“So, what’s the story?”
ConfEd Summer Conference
London, 12 July 2002
It's a pleasure to address you this afternoon, but I do so with some trepidation.
My career has been very different to yours since I resigned from the headship of a
large comprehensive school back in 1985. Even in those days I believed that
bureaucracy and muddled thinking about learning were undermining 'education.' For
some seventeen years I've been operating "outside the normal school paradigm."
This has introduced me to a portfolio of ideas, from the sciences about the working of
the human brain; from economics about the shaping of cultures and - in its broadest
sense what it could mean to be a human in the century before us.
These ideas it may be helpful to share with you.
Such ideas beg a question of the greatest importance. It is simply this. As
educationalists, just what is it that we think we're doing?
Given what we now know about human development, about the relationship between
nature and nurture, and about complexity and systems theory, just what kind of
education should we each be advocating, and for what kind of world do we think this
will be appropriate?
Your people - the up to one million or so living in your authority assume (at a quite
basic level) that if you're a Director of Education or Chief Inspector you are the
ultimate authority on education. Intuitively they may sense difficulties, they may see
that some things are not as they should be, but they don't quite know what to make of
it all. They think you know what you're doing and why. That lets them off the hook.
They trust you to understand how all the bits come together.
As science discovers ever more about the nature of the human brain, how it works and
how "it makes up its mind", big questions about human learning are starting to hang
in the air. Unanswered questions. Many of you have heard me before pose this
particular one; "With all this knowledge do we wish our children to grow up as
battery hens or free range chickens?"
Is that simply a cheap, oratorical device to catch attention, before you start to doze
after a good lunch, or is it a reasonable metaphor, for surely the answer must be
obvious? But is it? A cursory glance at the shelves of a supermarket will remind you
that you have to pay significantly more for the meat or the eggs of free-range chickens
than those from the battery hen. Quality always comes at a price; yet excessive cost
cutting drives our own economy, as you know only too well.
We live in complex and confusing times and things don't seem to be getting any
easier. Your desks are littered with the appeals of special interest groups. Your arms
are tired of being twisted. "You can't have your cake and eat it", you're tempted to
2
snap back. "Everything is connected to everything" you sense, but how do you turn
that into constructive policy, rather than a lame excuse for perpetuating the status
quo?
Remember the prophet Isaiah; "Without a vision the people perish"?
If the people in your neck of the woods can't see the big picture, is that because you
too have failed to join all the bits together? It shouldn't have taken a Demos
publication on Systems Failure to give us the necessary confidence to argue that
education, like other aspects of the public services dealing with intelligent, thinking
people, is a complex adaptive system. A system that is subject to the law of
unintended consequences.
All of us have to make numerous speeches but does what we say amount to a vision
of real substance? Are we authentic? Do you see yourselves as the ultimate advocate
for whatever are the non-negotiable needs of young people; or do you see yourself as
being "under orders" to get a job done according to some definition as laid out, not
simply by a committee, but by a committee of committees?
Do people hear the real "you" speak? Can we, as individuals, rise to the challenge
posed recently by Vaclav Havel, the former dissident and now president of the Czech
Republic, when he said, "Education is the ability to perceive the hidden connections
between phenomena". Are you doing that…. are you pointing out the implications of
unintended consequences?
We are here, I guess, because we were once young teachers, who wanted to make the
lot of the next generation better. Do you occasionally think back with nostalgia to
those days in the classroom when all you were concerned with was feeding the
creative spark of the youngsters in the front row? It was often a raw experience - your
idealism and determination, and their innate scepticism as to whether you were worth
taking seriously.
Think back to a time when you did that really well.
For me the class that still excites me was a long time ago. To earn some extra money
at the beginning and end of each of the university terms, I worked as a temporary
supply teacher (for all of £2 a day), at a secondary modern school near our home in
Essex. The school served the bottom 60 or 70 percent of the ability range. Teachers
weren't sure what to do with pupils who mostly left school with precious few
qualifications, a rudimentary basic education and little belief in their ability to shape
their own futures.
It was one Friday afternoon in late 1963, a year after the Cuba crisis and a few weeks
after Kennedy's assassination. "We're short staffed", the deputy head explained, "I'll
have to ask you to take two classes of 15 year olds for the whole afternoon. Do
anything you like to keep them quiet. If it gets too difficult for you to handle I'll take
over half way. And, by the way, unfortunately their teachers have not left any work
for them to do, and I can't find any of their text books!"
3
I went into the oversized class unprepared, hoping against hope for some form of
inspiration to get me started. I paused at one desk where a boy had a copy of The
Colditz Story. Noting my interest the boy opened up a bit and asked, "Why did there
have to be a war in 1939?"
It was a red herring; a conversation starter which the class hoped would keep me
talking and take any pressure off them to do any serious work. I saw I could use this. I
opened up the discussion and asked the class to note a number of dates and events and
then I got each one to record as many family experiences as they could to fill in the
human detail behind those events. This caught their interest; they were able to talk in
class about things they had heard their parents talking about at home. They were
thinking.
I turned and divided the blackboard into seven columns, one for each year of the war.
In white we wrote down events as the boys could remember them; Dunkirk, U-Boats
in the Atlantic, the Blitz, Normandy, North Africa, the Atom Bomb. In red we listed
personal notes such as "Mum was evacuated from London to Scotland", "Dad was
called up and sent to India", "My Aunt met a GI and went to live in Alabama" and so
on.
They responded with an interest and enthusiasm that left the deputy head incredulous
when he looked through the glass panel in the door mid-afternoon. By treating the
pupils as intelligent, inquisitive and essentially good people, I had invited them to
learn together, and they had responded with unaffected enthusiasm.
I would have forgotten about that lesson had it not been for a brief, chance
conversation about eighteen years later, during the Falklands War. I was rushing back
across Kings Cross to catch a late train, only to arrive on the platform moments after
the train had pulled away. Obviously irritated, and preparing to stand for thirty
minutes for the next train, a porter came up to me, "I know you, don't I? Didn't you
once teach at Rainsford in Chelmsford? Aren't you the man who got us talking about
the Second World War? You got us to think about why people go to war. That must
have been at least twenty or so years ago, but I've been thinking a lot about that, what
with the newspapers so full of our army going down to the Falklands. It seems to me
as if it's all a load of hype and politicians pride being hurt. At least that's what I'm
saying to my mates!"
I guess I have several thousands of properly prepared lessons behind me, but I doubt
if any of them were ever as good as when I had the confidence to go with the mood of
the class, rather than just the syllabus.
