HMC
St Andrews 5th October 2011
The 21st Century Learning Initiative
www.21learn.org
www.born-to-learn.org
Knowing What We Now Know...
John Abbott
Based on my book...
Overschooled but Undereducated
V.E. Day 1945
A quality education is like a
three-legged stool which can
balance, on any surface
however rough, providing the
legs are the same length –
home school and community
“I call a complete and generous
education that which fits a man
to perform justly, skilfully and
magnanimously all the offices ,
public and private, of peace and war”
John Milton 1642
“No man is an island entire of itself; every
man is a piece of the continent, a part of
the main...
And therefore never send to know for
whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”
John Donne 1624
1957
Suez Crisis
Conscription,
National
Service
Mock Oxbridge Scholarship Paper
Autumn 1957
“The roots of civilisation are twelve inches
deep”; discuss
‘In our concentration on academic
performance we lose sight of our main
business of educating human personality.’
(TES September 1959)
‘All considerations of the curriculum should
consider “how best to use subjects for the
purpose of education... rather than
regarding education as the by-product of
the efficient teaching of subjects”.’
(Sir Phillip Morris, 1952)
Island of Ulva, 1962
Island of Ulva, 1962
“If you are born on a mere speck of land in
the middle of the ocean you quickly discover
how things work, and why people do as
they do. Learn that lesson well, and you are
equipped to become a citizen of the world.”
Citizen of the world?
“The idea that talents are lent for the service of
others and not given, and that knowledge should
bring humility and a sense of involvement in mankind,
has to be the necessary corrective to the arrogance of
meritocrats, for without this the School’s record of
academic success would be indeed alarming.”
“Dare to be wise”
P.G Mason, High Master
Manchester Grammar School, 1965
The Headmaster,
Alleyne’s School,
1972-1985
Stevenage, founded 1558
After a couple of years...
“You have more pilot projects in this school
than there are aircraft in the RAF, and they
are all looping separate loops – where do you
think you are going?” (Chairman of Governors)
“The trouble with secondary schools is that
they only understand teaching and don’t
understand enough about how children
learn. Until you get this right nothing much
will happen.” (Primary Head)
At the heart of the educational
process lies the child. No advances
in policy, no acquisitions of new
equipment have their desired effect
unless they are in harmony with the
nature of the child, unless they are
fundamentally acceptable to him.
Bridget Plowden, 1967
“... explore the Secret Garden of
the Curriculum”
THE GREAT DEBATE 1976
“... explore the Secret Garden of
the Curriculum”
THE GREAT DEBATE 1976
THE GREAT EDUCATIONAL
REFORM BILL 1988 (GERBIL)
In 1993 a Minister apologised because
“the early architects of the whole system
built into it too much bureaucracy, and
too much convolution”
Pedagogy, and how humans learn
It was only in the mid-1970s that evolutionary studies
and psychology come together, largely as the result of
the work of Sir John Eccles (Nobel Prize winner, 1965)
and his two key books - The Physiology of Synapses
(1964), and Evolution Of The Brain : Creation Of The
Self (1989).
Neural Darwinism,
or the grain of the brain
“The complexities of our minds and bodies bear witness
to a long history of subtle adaptation to the natural
world by our innumerable ancestors. Literally every child
is born with a mind and body that recreates the imprint
of the history of our species.”
Synthesis
“A scientist is supposed to have a complete and thorough
knowledge at first-hand of some subject, and therefore is
usually expected not to write on any topic of which he is
not a master...
I can see no other escape from this dilemma (lest our
true aim be lost forever) than that some of us should
embark on a synthesis of facts and theories, albeit with a
second-hand and incomplete knowledge of some of them
– at the risks of making fools of ourselves.”
Professor Erwin Schrödinger, What is Life? (1944)
A tiny selection of readings....
