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
Responsibility
Thesis 67 – Equal Opportunities
The early 1960s were for Britain a rare moment of opportunity; post-war prosperity had created a more homogenous, more socially ambitious and optimistic people, yet culturally and educationally the country still remained divided by an education system designed at other times to serve a very different kind of people. The provision of technical schools […]
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 54 – Preparation for Democracy
Schools, as relatively self-contained communities made up of people of diverse character and ability should, in the way that they are organised, seek to reflect the dynamics of the less structured natural communities into which young people will inevitably graduate as adults. Schools will be at their most successful when they saturate children with […]
Thesis 50 – Who’s Responsible?
What a person achieves through their own efforts they most value. Where individuals, through the nature of the economic system in which they live, cannot earn sufficient to provide for the proper education of their own children, then the future well-being of that society, as well as that of their children in particular, will be […]
Thesis 43 – Payment by Results
“Anyone who will look before him must see the growing political importance of the mass of the population. They will have power. In a very short time they will be paramount. I wish them to be enlightened, in order that they may use that power which they will inevitably obtain.”1 Until 1833 the […]
Why did we let it happen?
Thoughts on reading “Towards a Totalitarian Education System in England” by Sir Peter Newsam.
Deschooling our Humanity
Everywhere not only education but also society as a whole needs “deschooling.”
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’.
Magnanimity
The oft forgotten part of Milton’s trinity – justice, skilfulness and a generous heart
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