Of course that meeting was a rare treat. "Most teachers", wrote Sir Richard
Livingstone the President of Corpus Christi College, Oxford in 1941, "don't live to
see the full fruits of their teaching. An oak tree is a long time in growing".
What will be the fruits of your administration twenty years on, in 2022? Are your
teachers going with the mood of the class? Will their ex-pupils remember their
lessons with affection and gratitude? Are your teachers truly authentic, teaching what
they believe are their own best thoughts, or do the pupils see teachers as some kind of
"delivery system" for something that their heart is not necessarily in?
4
I must now admit a real difficulty with this conference. I prepared this lecture
knowing that you had just become a union of the Society of Education Officers and
the Association of Chief Inspectors and Advisers. Then I saw your new logo. ConfEd.
And I read your strap line: The Confederation of Education Service Managers.
That stopped me in my tracks. Is that really what you have become - service
managers? Managers, by definition, have a relatively straightforward task to do. They
'manage' something defined by someone else. Who is that someone else if not you?
True, we live, thankfully, in a democracy. We have elected politicians. Since
becoming Head in 1974 I've seen 9 Secretaries of State come and go- Shirley
Williams, Mark Carlisle, Keith Joseph, Kenneth Baker, John Patten, Kenneth Clarke,
Gillian Shepherd, David Blunkett, Estelle Morris…..all good people but in most
instances politicians first and foremost with policies designed to get them re-elected
within 3 or 4 years. Without continuous dialogue even confrontational argument with
yourselves, their policies are all too often short-term. You, ladies and gentlemen, must
never see yourselves simply as education service managers.
As my colleague in the States, Dee Hock, the founder of the Visa Corporation - the
little bit of plastic that takes the waiting out of wanting - so often declares "It is
leadership this world so badly needs, and so-called scientific management it so sadly
gets".
It is as leaders - intellectual visionaries, not as generals or commanders - that I address
you. People with whom the buck stops. Men and women who can, with hands on
hearts, face quizzical teenagers and give them your word that this is the very best
education that could ever be provided.
Three years ago, after a conference of teachers in the Estonian city of Narva, I was
cornered by a large English-speaking Russian lady, complete with bearskin coat and
hat; "Who are you?" she asked. Confused for a moment as to whether this was a
question of personal identity or profound philosophy, I was quickly to discover it was
the latter.
"You in the West persistently misunderstood us dissidents. When we tore down the
Berlin Wall we did so because we wanted to be free to make decisions for ourselves.
But you thought we did this because we wished to replace Communism with
Capitalism. Now it looks as if we are replacing one tyranny with another. When the
Berlin Wall was there you in the West defined yourselves negatively; you were
against Communism. Now that Communism is no longer a threat to you, your reason
for being seems empty. Surely you are about more than just money".
As she spoke she constantly emphasised the word we. "We would be free to make
decisions for ourselves". We - the citizens - not politicians, not policy-makers, not
educationalists. But "We", the thinking people who had the confidence to throw out
the most centralist political power of the twentieth century. The words that woman
spoke shook me. She had challenged me to assume a personal responsibility for the
tribe from which I had come. "This is the code you must believe in", she seemed to be
saying, "because that is the life-style you are living from day to day. For, if not, then
surely you should by now have become a dissident yourself?"
5
This reminded me of the Paul Hamlyn Foundation's Report published four years
previously called "Learning to Succeed". A Bishop in the subsequent House of Lords
debate commented: "Learning to Succeed? Yes, but for what? I understand the need
for economic growth but, as a goal in itself, surely it stands as barren and arid?
Education stands in danger of seeing people only as tools for economic progress
unless it is accompanied by a vision of individuals as creative, responsible and
spiritual beings, and society as the matrix within which genuine fulfillment is the goal
for all.
"No time to waste, says the National Commission for Education, and I endorse that
sentiment," continued the Bishop, "But I would add to it another one. No people to
waste. I believe that at this moment our society is in danger of wasting people."
Deep down we feel offended if we are accused of wasting people. For nearly three
thousand years preachers have quoted the question posed in the Book of Proverbs
"What is Man that Thou art mindful of him?" And for as many years we have
struggled for an answer.
We come from a long tradition, be it Jewish, Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant or
Humanist, that taught us that there is a spark of the Divine within each one of us. We
have not quite forgotten the significance of the Good Samaritan. We would not
consciously deny that spark of something very special in any one we might meet, or
who is close to us.
Yet in our complex world it seems increasingly that people who are out of sight are
out of mind as well. The thought of child labour is abhorrent to us, but we flock to
buy cheap t-shirts, or expensive Nike trainers, and don't want to acknowledge the
conditions under which they were made. We live within an economic system that,
despite our idealism, we know wastes people. The children of some of these "wasted"
people are in our schools; such children don't start with an optimistic view of life.
I raise this issue in many lands because with globalisation the issues are becoming
depressingly similar. A year or so back I received an email from the Principal of one
of the world's most remote secondary school, in Nunavut to the north of the Hudson
Bay.
"The problem is simple," said Walter Roniawski. "What it means basically is that
those educators who are actively searching for better ways of understanding children's
learning, i.e. how they learn, are so tied up with bureaucrats and educational
administration that we are too tired to keep on trying to improve the lot of children.
As a principal I can see what is possible, but paper work, apathy, discipline problems,
refusal to accept responsibility for actions, seriously undermine the entire process.
After forty-four years I'm retiring this year. Teaching Inuit children has been a joy.
But I'm tired, and I sometimes wonder just what I have accomplished.
Tired and ground down by the system.
It seems to matter little whether we are at the top of that system - or at the bottom. We
all feel ground down and frustrated that systems never work with the perfection that
their advocates (often ourselves) expect.
6
It was Lenin who once observed that Frederick Winslow-Taylor should be recognised
as one of the three greatest architects of the Twentieth Century, yet probably less than
a quarter of you even recognise his name. Frederick Winslow-Taylor was the
American engineer who invented Time and Motion Studies. Full economic
productivity he argued would only come when employees worked with the
predictability and efficiency of machines. Addressing Congress in 1911 he stated;
"The primary, if not the only, goal of human labour and thought is efficiency; that
technical calculation is in all respects superior to human judgement; but in fact human
judgement can't be trusted because it is plagued by laxity, ambiguity and unnecessary
complexity".
"Let a specialist define every task in the greatest detail so that every worker will
perform identically", argued Taylor. Theoretically that might have sounded possible.
"The trouble is", mused Henry Ford, "when I hire a pair of hands I also get a human
being".
Adam Smith, a century before, had anticipated what might be the mentality of people
who worked under such conditions. In comparison to the alert intelligence of the
craftsman, such people, Smith speculated, would "generally become as stupid and
ignorant as is possible for a human being to become".
