The 21st Century Learning Initiative » canada

Citizen of the World

The 21st Century Learning Initiative — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 15:00:38 +0000

Grow slow to grow tall

By using the life story of Peter Puget to illustrate the relationship of prepubescent learning to the nature of the adolescent brain, I may have lost interest of those readers with no affinity with the Pacific Northwest. The significance of the map-making skills of that twenty-two year old might have been lost on those who have never seen the beauty of Mount Baker, or stood on the shores of the Olympic Peninsula. Just as Australians don’t know of Peter Puget, neither do Canadians or Americans know of Lachlan Macquarie, now widely recognised by Australians as “the father” of their country.

Lachlan Macquarie was born two years later than Peter Puget on the small island of Ulva just off Mull on the West Coast of Scotland. Although Lachlan’s father was the clan chief the Macquaries, a poor and tiny clan living, as did all other Highlanders, in cottages made of dry-stone walls and thatched with reeds. They were, nevertheless, a fiercely tough and resilient people. The young Lachlan had as good a ‘Mark Twain’ kind of childhood as had Peter Puget but his father, like Puget’s father, fell on hard times when the boy was coming up to fourteen. The Macquaries went bankrupt. Lachlan made his way to Edinburgh where he enlisted in the army and went into the 84^th Regiment of Foot and fought in the American War of Independence.

Losing that war England no longer had a place to send convicts, and was forced to find an alternative. In 1784 the “First Fleet” sailed for Australia to establish the colony of New South Wales based on one of the world’s finest natural harbours – now known as Sydney. The early years of the colony were chaotic; the fifth Governor, William Bligh (of the ill-famed HMS Bounty) was particularly cruel and ineffective. Twenty years after its establishment, a state of anarchy prevailed.

Then, into Sydney Harbour in June 1814, sailed Lachlan Macquarie, appointed by the British government as the new Governor. Since his early days fighting in America, Macquarie had been promoted to Captain in 1789, Major in 1801 becoming Lieutenant Colonel of the 73^rd Regiment of Foot in 1805. With an extraordinary mixture of firmness and a fine appreciation of human nature, always linked to a sense of good order and discipline, Macquarie turned the chaotic colony into the beginning of a self-respecting settlement which, by the time he retired in 1821, was already home to an expanding population of both free settlers, and pardoned convicts. He expanded the frontiers of the colony, and sent expeditions into different parts of the continent. Contemporaries and historians alike have been amazed at Macquarie’s achievements.

Years later Macquarie was asked how it was that he, a man from such a tiny insignificant island in the shadow of the great mountain mass of Ben More on Mull, could have developed such phenomenal powers of leadership. just before he died he wrote,

“If you are born on a mere speck of land in the middle of the ocean you quickly discover how things work, and why people do as they do. Learn that lesson well, and you are equipped to become a citizen of the world.”

What a magnificent expectation – to become “a citizen of the world”! Following my lecture last week on Salt Spring Island in British Columbia, this will now hang on the walls of the Gulf Island’s Secondary School.

Surely it should also hang on the walls of every British primary school for that surely is what education has to be all about? As then, so now, the strongest of the next generation will be the ones who have been allowed the most challenge, and given the strongest support, when young. They are the ones who, like Peter Puget, Lachlan Macquarie and England’s Horatio Nelson, will grow up strong, thoughtful and – most importantly – be able to turn ideas into actions.

See multiple references to Adolescence in Overschooled but Undereducated

“Look to the Rock from which you were hewn…”

The 21st Century Learning Initiative — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 14:47:11 +0000

It wasn’t Michelangelo who said that – although it might have been for he was always at pains to select the particular block of stone which would best enable him to draw out of its structure that which he had in his mind’s eye to sculpt – it was the prophet Isaiah (Chapter 51) who drove home his point by saying “(and think) of the quarry from which you were dug.” Just as Michelangelo couldn’t have created his David out of any old piece of granite, so the people of Israel knew as well as today’s industrial chemist that the clay extracted from one quarry might be excellent for the production of fine china, exclusive paper or toothpaste, but would be useless for forming firebricks, floor tiles or as an additive to paint.

While every one of the six billion people on the face of the earth comes from a single species, the culture into which we are born creates a kaleidoscope of tribes and nations that think, and act, in significantly different ways. Since E.O. Wilson’s seminal treatise On Human Nature was published in 1978 scientists have come to accept that our species is as it is partly as a result of deep-seated instinctive behaviours built up over the millennia, transmitted through genes, and then refined in each generation by its immediate nurture. In Isaiah’s terms it all depends from which part of the quarry you were hewn; just as both York and Bath stone were laid down millions of years ago in the Jurassic Sea, micro-processes in that same sequence produced stone tough enough to provide pavements, while stone in another quarry is soft enough to build houses and carve fabulous gargoyles.

