who they want to be. The clue to this is in the people’s perception of who they are in academic terms, and that has to mean what history is taught in the schools.

In America the nature of the history curriculum is a most vexed issue. How could Columbus have “discovered” America if the “Americans” had not been living there themselves for thousands of years? Can Americans of African origin have the same affinity for European culture as to the WASPS of New England? Do the masses who, only a generation or so ago, escaped from “industrial bondage” believe in the recuperative capabilities of unbridled capitalism? Whose side would you have been on in the Civil War, and do recent immigrants have a greater loyalty to the values of their new homeland than they did to their countries of origin? Whose literature should children be taught; whose music should they espouse, and are they really citizens of the world if, first and foremost, they believe in America’s world economic dominance?

By replacing the standards movement in 1996 with the accountability movement what had once been an effort to improve the quality of education turned into little more than an accounting strategy – measure, then punish or reward. Sensing a political quagmire, Federal politicians decided to leave to the individual states the decision as to what to teach and how to teach it. Fifty different curricula arose of highly variable quality, and multiple ways of looking at children’s learning and so confusing any development of a national vision of education. George W. Bush bought in the “No Child Left Behind” strategy with its emphasis on high-stakes testing, data-driven decision making, choice, Charter Schools, privatisation, regulation, merit pay and competition amongst schools. Incredible as it might seem, by 2008 this had been taken up by the Democrats.

* * *

To an Englishman this is all too familiar – we too have been befogged by statistics and the mesmeric impact such abstract data can have. But reading a detailed analysis of how this can pervert the delivery of education in someone else’s country, can challenge readers to reflect more dispassionately about affairs in their own land. By 2007 Ravitch had become quite unequivocal in her judgement – without a national vision of what good education involves the test results alone simply provide a treacherous smokescreen to what is actually happening in schools. “Schools that expect nothing more of their students than the mastery of basic skills will not produce graduates who are ready for college, or the workplace”, she now writes, and then continues “without a comprehensive liberal arts education our students will not be prepared for the responsibilities of citizenship in a democracy…”

Ravitch is at pains to say that education is an arduous process and always requires enormous effort to succeed. “The most durable way to improve schools is to improve curriculum and instruction and to improve conditions in which teachers work and children learn, rather than endlessly squabbling over how schools systems should be organised, managed and controlled. It is not the organisation of the schools that is at fault but the ignorance we deplore, with the lack of sound educational values”.

Out of the dozen reasons that Ravitch quotes as to why schools will not improve under the present regime I select four;

… if elected officials intrude into pedagogical territory and make decisions that properly should be made by professional educators, Congress and State legislatures (for which we English should read Parliament and the local town hall) should not tell teachers how to teach, any more than they should tell surgeons how to perform operations.

… if we value only what tests measure we miss the point, for not everything that matters can be so quantified – such as a student’s ability to seek alternative explanations, to raise questions, to pursue knowledge on his or her own and, critically, to think differently.

… if we entrust educational policy making to the magical powers of market choice, education is reduced to a matter of winners and losers. Surely our goal must be to establish school systems that foster academic excellence in every school and every neighbourhood?

… if we expect schools to act like private, profit-seeking enterprises we fail for the goal of education is not to produce higher scores, but to educate children to become responsible people with well-developed minds and good character.

Nor will schools improve if they are used as society’s all-purpose punching-bag, blaming them for all the ills of the economy and the problems created by poverty, dysfunctional families and the erosion of civility. She states passionately, “if there is one thing all educators know, and that many studies have confirmed for decades, it is that there is no single answer to educational improvement. There is no silver bullet”, and it all starts with the need for a well thought through, respected and robust vision of what is involved in good education.

* * *

The 21st Century Learning Initiative endorsed such a sentiment even before it produced “the Synthesis” (1996) drawing upon a vast range of research studies into how the brain works and children learn as a result of the first set of Wingspread conferences in 1995. But the Initiative added the additional ingredient namely that the biological origins of the human brain give it a certain “grain” which, if worked with, can achieve magnificent results, but if ignored (as it has been in so much present pedagogic practice both sides of the Atlantic) children simply fail to develop in the way that they are entitled to do.

Of all the reports and British Government White Papers of the past five years it was probably the Cambridge Primary Review, published in the late Autumn of 2009, that showed just how removed English educationalists still are from the work in the biomedical and cognitive sciences. Commissioned by the Esmée Fairburn Foundation this report cost several million pounds. It is a massive document of more than half a million words, compiled by 14 editors and 66 consultants which drew upon some 4000 published sources. Its main limitation is that it treated primary education in isolation both from secondary education and from the influence of the home and community on the growing child. Then, if you consult the index, you will find almost no reference to the researchers in the cognitive and biomedical research which I have quoted here, and which the Initiative sees as being very significant. There is no reference whatsoever to the groundbreaking work of Gerald Edelman, the Nobel Prize winner, now known in cognitive science as NeuralDarwinism.

