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
Evolution/Ancestors
Thesis 6 – Burning with Curiosity
[Please scroll down to listen to an audio version of this thesis] It is inquisitiveness that best defines what we humans are all about. We ask endless questions, the answers to which often beg still further questions. From the darting, curious, eyes of a baby only a few weeks old, to the growing child’s persistent […]
Thesis 4 – Ancestral Influences
[Please scroll down to listen to an audio version of this thesis] We humans with our likes and dislikes, our senses and our sensibilities, didn’t fall ready-made from the sky; nor were we born with minds and bodies that bear no imprint of the history of our species. The way we interact today at a […]
Thesis 3 – The Amazing Brain
[Please scroll down to listen to an audio version of this thesis] The human race is the planet’s pre-eminent learning species − it is our brains that give us our superiority, not our muscles. The brain has evolved over vast periods of time to become the most complex organism in the known universe. It is […]
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 […]
The Story, so Far
Can we – in this generation that knows so much about where we have come from – help our children to be wise rather than greedy?
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’
Competitive or Collaborative?
It is an ages-old question; are humans predominantly competitive or collaborative? If we can be both what conditions how we behave from moment to moment?
The Evolution of Despair
Collapse of civility “Millions of Britons unable to cope with modern life,” the Young Foundation reported last week portraying Britain as a psychologically fragile society where increasing wealth is often accompanied by soaring levels of individual isolation and distrust. What goes around, it seems comes around. It was 14 years since Time Magazine published The […]
Chief Bureaucrat?
Political Banana Skins The BBC series Yes Minister was some of the finest political satire ever seen on television. Hacker (Paul Eddington) infuriated his Permanent Secretary (Nigel Hawthorne) by his ability to pick up what seemed the right issues, and then confuse these with his need to win votes. In one particular episode Hacker, as […]
Knowing Your Way Around
Understanding Maps We live in a world full of devices which, it is claimed, make life easier. Hardly anyone under the age of 45 can remember what it was like before the invention of hand-held calculators when, if you wanted to keep check of your purchases before you got to the checkout, you had to […]
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.