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
Curriculum
Thesis 75 – Edge of Chaos
Humans thrive when perched on the border between order and chaos. Too much order and we become complacent, and hardly bother to monitor ourselves; too much chaos, and so much of our energy is used simply surviving that we hardly think about new ways of doing things. Good teachers hold their pupils on this precarious […]
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 70 – Muddled Thinking
“As you leave school I have one piece of advice to give you. Develop at least two hobbies that have absolutely nothing to do with your career. Work hard at your career, but stick even more closely to your hobbies — foster them, love them, and allow yourself to be intrigued by them. Your greatest […]
Thesis 66 – Segregation
A tripartite system of secondary schools puts the child first. The different kinds of schools are to be designed to suit different children, not different social groups, or the incomes of their parents. No child should be forced into an academic education which bores it to rebellion, merely because that type of grammar school education […]
Thesis 63 – Fundamentally Flawed
Children deserve the very best education if they are to learn how to improve themselves and their communities. Their education must be geared to the world in which they live, prepare them for a full life, and help them to become adaptable. Above all else education must reach every child. Unlike 1914 Englishmen didn’t […]
Thesis 59 – Controlling Behaviour
Under pressure teachers may make things too easy for their pupils by relieving them of the necessity of finding things out for themselves. By dint of brilliant teaching they succeed in almost eliminating the learning process, so that pupils come to depend on the teacher, not on themselves. The more accomplished such teachers are in […]
Thesis 42 – Invention of Public Schools
“As on the one hand it should ever be remembered that we are boys, and boys at school, so on the other hand we must bear in mind that we form a complete social body… a society, in which, by the nature of the case, we must not only learn, but act and live; and […]
Why did we let it happen?
Thoughts on reading “Towards a Totalitarian Education System in England” by Sir Peter Newsam.
School and Curriculum or Learning and Humanity?
To embrace humanity is to embrace life. To talk about life we have to first agree that life is something we want to live.
Battling for the Soul of Education
A review of Diane Ravitch, ‘The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How testing and choice are undermining education’.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.