Taylor acknowledged that his approach would destroy the dignity of labour, and
effectively bore the daylights out of employees. So he advised the employers to
double, or if necessary even to treble the wages that they paid to their employees - to
buy them out of boredom as it were - but still he was able to reassure the employers
that they would make vastly increased profits. "You leave your brains at the door
when you go to work at Ford", commented a disillusioned worker at Dagenham in the
early 1930s.
The Twentieth Century has seen a bitter struggle between those educationalists who
see the ability to handle ambiguity, complexity and issues that by their very nature
can't be quantified, as being the very essence of human creativity, and those who see
such intangibles as ghastly distractions that have to be ruled out of the equation to
enable economic efficiency to dominate.
The final battle may now be about to begin, and it is most uncertain who will win. To
a large extent it will depend on you.
Fritjof Capra in his recent book "The Hidden Connections" quotes the management
theorist, Peter Senge, as suggesting two useful metaphors for understanding
institutions. One metaphor is to regard an institution as "a machine for making
money", and the other is simply to see an institution as "a living being".
"The machine model is so very powerful that it shapes the character of most
organisations. They become more like machines than living beings", says Senge,
"because their members think of them in that way". Note the wording; "think of them
in that way". "Such institutions," he continues, "are often highly successful in terms of
increasing productivity and overall efficiency, but they breed animosity amongst their
employees, quite simply because people resent being treated like cogs in a wheel.
7
Organisations managed in strictly mechanistic ways cannot survive in today's
complex, knowledge-orientated and rapidly changing world".
Nor, as you well know, can schools, nor can other sections of the public service be
managed as if people don't have minds of their own. Neither can you, as successive
Secretaries of Education have discovered, for you too need at a very deep biological
level "to think things out for yourselves" if you are to work at the peak of your
potential.
To management theorists it is not only Taylorism that should be consigned to the
shelves of history, it is the tenacity with which many people hold to the idea that
reductionism is an effective technique to solve complex social issues. And that is
simply not true. Reductionism often ends up trivialising a problem, as it is unable to
spot that the essence of the problem lies not in the bits but in the relationships. If you
like, neither in the Primary school or the Secondary school, but in the relationship
between them. It's not a crisis in schooling that we have been trying to deal with the
past 20 or 30 years - it's the relationship between community and children that has
fractured.
Writing in The Times early in June, Libby Purves graphically described how such
thinking inhibits the proper growth of children's minds. "The class of 2002 in England
and Wales are now officially the most intensively tested generation ever… altogether
the culture of testing rather than educating runs from nursery to university. What
began as a reasonable idea - 'Let's check on what's going on' - has grown into a
monster. If you are forever doing formal tests and waiting for someone to give you
marks, then you never learn the skills for assessing yourself and measuring your own
knowledge and ability against genuine, outside challenges… the constant neurotic
focus on grades stops teachers from encouraging connections and fostering creative
flexibility".
It is essential that we step outside the box, slow down, and start to think this one
through afresh. W.M. Davies, the 19th Century American poet expressed it perfectly:
"What is life if, full of care, We have no time to stand and stare?"
Vision only comes if you are able to step back from the turmoil and think clearly.
How often have you heard consultants telling you to work out your "first steps", long
before you've convinced yourself you know where it is you want to go!
We are not alone in wondering why our organisations aren't working well. Why, we
worry ourselves, do projects set up with the very best of intentions take so long;
develop ever greater complexity yet so often fail to achieve any truly significant
results? And why (as Meg Wheatley asked in 1992) does progress, when it eventually
appears, so often come from unexpected places? Why does the process we are being
paid to manage feel as if it's actually drowning us?
As a headteacher for thirteen years (which meant that I had the advantage of starting
when I was young and enthusiastic) I resigned my tenured post seventeen years ago
with the conviction, though weakly described, that I just wasn't going to be able to get
the kids to the point they needed to get to, simply by carrying on down the same old
8
route. It's the same feeling I believe that is there in the minds of many of the forty
percent of NQTs who leave the profession within three years of qualifying. It's there
in too many tired headteachers, and I guess in some Ministers of Education who must
wonder just what all their hyperactivity has really achieved.
If I have anything to add to your understanding of all this it's because for the past
seven or eight years I have been president of The 21st Century Learning Initiative.
This has enabled me to become immersed in the ever growing literature on how
humans learn and how systems operate, how economic imperatives subtly change
cultures and how new thinking in philosophy could lead to a deeper respect for all
forms of life. With this same rather 'fuzzy' focus that I have of the British scene, I can
also synthesize issues emerging in other lands.
In a world awash with information I would justify a fuzzy focus in terms comparable
to how you can come to appreciate an impressionist painting, say George Seurat's
"Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grand Jaffe". Look very closely at the
painting and you see a chaotic mass of disconnected dots of contrasting colours, but
move away a little - let your eyes water a bit - and suddenly a beautiful picture
emerges.
To understand what is happening to us - why we may be getting the wrong results
from policies inspired by the very best of motives - we have got to be able to
continuously shift focus for, unless we can comprehend the whole picture, our best
endeavours will always be tinkering with the separate bits
Remember the Indian proverb about the three blind men who were asked to describe
an elephant? One man went up and, feeling it's trunk, quickly assumed it was an
enormous snake; another ran his fingers around one of its legs and thought it was a
tree, while the third felt a floppy ear and announced, with great certitude, that it was a
giant leaf. Not one of them recognised the elephant.
There are four aspects of what is going on around us that I would like to comment on.
The first is to be clear about what we mean by 'education'. The second is to get a
better feel for what we now know about how humans learn. Once we're clear about
these we need to explore the implications of spontaneous self-organisation as a way of
identifying why organisational change is so difficult. Finally, we need to come back
to ponder, in terms of the 21st Century, the proverbial question, "What is Man that
Thou art mindful of him?" Once we've done that then we may well see the whole
elephant, the big story that we need to tell.
***
So, let's take the first issue. What do you and I mean by 'education'?
What did the old Manpower Services Commission mean in the mid-1980s when its
strap line was "From teaching to learning"? Why did Chris Woodhead get so upset
when Michael Barber attempted to revitalise that idea a couple or three years ago?
For long years I took the Latin word "educare" not only as the root of the word
education, but also as defining its fullest meaning. "Educare" meant "to lead out", in
9
the sense of a Roman general leading his troops from the security of the camp onto
the open field of battle. Knowing that his soldiers had been well trained, he knew that
they could both stand on their own feet and work as a team.
