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
Seeing the big picture
Education is never far from the headlines. This week, for example, head teachers have been complaining about the demise of careers services – services which were created to provide expertise for students across schools in local authorities. And added to this are concerns with planned changes to the A-level examination. And while education hits the […]
Is Britain's education system being tested to destruction?
In a recent article in The Guardian, David Priestland argued that education reforms in the UK are destroying the quality they are supposed to ensure. The UK is trailblazing outcome-based education and the US is not far behind. So, is this approach to education effective? In this week’s podcast, John Abbott looks at this approach […]
What can Jared Diamond tell us about bringing up children?
Jared Diamond has just published his latest book, The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn From Traditional Societies? In our latest podcast, John Abbott takes a look at the book and what it tells us about how to bring up our children. John connects Jared’s anthropological thinking with evolutionary biology and the fact that […]
The year ahead
In our Wish for Christmas, John asked that society could educate people so that they could feel ‘confident dealing with ambiguity, that they are confident dealing with other people’s arguments’. As we start 2013 so we are faced with big challenges: fiscal cliffs, obesity epidemics and mounting debt, to name but three. So, how are […]
A wish for Christmas
My wish for Christmas is a very big wish: that we can educate people to the point that they can feel confident dealing with ambiguity, that they are confident dealing with other people’s arguments and don’t get so het up about it that no one is going to take any notice of them. So it […]
No small matter
The spectacular rise in standards of living in recent years within the English-speaking nations, especially amongst the English themselves, has created an extraordinary paradox. The busier and wealthier we have become the less time we seem to have for each other. This has created a crisis in how we educate our young people. It is […]
How far have we come in 2012?
I asked John Abbott about our year at the 21st Century Learning Initiative. Lots of changes, as you have seen. We also unearthed this wonderful video, made for Education 2000 – the precursor to the initiative. listen to ‘How far have we come in 2012?’ on Audioboo This video was created after a CBI conference […]
Escaping the exam factory
Some 25 years ago John Abbott addressed the Confederation of British Industry conference on why learning is so much more than just schooling. This year’s CBI conference touched on the same topic. Here is coverage of this year’s conference by the Guardian’s Peter Walker: Business leaders criticise slipping standards of ‘exam factory’ schools And here is […]
Conference Keynote: Into the Future; Knowledge Transfer, and Cultural Norms
This keynote was delivered by John Abbott to the Business Council of British Columbia Human Capital Conference on 22 November 2012 at the Fairmont Pacific Rim Hotel, Vancouver. Reuniting Thinking with Doing: Igniting the Innate Passion of Adolescence for Personal Engagement from Responsible Subversives It is a pleasure to be with you. Although I […]
Into the Future: Knowledge Transfer and Cultural norms – Pre-Conference Briefing Paper for the British Columbia Human Capital Conference
This is the Pre-Conference Briefing Paper for the keynote given by to the Business Council of British Columbia Human Capital Conference, 22nd November 2012 at the Fairmont Pacific Rim Hotel, Vancouver. Contrary to many a childhood memory, learning is not an alien activity which has to be imposed on humans; rather it is a set […]
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