A Specimen lecture (first given in February
2011, in England and Canada) that draws
together most of the issues contained in the
animated documentary series ‘Born to Learn’.
‘It’s your world to shape, not
just to take’
John Abbott
President, The 21st Century Learning Initiative
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Initiative - www.21learn.org
“The task is not so much to see what
no one has yet seen, but to think
what nobody yet has thought about
that which everybody sees.”
Schopenhauer, 1788-1860
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What do you think you see?
Candlestick or Faces?
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Changing Perceptions
Going from one way of seeing things to
another is the starting point for significant,
irrevocable change in the way we humans
understand how things work.
Theory of ‘Paradigm Shift’ : Thomas Kuhn
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962)
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How do you see our world?
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The Troubled World of 2011
• There are now two and a half times as many people on the Earth’s surface
as when I was born just before the outbreak of World War Two.
• At the most recent count, about 7,000 people (One hundred millionth of the
world’s population) owns more than over 3 billion people, (just under half the
population).
• 80% of humanity lives on less than $10 a day.
• The richest 20% of the world’s population receives 75% of the world’s
income while the poorest 40% receive only 5% or the world’s income.
• Of the world’s largest 150 economic entities, 95 are corporations (63.3%).
Wal-Mart, with revenue of $287.99 billion, is the largest corporation on
the planet, and ranks number 22 on the list. The United States is the
world’s largest economy with a total economic output in 2004 of
$11,667,515,000,000.
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“If civilisation is to survive it
must live on the interest, not
the capital, of nature.
Ecological markers suggest
that in the early 1960’s, humans were
using 70% of nature’s yearly output; by
the early 1980’s we’d reached 100%; and
in 1999 we were at 125%”
Ronald Wright
A Short History of Progress (2004)
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We each see the world from our own perspective.
And did those feet in ancient time.
Walk upon England’s mountains green:
And was the holy Lamb of God,
On England’s pleasant pastures seen!
Here is mine:
my parents grew up in middle
England in the 20s and 30s
I was born as Britain went
to war with Germany and
bombs fell near my home
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My recent ancestors
History experienced across the
Generations
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My adolescence, and the
development of a Broad Mind
“The essential skill is to develop the ability to learn.
However you can’t learn how to learn without
learning something. It is much easier to measure
what you have learnt than it is to measure how you
learnt it... Examination results alone don’t prove that
you can think straight.”
Derek Pitt, Teacher in the 1950s of A Level History and English, a
keen musician and student of Medieval Art – and cricket coach
“The roots of civilisation are twelve
inches deep; discuss”
(Oxbridge Scholarship question)
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The problem for pupils if teachers can’t make
their subject live
A critical incident: failing Latin O Level three times I came
close to jeopardising my chances of going to University, but
years before I was taught to wood carve by an old sailor.
Being selected to represent England at an International
exhibition of Woodcarvers six weeks before sitting the
exam for the fourth time gave me so much confidence in
myself that I decided not to go to any more Latin lessons
and simply taught myself by a massive act of
memorisation. In six weeks I gained 89% in the exam
having previously never got more than 21%... But a month
or so later, I couldn’t remember much of the Latin but
learnt that I could do more for myself than I could by
relying on the system.
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University, and the enthusiasm to
create a better world
Rhum
expedition
1959
Gometra
expedition
1962
University Maiden Eight 1961
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Manchester Grammar School, 1965
“The ideas that talents are lent for the service of
others and not given, and that knowledge brings
humility and a sense of involvement in mankind, are
just as necessary correctives to the arrogance of a
meritocrat in a highly technical world as they were
in Hugh Oldham’s day (1514), and without them the
School’s record of academic success would be
indeed alarming.”
“Dare to be wise”
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P.G Mason
High Master
From leader of expeditions to being
a Headmaster
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So began my search to understand
human learning
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The human race is the
planet’s pre-eminent learning
species – it is our brains that
give us our superiority, not
our muscles.
