It’s Your World to Shape,
Not Just to Take
John Abbott, President
The 21st Century Learning Initiat
Student Conferences BC
February 2012
Presentation 1
A
“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?
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Candlestick or faces ?
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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A
The Troubled World of 2012
• 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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David Suzuki, 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. The 21st Century Learning Initiative www.21learn.org
A
“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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B
B
My recent ancestors
History experienced across the
Generations
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My adolescence, and the development
of a Broad Mind
B
“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 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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B
University, and the enthusiasm to
create a better world
Rhum
expedition
1959
Gometra
expedition
1962
University Maiden Eight 1961
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B
Manchester Grammar School, 1965
B
“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
meritocratic 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
B
From leader of expeditions to being
a Headmaster
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So began my search to understand
human learning
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B
C
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
st
21
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.”
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C
Over 800 lectures…
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…in over 40 countries
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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C
C
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, in
effect, the four month stage (should the
foetus remain in utero for a full term,
pregnancy would last for 27 months...and the
baby would never get out).
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Mothers and babies need protection for years –
hence the need for long term bonding.
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C
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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C
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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C
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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C
C
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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C
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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C
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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C
Now, in 2011, we understand...
C
“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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C
“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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C
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 tot he 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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C
D
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
D
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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D
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 that
imagination of millions of children and
frustrated a large number of teachers).
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D
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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D
D
(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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E
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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E
E
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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E
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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E
Don’t Fence Me In – Cole Porter, 1934
E
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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E
E
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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E
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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E
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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E
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 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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E
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E
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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E
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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E
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
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
“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.
Lord David Alton, October 2011
This has proved to be a summer of discontent; a season
of social disorder and of fragile and floundering
economic indicators.
The riots which have disfigured our cities, reports of which
have reverberated around the globe, came in the wake of an
endless procession of scandals. We have seen the erosion of
confidence in our parliamentary institutions, our mass media,
our police and our banks. Hardly an institution remains
untouched. David Henry Thoreau once said that if we cut
down all the trees there will be nowhere left for the birds to
sing. At times, during these past few months, the chain saws
have been merciless as the great oaks have been felled...
...We are entitled to be sickened at the sight of a bleeding
boy, attacked and robbed again by those who first appeared
to have come to his aid; or the 67-year-old killed because he
tried to prevent arson; or the 11-year-old brought before the
courts and convicted because, along with thousands of other
looters, he exploited the breakdown in law and order. But beyond
our shock and anger we must also ask ourselves some deeper
questions about the country we have made and the country which
we want it to be.
If we do not heed this wakeup call and attend to the root problems
far worse will visit us in the future. This will involve the renewal of
our battered and compromised institutions and require us to
reassess how we see ourselves as citizens and how we see our
obligations and duties, our responsibilities as well as our rights. It
needs two things: different values and a clearer sense of what
promotes human wellbeing.
Robert
Bateman:
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?”
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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“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,
4, Scene 3
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Learning
InitiativeAct
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For further information:
Web
www.born-to-learn.org
www.21learn.org
Email
mail@21learn.org
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"I maintain that the human mystery is incredibly
demeaned by scientific reductionism, with its
claim in promissory materialism to account
eventually for all of the spiritual world in terms
of patterns of neural activity. 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."
Sir John Eccles, 1989
Neurologist, Nobel Prize Winner, Cambridge
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Spirituality
"Mystical, symbolic and religious thinking all those ways of
thinking that the rationalist would condemn as " irrational" seem to characterize human thinking everywhere and at every
time. It is as if there was some adaptive advantage to such
modes of thinking that offers benefits that rationality can not
provide. Perhaps the advantages that irrational, speculative, and
religious beliefs offer through their ability to spur us to actions
with positive consequences are significant enough to account
for our propensity towards their adoption. Extraterrestrial
robots who are completely rational might evolve very slowly
indeed."
John D. Barrow
The Artful Universe, 1996
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F
What is Man?
