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
Community/Collaboration
Winning Friends and Influencing People
Education 2000 had become sufficiently well-known by 1987 for me to be invited to address the Annual Conference of the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) which was televised live with a studio audience of 1,800. This represented a massive step from a standing start of only two years before.
The Difficult Birth of a Transformative Idea; The story up to 1987
Emphasis was placed on community involvement and responsibility; the utilisation of technology in an open and more dynamic forms of learning; re-orientating the curriculum and preparing young people for adulthood in times of rapid and complex change; through both formal and informal learning.
Thesis 92 – Roots of Democracy
Humans thrive amidst webs of social relationships. Our innate self-centredness is tempered by the social skills learnt within the family; families prosper when they are supported by others within recognisable and lively communities, while dynamic communities are the bedrock on which democracy has to be built. An over-dose of individuality (important as that is […]
Thesis 85 – Does Every Child Matter
All children deserve the chance to grow up in a loving, secure family. They could have the chance to fulfil their potential if society reduced levels of educational failure, ill health, substance abuse, teenage pregnancies, abuse and neglect, crime and anti-social behaviour among children and young people1. The Report “Every Child Matters”2 was stimulated […]
Thesis 83 – Schools for Sale
Wanted… Sponsors for City Academies, a new form of state secondary school independent of local authority control. A bargain too good to miss! Two million pounds sponsorship will release a twenty-five million pound government grant. Sponsors of three academies will be offered a fourth free-of-charge.1 To hear this in 2005 sounds bizarre. And it […]
Thesis 82 – Making More Sense
While there has to be an absolute limit to what a person can be taught, and even more to what they can memorise, there is no limit to what a motivated person who knows how to think, and collaborate with others, can learn for themselves. Curious as it may seem the Department of Education […]
Thesis 73 – Technology, Dream or Nightmare?
Why is it, people ask themselves time and again, that after years of conventional teaching do so many youngsters appear to have little personal initiative, seem so unwilling to accept responsibility… after all, at the age of eleven so many of them left their primary schools alert, excited, inquisitive?1 By the mid 1980s an […]
Thesis 72 – Lost Dreams
The more parents urge schools to concentrate on the development of their children’s academic ability, the more schools concentrate on intellectual skills and examinations at the expense of other valuable activities. When society itself is so deeply divided on issues of right and wrong it is virtually impossible to provide pupils with an effective moral […]
Thesis 71 – Fool’s Gold
“No one would remember the Good Samaritan if he had only had good intentions. He had money as well (and) pennies don’t fall from Heaven, they have to be earned on earth. (Let’s get this clear)… there is no such thing as Society; there are only individual men and women, and there are families”1. […]
Thesis 69 – Fair Deals for All
Comprehensive schools were conceived as a beautiful dream by ardent educationalists; they were frequently delivered in confusion, and developed for the most part in a mêlée of indifference, during which many of those who should have been fully engaged looked instead only for sectional advantage. The relationship of school to community is inevitably convoluted; […]
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