"Stand on their own feet", was the point I always stressed. Sometimes, for effect, I
would quote the German philosopher, Nietzsche, "To remain a pupil is to serve your
teacher badly".
Good teaching is about giving young people the confidence not to wait to be taught, to
be able to do things without a teacher.
Recently I have wanted a more contemporary way of getting people to think about
learning that put an even greater emphasis on the learner. I found the model in the
Catholic doctrine of Subsidiarity. It's gloriously simple.
"It is wrong for a superior body to keep to itself the right of making decisions for
which an inferior is perfectly capable of doing for itself".
You can't get a better definition of "bottom up" than that.
It's rather like the way in which parents look forward to the day our children leave the
family nest so well prepared for anything that life can throw at them that they just
don't need us any more. But that's not easy. We don't like letting go, but if we're not
careful the family relationship can easily turn sour. So can the pupil-teacher
relationship.
But get that relationship right and you're back with Socrates, and a long way from a
standardised national curriculum, or a uniform way of organising institutions, or a
funding mechanism that favours secondary education over the primary sector.
The doctrine of Subsidiarity was first promulgated in the 1930s by the Catholic
Church in an attempt to counter the de-humanising impact of Communism with its
belief in the absolute supremacy of the state over the individual. Interesting, isn't it?
Seventy or more years ago the Church saw the spiritual damage being done to
individuals by excessive central control. In Geoff Mulgan's Paper to the Open
University last year, he asserted "The moral claim for self-organisation". I would add
a further claim: that of a biological imperative in each of us "to work things out for
ourselves."
"That's why we tore down the Berlin Wall", I could almost hear my Estonian friend
exclaim, "because we wanted to do our own thing".
"Doing your own thing" is a critical component of successful learning. Eric Hoffer
caught this graphically when he said "In times of change learners inherit the earth,
while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped for a world that no longer
exists".
We may accept that wonderfully vivid distinction, but we English fall too easily into
military metaphors. I believe that David Milliband, the new Schools Standards
Minister (that sounds like real Taylorism!) did this in early June when he sought
10
credibility with an educational audience by quoting Jonathan Sachs, the Chief Rabbi,
as saying, "To defend a country you need an army; to educate a civilisation you need
schools and you need teachers. Schools are the armies of civilisation".
Milliband was widely applauded. In a sense quite rightly. But think more carefully
about our changing world. America has the largest military and intelligence forces in
the world, yet it was in danger of being brought to its knees by two dozen or so clever
and totally remorseless terrorists on September 11th last year. A conventional army
can't defeat such tactics. Only two things can. One is to remove the cause of the
conflict - and that is a political issue about competing value systems only resolved
within a democratic process by a thoughtful populous that knows "it can't have it's
cake and eat it". The other is the recognition by all of us "that the price of civilisation
is eternal vigilance". No army can save us from a corruption within our own society.
Only "we", in the sense that the Russian Estonian had used the word, can do this.
We all have to be "out of the box" thinkers. Which is what we are by nature. We need
to be alert and involved. That is why we have inherited such strong powers of
peripheral perception. It's why we daydream so well. Intuitively we notice things that
shouldn't be; we take notice more of a single discordant note than we do a thousand
perfect pitches. Why? Because that is how our ancestors survived for millions of years
- by going on the cave when something didn't seem quite right. Their survival
depended on the vigilance of everyone.
That is why I think Vaclav Havel gave the description of education "as the ability to
perceive the hidden connections between phenomena". That is how he moved from
the dissident's prison cell to the President's mansion. It's how Nelson Mandela did it
too, by seeing things as they really are, and speaking the truth.
This is the first part of our story. Our society's Achilles heel is an inadequate
appreciation of the dynamic of education, and the false assumption that learning and
schooling are somehow synonymous.
Secondly, where have all the ideas about human learning come from? The new
biomedical technologies of PET and CAT scans, together with functional MRI and
the proliferation of useful quantifiable data from the cognitive, evolutionary and
genetic sciences, are laying the foundation for some fundamentally new thinking
about human learning, such as neural Darwinism, or the neurological base for
Constructivism or a Connectionist Theory.
Some of what is being discovered helps to better explain what earlier was seen as folk
wisdom. Confucius could have had no appreciation of how the brain actually "did it",
nevertheless he, like countless others, knew intuitively that simply telling somebody
something out of context, was not as good as experiential learning. It wasn't just
Socrates who knew that knowledge was constructed slowly by each individual using
their own preferred modes of thought; 2500 years later Howard Gardner has called
these "naïve theories of everything".
St. Augustine, that brilliant intellectual of the Sixth Century North African Church the man who once in his youth prayed "Lord make me good, but not yet!" - remarked
that he learnt most "not from those who taught me, but those who talked with me".
11
Less than ten years ago the Kellogg Foundation, in a massive study in Michigan,
showed that the greatest predictor of success at the age of eighteen was the quantity
and quality of dialogue in the child's home before the fifth birthday. Ignatius Loyola
in putting into words in the Sixteenth Century, "Give me a child until he is seven, and
he is mine for life", knew nothing of the growth of innate predispositions which have
so interested cognitive scientists in recent years. Loyola simply intuited what
craftsmen the world over have known about their apprentices, namely that the brain is
shaped through its specific activity, be that singing, playing an instrument, driving a
London taxi, or learning to steer a Polynesian canoe through the knowledge of the
stars in a Pacific night sky. The brain is shaped by the way it is used.
Such are the vagaries of history that the concept of natural learning (now described in
technical terms as cognitive apprenticeship) is attributed to Rousseau in the mid-18th
Century, whereas every part of his theory of learning had been anticipated more than
a century earlier by John Amos Comenius in his book "The Great Didactic".
Comenius said, "Following in the footsteps of nature the process of education will
become easy if (a) it begins early, before the mind is corrupted, (b) if it proceeds from
the general to the particular and (c) if the learner be forced to nothing which the
natural bent does not incline it, in accordance with its age and with the right method".
Pestalozzi, Froebel, Montessori and John Dewey developed such intuitions into the
beginning of a theory, and Lady Plowden and a whole generation of quite excellent
primary school teachers in England in the 1960s, pioneered an emerging pedagogy of
constructivism.
"All that stuff is only the manifestation of a political creed", I was told by an ardent
Conservative in the middle 1980s, "I know all about Piaget, and I think it's nonsense,
what we need is an objective, scientific theory of learning; then we'll have something
of substance to go on."
That was when I realised that educational theorists with a particular responsibility for
implementation strategies - people like ourselves who, in the main, come from the
humanities or the physical sciences - had to start getting our minds around something
broader than simply philosophy and psychology, and get into the whole nature of the
biological understanding of the brain.
