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
Blog
The Eye of the Storm
The Eye of the Storm is both an analogy and a metaphor, describing that region at the centre of a violent tropical cyclone of mostly calm, windless conditions. Well experienced sailors understand that the safest thing to do as a storm approaches is, counter-intuitively, to sail directly into the storm in search of the ‘eye’, […]
Functional literacy
We live in volatile and uncertain times and technology is powering change in the way we operate. So what’s the one thing we need our children to be comfortable with? Change. In this week’s podcast John talks about ‘functional literacy’ – the ability of our children to feel comfortable with our ever changing society. This […]
What's the best piece of advice you've been given?
At the end of the lectures John gives he usually gets asked how to turn the ideas of the 21st Century Learning Initiative into action. It’s a big theme for us and our thinking is that by being equipped with the right information we can then start to make some informed decisions. That’s why we […]
It's good to talk
Talking helps us humans to grow our brains and to keep them agile as we grow and get older. And being a social and inquisitive species makes conversation – the sharing of ideas about ourselves, others and past and possible future events – central to our survival, and ultimately our humanity. In the latest two […]
Specialists versus experts
In this week’s podcast, John talks about the difference between experts and specialists. As a piece of related reading we have taken an excerpt from John’s book, Unfinished Revolution, which expands on this relationship. In Frederik Winslow Taylor’s book The Principles of Management, published in 1911, stated that: “The primary, if not the only, goal […]
Have we surrendered to the specialists?
The difference between a specialist and expert is a subtle one but it is significant when we look at the research that is informing the development of education. It takes expertise to look at the big picture but we tend to default to what specialists have to say. And by their very nature they tend […]
We are who we are because of the stories we hear
History is about telling stories – whoever you are or wherever you are in the world, there is a story about where you have come from. And these stories are the making of our children – they will help them understand where they have come from and their place in the world. Stories will define […]
A simple solution to our educational troubles
This week’s podcast aims to offer a simple solution to England’s educational troubles (to those of you not living in England you will nevertheless find this of interest). Building on last week’s podcast in which John described how the three legged school of school, community and family must be in balance for an effective education, […]
Battery hens or free range chickens?
Last week’s podcast ended by posing this question: Do we want our education systems to produce battery hens or free range chickens? Picking up on that question this week, John takes a deeper look into the role of education and explores what kind of education we – as individuals, families, communities, nations – might want […]
The Heart of the Matter
In this week’s podcast, John takes us right to the heart of what constitutes an appropriate education for our children. This thinking is based on the synthesis of more than 30 years’ worth of research and learning around how we develop as humans and how we best learn as children. The three factors at the […]
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