Transcript Silos and Quantum Mechanics?

Silos or Quantum
Mechanics?
John Abbott
President, The 21st Century Learning Initiative
Presentation at HRSDC Knowledge Conference
Co-sponsored by the Canadian Council on Learning
Battery Hens
or
Free Range Chickens?
Traditionally, Education has often been likened to a
three-legged stool, which will always adjust to the
most uneven surface (unlike a four-legged chair)
The Home (Emotions)
The Community (Inspiration)
The School (Intellectual)
Progressively, however, modern society had
attempted to define Education as Schooling and
has defined schools as having a similar three parts
- Academic, Socialisation and Control
You can't bring up children to be
intelligent in a world that is not
intelligible to them. Streets that are
unsafe for children to play in are as
much a measure of failed
educational policy as are burnt out
teachers and decaying classrooms
There are three crises within modern
society, the lack of resolution of which is
placing an unbearable pressure on
schooling, and the expectations of young
people:
• Global warming, and a potential ecological
collapse
• The exploitation of non-renewal resources
• Collapse in mental health as a result of
excessive work and activity pressure, and
increased population
Education is the ability to
perceive the hidden connections
between phenomena.
Vaclav Havel, 2000
Tell me, and I forget;
show me, and I remember;
let me do, and I understand.
Chinese Proverb
Research from the Kellogg Foundation, conducted in
the State of Michigan, into the predictors of success at
the age of 18
"[This] compared the relative influence that family,
community and other factors have on student
performance. Amazingly it concluded that factors
outside the school are four times more important in
determining a student's success on standardized tests
than are factors within the school.”
"The most significant predictor was the quantity and
quality of dialogue in the child's home before the age
of five."
Quoted at The White House Conference on Early Childhood Development
and Learning, April 1997
“Learning about Human Learning”
The emergence of a new Synthesis drawn
from several disciplines
1) Philosophy, and later pedagogy
2) Evolutionary Theory
3) Psychology (Behaviourism)
4) Cognitive Science (Metacognition)
5) Neurobiology
6) Evolutionary Psychology
7) Values (philosophy, purpose); Nature via
Nurture
Our bodies and minds are not of recent origin.
They are the direct consequence of millions of
years of surviving in Africa and adapting to the
dramatic changes this continent has seen in the
course of the last five million years. Africa has
shaped not only our physical bodies, but the
societies within which we live. The way we interact
today at a social and cultural level is in many ways
the result of organisational skills developed by our
hominid ancestors in Africa over millions of years.
Cradle of Humankind
Brett Hilton-Barber and Lee R. Berger, South Africa, 2002
"Edelman's model of our brain as a rich,
layered, messy, unplanned jungle eco-system
is especially intriguing, however, because it
suggests that a jungle-like brain might thrive
best in a jungle-like classroom that includes
many sensory, cultural, and problem " layers
that are closely related to the real world
environment in which we live - the environment
that best stimulates the neural networks that
are genetically tuned to it.”
A Celebration of Neurons, Robert Sylwester, June 1995
Learning, Behaviourists asserted, was all
about being taught. With the appropriate
teaching, they argued, it was possible to
condition people in any way specified.
Inadequate learning could then be explained
by ineffective teaching methods, rather than
any possibility that the very methods
employed by schoolteachers might run
totally counter to the “grain of the brain” –
the way people learn naturally.
Human babies are born with brains that contain a
mass of evolutionarily constructed predispositions
that enable the baby to mastermind its own
subsequent brain growth. It is this phenomenal
natural talent for learning that accounts for our
species growing from being almost helplessly
vulnerable at birth to eventually becoming the
dominant species on the planet. It is our brains
that give us this dominance, not our muscles – and
our brains do not grow through instruction, but
have evolved to learn from direct experience.
QuickTime™ and a
TIFF (LZW) decompressor
are needed to see this picture.
We now know that Behaviourism is a
significantly flawed concept. If today’s
secondary schools are the wrong place for
the descendants of brilliant stone age
thinkers to thrive in, then society as a whole
(and certainly not simply the schools on their
own) has to rethink how to direct the
creative energy of adolescence to the
overall good of the community.
