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
Civilization
Thesis 41 – March of Progress?
There is no safe depository for the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if it is thought that they be not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion.1 A vigorous, if somewhat alternative, […]
Thesis 37 – Landscapes of Our Minds
Our bodies and minds are not of recent origin. They are the direct consequence of millions of years of surviving, and evolving, in landscapes and in climates different to present-day England. The preferences of our distant ancestors, and their ways of looking at life, still condition many of the decisions that we, and our most […]
Thesis 23 – Ancient Brits
“Our DNA does not fade like an ancient parchment. It does not rust in the ground like the sword of a warrior long dead. It is not eroded by wind or rain, nor reduced to ruin by fire and earthquake. It is the traveller from an antique land that lives within us all”.1 The […]
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 […]
Thesis 21 – Roman Law and Order
The Romans were to the Greeks what today’s young venture capitalists are to middle-aged professors of moral philosophy. They just didn’t think in the same way, or hold similar values. While the Greeks were exhausting themselves in costly wars the determined, no-nonsense farmers of Latinium progressively transformed themselves into merchants, and then into soldiers so […]
Thesis 19 – Remember our Ancestors
“What task could be more agreeable than to tell of the benefits conferred on us by our ancestors, so that you may get to know the achievements of those from whom you have received both the basis of your beliefs, and the inspiration to conduct your life properly?” It’s all too easy to assume […]
Thesis 18 – Understanding Cultures
Why are we as individuals and societies all so different, yet at the same time so curiously similar! The colour of our skins may vary but in comparison to the overall structure of our bodies and what we are discovering about our inherited predispositions to behave in certain ways, we all conform ─ English, African, […]
Thesis 17 – The Pursuit of Happiness
Children born in the early 21st century will be heirs to more than fifty years of extraordinary technical and economic developments which have fundamentally changed the way the England of their grandparents once lived. Does this mean that history has nothing useful to tell them, for life is apparently easier, the choices more extensive, and […]
Thesis 16 – Setting a New Course
Today’s society faces a crisis of perception; a whole constellation of ideas and beliefs which had defined Western society since the Reformation five hundred years ago, is now falling apart. We are rapidly rejecting a mechanistic view of the universe, the assumption that the human body behaves like a machine, that life is a competitive […]
Get More, Want More or how to think our way out of a bad end.
A review of Spencer Wells, ‘Pandora’s Seed: The Unforeseen Cost of Civilisation’
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