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Overschooled and Undereducated: Getting the Balance Right

Good evening. It is both an honour and a pleasure to be invited to give this lecture. I do so with some trepidation. I know I am easily carried away with my enthusiasm! Some years ago my wife and I were on a Sunday afternoon walk with our three sons. Our youngest, Tom, who was […]

In Defense of Genius

Annual Lecture to the Arts Council of England, 8 February 1996 Dean Clough is the ideal starting point for my lecture. Its success is the reason I was invited to join the Arts Council as a member in 1991 and then to Chair the newly formed Regional Arts Board for Yorkshire and Humberside. Dean Clough […]

An Organic View of Educational Change

“Once there lived a village of creatures along the bottom of a great crystal river. The current of the river swept silently over them all- young and old, rich and poor, good and evil – the current going its own way, knowing only its own crystal self. Each creature in its own manner clung tightly to the twigs and rocks of the river bottom, for clinging was their way of life, and resisting the current was what each had learned from birth. But one creature said at last: ‘I am tired of clinging. Though I cannot see it with my eyes, I trust that the current knows where it is going. I shall let go and let it take me where it will. Clinging, I shall die of boredom.’ The other creatures laughed and said: ‘Fool, let go and that current you worship will throw you tumbled and smashed across the rocks, and you will die quicker than boredom. But the one heeded them not, and taking a breath did let go and at once was tumbled and smashed by the current across the rocks. Yet in time, as the creature refused to cling again, the current lifted him free from the bottom and he was bruised and hurt no more.”

Some Recent Developments in Cognitive Science

While all children need both a body of knowledge and some basic skills to enable them to be functionally literate, a rapidly changing society demands that young people be able to rise above such rote, factual levels to think critically, and creatively; to be flexible, and spontaneously to be able to solve ill structured, ambiguous problems in areas in which they have little first hand information.

The Confederation of British Industry Speech

Confederation of British Industry (CBI) National Conference 2nd November 1987 Presentation on Education 2000 by John Abbott, Director of the Trust, and interdiction by Brian Corby, Chief Executive of The Prudential Corporation. Young people are a Nation’s most precious resource. On the quality of their education our future – our pensions if you like – […]

1981 Letter from the Headmaster to the Times Editor

  Alleyne’s School Stevenage Hertfordshire SG1 3BE From The Headmaster 15th October 1981.   ‘Letters to the Editor’, The Times, P. O. Box 7, 200 Grays Inn Road, London  WC1K SEK.   Dear Sir, Sir William van Straubenzee recently warned the new Secretary of State for Education ‘that cuts in education had not just cut […]

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