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The 21st Century Learning Initiative
Washington DC
1995 onwards
“The Initiative will facilitate the emergence of
new approaches to learning that draw upon a
range of insights into the human brain, the
functioning of human societies, and learning as
a community-wide activity.”
The 21st Century Learning Initiative www.21learn.org
Over 800 lectures…
…In over 40 countries
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The Descent of Mankind
Studies in genetics suggest that the split with the Great
Apes occurred seven million years ago. At twenty years to
a generation that is three hundred and fifty thousand
generations ago, at a minute a generation, this is
equivalent to the minutes we are, on average, awake for
in a year.
In all that time the genetic structure of us humans differs
from the Great apes by less than 2%.
Stone Age Man, on this scale, appeared 60 hours (two and
a half days), while Modern Man, Homo Sapiens appeared
some thirty hours ago, in
Africa, or equivalent to one and a half
days ago.
Each of us is a result of all that evolution.
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From the time at which our species came
out of the trees and began to walk on
their back legs, this produced a problem
for females as the birth canal couldn’t
expand without her losing the ability to
be bipedal. The problem was exasperated
as the human brain began to grow, so
forcing the skill to grow. Every other
mammal gives birth to its young when
their brains are at least 95% complete,
but humans are forced to drop their babies
extraordinarily prematurely at the point
when their brains are in fact only 40%
developed (should the foetus remain in utero
until the brain was fully formed, pregnancy
would last for 27 months...and the baby
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would never get out).
Mothers and babies need protection for
years – hence the need for long term
bonding.
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The growth of synapses during the
first 6 months
Not until the child is
about three years old
does it’s brain reach 95%
of structural completion
(that does not mean it
has finished its growth far from it for further development involves
removing part of the young brain to enable it to
become more complex)
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How do we learn?
“Tell me and I forget;
show me and I
remember; let me do,
and I understand.”
Confucius, 551-479 BC
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Probably
the
earliest
representation of intellectual
thought
was
the
bone
uncovered in France some 15
years ago, covered with a series
of images that archaeologists
and
astrophysicists
have
identified as the phases of the
moon over a number of nights
as observed from that latitude
32,000 years ago (c. 1,600
generations back.
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Babylonian Mathematicians
5,500 years ago (c. 270
generations ago)
The mathematics of space:
60 seconds to a minute,
60 minutes to a degree,
360 degrees to a circle...
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Polynesia
Apparently the islands of
Polynesia began to be
colonised some 1500 years
ago by people who navigated
entirely on their ability to use
the stars as a chart...
...together with their understanding
of the different ocean currents
containing waters of significantly
different temperature and shoals of
different kinds of fish. The skill to do
this is something modern man can
only wonder at...
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Evolution in Brain
Until the early 19th Century the very best estimate
of the age of the earth had been made in the mid
17th Century which had calculated from the book of
Genesis that the earth had been formed at 4pm on
the 22nd October 4,004 BC. Findings in geology in
the late 18th Century suggested that it really had to
be several million years ago.
Sixty years later in The Origin of Species, Darwin
said, “it is not the strongest of the species that
survives, nor the most intelligent. It is the one most
adaptable to change.”
Biology at the time lacked any technology that
enabled it to study the structure of the brain at a
scale which could show synaptic development. But
Darwin guessed, “psychology will be based on a
new foundation, that of the necessary requirement
of each mental power and capacity by gradation
(evolution). Light will [then] be thrown on the
origin’s of Man and his history.”
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Discovering the origins of human
thought and behaviour
Any serious consideration of ‘evolution in
brain’ did not enter psychologists’ thinking
until the early 1970s (when I studied
Education in the mid-sixties there was
absolutely no reference to the brain). Not
until the invention of PET scans and latterly
functional MRI in the late 1970s onwards has
the study of cognitive processes been open to
visual comprehension.