David Cameron appeared to impress the party faithful when he said that Gove’s ideas were drawn from Sweden, American and Canada. As someone involved with education all my working life I have travelled widely and found the study of other systems of education fascinating… not in what they had enabled me to bring back in my rucksack as nuggets of perfection but how they have acted as mirrors to help me question, ever more sharply, what we do in England. In 1969 I had the opportunity to sit in the back of a secondary classroom in New Hampshire. I was most impressed by the pupils’ enthusiasm, but was confused, from my grammar school background, by the total informality of the discipline. “You must understand”, the Professor of Education who was showing me around said, “there is a subtle difference between what we Americans think is our job in education, and what I picked up when studying at Oxford about what you English think education is about. It seems to me that you have a preconceived idea of the perfect youngster and do all in your power to shape kids appropriately. We Americans are uncertain about the future. We are still a frontier people – we think it is our job to help every youngster to so ‘sharpen his axe’ that he or she will be able to cut their way through whatever concrete jungle they may face. Our job is to build up rugged individuals, while you seem determined to cut children down to size.”

As a young teacher that impressed me greatly. But it seems as if Gove and Gibb have been searching for another kind of answer. They start with questions of governance, not with questions about how children learn. Never was this clearer than with the publication last week of the massive Cambridge Primary Review. While Labour simply dismissed the Review as being out of date, Nick Gibb used its criticism of an over-centralised curriculum to make a political attack on Labour, and then dismissed out of hand any suggestion that formal schooling should not start until six because that offended Conservative doctrinaire thinking.

So, in 2009, instead of acknowledging that the reason Finland and the other Scandinavian countries are at the top of the OECD achievement tables is a result of their pedagogic insights, David Cameron attributes it to free-market principles that have led the Swedes (with their very materialistic view of life) to open up schools to be run for profit. Cameron then sited Canada, by that he must mean the Province of Alberta as Canada has no uniform system of education that is so rich from its oil revenues that it has abolished income tax as an example of free enterprise. Shopping around for other examples of changed governance, he turned to the United States. This is very strange for America rejoices in its local federal responsibilities (the kinds of local autonomy which both Labour and Conservative have done their best to destroy in England) and which shamefully partners England at the bottom of the UNICEF Well-being of Children Report of two and a half years ago, and urges the English to adopt the Charter School Movement.

No, the English don’t have to go overseas to find magic bullets. They have to take the time to understand their own system better, and be humble enough to realise that international studies in neurology, evolution and cognitive science can help even the English to unpack the relationship of what we are born with, and how our historic culture has shaped the grain of our brains.

Is that really too much for politicians to think about?

See Parts 9 and 10 of the Briefing Paper

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Getting the Message Across

The 21st Century Learning Initiative — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 14:11:23 +0000

The observant blogger probably thought that I had run out of steam when, after producing a dozen blogs in as many days in February, I suddenly stopped. “What’s gone wrong?” asked one; “Will you start again?” said another. But, truth to tell, most people hardly noticed!

A blog to be of any use has to have continuity, spontaneity, topicality, the thrill of the immediate, and present.

My reason for stopping can now be told. Fired up by the excitement of having found a really good publisher for Heather’s and my book, Overschooled but Undereducated, I was all set to make blogging priority when two things hit me. The first was just one of those things, but difficult to deal with nevertheless… I lost the man who I had hoped would develop our fund raising and marketing strategy. Serious as that was it was my realisation that, if the book were not to be published until November, we could be too late to have any influence on politicians as they set out their Manifestos for that General Election which has to be held before June 2010. “The best time to get politicians to listen to you is just before, not just after the election,” said one Member. “You need to give us some very clear actions now as to what to do should we be elected. Leaving it until the book comes out will be too late.”

While on a 10-day lecture tour in Canada in early March – a tour that took me through the northern Athabasca oil fields of Northern Alberta and to the Gulf Islands just off Vancouver (I missed two good blogs on the ethics of oil extraction, and the delight of flying in seaplanes) – I worried away at how to create a document that would somehow summarise the entire argument of the book as well as setting out a set of actions that needed to be followed, all in one-tenth of the number of words I had used in the book.

Three months on and the Initiative is now publishing A Briefing Paper for Parliamentarians on the Design Faults at the Heart of English Education. It has not been an easy task, and there was no time left to write blogs. Overschooled but Undereducated was the summation of years of study, research and practice and the Briefing Paper is a still further distillation. Readers will have to judge for themselves whether or not this is good enough to help shape the political agenda of the next government. Personally I think it does, but that really isn’t the issue. It is not what an author wants to say that matters; it is whether the author can take readers willingly to places they had never known before that actually matters.