Neurobiology is just starting to show that, far
from such behaviour being simply the result
of tempestuous hormones, the physiological
changes taking place in the adolescent brain
are so profound that they rival the growth
spur of early childhood. These structural
changes, only apparent to scientists in the
last five or so years, suggest that the
adolescent brain is passing through a period
of structural reorganisation that is every bit
as critical as are the first few months of life.
Adolescence
From the earliest of times the progression from
dependent child to autonomous adult has been
an issue of critical importance to all societies.
The adolescent brain, being “crazy by design,”
is a critical evolutionary adaptation that has
built up over countless generations, and is
essential to our species’ survival. It is
adolescence that drives human development
by forcing young people in every generation to
think beyond their own self-imposed limitations
and exceed their parents’ aspirations.
These neurological changes in the young brain
as it transforms itself means that adolescents
have evolved to be apprentice-like learners, not
pupils sitting at desks awaiting instruction.
Youngsters who are empowered as
adolescents to take charge of their own futures
will make better citizens for the future than did
so many of their parents and their grandparents
who suffered from being overschooled but
undereducated in their own generations.
From the findings of cognitive apprenticeship, it
would seem that a model of learning is needed
that gives every support possible to the youngest
learners (both to the children themselves, as well
as the range of adults who support them) so that,
as the child grows older, it takes more control of its
own learning.
Such a Model of Learning would match exactly the
neurological progression of the brain of the young
child as it transforms itself into the adolescent
brain. Adolescents, it seems, have evolved to be
apprentice-like learners, not pupils sitting at desks
awaiting instruction.
Upside Down and Inside Out
A possible description of the assumption we
have inherited about systems of learning,
namely, that older students should be taken
more seriously than younger students and
that the only learning that really matters is
that which is formal. This presentation will
call for these assumptions to be reversed in
the light of modern understanding about how
humans learn.
INTELLECTUAL WEANING
("Do it yourself")
SUBSIDIARITY:
It is wrong for a superior body to retain
the right to make decisions that an
inferior body is already able to make for
itself.
"Much to my surprise I can't really fault your
theory. You are probably educationally right;
certainly your argument is ethically correct.
But the system you're arguing for would require
very good teachers. We're not convinced that
there will ever be enough good teachers. So,
instead, we're going for a teacher-proof system
of organising schools - that way we can get a
uniform standard."
Verbatim report of conclusions of
presentation made to the Policy Unit at
Downing Street in March 1996
Public policy in England has come to be based
on the assumption that schools can do more
and more of what earlier the home and
community had considered was their
contribution to the raising of children. We now
place excessive emphasis on the art of
teaching while being politically afraid to remind
ourselves that the full education of young
people requires the active, responsible
involvement of parents and the whole
community. By default we are expecting
schools to do it all.
Traditionally, Education has often been likened to a
three-legged stool, which will always adjust to the
most uneven surface (unlike a four-legged chair)
The Home (Emotions)
The Community (Inspiration)
The School (Intellectual)
Progressively, however, modern society had
attempted to define Education as Schooling and
has defined schools as having a similar three parts
- Academic, Socialisation and Control
"The intellectual and emotional features of the
human mind both arise from a single source,
namely, complex emotional interaction. By
fostering rapidly increasing impersonality in
every aspect of life, however, the structure of
modern society undermines the foundations of
the mind. Advanced societies thus risk
destroying the basis of their own achievements.
If certain trends continue, society stands to lose
not only its soul but also the prize for which
Faust traded his own soul, the ability to acquire
and use knowledge.”
-Stanley Greenspan
Policy makers need to ponder these issues
most carefully, reappraising the effect an
outcome-based system of education has upon
schools and the unbalanced curriculum they
offer. It is paramount that they consider the
impact this has on teachers, all too often killing
their ability to think for themselves, to innovate
or be creative, to respond to the needs of the
children they know well and to lead them on to
become independent radical thinkers. This is
the new world at whose birth we all have to
assist.
Supporting documentation for this
discussion can be downloaded
from the Initiative’s website:
http://www.21learn.org
UK contacts
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fax. +44 (0) 1225 339 133
email: [email protected]