Suddenly scientists saw in our ‘preferred
ways of doing things’ strategies that in all
probability have been shaped by the earliest
experiences of mankind.
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Now, in 2011, we understand...
“Human beings did not fall ready
made from the sky. Many of our
abilities and susceptibilities are
specific adaptations to ancient
environmental problems rather
than separate manifestations of a
general intelligence for all
seasons.” (Barrow, 1996)
“The human mind is better equipped to gather
information about the world by operating within it
than by reading about it, hearing lectures on it, or
studying abstract models of it.” (Santa Fee Institute, 1995)
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“Historical evidence is plentiful for
the first couple of hundred years,
then rapidly diminishes. At the
5,000 year mark visible records
disappear altogether. At the
15,000 year stage humans began
to settle down. Go back to the
50,000 year mark and it seemed
that our slowly evolving ancestors
started to show the first signs of
modern human behaviour.”
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Humans have been using language for
more than 100,000 years. Children
master most of the complexities of
grammar with practically no explicit
instruction from their parents. It is
almost totally dependant upon extensive
parent-child verbal interactions which
provide an essential environment to
unlock the inherited predispositions to
structure sound in a meaningful way.
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The invention of writing – the conflict
between word and image
This book tracks the correlation between the rise
and fall of literacy and the changing status of
women in society, mythology and religion
throughout history.
It contrasts the aural, right-brain teachings of
Socrates, Christ, and the Buddha with the
hierarchical and sexist forms that evolved when
their spoken words were committed to writing,
which led to the ferocious religious wars and
neurotic witch-hunts (about 5,500 years ago).
While the benefits of literacy are obvious; this
gripping narrative explores the dark-side, tallying
its previously unrecognised costs.
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Three different traditions
1) The Judaic-Christian tradition of self improvement, the Book of
Ecclesiastes says, “of the writing of books there is no end, and
much study wearies the mind” (approximately 800BC)
2) Platonic Thought proposed that philosophers and rulers were
born with gold in their blood, warriors were born with silver in
their blood and farmers and labourers were born with lead. He
believed that nothing in a person’s life could change their status.
(428-348BC)
3) The Roman belief in rote learning and
the forcible injection of learning through
the classroom
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This began to change slowly
Roger Ascham, tutor to Queen Elizabeth I and a renowned classical
scholar, sat down in Windsor Castle in the late 1560s to write the
first book in English on education, called The Scholemaster aimed
at correcting the faults of traditional Roman education.
Firstly, he urged cultivation of what he called ‘Hard-Wits’ rather
than superficial ‘Quick-Wits’ of those whose memories were good,
but who couldn’t work things out for themselves. “Because I know
that those which be commonly the wisest, the most learned, the
best men also, when they be old, were never commonly the
quickest of wits when they were young.”
Secondly, he urged teachers to be more gentle with their students
and warned them against what he called ‘the Butchery of Laten’ –
go easy on the birch he was saying, for children who only learn
because they are frightened, gain nothing.
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Thirdly, Ascham urged that “in the attainment of wisdom, D
learning from a book or from a teacher is twenty times as
effective as learning from experience because it is an
unhappy mariner who learnt his craft from many
shipwrecks.”
Why this extraordinary explanation?
“I was once in Italy myself, but I
thanked God that my abode there was
but nine days. I saw in that little time,
in one city, more liberty to Sin than
ever I saw in our noble city of London
in nine years.”
Consequently Ascham piously defined
the indisputable role of the school
master as a censor of what their
students should learn.
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Behaviourism and JB Watson
JB Watson (1878-1958), denied that evolution
has any part to play in the understanding of the
human brain. It was all to do with the
relationship between what a teacher put in,
and what a child observed. He believed that
learning should become something that
schools did to you, and quality instruction as
being infinitely more important than
encouraging students to think for themselves.
He believed that children’s minds were putty to
be shaped by well-trained teachers... (the
shadow of this thinking has deadened the
imagination of millions of children and
frustrated a large number of teachers).