Achieving that is, after all, the art of the good teacher. Action Six states “Teachers need both technical subject knowledge and considerable expertise in both pedagogy and child development, combined with the avuncular skill of brilliant storytellers.”

Parliamentarians are like children in many ways. Like the rest of us they listen to good stories but quickly get bored by too many dry statistics. Like children we all look for excuses not to listen.

Now turn to the Briefing Paper here on the website and see if you find this a good way of getting Parliamentarians to understand the educational needs of young people. If you do please share the whole of this Paper with as many other people as you can find who are now ready to hear the message.

Stories from Alberta

The 21st Century Learning Initiative — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 13:45:15 +0000

My travels have taken me to unusual places, and inevitably I meet audiences of many different kinds. The people of Northern Alberta, living in an area the size of Florida, and now known as the Athabasca Oil Sands, were one of these highly distinctive groups that I spent time with in March.

They are of the Cree and Dene tribes who, until only a generation ago, existed as their ancestors had for hundreds of generations along the trap lines. In the harsh environment of subzero temperatures for much of the year and mosquito infested forests at other times, these native indian peoples are brilliant hunters.

Starting with the fur traders 300 years ago this area has been a conflict zone between the western Christian tradition of “going forth and exploiting the land” and the native indian tradition that says the land is the seat of all knowledge, it is sacred, and is to be respected, because it is more important than the human. When geologists first discovered the oil sands they saw them as being too expensive to exploit but now the price is so high that some of the world’s largest oil companies are now investing vast sums to literally strip off a hundred feet of top soil, and then process the oil sands. In the process, they are completely destroying the native indian habitat (and sacred space) replacing what was once full of natural beauty with a desiccated space of featureless landfill.

“It is destroying our people,” I was told my a much-respected Elder, as she described why on average there is a youth suicide every week. “We need to ensure that the Gifts of Knowledge which have been passed from generation to general of aboriginal children continue to be told and retold.” She continued, “The Seven Traditional Teachings or the Gifts of Knowledge, cannot be used without each other, to leave out one teaching from your life is embracing the opposite of what they each are.” There is much, not only for the native indian peoples of Alberta to remember from these teachings, but for the rest of us in the west to learn. You can read more about them here.

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Pre-packaged Food, and Pre-packaged Learning

The 21st Century Learning Initiative — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 13:30:37 +0000

Yesterday was busy. It was late, and I was tired as I arrived at Paddington some 7 or 8 minutes before my train left. Noting that there was to be a ‘travelling chef’ on the train I decided against buying sandwiches at the station, and take my chance with the buffet.

The only hot food left was a cheeseburger which, the young and apologetic ‘travelling chef’ expressed, was now half price as it was the last journey she would make that evening. Ordering a beer as she popped the pre-prepared burger into the microwave the chef grinned: “Not much of a supper that – it’s not what I will give my man later on”.

As I returned to my seat and gingerly bit into an over-hot, rather plastic version of what I might have eaten at Scout Camp many years ago, I was forcefully reminded of an astute comment made by a 15-year-old Canadian girl recently as she described the limitation of modern teaching methods. “The trouble with you teachers is that you regard teaching like a pre-packaged television dinner. You expect us to go to the deepfreeze, pull out a package, read the instructions and peel off the plastic wrapping and put it into the microwave. You watch to make sure that we read the instructions carefully and set the microwave at the right temperature and for the right length of time. When the pinger goes and it comes out you look over our shoulders and say ‘That was good – you get 10 out of 10’”.

“Such an approach to schooling means nothing to us at all”, the Canadian girl had continued, “we would far prefer to invent the recipe for ourselves, go out and find the ingredients and work out how to mix them in the best way to produce something edible. It might not look quite as professional as the pre-packaged meal, but even if you only gave us 3 out of 10 for doing it, we would feel a great sense of achievement. By giving us 10 out of 10 for something that doesn’t really matter to us leaves us feeling that schooling is vacuous.”

Leaving most of the cheeseburger uneaten, I sipped the rest of my beer as the words of the travelling chef came back to me: “Not much of a supper that – it’s not what I would give my man”. And that is exactly what many of today’s teachers feel as, exhausted by the sheer boredom and pressure of daily routines and preparing pre-packaged lessons, they resign in frustration from the teaching profession. It is a terrible shame. It wasn’t that the ingredients in that cheeseburger were wrong, any more than it is that the ideas which are to be found in a school curriculum are wrong, it was just that they hadn’t been combined together in a way that satisfied my hunger, or – mixing metaphors – fulfilled a child’s need to work things out for itself. And by pretending that this was a proper meal could never give job satisfaction to a so-called travelling chef.