The 21st Century Learning Initiative
Promoting a Vision, Knowledge, Experience and a Network
What price 'Intelligence'?
Response to Tony Little's book 'An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Education'
This short monograph was written by Neil Richards, a Trustee of the 21st Century Learning Initiative in response to the publication of Tony Little’s book, An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Education.
Battling for the Soul of Education
Moving beyond school reform to educational transformation:
The findings and recommendations of 3 decades of synthesis
Download from battlingforthesoulofeducation.org
The 99 Theses
Thesis 10 – I Can or I.Q?
We admire people who sense what is the right thing to do in an unfamiliar situation. Intelligence is more than just a general capacity to learn, to reason or to understand, it is a quickness to apprehend, as distinct from ability which is the capacity to act wisely on the thing comprehended. Intelligence is […]
Thesis 11 – Playing to One’s Strengths
Psychologists for long pondered the question, “Which is more important — Nature or Nurture?” It has always been an emotionally charged debate. Political demagogues in the twentieth century incited their peoples to extremes of racialism having convinced themselves that certain cultural features ‘were there in the blood’. This led to eugenics. Research now shows conclusively […]
Thesis 12 – The Need To Know
Children’s search for meaning starts young. Children who are already anxious to make sense of issues that matter to them in their own private lives, who come to formal schooling keen and enthusiastic to use whatever it can offer them to help meet their personal objectives. It is not the other way round. The greatest […]
Thesis 13 – What is Life?
With the advent of consciousness humans started to ask the apparently unanswerable questions, questions that take us to the supreme heights of human achievement, and into the depths of despair. Not for us the unreflective life of a dog, or even possibly a chimpanzee; we humans try to solve the riddle of existence by posing […]
Thesis 14 – Significance of Narrative
Humans are a story-telling species. Faced with a multiplicity of facts and ideas which we may only imperfectly understand, we use stories to create frameworks that help us to transmit the sense of what we understand to other people. Our culture is contained within the stories we tell. The thing which humans need more than […]
Thesis 15 – Wisdom beyond Knowledge
Our lives are drenched with information. With so much that we could think about it’s inevitable that we shut most of it out of our consciousness for fear that our brains will crash through overload. So selective can be our focus that we can easily miss the blindingly obvious. Give ourselves time to think and […]
Thesis 16 – Setting a New Course
Today’s society faces a crisis of perception; a whole constellation of ideas and beliefs which had defined Western society since the Reformation five hundred years ago, is now falling apart. We are rapidly rejecting a mechanistic view of the universe, the assumption that the human body behaves like a machine, that life is a competitive […]
Thesis 17 – The Pursuit of Happiness
Children born in the early 21st century will be heirs to more than fifty years of extraordinary technical and economic developments which have fundamentally changed the way the England of their grandparents once lived. Does this mean that history has nothing useful to tell them, for life is apparently easier, the choices more extensive, and […]
Thesis 18 – Understanding Cultures
Why are we as individuals and societies all so different, yet at the same time so curiously similar! The colour of our skins may vary but in comparison to the overall structure of our bodies and what we are discovering about our inherited predispositions to behave in certain ways, we all conform ─ English, African, […]
Thesis 19 – Remember our Ancestors
“What task could be more agreeable than to tell of the benefits conferred on us by our ancestors, so that you may get to know the achievements of those from whom you have received both the basis of your beliefs, and the inspiration to conduct your life properly?” It’s all too easy to assume […]
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