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Einstein disagreed profoundly
“It is almost a miracle that
modern teaching methods
have not yet entirely
strangled the holy curiosity
of enquiry; for what this
delicate little plant needs
more than anything, besides
stimulation, is freedom.”
Albert Einstein, 1889 - 1955
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In the 1980s cognitive science,
began drawing upon neurobiology
began to undermine the claims of
the behaviourists
“Learning does not require time
out from productive activity;
learning is at the heart of
productive activity”
Shoshana Zuboff, 1988
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(Professor) Baroness Susan Greenfield
SUSAN GREENFIELD CBE is an eminent neurobiologist
who was appointed Director of The Royal Institution in
London in 1998. Since 1996 she has been Professor of
Pharmacology at the University of Oxford. Her research
concentrates on understanding brain functions and
disorders, such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's diseases,
as well as the physical basis of consciousness. She has
also spoken out about the impact of social networking
sites and the amount of time children and young people
spend in front of computer screens:
“By the middle of this century, our minds might have
become infantilised - characterised by short attention
spans, an inability to empathise and a shaky sense of
identity,”
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Adolescence
A Tribe Apart ?
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Synaptogenesis
We know that the human brain is
essentially plastic, but it constantly
reshapes
itself
in
response
to
environmental challenges, but that it does
this within the blueprint of the species’
inherited experience. There are three
phases during the normal life cycle when
the brain goes through extraordinary
periods of internal reorganization - a kind of
mental housekeeping. Experience during
each of these phases becomes critical to
how the individual brain is reconfigured to
deal with the next stage of life.
1993
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Crazy by Design
We have long suspected that there is
something going on in the brain of the
adolescent, apparently involuntarily,
that is forcing apart the child/parent
relationship. Adolescence is a period of
profound structural change, in fact “the
changes taking place in the brain during
adolescence are so profound, they may
rival early childhood as a critical period
of development”, wrote Barbara Strauch
in 2003. “The teenage brain, far from
being readymade, undergoes a period
of surprisingly complex and crucial
development.
The adolescent brain is crazy by design.”
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Becoming Adult
From the earliest of times the progression
from dependent child to autonomous adult
has been an issue of critical importance to all
societies.
The adolescent brain, being “crazy by design,”
could be a critical evolutionary adaptation that
has built up over countless generations, and is
essential to our species’ survival.
It is
adolescence that drives human development
by forcing young people in every generation to
think beyond their own self-imposed
limitations and exceed their parents’
aspirations. These neurological changes in the
young brain as it transforms itself means that
adolescents have evolved to be apprentice-like
learners, not pupils sitting at desks awaiting
instruction.
2002
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Flow
Neuroscientists, together with psychologists and
evolutionary scientists are starting to “show that
youngsters who are empowered as adolescents to
take charge of their own futures will make better
citizens for the future than did so many of their
parents and their grandparents who suffered from
being overschooled but undereducated in their
own generations.”
“Students who get the most out of school, and
have the highest future expectations, are those
who find school more play-like than work-like.
1997
“Clear vocational goals and good work experiences do not guarantee a
smooth transition to adult work. Engaging activities – with intense
involvement regardless of content – are essential for building the
optimism and resilience crucial to satisfying work lives.”
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Don’t Fence Me In – Cole Porter, 1934
Oh, give me land, lots of land under starry skies above,
Don't fence me in.
Let me ride through the wide open country that I love,
Don't fence me in.
Let me be by myself in the evenin' breeze,
And listen to the murmur of the cottonwood trees,
Send me off forever but I ask you please,
Don't fence me in.
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There are very many others
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So What Now?
Formal schooling, therefore, has to start a
dynamic process through which students are
progressively weaned from their dependence
on teachers and institutions, and given the
confidence to manage their own learning,
collaborating with colleagues as appropriate,
and using a range of resources and learning
situations.