When I consider your heavens,
The work of your fingers,
The moon and the stars,
Which you have set in place.
What is man that you are mindful of him,
The son of man that you care for him?
Yet you have made him little lower
than the angels
And crowned him with glory and honour.
Psalm 8: 3-5
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The Spiritual Issue; Neil Postman, 1997
"We do not need to invent a story for our times out of nothing. Humans
never do. Since consciousness began we have been weaving our
experience of ourselves and of our material world into accounts of it; and
every generation has passed its ways of accounting on.... The great
revolutions and revelations of the human past, and I include the Christian
revelation, have all been great retellings, new ways of narrating ancient
truths to encompass a larger world.
My two favourite quotes: Galileo in the early 17th century said,
"The intention of the Holy Spirit is to teach how one goes to
heaven, not how heaven goes.”
Three hundred and seventy five years later, Pope John Paul II said,
"Science can purify religion from error and superstition.
Religion can purify science from idolatry and false absolutes. "
"The future sanity of the world depends
on the coming together of two great
disciplines that haven't spoken together
for more than a hundred years - Biology
and Theology".
State of the World Forum, San Francisco, 2001
The 21st Century Learning Initiative www.21learn.org
"This is what we are about. We plant seeds that one day will grow.
We water seeds already planted, knowing that they hold future
promise. We lay foundations that will need further development.
We provide yeast that produces effects far beyond our capabilities.
"We cannot do everything, and there is a sense of liberation in
realising that. This enables us to do something, and enables us to
do it very well It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning, a step
along the way, an opportunity for the Lord's grace to enter and do
the rest. We may never see the end result, but that is the
difference between the master builder, and
the worker.
"We are workers, not master builders, ministers, not Messiahs. We
are prophets of a future not our own".
Archbishop Oscar Romero, 1980
“The new middle-class world in which many American
adolescents grow up is one that combines harshness and
heedlessness in equal measure, a world which makes it
very hard to grow up. It makes it all too difficult to
achieve a strong and abiding sense of worth and all too
easy to feel like a failure and a loser. It makes it all too
easy to feel like an outsider, all too difficult to feel
appreciated or respected for being who you are. It is a
world in which it is treacherously easy for adolescents to
trip up and break the rules but in which no one can be
bothered to help them avoid tripping in the first place.
Adolescence is rarely an easy time. But it need not be as
hard as it often is in America.
The Road to Whatever, Elliott Currie, 2004
Lost
by Anne-Marie, aged 18,
Killarney, May 2004
As I sit there the wind goes by
Not moving anything.
The clouds slowly move across the sky
With a feeling of departure.
I’m lost, I’m lost in this dark deep place.
I’m screaming from inside for it to go away.
It’s too late.
I stand with a sharp object in my hand.
I feel I’ve been crying for years.
My face reflects this, swollen and red.
As I stand there motionless, I think: why stay?
1/3
2/3
I’ve hurt so many – even my own flesh and blood.
The sky keeps moving
I stay locked within the dark circle, and life moves by.
I look at the object that lies in my hand.
I slowly move it to my heart and press hard.
I feel a sharp stinging pain but I continue.
I continue to feel the sharp object penetrate my skin.
The suddenly I stop. I think: I can’t, I can’t do this.
I drop to my knees, open my mouth to scream
But nothing comes out.
3/3
I stay there, tears rolling down my cheeks, and a clean
knife lies by my side.
I feel ashamed, yet disappointed.
I wonder: why does life have to be so hard?
Why do people have to feel so much pain?
It’s so unfair, it’s so draining and confusing.
I’m tired of fighting; I’m tired of fighting with myself
I just want it to stop.
F
“I call a complete and generous education that
which equips a man to perform justly, skilfully
and magnanimously all the offices public and
private of peace and war”
John Milton
1644
The 21st Century Learning Initiative www.21learn.org
F
Dear Teacher,
I am a survivor of a concentration camp. My eyes saw what no
man should witness:
• Gas chambers built by learned engineers;
• Children poisoned by educated physicians;
• Infants killed by trained nurses;
• Women and babies shot and burned by high school and
college graduates.
