The Messiness of Human Learning

The start of 2001 was a time of excitement. Personally I had started to feel confident that, after the traumas of 1999 the initiative was building a firm base on which to push these ideas across the UK, and maybe elsewhere.

Recovering Confidence and Deepening the Message

You will never solve a problem by using the same thinking that created the problem in the first place

Thesis 99 – The Story Now to be Told

“We have not inherited this world from our parents, we have been loaned it by our children”1. Recognising that we are all part of something bigger than ourselves is both a humbling and an empowering thought.  Like the Saxon nobleman observing the sparrow (Th. 23), we know that we only appreciate a small fraction of […]

Thesis 98 – Upside Down and Inside Out

The pace of change is now so great that it is no longer enough for schools simply to transfer to the next generation the wisdom of earlier times; they have to start a dynamic process whereby pupils are weaned of their earlier dependence on institutions, and given the confidence to manage their own learning1.   […]

HMC Conference, St Andrews

The most complete statement of the Initiative’s ideas

Battling for the Soul of Education

A review of Diane Ravitch, ‘The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How testing and choice are undermining education’.

Learning to Go with the Grain of the Brain

If young people are to be equipped effectively to meet the challenges of the 21st century it is surely prudent to seek out the very best understandings from current scientific research into the nature of how humans learn before considering further reform of the current system.

This article by John Abbott and Terence Ryan appeared in the Spring, 1999 issue of Education Canada.

Upside Down and Inside Out: Why good schools alone can never be good enough to meet the need for community and economic regeneration in the 21st century

Most school reform in Britain, as in America, has had limited impact because it simply assumed that learning and schooling were synonymous; schools have falsely been seen as being independent of the larger socio-economic structures of which they are an intrinsic part.