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
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Today’s fast moving, technological world tends to dismiss apprenticeship either as a product of celebrity entertainment or as a trade skill for those not bright enough to go to university. How wrong we all are! My father was one of the most intelligent men I have ever met. Born a day before the start of […]
Apprenticeship is back in the news. What England needs, Vince Cable the new Business Secretary said on The Today Programme, is many more apprentices… men and women whose studies combine the theoretical with the applied.
The Apprenticeship Model of Learning Human behaviour fascinates us as much today as it did the philosophers of old. Yet it is only recently that scientists have begun to unravel just why it is that we think as we do – and why that thinking can go badly wrong. Drawing together the research from the […]
The solution to England’s education problem will be very simple once the country comes to appreciate the damage still being done by two Victorian myths that haunt everyday thinking.
Wisdom that can’t be taught There is a new word being heard around the block – internship. Traditionally it meant newly-qualified medical graduates understudying experienced doctors, but Alan Milburn’s Report, “Unleashing Aspirations,” expands the definition to mean young people shadowing experienced professionals so learning some of the tricks of their trade. Internships are similar to […]
If we humans are the planet’s pre-eminent learning species surely none but the most obdurate of young people should readily accept the benign conditions of the classroom?
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This article has exercised a great influence on the 21st Century Learning Initiative’s thinking. It originally appeared in the Winter, 1991 issue of American Educator, the journal of The American Federation of Teachers, and is reprinted here with permission.
Central to the Initiative’s thinking is the concept of cognitive apprenticeship
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.