So, I am suspicious of education. My request is this: help your
students become human. Your efforts must never produce
learned monsters, skilled psychopaths, educated Eichmanns.
Reading, writing, arithmetic are important only if they serve to
make our children more human.
Reproduced from TACADE, 1993
F
• Upside Down and Inside Out
• A possible description of the assumption we have
inherited about systems of learning, namely, that
older students should be taken more seriously
than younger students and that the only learning
that really matters is that which is formal. This
presentation will call for these assumptions to be
reversed in the light of modern understanding
about how humans learn.
The 21st Century Learning Initiative www.21learn.org
Guiding Questions
1. How do we create a sense of urgency to move theory around human
learning to practice in our classrooms? What overarching structures
need to change to facilitate this shift?
2. Paint us a picture of what a classroom that is reflecting this shift would
look like. Sound like. For teachers and for students. How do we create
such classrooms within our existing structures?
3. What are three things we should consider as we move toward having
full-day kindergarten classes in our schools next year?
4. “Is education about content or process?” Could you expand on this
idea?
5. How do we nurture the natural stages of development of early learners
and adolescents? How can we embrace their appetite for adventure and
ensure that we are not inadvertently repressing it at any stage?
Guiding Questions
1. 21st Century Learning became a common buzzword over the last year.
How do you define 21st Century Learning? How does technology fit
into your definition?
2. Could you expand on your ideas around the following:
“In a phrase, it is the collapse of civil society ... [that requires us to]
start a dynamic process through which young people are progressively
weaned from their dependence on teachers and institutions...”
The 21st Century Learning Initiative www.21learn.org
‘It’s your world to shape, not
just to take’
John Abbott
President, The 21st Century Learning Initiative
The 21st Century Learning
Initiative - www.21learn.org
Breakout Groups
1. Preparing young people to think about education in a very different fashion;
developing the ability to think, communicate, collaborate and make decisions
2. Preparing ourselves to devise strategies that go with ‘the grain of the brain’;
education as the precursor to a functional democracy
3. Building communities that accept responsibility to uses all their resources to
support the development of young people; cognitive apprenticeship, and
Subsidiarity
4. Helping society in general to understand the need to reverse an upside down and
inside-out system of schooling so as to prepare young people more effectively to
stand o their own two feet
5. ‘Ill fares the land, where wealth accumulates and men decay’ (Oliver Goldsmith);
helping the next generations to live in a post-capitalist society.
Think
communicate collaborate make decisions
Both social capital and democracy are slippery concepts. Democracy is
particularly fragile and is forever dependent on an educated public being able
to hold politicians to account for the small print of their highly-vaunted
political promises.
Cognitive Apprenticeship. The development of our exquisite practical and
theoretical skills goes right back into the mists of time when our ancestors
learnt interactively as they struggled together to achieve common tasks.
Through such intellectual processes a pre-disposition for cognitive
apprenticeship developed in the human brain.
Learning together within the security of the family, before sharing and testing
more complex issues within a larger community is what is most natural to the
brain – a progression from emotional to inspirational and on to intellectual
development. Cognitive apprenticeship is about making thinking visible.
(Modelling, Scaffolding, Fading)
Subsidiarity: it is wrong for a superior body t hold to itself the
right to make decisions that an inferior is already able to make
for itself. Subsidiarity is not the same as delegation. If, as an adult
or an inquisitive young person, you equip yourself to be able to
do something, and then you are constantly overruled or micromanaged, you fast lose your motivation as control is taken away
from you. Subsidiarity is what adolescents demand if they are
eventually to become the functioning adults; deny the this
opportunity and they fester.
“The day is not far off when the economic problem will take the back
seat where it belongs, and the arena of the heart and the head will be
occupied or reoccupied by our real problems — the problems of life
and of human relations, of creation and behaviour and religion.”
John Maynard Keynes
(1883 – 1946)