A scientific appreciation of why we humans are as we are - and what we might do
about it - really dates from 1859 when Charles Darwin published "The Origin of
Species". The principles of natural selection shook the Victoria world rigid. Sensitive
to how distressing many (including his own wife) would find such a theory, Darwin
made only the briefest reference in "The Origins" to human evolution; "Psychology
would be based on a new foundation, that of the necessary requirement of each mental
power and capacity by graduation (evolution). Light would then be thrown on the
origin of man and his history".
Two things have struck me most forcibly in my recent studies. The first is incredibly
simple, but of enormous significance.
While Darwin never minimised the ruthlessness with which evolution works, he never
actually said that evolution was driven simply by the survival of the fittest. He said
12
something far more profound; "It is not necessarily the strongest of the species that
survives, nor the most intelligent. It is the one which is most adaptable to change".
The concept of 'fitness', the ability to find a niche and exploit it in collaboration with
others, is fundamental to current thinking about evolution.
To Thomas Huxley, Darwin's self-appointed bulldog, "fitness" did not provide the
sound bite that Victorian society was looking for. In popularising "survival of the
fittest" Huxley gave the Victoria entrepreneur, the men already well steeped in
Samuel Smyles' "Self Help" - the natural justification for unfettered competition.
Later of course it gave to the eugenicists what they saw was the ultimate justification
for a range of hideous policies that culminated in the gas chambers of Auschwitz and
Dachau. It is Adaptability that drives evolution, not the law of the jungle or the
corporate boardroom.
But something else happened in the years that followed 1859, which is one of the
main reasons that our profession is now in turmoil. It is best explained, to my mind,
by Henry Plotkin, Professor of Psychobiology at the University College London in his
book "Evolution in Mind". Plotkin explains how it was only in the early 1850s that
psychology was established as a recognised academic discipline. As a subject it was a
hybrid of philosophy and physiology. The former a subject of exemplary gravitas, but
totally lacking in quantifiable research data, while the latter was a white coat
laboratory study of the functioning of specific parts of the body, and therefore highly
quantifiable.
To its early disciples this was the perfect marriage of ideas that ought to produce
brilliant offspring. There was, however, a difficulty. What, out of such a marriage,
could be its methodology? Noting the ever expanding range of issues that could
become involved, psychology rapidly adopted a "now and forever causation" as its
guiding principle - the human brain was, and always had been, the same. It was
unchangeable, a given.
And then, a year or so afterwards along came Darwin, and a theory that all living
things were constantly evolving. Darwin challenged psychology to build its
methodology on a new foundation, namely that of evolution in the brain. Psychology,
in its early years, simply could not cope with such a theory, and rather like the Church
found it convenient simply to ignore the possible implications of evolution in mind;
this was just too much to take on. As the Church found relief in the redefinition of
Cartesian Duality, so early psychology turned to behaviourism as a quantifiable and
apparently non-contestable methodology.
Medical science, on the other hand, quickly saw in the principle of natural selection a
unifying theory of the human body and an explanation of the possible nature of
inheritance. This gave medecine a theoretical framework that could later embrace new
findings ranging from genetics in the 1870s through to the significance of DNA when
identified by Crick and Watson in Cambridge in the 1950s. Medical science, in 2002,
is light years away from the largely folk medicine of the 1870s.
But not so, unfortunately, education, which tried to ignore evolution until the 1980s.
Story-tellers may mock us when they suggest that a surgeon from 1870 would be
completely lost in a modern operating theatre, but that a teacher from 1870 would
13
quickly look around the room, note the students, pick up a piece of chalk and, turning
to scribble on the blackboard, start to dictate a note. If such a teacher were to falter for
a moment, then no doubt a pupil could point them in the right direction to the relevant
section of the national curriculum. This sounds cruel, but you know there is an
element of real truth in it. You know too that there is a world of a difference between
the training of a doctor and that of a teacher. Strange, isn't it, because of all the
organisms in the body it is the brain that is by far and away the most complicated.
Surely we are missing something vital?
Psychology focused solely on those behaviours that could be observed and measured,
rather than those that might be the result of internal biological processes. If something
could not be seen, tested and confirmed in a controllable, laboratory environment
then, as far as psychology was concerned, it simply did not exist. Pavlov's salivating
dogs became a starting point for courses in human behaviour; as a note I made in a
university lecture in the mid-1960s reads, "Animals have instincts; humans have
learned behaviours".
The limitation of behaviourism is seen best, at least to me, in the mid 20th Century
attempts not only to quantify intelligence, but to show that subsequent human
behaviour can be predicted from a solitary measurement made at the age of eleven the 11+ Examination - not quite, even now, an historical anomaly.
It's there also in the over-simplistic assumptions that if we want to improve economic
productivity through the further development of our national reservoir of intellect,
then we have to invest in more schooling. Research by Bowler, Gintis and Osborne
entitled "The Determinants of Earnings: a Behaviourist approach" published in
December last year, showed that over 50% of the variance in earning capacity after
leaving school could not be attributed to cognitive factors. In comparison to years of
schooling socio-economic background and standardised non-cognitive IQ factors such
as industriousness, delayed gratification, punctuality, perseverance, adaptability,
membership of clubs, churches and other forms of social engagement were
significantly more important in determining earning potential.
It takes a long time to shift a myth, however strong the evidence. While it is
undoubtedly true that some people are born with potentially better brains than others,
the key factor is how the individual uses his or her brain starting from the very earliest
moments of life. Some people have popularised this as "use it or lose it". That is
useful as far as it goes. But we need to be clearer about what "using it" actually
means.
Let me give you a simple analogy. Many of you will remember, not so many years
ago, that when you bought a new car you could never go more than 30 miles an hour
for the first 500 miles. To your chagrin you had to display a warning "Running in please pass!" Then for the next 500 miles you had to keep to 40 miles per hour, and so
on. When eventually the engine was run in you could drive as fast as you liked, but
woe betide the well-being of your engine if you tried to go too fast too soon. Those
first 2000 miles of driving were, literally, a matter of testing and rounding off the
edges.
14
The brain is just like that too. Very few of you will remember anything from your first
three years of life (other than highly traumatic events). For long years academics and
educators took this to mean that such learning was not particularly important. That
was a terrible mistake; these are the years in which the brain is running itself in, and
it's on the quality of this experience that future learning depends.
Very recently neuro-biologists at San Diego have started to use non-evasive,
functional MRI to look at the way a child's brain develops below 18 months of age.
