The 21st Century Learning Initiative
Promoting a Vision, Knowledge, Experience and a Network
What price 'Intelligence'?
Response to Tony Little's book 'An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Education'
This short monograph was written by Neil Richards, a Trustee of the 21st Century Learning Initiative in response to the publication of Tony Little’s book, An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Education.
Battling for the Soul of Education
Moving beyond school reform to educational transformation:
The findings and recommendations of 3 decades of synthesis
Download from battlingforthesoulofeducation.org
Genetics/Mutation
The Born to Learn Animations
Profound truths are often so unsettling that people lose themselves in lengthy explanations that ultimately confuse, rather than clarify. This is a very human trait which starts as the youngest children begin to form straightforward explanations as to how they see ideas fitting together. But unless they replace such earlier ‘naive’ explanations as they […]
Bronowski, ‘The Ascent of Man’
Bronowski’s (1973) ability to create a synthesis across multiple disciplines was the stimulant to Education 2000’s work
Thesis 81 – Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors
Eat five pieces of fruit and vegetable daily. Limit your consumption of meat; eat wild grains and fish, reduce salt and sugar. Exercise regularly. Talk a lot and tell stories; don’t work too hard; get plenty of sleep, and share and share alike1. Humans have been using their brains to think, and their stomachs […]
Thesis 61 – Questioning Intelligence
“Am I just thick”, asked a thirteen-year-old girl, “or am I only good at those things that really interest me?” Her friends grinned; “She’s very good at annoying the boys”. And then, “Does my brain get better through use?”, quizzed a third. “What sort of use?”, interjected a fourth1. What makes us the thinkers […]
Thesis 48 – Why Are We As We Are?
Instead of Mankind having been separately created, as described in the Book of Genesis, Darwin’s theory of evolution suggested that all life forms currently found on our planet came into being through a gradual process of genetic differentiation and selection under environmental pressure, over immense periods of time. In “The Origin of Species”1 Darwin […]
Thesis 23 – Ancient Brits
“Our DNA does not fade like an ancient parchment. It does not rust in the ground like the sword of a warrior long dead. It is not eroded by wind or rain, nor reduced to ruin by fire and earthquake. It is the traveller from an antique land that lives within us all”.1 The […]
Thesis 11 – Playing to One’s Strengths
Psychologists for long pondered the question, “Which is more important — Nature or Nurture?” It has always been an emotionally charged debate. Political demagogues in the twentieth century incited their peoples to extremes of racialism having convinced themselves that certain cultural features ‘were there in the blood’. This led to eugenics. Research now shows conclusively […]
Thesis 4 – Ancestral Influences
[Please scroll down to listen to an audio version of this thesis] We humans with our likes and dislikes, our senses and our sensibilities, didn’t fall ready-made from the sky; nor were we born with minds and bodies that bear no imprint of the history of our species. The way we interact today at a […]
Thesis 1 – Providing Roots and Wings for our Children
[Please scroll down to listen to an audio version of this thesis] The education of children is the most important task parents, or a nation, have to undertake; on them the future well-being of the world depends. Through the combined influence of home, community and school, education has to create men and women capable of […]
Apes, Humans and 747s
Genetics It was in 1997 that Henry Plotkin, Professor of Psychobiology at University College London, published Evolution in Mind. In this he gave a fulsome explanation to Dobzhansky’s assertion that “antecedence becomes cause” – how we think today is largely shaped by the structures in the brain which have developed over enormous periods of time […]
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