John Bowlby - Attachment (1969) Howard Gardner - Frames of Mind; the theory of multiple intelligences
(1983) Shoshana Zuboff - In the Age of the Smart Machine; the future of work and power (1984) Howard
Gardner - The unschooled mind; how children think and how schools should teach (1991) Gerald Edelman
- Bright air, brilliant fire (1992) Mitchell Waldrop - Complexity; the emerging science at the edge of order
and chaos (1992) Caine and Caine - Making Connections; teaching and the human brain (1991)
Christopher Wills - The Runaway Brain (1994) David Perkins - Outsmarting IQ; the emerging science of
learnable intelligence (1994) Robert Wright - The Moral Animal; evolutionary psychology and everyday life
(1994) John T. Bruer - Schools For Thought; a science for learning in the classroom (1993) Coveney and
Highfield - Frontiers of Complexity; the search for order in a chaotic world (1995) Peter Senge - The Fifth
Discipline; the art and practice of the learning organization (1990) Stephen Mithen - The Prehistory of the
Mind (1996) Arne Wyller - The Planetary Mind (1996) Edward O. Wilson - The Future of Life (2002) Edward
O. Wilson - Consilience; the unity of knowledge (1998) Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi - Flow; the psychology of
optimal experience (1990) Henry Plotkin - Evolution in Mind (1997) Stephen Pinker - How the Mind Works
(1997) Stephen Pinker - The Language Instinct (1996) Patricia Hersch - A Tribe Apart; a journey into the
heart of adolescence (1998) Thomas Hine - The Rise and Fall of the American Teenager (1999) Meredith
Small - Our Babies, Ourselves; how biology and culture shape the way we parent (1998) Susan Greenfield
- Brain Stories (2000) Spencer Wells - The Journey of Man; a genetic odyssey (2002) Fritjof Capra – The
Hidden Connections (2002) Matt Ridley – Nature via Nurture: genes, experience and what makes us
human (2003) Spencer Wells - Pandora’s Seed; the unforeseen cost of civilisation (2010) Jared Diamond Guns, Germs and Steel; a short history of everybody for the last 13,000 years (1998) Nicholas Wade Before the Dawn; recovering the lost history of our ancestors (2006) Diane Ravitch - The Death and Life
of the Great American School System; how testing and choice are undermining education (2010)
Jonathan Sacks - Recreating Society; the home we build together (2007) Raymond Tallis - Aping Mankind;
neuromania, Darwinitis and the misrepresentation of humanity (2011)...
The Hidden Connections: a science for sustainable living
Fritjof Capra (2002)
“Education is the ability to perceive the hidden connections
between disparate phenomena,” a statement first made by the
Czech philosopher and politician Vaclav Havel, and adopted by
Capra as the ultimate explanation for the operation of the brain
Nature via Nurture: genes, experience and what makes us human
Matt Ridley (2003)
Recent findings in the biomedical sciences show that it was totally
wrong to see it as a struggle of nature versus nurture, rather it is
the development of nature via nurture.
These two create a whole new paradigm for learning
“We are both empowered by the
experiences of our ancestors, but we
are constrained as well. Driven to live in
ways that are utterly uncongenial to
our inherited traits and instincts simply
drives people mad”
Please click here to view animation one:
Born to Learn
or visit www.vimeo.com/20924263
A model of learning is needed which would
match exactly the neurological progression of
the brain of the young child as it transforms
itself into the adolescent brain. Adolescents,
it seems, have evolved to be apprentice-like
learners, not pupils sitting at desks awaiting
instruction.
Please click here to view animation two:
Class Reunion
or visit www.vimeo.com/25962693
If Matthew Ridley is right that we are as we
are because of the way nurture interacts
with our nature then a child coming into
school already has his or her mind shaped by
the dominant assumption of the society in
which they are already a member.
Please click here to view animation three:
Faustian Bargain (trailer)
or visit www.vimeo.com/29948790
“Our enormously productive economy...demands that we make consumption
our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that
we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego-satisfaction, in consumption... We
need things consumed, burned up, replaced and discarded at an ever
accelerating rate.”
quoted in ‘The Waste Makers’, 1960
On September 14th 2011, half
a century later, the largest
shopping centre in Europe –
Westfield Stratford – was
opened as the only gateway to
the Olympic Park of 2012; in
floor area it is 20 times that of
St Paul’s Cathedral.
‘British family life is in crisis’
proclaimed the Telegraph last
week. ‘It is parents who are to
blame who by working like pit
ponies to house our offspring,
feed them and keep them in with the latest digital cameras and micros scooters, it seems we have
created a generation of miserable children who are wallowing in materialism. We spend £7.3 billion
on toys in children's bedrooms, when what they really need is to play outside with friends and family.
The Ultimate Ecological Crisis
“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%.” A Short History of Progress, 2004
Asked on 1st January 2000 what chance he gave the world
of surviving the next thousand years, Sir Martin Rees, the
Astronomer Royal and later President of the Royal Society
said; “I’m not sure about the next millennium but I think I
give us a 50/50 chance of surviving the next hundred
years. I fear that the speed of man’s technological
discoveries is outpacing our wisdom and ability to control
what we have discovered…”
When our first granddaughter was born a year
ago, our doctor said with great pleasure “she
has a 25 % chance of living to the age of 100”.
For her to do that we have to educate the next
generation to bring technological knowledge
and wisdom together.
Educational impact of Frederick
Winslow-Taylor
• David Wardle the English educational historian wrote, “it was the factory
put into the educational setting... Every characteristic was there, minute
division of labour... A complicated system of incentives to do good work, an
impressive system of inspection, and finally an attention to cost efficiency
and the economic use of plant”.