Their initial findings are intriguing. Those youngsters who come from homes which,
in terms of mental stimulation, could be thought of as largely sterile (too much
unsupervised TV, few toys, virtually no reading) were found to have very linear
dendritic structures with relatively few inter-connections. However, those children
coming from homes where there was a variety of stimulation and talk had early
dendritic structures that were full of bifurcation and inter-connections. Einstein's brain
was not found to have been extraordinarily heavy; what it did have was an
exceptionally large number of glial cells that facilitated multiple bifurcations of the
dendrites.
It's the making of connections that is so important, and the earlier children start doing
this the better brains they will build for themselves.
We may think we know all about this. Intuitively, perhaps more from your experience
as a parent on a one-on-one basis with your child than is possible for a teacher in a
classroom, you understand the work of cognitive scientists in what is now called
cognitive apprenticeship. It's very simple.
For most of human history life was tough and unpredictable. You were probably
already a semi-cripple from some injury before the age of 25. You were old by 30,
and geriatric by 35. Adults were so busy keeping the wolf from the door they had to
teach their children while they were "working on the job". They had no energy to
waste; this had to be done effectively, or the child would not grow into the adult who
could progressively take onto its young and growing shoulders what the older
generation could no longer do for themselves. When the child was young it therefore
needed maximum adult support. As it learnt some basic skills so it needed to practice
them - "testing" came in the form of reality; if you hadn't learnt that skill you probably
did not survive. As the child grew, and the adults became more tired, so adult support
became like temporary scaffolding - only needed until the cement in the metaphorical
wall the child was building had set.
This is the model of learning encased in our genes.
"Learning is not something that requires time-out from productive activity", noted
Shoshana Zuboff in her book on working practices in the computer age, "Learning is
at the very heart of the productive process". It has been, for millions of years.
But the central myth remains. Learning is about schooling; formal, measurable
instruction is what really counts. The education of young children does not require as
much funding as the education of older children. Teachers (if measured in terms
recognisable to an accountant) are about forty times more important in the equation
15
than are learning resources to which children should have open access - namely
books, computers and the like.
Two Canadian cognitive scientists, Bereiter and Scardamalia, in their fascinating book
on Expertise show how flexible and creative thinking necessitates rich experiences
both inside, and outside, the school.
"Given the inherent limitations of schooling it seems essential for a child to have an
intellectual life outside school. It gives the child a chance to develop personal
knowledge-building goals, and schemas for incorporating new information in ways
that advance towards those goals. Thus equipped, the child is in a position to use
schooling as a source of learning opportunities without being drawn into short-cut
strategies that work well for handling school tasks, but that lead nowhere in the lifelong development of expertise."
Let me give you a personal story to illustrate this. For several summer holidays, when
our three sons were young, we used to swap our house near Cambridge with friends in
Virginia. To our young sons America was a dreamland of long, hot summer days,
cheap ice creams, actually tolerable and sometimes even interesting historical sites
and visitor's centres. And they even got used to the marvellous story telling of that
superb raconteur out of Lake Woebegone, Minnesota, Garrison Keillor.
Late one evening, months later, driving down the motorway from Yorkshire with the
children, we thought asleep in the back of the car, my wife put on a Garrison Keeler
tape. It was the one where he describes his fictitious one-room schoolhouse out on the
prairies. "At one end of the room there was a portrait of George Washington and at
the other end one of Abraham Lincoln, beaming down at us like two long lost
friends", Keillor drawled.
"That's silly", piped up seven-year-old Tom from the back seat, "They weren't alive at
the same time, so they couldn't have been friends".
I was startled, I think I even swerved a little. "How do you know that?" I asked,
mystified.
"Well," said Tom, "when we went to Washington's home, the guide said Washington
died ten days before the beginning of the 19th Century - and when we went to
Gettysburg the man playing the part of Lincoln can't have been 70 years old. So they
couldn't have known each other".
I was intrigued. His logic and the connections he had built, challenged my
understanding of how learning takes place spontaneously.
A few years later, at a dinner party in Seattle, I recounted that story. "How I wish
American elementary schools taught history as well as that", mused our host, a
professor of education.
"But I didn't learn it in school", said Tom, "Our history lessons are boring. I just love
being in America!"
16
"So what's your favourite subject?" asked our friend.
Tom grinned. "Maths, because our teacher always gets us to think about connections
and patterns. That's really interesting because then I can see how things work out and
come together".
Patterns and relationships, emotions, the need always to make sense; intrinsic interest,
a mix of formal and informal learning, historical dates, mathematical formulas, hot
summer days, and captivating story-tellers. These elements in Tom's learning defy
any logical structure. The process of learning is wonderfully spectacular and
extraordinarily messy. It does not easily fit within a closely defined classroom-based
curriculum, particularly for adolescence. Children's natural enthusiasms are too often
dulled by the school's need for order, and we completely forget their natural capacity
for self-organisation.
The very best High School I ever visited told me, in the strongest possible terms, that
the reason they were successful dated from the moment that they stopped thinking of
themselves as a school standing on its own and recognised they were an integral part
of the local community. The principal, John Sekala, told me: "Children here (this was
Princeton, New Jersey), as with youngsters anywhere in the Western world, only
spend twenty percent of their waking hours between five and eighteen in a classroom.
However you do the sums, three-quarters of their waking hours are not even spent in
school. So if we wanted to educate youngsters better we, the school, had to remind the
community that their responsibility for children was every bit as great as ours, if not
greater.
"It wasn't easy", Sekala continued, "but we set aside two years to share with the
leaders of the community a search for a community-wide mission statement for
learning that would represent the very best expectations of everybody. We identified
some sixty groups - including the leaders of voluntary organisations, religious groups,
employers, teachers, the research community, artisans, and the like - and for months
and months these groups struggled. It was amazing, when you take the lid off, what
confusion there is about how we learn!"
Eventually a single paragraph of three sentences emerged.
"This township believes in functional literacy, that is the ability to be comfortable
with all the change of a rapidly evolving, highly technological society. Comfort
depends on mastering the skills of learning and knowing that it is the individual's
responsibility to develop this for a further 70 years or more after leaving school. It
depends on four key skills: the ability to think, to communicate, to collaborate, and to
make decisions.
"To create such a statement, understood and owned by the whole community of some
60,000 people, was a massive investment of time," admitted Sekala, "but it worked
like a dream. Now each teacher uses their subject-specific material to foster children's
ability to think, communicate, collaborate and make decisions. The kids themselves
know that it is our aim to make them comfortably independent of ourselves as early as
possible - that's why we have invested in a computer for every child, and that is why
17
for most of our older students in Grades 11 and 12 they spend on average at least two
days a week on projects outside the school.