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Subsidiarity
“It is wrong for a superior to
keep to itself the right of making
decisions for which an inferior is
perfectly capable of doing for itself.”
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The English Confusion
Perhaps best illustrated when David
Blunkett, overturning the earlier English
tradition that education was about the
development of a child’s full personality,
said, “... the work of the DfEE fits with
a new economic imperative of supply
side
investment
for
national
prosperity”.
All of which went back to the introduction of the
National Curriculum by Kenneth Baker in 1988,
subsequently tinkered with by Kenneth Clarke,
John Patten, Estell Morris, Charles Clarke, Ruth
Kelly, Alan Johnson, Ed Balls and now Michael
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The Political Dilemma
“Much to my surprise I can’t really fault your
theory. You are probably educationally right;
certainly your argument is ethically correct.
But the system you’re arguing for would require
very good teachers. We’re not convinced that
there will ever be enough good teachers. So,
instead, we’re going for a teacher-proof system of
organising schools for that way we can get a
uniform standard.”
Verbatim report of conclusions of presentation
made to the Prime Minister’s Policy Unit,
Westminster March 1996
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It has been the lack of real understanding about
education and learning amongst teachers that
has allowed successive governments to bully the
profession. Teachers undoubtedly need to
understand the theory of learning. Deprived of a
real understanding of both pedagogy and policy
they are simply parroting the latest curriculum
directives.
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The problem is one of Synthesis
Synthesis is the drawing together of ideas,
whereas the essential Western tradition of
education is reductionism – reducing complex
issues to easily studied separate bits. The
problem with that is that it becomes ever more
difficult to see the Big Picture.
Have you a mind big enough to get around all
these issues and tease out the common threads?
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Time is going by
"The biggest crisis we are facing is a Crisis of Meaning. The
tremendous social changes of the last 100 years have stripped
modern society of that which gives us meaning be it in our roots to
our ancestors, religions, spirituality, our relationship to nature......
Within this Crisis of Meaning our young people are facing a MORAL
crisis - a crisis of values. Without these anchors young people no
longer understand the value of perseverance, learning for learning's
sake etc.. Instead our daily lives are filled with a pursuit of money
and temporary ecstasy. Both of these goals are
unfulfillable and result in a misguided frenzy in the
pursuit of the next thrill, or in depression.”
E-mail from Dr Rolando Jubis
Psychologist and Counselor
Jakarta International School, 11/11/00
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Robert Bateman
from British
Colombia:
painter,
conservationist,
and
philanthropist
(born 1930) ...
...fears that the ever-growing disconnection of the human race from
the rest of nature is a “link that is not only being diminished, it is
being completely eliminated for the first time in the history of our
species. This is going to change the world in a horrible way: what
kind of parents are these
zombies going to grow up to be, if they
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grow up?”
David Suzuki from British Colombia, internationally renowned geneticist and
environmentalist, born 1936...
...believes that “human intelligence and foresight got us into our present pickle by
enabling us to invent such efficient ways of exploiting Nature that our population
growth went into overdrive. Now human intelligence and foresight are all we can
rely on to see us through the tight bottleneck we are fast approaching – that
narrowing chasm where far too many people are faced with far too little food and,
very possibly, far too little air.
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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.
Edna St. Vincent Millay "Huntsman, What Quarry"
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William Shakespeare (1564-1616)
with photos from Gulf Islands 2011
“There is a tide in the affairs of men which,
taken at the flood, leads on to fortune...”
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“...But omitted, and the voyage of their life is
bound in shallows and miseries...”
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“... On such a full sea are we now afloat, and we must take the
current when it serves -- or lose the ventures before us.”
William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Act 4,
Scene 3
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For further information:
Web
Email
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mail@21learn.org
Website:
Email:
UK contacts
Telephone:
Fax:
www.21learn.org
mail@21learn.org
jabbott@rmplc.co.uk
01225 333376
01225 339133
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