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
Culture
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 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 14 – Significance of Narrative
Humans are a story-telling species. Faced with a multiplicity of facts and ideas which we may only imperfectly understand, we use stories to create frameworks that help us to transmit the sense of what we understand to other people. Our culture is contained within the stories we tell. The thing which humans need more than […]
Thesis 11 – Playing to One’s Strengths
Psychologists for long pondered the question, “Which is more important — Nature or Nurture?” It has always been an emotionally charged debate. Political demagogues in the twentieth century incited their peoples to extremes of racialism having convinced themselves that certain cultural features ‘were there in the blood’. This led to eugenics. Research now shows conclusively […]
Thesis 1 – Providing Roots and Wings for our Children
[Please scroll down to listen to an audio version of this thesis] The education of children is the most important task parents, or a nation, have to undertake; on them the future well-being of the world depends. Through the combined influence of home, community and school, education has to create men and women capable of […]
Deschooling our Humanity
Everywhere not only education but also society as a whole needs “deschooling.”
Pilgrim or Customer: Master and Apprentice, Chapter 17
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