"The most important thing", Sekala claimed proudly, "is that the parents and the
leaders of the community accept this common vision. With a clear definition of your
goals, and good support for teacher development, you can largely trust teachers to
self-organise".
Sekala grinned; his staff looked, and indeed were, extremely well motivated. They
smiled a lot. So did the 1,400 healthy adolescents. "We know where we're going, and
we know that we are responsible", concluded Sekala.
This gloriously successful school became, however, seriously and progressively
undermined years later when the entire State of New Jersey became infatuated with
setting standard tests, with a formalised statewide set of curricular goals, and unified
performance targets for teachers right across the State. The teachers in Princeton High
School effectively lost the right to self-organise, and no amount of control directives however benign - has put the sparkle back into the teachers, or into the eyes of the
pupils.
"As a high octane fuel", someone joked, "you can't beat intrinsic motivation. Extrinsic
motivation, however well advocated, is like low grade diesel fuel".
Which takes me to the third issue. We have known for many years that the application
of reductionist techniques, so effective in the physical sciences and in engineering,
have only limited application when applied to human activity systems. Within most
teachers there is the ability to construct, within a class of youngsters, an emerging
learning experience that will still be there in 18-20 years time. That is because we,
and the students, are constructing the experience between ourselves. Good teachers
know their subjects, and they know how pupils learn.
Ten or more years ago writers like Mitchell Waldrup and Meg Wheatley described in
compelling detail the nature of complexity theory. Ash Hartwell, a professor at the
University of Massachusetts, wrote in 1993, "The process of individual learning is the
most dynamic process, the most 'emergent' reality, in the universe". John Cleveland,
in a much quoted essay of 1994 entitled "Learning at the Edge of Chaos", noted:
"Most school reform has failed in its attempt to mandate new structures without
changing the important rules in the system, especially theories about how people
learn. New learning theory and practice constitute fundamentally new ways of
governing the interaction between players in the educational system. As these rules
spread throughout the system we should expect to see the old structures break up and
new ones form. This means we should look forward to an extensive period of
turbulence in education.
"In fact," Cleveland went on, "our practical experience has been that educators are
intuitively attracted to 'the edge of chaos' in learning theory and practice, but shrink
back from it when they realise that letting it spread will create high levels of
disequilibria and likely result in massive structural changes throughout the system".
18
And that is exactly what has been happening to us now for most of our professional
lives. How many times have you, thrilled by the potential of a really new way of
capitalising on a fundamentally new approach to doing something, suddenly had your
wings ruthlessly clipped?
I well remember, twenty or so years ago, showing the new Secretary of Education,
Keith Joseph, the first classroom in England which had been equipped with a
computer for every child. I kept my explanation simple. "What I would like to do," I
said, "is to get to the stage where every child is so proficient in word processing, and
has such open access to the technology, that every note that they ever take, every
essay that they ever write is done on a computer. That would enable drafting and
redrafting to be done every time a piece of written work is undertaken". Keith Joseph
was undoubtedly interested. I carried on the description, "The average 12 year old can
type three times faster than they can write by hand. Think what would happen if we
could develop a curriculum that was not constrained by the slowness of pencil and
paper technology!"
Joseph became even more interested. "What will it take to do that?" he asked.
"In the first instance, some cost-of-change funds. This will be as much to do with
pedagogic change, as it will be dependent on purchasing the computers. As much
money would be needed on teacher training as on the equipment. Then we would
need to develop a new assessment system. However, as time went on, it would
compel us to think in terms of reallocating our conventional resources. Specifically it
would mean increasing staffing ratios in primary schools, where the new technologies
would need to be learned and effectively practiced. Then we would have to move
money away from whole class teaching in the upper years of secondary education and
invest it in the younger classes."
The conversation went on a long time. Joseph asked me to meet him in London three
weeks later.
"I fear it has been difficult to get the resources to do what you suggest", he explained,
"But in collaboration with the Manpower Services Commission I'm going to launch a
scheme which has some similarities with what you are proposing". He did just that. It
was TVEI. An authority officer came to see me with a sheaf of papers a week or so
later. "If you want any of this money you'd better read all this". I did so. I was
horrified, "This isn't what I was arguing for. This is treating technology as a
vocational skill, not as a way of transforming learning".
"That's as may be", the officer replied, "But this is the way the Authority is going to
handle things. You might have had the idea but it's the Authority that has
responsibility for implementation. You can take it or leave it. Half a glass is probably
better than an empty glass". Then he got at me personally. "We all have to have our
wings clipped from time to time, it's the way systems work".
Or die, I thought, as he left my study. We in fact got a load of money and enough
strings to stop us rocking the system. I felt very alone in all this. In despair I resigned
my Headship two years later.
19
Clipped wings. There is a wonderful metaphor in the recent Demos publication
developed last year by Plusek at a conference entitled "Why won't the National Health
Service do as it's told?" The author was searching to demonstrate why human-activity
systems can't be managed in a linear, mechanical fashion. The difference could be
compared, he said, to throwing a stone, and throwing a live bird. "The trajectory of a
stone can be calculated quite precisely using the laws of mechanics, and it is possible
to ensure that the stone reaches the exact destination. However, it's not possible to
predict the outcome of throwing a live bird in the same way, even though the same
laws of physics ultimately govern the birds motion through the air." Quite simply,
once released from your grasp, the bird may well decide that there is a better place to
go than the one you had intended. One flick of its wings, and it's away, doing its own
thing.
There is a way to avoid this, Plusek suggests, and that is to tie the bird's wings, weight
them with a rock and then throw it. This will make its trajectory (nearly) as
predictable as that of a stone, but in the process the capability of the bird is
completely lost, possibly ensuring that the bird would be crushed to death on its
landing, having even been denied the ability to organise this for itself.
I don't take the credit for what Plusek says that this "is more or less what policymakers try to do when using a scientific management approach, based on a
mechanical model, and try to control the behaviour of a complex adaptive system. But
I do concur entirely with his sentiment. I've experienced the waste of so much
creativity by the supercilious assumptions that human imagination and genius can be
managed in an inanimate way.
By our immature infatuation for quantification available through an excessive
dependence on reductionism, we think we are being "scientific". Think again. We are
probably just being stupid.
So to my fourth and final point, the one, which I believe, makes our story live. Just
what is Man that we are mindful of him?
Last summer I was invited by one of the Welsh authorities to present the prizes at
what amounted to a whole Authority's Speech day. As it happened - much to my
surprise - it was a magical experience. Like most of you, I expect, I have a pretty
jaundiced view of County Halls - places I'm happier to leave than to enter!
