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
Thesis 65 – New Beginnings
Children grow, both physically and mentally, at different rates; many a child rated as bright or dull has confounded the experts not only in later life but even within a few years, or even months. What all children need is to have their intellectual curiosity so fired up that they will go on learning long […]
Thesis 64 – Choirboys to Teddyboys
The “Janet and John”1 nuclear family of the post-war years was quickly overtaken by those who were born in the Great War2, schooled during the slump, conscripted in the Second World War, and rationed for years afterwards. They would not willingly forego the security and comforts now within their grasp, in the hope of some […]
Thesis 62 – Learning Makes Sense
“Our education, like our civilisation, is penetrated with an unintelligent utilitarianism, which makes us feel that we ought to be doing something ‘useful’; useful subjects are indispensable, but the prior task of education is surely to inspire, to give a sense of values and the power of distinguishing in life, as in lesser things, what […]
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 47 – An Educational Rape
“You are all of you in this land brothers”, Plato told the Greeks, “but when God formed you he added gold in the composition of those who were qualified to be Rulers; he put silver in the Auxiliaries; and iron and bronze in the farmers and the rest”.1 The mid-Victorians thought differently to […]
Thesis 38 – The Cost of Wealth
The Industrial Revolution was the most fundamental transformation of human life in the history of the world. The British have been profoundly marked by the experience of our economic and social pioneering, and remain marked by this ─ even, it seems, in genetic terms ─ to the present day.1 The cotton industry2 best exemplifies […]
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 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 […]
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