That is a terrible shame for the most significant of the Cambridge Review’s recommendations – that formal schooling should be delayed until the age of six – receives tremendous support from the work of Edelman and the like. Without that additional body of research findings the Review seems to be merely a recycling of earlier ideas. English politicians in 2009 were quick to spot this. Ed Balls the then Minister of Education claimed that this was based on totally out-of-date statistics and ideas. Three days later Michael Gove, the education spokesman for the Conservatives and former leader-writer for the Times claimed “Another Academic Exercise Divides Opinion”. All this looked so much like what Diane Ravitch was describing about the reform movement in America.

In both America and England academics and intellectuals have lost their (often despised) authority with which to challenge those simplistic political dogmas and snake-oil placebos that have so bedevilled educational policy for more than a generation, and have allowed ambitious politicians to selectively put one set of research findings against another in contexts which make no apparent sense.

Albert Shanker understood this and had the vision of a genuinely well-educated society able to sustain American democracy. Where is his successor, either in England or in America?

Without the ability to synthesise – to draw together those different yet most certainly valid understandings of the wonder of human learning as set out by scientists, philosophers and practitioners, education flounders for the lack of a really good map. Without such a map we are lost. The poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, writing in 1939, expressed this perfectly.

Upon this gifted age, in its dark hour,
Rains from the sky a meteoric shower
Of facts . . . they lie unquestioned,
uncombined.

Wisdom enough to leech us of our ill
Is daily spun, but there exists no loom
To weave it into fabric.

Where is the weaver, and in which country the loom? On the basis of the OECD analysis of educational performance published in December 2010 (in which the United States came 12th overall, and the United Kingdom 18th overall), neither the loom nor the weaver are likely to be found in either of our two countries, unless each heed the advice given in this book.

Related posts:

1. Who will take Education where?
2. Occasional Pieces: Education: A Question of Democracy
3. What Changes in Technology and the Economy May Mean for Education Systems

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.

No related posts.

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.

Related posts:

1. The Right Reverend Peter B. Price, The Bishop of Bath and Wells
2. Dr. Keith Robinson, Chief Executive of the Wiltshire County Council and Chairman of the Association of County Chief Executives
3. David Peake, Former banker (Chairman of Kleinwort Benson)

At all levels these are confusing times; it is as if something we once understood is crumbling, decaying and exhausting itself while we are expected to preside as midwives to a new world we can’t yet, quite, understand. We know we have to do something – but what exactly?

Developments in the fields of cognitive science, evolutionary biology and psychology all point to the same, stark fact: the means to adapt to this new world will not come from our present-day thinkers, but from the younger generations, our adolescents – provided that from birth onwards, they are given the right environment to fulfil their potential.

It is in the early years of life that we learn directly and willingly from those around us – in particular from those we admire. Young children are typically enthusiastic and malleable – which makes the sea change at puberty all the more unsettling. Passing into adolescence, these once-pliable children begin to question and challenge existing social practices.

Because adolescence upsets the carefully controlled world of the adult, society has come to perceive it as a threat rather than the opportunity it really is. We therefore expect little from our adolescents; we assume them to be at the mercy of their hormones and liable to make stupid mistakes. We just hope they get through the teenage years intact – do what they’re told, pass their exams and come out the other side with the qualifications they need to get a good job.

This belief in adolescence as an ‘aberration’ – something that shouldn’t happen – is current. The scientific understanding on which it is based, however, is not.

Now that we know so much more about how we have evolved, how we learn and the seismic changes that occur in the teenage brain, it is clear that this approach has done a terrible disservice to both our young people and our society as a whole. Science has revealed the tremendous potential of adolescence. Now the rest of society needs to catch up – in terms of how we teach, and how we engage with our young people.

Indeed, one could confidently argue that it is precisely because we have been failing our adolescents over the past century – by not preparing them to think for themselves – that we are now up against some of the most terrible crises humanity as a whole has ever faced.

This document sets out the strong case that adolescence, far from being an aberration that needs to be contained, is in fact a biological adaptation that has ensured the survival of our species thus far. It examines how England specifically has failed its young people, and how it continues to do so. And it sets out clear steps that need to be taken to create an environment and education system that better serve the younger generation and equip them for a rapidly changing world.