But that evening was different. As I parked my car I was aware of apparently
hundreds of happy, smiling young people ascending the slight hill to County Hall,
accompanied by many equally happy parents. It was almost Beowulf's "a fair field full
of folk". There were many prizes to give out, to youngsters, to young adults and to
that glorious band of intrepid Third Agers. The most important prize, the last of the
evening, was to a young woman in sea cadet uniform, pushed forward in a
wheelchair.
She could not lift her head and I had to kneel down to talk to her. Her neck, her hands
and arms were deformed, but her face was one of the most beautiful I've ever seen.
Her smile was so full of joy that it transformed the hall, for hers was a soul that was in
no way constrained by physical disability.
20
She was a magnificent demonstration of what we humans can be, and I'm sure she
was living proof of the love and affection of many people over very many years who
saw, in her misshapen body, a spark of the divine that called forth out of them more
than they thought they could ever have given.
Kenan Malik, a cognitive scientist from the University of Sussex, in his book "Man,
Beast and Zombie", is fearful that we are losing this profound sense of our humanity.
He warns that evolutionary psychology "views man as a sophisticated animal,
governed as any animal is by its evolutionary past"; while cognitive science "treats
the human mind as a machine or as a 'zombie' an entity that has no consciousness".
Man as beast, or man as zombie?
"To many", says Malik, "the triumph of Darwinism and of artificial intelligence seems
to have solved the age-old problem of how to understand human beings in a
materialistic universe. But this is an illusion, I suggest, fostered by the abandonment
of any attachment to a humanitarian vision. The triumph of mechanistic explanations
of human nature is as much a consequence of our culture's loss of nerve, as it is of
scientific advance".
Early in 1989 the Cambridge neurobiologist, Sir John Eccles, wrote (and he could
have been thinking of that girl in Wales), "I maintain that the human mystery is
incredibly demeaned by scientific reductionism, this belief must be classed as a
superstition…. We are spiritual beings with souls in a spiritual world, as well as
material beings with bodies and brains existing in a material world".
In the few minutes that remain to me, let me approach the ultimate question - what are
we educating people for - from the side.
Twenty or so years ago I had the germ of a thesis in my mind which I wanted to
explore, but never did. It went something like this, "When the proportion of a
population who believe that their reward will be in the hereafter falls below a certain
level, the dominant mene in that society suddenly swings from moderation in all
things to a rampant desire for instant satisfaction in the here and now".
I don't claim any great perspicacity in such a thought, but I do wish I had followed the
idea up. Whatever that proportion is, I think we have now fallen below it. As a society
we are all out for what we can get in the here and now; gone is the medieval caution
of the seven deadly sins all of which are now the drivers of the new economy. Gone is
the thought that we are investing in our children's and our children's children. Almost
gone, but thankfully just starting to re-emerge, is care for our planet. Maybe it was
September 11th that jolted us, maybe it's the weird weather patterns we are
experiencing. Just some people are getting back to dreaming big daydreams.
E. O. Wilson, the eminent biologist, is one. In "The Future of Life", published three
months ago, he writes "The mood of Western civilisation is Abrahamic; may we take
this land that God has provided and let it drip milk and honey into our mouths for
ever.
Look at what has happened. "Now more than six billion people fill the world. The
great majority are very poor; nearly one billion exist on the edge of starvation… half
of the great tropical forests have been cleared. Species of plants and animals are
21
disappearing a hundred or more times faster than before the coming of humanity. An
Armageddon is approaching, but it's not the cosmic war and fiery collapse foretold in
sacred scripture. It is the wreckage of the planet by an exuberantly plentiful and
ingenious humanity… a global land ethic is urgently needed.
"Surely our stewardship is the only hope? We will be wise to listen carefully to the
heart, then act with rational intention and all the tools we can gather and bring to
bear."
Some years ago the Russian writer V.V.Rozanov wrote, "All religions will pass, but
this will remain; simply sitting in a chair and looking in the distance".
Richard Holloway, former Bishop of Edinburgh, challenges us to reverse that claim;
"Religion will remain as long as we sit in that chair looking into the distance".
Our generation can see further into the distance than any of our ancestors. The
children in our schools will no doubt see still further, always providing that we
encourage their inquisitiveness.
Holloway finishes his book "Doubts and Loves" by saying, "To us the sun appears to
be the largest and brightest of the stars, but it is actually the smallest and faintest. The
sun is a dwarf star, lying in a region of our galaxy, The Milky Way. Our galaxy
contains about a hundred billion stars, ranging in mass from a tiny proportion of the
mass of the sun to a hundred times that size. Our planet Earth is a puny object in a
violent, unbelievably vast and expanding universe, yet it has remained hospitable to
life for at least three and a half billion years. Our very existence is a consequence of
the stability of the sun, which has been burning long enough to allow life to evolve
and flourish on our planet. It is that violent and blazing star, whose light and heat
come to us from ninety-three million miles away, that makes it possible for us to sit
comfortably in our homes thinking about it at all".
And then he concludes, very simply but incredibly powerfully, "…that act of thought
is almost as great a miracle as the universe. We are a sub-microscopic dot in a tiny
corner of a small galaxy in a universe containing million of galaxies, but in us the
universe has become conscious, has started thinking about itself. The sun is not
thinking about itself as it burns; the universe is not thinking about, is not conscious of
itself as it explodes through space - but we are. Something is going on in our selves
that is as wonderful and extraordinary as the universe itself".
Countless thousands of previous generations would, I'm sure, have given their right
arm to be where we are now.
But what an awesome responsibility! Not only can we comprehend all this, our
scientists are close to having the capability (hopefully not intentionally) of destroying
it all. That shakes us rigid because whether we foul all this up or take humanity
further into a more promising future depends on some of the grottiest little thirteenyear-olds currently hiding in the corners of your schools. They are the future.
If you are the visionary leader I imagine you wish to be, a person who enables your
community to articulate its future, then I have no doubt that your community will
ensure that you have a substantial future. Such communities will know that one size
22
never did fit all, and will recognise that it is in their ability to self-organise that the
creativity of the children will be released.
If you simply see yourselves as managers then your jobs are only as secure as the next
reorganisation. And the children - the nation's future - will be leaderless.
It is you who have the Big Story to share.
John Abbott
President
The 21st Century Learning Initiative (UK)
Business Centre West
Avenue One
Letchworth
Herts, SG6 2HB
Tel: 01462 481107
Email: jabbott@rmplc.co.uk
“John/Papers/SpeechConfEd12 July2002.doc”