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
Adolescence
Thesis 60 – Mirrors of Ourselves?
Our opinions about adolescents are deeply contradictory; inquisitive yet confrontational, sometimes energetic yet frequently infuriatingly laid back, we don’t know if we love them or despair of them. No longer children to be told what to do, they lack adult powers of judgment, and are as uncertain as to how to behave as are adults […]
Thesis 58 – Over the Top
To educate is to open people’s minds to endless opportunities, but without a moral ‘lens’ with which to evaluate the appropriateness of these, much mischief can result. It is not simply that the devil finds mischief for idle hands to do, it is because “if we are to have criminals in our society, then pray […]
Thesis 42 – Invention of Public Schools
“As on the one hand it should ever be remembered that we are boys, and boys at school, so on the other hand we must bear in mind that we form a complete social body… a society, in which, by the nature of the case, we must not only learn, but act and live; and […]
Thesis 39 – Spontaneous Schooling
“This word-teaching, rote-learning, memory-loading system is still dignified with the name of ‘education’; … need we wonder that many scholars have so little practical or useful knowledge, or that the greatest block-heads at school often make brighter men than those whose intellects have been injured by much cramming?”1 Wealth and comfort lull people into […]
Thesis 33 – Learning Responsibility
Apprenticeship was an education for an intelligent way of life, a mechanism by which young people could model themselves on socially approved adults so providing a safe passage from childhood to adulthood in psychological, social and economic ways.1 Adolescents are neither children, nor adults. No longer content simply to be sat down and talked […]
Thesis 30 – Man For All Seasons
Children need to learn to think, to make connections, to work together, to take risks, to discover their own talents. They need to read about all kinds of things and explore different media. They need a curriculum that is broad, balanced and differentiated.1 Born in 1564, and so thirty years younger than his […]
Thesis 28 – Origins of Modern Education
In recent years it has been said ruefully that the English naturally excel in invention, the Japanese in manufacturing and the Americans in salesmanship. Why are the English like this? It seems it all goes back to the Reformation, to the very first book ever written in England about education, which argued that as a […]
Thesis 25 – Early English School
“The knowledge of past events has further virtues, especially in that it distinguishes rational creatures from brutes, for brutes whether men or beast, do not know… about their origins, their race, and the events and happenings in their native land”.1 The conquering Normans rapidly displaced the original nobility and replaced English bishops by Frenchmen. […]
Thesis 24 – Emergence of the English
The life of nations, no less than that of men, is lived largely in the imagination. History is continuously being edited to empower the story each generation wishes to believe about itself.1 The Romans were in britain for nearly four hundred years, and when they withdrew in 407 they left behind a well-farmed land […]
Thesis 22 – Judaism and Christianity
Of the three roots of western civilization ─ Greece, Rome and Palestine ─ it is the influence of the Jews which is the most extraordinary. A tribe of desert nomads seeking land of their own between the great kingdoms of Assyria, Babylon and Egypt, these were a people whose struggles against adversity had convinced them […]
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