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
Survival
Thesis 40 – Schoolroom, Workshop or Quarterdeck?
Apprenticeship, with its structured approach to hands-on-learning and its effective application of adolescent brawn, had largely created the conditions for England’s spectacular industrial growth. Yet apprenticeship was to become the first major casualty of the Industrial Revolution, while the grammar schools were to linger on in their unreformed state for a further half century. […]
Thesis 26 – Reformation
At rare and unpredictable moments a revolutionary concept fundamentally changes the underlying assumptions that had previously held an assortment of beliefs together. This is known as a Paradigm Shift1, a totally new mindset that reshapes relationships so that nothing can ever be seen in the same way again. Travellers in England early in the […]
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 10 – I Can or I.Q?
We admire people who sense what is the right thing to do in an unfamiliar situation. Intelligence is more than just a general capacity to learn, to reason or to understand, it is a quickness to apprehend, as distinct from ability which is the capacity to act wisely on the thing comprehended. Intelligence is […]
Thesis 8 – Endless Chatterers
[Please scroll down to listen to an audio version of this thesis] Humans Love to talk. It’s conversation that helps the youngest brains to grow, and the oldest brains to remain agile. The more we talk the larger becomes our vocabulary (the average Englishman has a vocabulary of some seventy-five thousand words). As an […]
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 […]
HMC Conference, St Andrews
The most complete statement of the Initiative’s ideas
Leaders, Learners and the Hero’s Journey
Delivered before the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development March 19, 1996 by Stephanie Pace Marshall, President of the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy.
The Impact of Brain Research on Possible Structures of Learning
An incomplete, but most interesting paper, challenging the structure of schooling
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