That was in 1976
• “The National Curriculum sets the standards...all schools set targets and
measure their performance. They can easily access best practice
information. They have increasing opportunities for professional
development. They are held to account through inspections and published
performance tables.” That was said in 2001
• In 2011, you know all too much about the impact of league tables and
teaching for the test.
• While successive Ministers of Education are pleased to reiterate that “the
work of the Department for Education and employment fits with a new
economic imperative of supply-side investment for national prosperity.”
“We can’t fault your theory. You are probably
educationally correct and certainly ethically
correct. But the system you’re arguing for
would require very good teachers. We don’t
think there will ever be enough good teachers,
and so we’re going for a teacher-proof way of
organising schools. That way you get a uniform
standard.”
Downing Street Policy Unit, March 1997
A simplified history...
• In 1869 W E Forster set out to create a national
system of schooling and proposed using the
endowments of some 3000 old schools to fund a
national scheme for teacher education.
• This so antagonised a number of your predecessors
that they founded this Conference to deny Forster
these funds; they succeeded.
• Consequently you were born in a spirit of conflict
with a struggling embryonic national system of
education; this seriously impacts on English schools
to this day (cf. Finland).
• In 1870 a national system of School Boards was
established across the country, based on local
taxation, even though this was without any
arrangements for teacher education.
• So successful were these schools that they
antagonised both the Church schools and
yourselves. Your predecessors were particularly
concerned that such schools would infringe upon
their almost exclusive interest in secondary
education.
• By 1939 only 18% of 14 year-olds were in school –
the second lowest proportion of any country in
Europe.
There are other shadows...
• Under the direction of a former Headmaster of Harrow, Cyril
Norwood, and overtly classically-trained civil servants, Butler
was persuaded to define state secondary education, as had
Plato, into thee parts – separating those with gold in their
blood from those with silver and iron.
• With only sufficient funds to lift compulsory education form 14
to 15, Butler accepted his advisers’ Proposal that three years
should be taken off the old elementary curriculum and
transferred to create a four-year secondary system.
• It is known that Norwood, by agreeing 11 as the age of
transfer, believed that he was keeping the independent and
maintained sectors structurally separate.
• For the past 70 years primary education has struggled to
achieve in six years what earlier it had done in nine.
Dr Arnold’s legacy
• It was Arnold’s genius to link boarding education to a
revamped classical curriculum and so rid ambitious, aspiring
Victorians of dealing with the problems of adolescence.
• Over the years boarding schools too easily became delightful
bubbles cocooned from the outside world.
• Recently secondary schools have become increasingly busy
places as they have taken on to themselves responsibilities for
which they were not designed. Those of you in predominantly
boarding schools, now recruiting ever more day pupils, are
attempting to squeeze your originally broadly-based
curriculum, once covered in 7 days each of 24 hours, into 5
days working only from 8.30 to 5.30.
• No wonder both you and your pupils can easily look so
hammered!
If you continue to apply the wrong model of
learning, for the very best of reasons, you
will never get the results you seek...
As Einstein once remarked, “you will never
solve a problem by using the same thinking
that created that problem in the first place”.
Just what are we all about?
I would like to set you two questions – not to be answered this morning – but
perhaps to be sent to me alter by email, not in any sense for correction, far
from it, but to get all of us thinking together about what needs to happen
My first question is about purpose:
Are you preparing your pupils to be pilgrims (as in John
Bunyan’s meaning in Pilgrim's Progress), or customers?
My second question is about process:
What kind of education for what kind of world? Are our
children battery-hens or free-range chickens?
What, however, is not clear is how HM Treasury
(through the office of the Secretary of
Education) will monitor and hold someone
accountable for the billions of pounds of public
money that all this will involve. Many details
remain to be worked out. Michael Gove is quite
properly inviting your support, and it is only
right that you should earn your charitable
status by demonstrating the public good.
A couple of years ago Andrew Adonis
caught the headlines by saying he
wanted to borrow some of your DNA so
as to improve the maintained sector.
It is the tragic consequence of 200 years of our
history that the differences between the two
systems are such that transfusion alone won’t
work. What we need – desperately – is that
deep dialogue between all involved in the
bringing up of young people that aims at such
a transformation of both parts of the system
that we can happily and quite naturally then
come together.
“I call a complete and generous education that
which fits a man to perform justly, skilfully and
magnanimously all the offices, public and
private of peace and war”.
John Milton, in a letter to Dr Hartlib, 1642
This lecture can be downloaded from:
www.born-to-learn.org
The 21st Century Learning Initiative www.21learn.org