How we learn, the nature of intelligence – and how wrong we’ve been…

The following table lists the outdated cultural and scientific assumptions on which our education system is based, and compares this with what scientists have since discovered about how we develop. The differences are startling:

What implications does this have?

How we currently educate children and adolescents is utterly at odds with the way they actually learn and develop. Adolescents are predisposed not to sit passively in a classroom and do what they’re told – and no teacher, however commanding, can override several million years’ evolutionary programming.

However, as a time-limited genetic predisposition, the features of adolescence – the risk taking, the exuberance and the outrageous questioning of the status quo – are there for a time, but they disappear as the young person grows older.  If the adolescent is prevented (by over cautious parents or a too rigid system of formal schooling) from experimenting and working things out for itself, it will lose the motivation to be innovative or to take responsibility for itself when it becomes adult. To over-school adolescents is to rob them of the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to grow up properly.  We all pay the price.

What needs to change?

It has taken England a long time to accept the transformative nature of learning, preferring instead (as proposed in 1944) that only a minority merited an education that taught them to think for themselves.  With a mid-nineteenth century mindset still operating in 1944, the post-war Government thought that those not quite good enough to go to grammar school should receive a technical education, but that the majority needed only an education in “routine” skills.  Even that came at a frightful cost for, desperately short of resources, Parliament cut three years off the elementary school curriculum to help create the four-year secondary school much to the detriment of young people’s long term social development.  England is still paying the price for ignoring, in some of the most deprived parts of this country, the implication of providing five or six generations of economy schooling, largely predicated on providing skills that were already redundant.

Now that we understand the grain of the brain, we simply cannot continue as we are. But this is not simply a matter of changing our education system. To begin supporting how our children naturally learn (and thus equip them to thrive in this fast-changing world), there must be a paradigm shift – a totally new way of thinking about the bringing up of children. This has enormous implications for the role of the home and the community, almost as much as it does for the school.

The 21^st Century Learning Initiative recommends the following:

Rejoin the practices of primary and secondary education. The primary and secondary school system was set up as a compromise between two conflicting views on how to educate children. Some felt children should be taught by subject (as exemplified by grammar schools), while others believed social development and the ability to make connections across subjects was more important (as exemplified by elementary schools). The system we have today was not set up in the best interests of children, but rather as a way of fudging together these two opposing camps to create one national system. In fact, recent research suggests that this transition at the highly sensitive age of 11 can be traumatic enough to set a child back developmentally.

Design a new pedagogy that is sympathetic to the way children develop. Younger children naturally learn from their teachers, so we should capitalise on this through smaller teacher-pupil ratios. The more care and attention given to a child’s development in the early years, the better equipped they are to direct their own learning in adolescence. Equally, secondary education should be transformed to give adolescents the opportunity they crave to manage their own learning and progression.

Invest in training highly able teachers. The transformation of education is more dependent on the quality of future teachers than it is upon structures, and has very little to do with buildings. Productive pupil / teacher relationships are based on explanation, on talking things through and exploring issues in their entirety. Which is why future teachers not only need to know a lot, but be wise enough to adapt their teaching to the needs of each child and class, taking into account factors such as socio-economic profile and geographical area, as well as individual development.  With this in mind, we call for a new model of teacher education that combines the highest understanding of subject content (the secondary model) with equally demanding knowledge of pedagogy and child development (the primary model).

Restore the importance of home and community as places of learning. Down-playing the role of the home (in the creation of the emotions) and the community (in creating a sense of social responsibility), has so over-extended the role of ‘institutional’ learning that it fails to induct young people into the much less structured and problematic world of adult life. Given the inherent limitation of schooling it seems essential for a child to have an intellectual life outside school – like a three-legged stool that stays upright however uneven the ground, a balanced education depends on the three legs of home, school and community.

Such whole-systems thinking will only be effective if it is unconstrained by conventional assumptions, or current institutional priorities or political dogma. These findings require a departure from the current way of doing things so radical that normal processes of incremental innovation will not be adequate. Neither top-down political imposition nor unsupported grass-roots innovators can create these kinds of change.

The Initiative will now seek to create local partnerships able to undertake this work at local level and over many years. It will be these communities that, by transforming their education systems, will truly release human potential at unprecedented levels.

Related posts:

1. The 21st Century Learning Initiative Platform
2. A Journey Towards an Understanding of Learning: A Headteacher travels with Education 2000 to the 21st Century Learning Initiative
3. The 21st Century Learning Initiative Canadian Group