Transcript Ministry of Education - The 21st Century Learning

Ministry of Education
British Columbia
February 27th, 2012
• The Innovation Conference of 2004 and the paper “Peter Puget, Adolescence,
and the Grain of the Brain”
• Subsequently asked to address the BC School trustees Association; through
the Canadian Council on Learning spoke in some 20 districts across the
province; two separate presentations to the Superintendents’ Conference
• January 2009: publication of Overschooled But Undereducated;
• April 2009: addressed some 400 members of the BC Ministry of Education and
subsequently (June) circulated the paper “Schools for the Future”
• Several visits to school districts on Vancouver Island and specifically to the
Gulf Islands School District; wide-scale international circulation of the paper
“No Small Matter”
• October 2011: visit to BC culminated in a presentation with UVic and
members of the Ministry: “you need to knock your heads together more often”
• Ted Riecken, Dean of Education at UVic, issued an invitation to come back
for a three week period – invitation supported by the Ministry”
• In the four months that followed, in addition to much else, I prepared for
this visit by publishing “Why is School Reform Difficult and often
Problematic” and then prepared a script for a possible television series,
based on these ideas, to be entitled “The Brilliance of their Minds”
• In preparation for the visit, I set up four set-piece lectures:
• “It’s your world to shape, not just to take” (a student presentation)
• “British Columbia and the Future of Teacher Education”
• “Why is School reform Difficult and Often Problematic”
• “The Narrative, necessary to change the future” (as seen from the
perspective of the Anglo-American model of education)
• Unfortunately this three week period has been more segmented most,
which has made it difficult to build up a consistent argument, leaving many
participants excited, but disconnected from the main themes
Who is doing what… and does it add
up to very much?
"This is what we are about. We plant seeds that one day will grow. We
water seeds already planted, knowing that they hold future promise.
We lay foundations that will need further development. We provide
yeast that produces effects far beyond our capabilities.
"We cannot do everything, and there is a sense of liberation in
realising that. This enables us to do something, and enables us to do it
very well It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning, a step along the
way, an opportunity for the Lord's grace to enter and do the rest. We
may never see the end result, but that is the difference between the
master builder, and the worker.
"We are workers, not master builders, ministers, not Messiahs.
We are prophets of a future not our own".
Archbishop Oscar Romero, 1980
No Small Matter… Beyond Technicalities , to
Matters of Substance
A society that has still to rediscover
reasons for its faith in the future is a
mean place in which to bring up our
children.
Beyond the nursery or the classroom, two
narratives are competing for our support.
The stronger, more apparently attractive and certainly
the most strident since the 1980s is that life is improved
by maximising your wealth so as to participate as fully as
possible in the good life.
The second, upon which the future of our planet and the
survival of the human race may depend, has emerged
progressively over the past five years; it is about the need
to adjust individual life aspirations so as to achieve
ecological and social sustainability.
These are very different, and competitive, narratives –
the first argues for the rights of the individual, the latter
for interdependence and community.
The struggle is being fought over the remains of much
older narratives, well-known in their different guises to
our ancestors.
These older narratives had been about moderating and
civilising the competing drivers of human behaviour that
would otherwise bring chaos to individuals and societies
by establishing a sense of the common good.
In today’s “let’s have it all now” society we have forgotten
the social significance of those spiritual traditions which
in the past sought to “bind” the individual and
community together for mutual benefit and create a
sense of meaning.
Like an Impressionist painting composed of thousands
upon thousands of apparently disconnected dots, we only
brilliance of the artist when our focus
understand the
shifts from seeing the separate dots
to suddenly appreciating the picture
as a whole. Even when we have the
whole picture nothing can be
achieved without a fundamental
change of heart on the part of the
people themselves.
A campaign to reverse an overschooled but
undereducated society cannot be masterminded
by any single, brilliant strategist.
It requires distributed leadership, and for
that to be effective everyone needs to be really
knowledgeable about why they are involved and
the rightness and urgency of the cause.
For young people to utilise their innate predispositions to the full,
they need both a formal, rigorous curriculum and a whole
experience of life that will later sustain and make them strong
enough to deal with all the vagaries of life.
John Milton, a man of towering intellect and much practical
common sense, spoke from a time before reductionism sought to
undermine the glory and complexity of what being human could
mean. He gave a definition of education nearly four centuries ago
that we need to rediscover:
I call therefore a complete and generous
education that which fits a man to perform
justly, skilfully and magnanimously, all the
offices both public and private, of peace and
war.
That pedagogy has to honour the principle of
Subsidiarity…
It is wrong for a superior to hold to itself
the right of making a decision which an
inferior is already qualified to do for itself.
This is hugely challenging both to the current
structure of education, and to the public’s perception
that schools should be the place to do with children
what adults now think they are too busy to do for
themselves.
Civil Society…
“We have left undone those things which we ought
to have done, and we have done those things we
ought not to have done; and there is no health in
us.” (Book of Common Prayer, 1662)
In 21st Century language; to fail to do something which
you are required to do is one thing. But not to do
something which you know ought to be done makes a
person equally culpable, in a covenantal relationship, of
letting other people down.
This has nothing to do with performability,
or regulation. Policy-makers have
frequently forgotten that most day-to-day
activity has nothing to do with the law; it is
about getting on with our neighbours and
creating a quality of life that depends on our
access to people we trust, like, admire and
find fun. Children need to learn this
everywhere – from their mother’s knee, to
the nursery, to the playground and in all
their interaction with members of the
community.
• Society is “an aggregate” (something formed
from a mass of loosely connected fragments)
of people living together in more or less
orderly communities, held together through
its own natural, organic procedures. Being an
aggregate is society’s strength; or, put
another way, society is the aggregate of what
people think for themselves. Through the
sharing of our thoughts we come to
appreciate the diversity and the collective of
society as a whole.....and are the richer for
that.
In 1946 John Maynard-Keynes said:
“the day is not far off when the economic problem will
take the back seat where it belongs, and the arena of
the heart and the head will be occupied or reoccupied
by our real problems – the problems of life and of
human relations, of creation and behaviour and
religion”.
As the sense of civil society weakens so the social contract on
which the bringing up of your own child is assigned to
someone else can all too quickly lead to education becoming
a matter for private gain, not for public good. When that
happens civil society is still further undermined. Functional
civil society and genuine democracy walk hand in hand, if they
don’t, one or each stumbles.
The Brilliance of their Minds…
This possible television documentary has a most serious
intent. Too often in the past education reform has been more
concerned with addressing the obvious symptoms of a
problem, rather than addressing the cause of the problem
itself. Now in the early 21st century the present arrangements
are so overlaid by layer upon layer of ‘quick fix’ solutions that
to cut through to the underlying causes requires a level of
knowledge and background most people simply just do not
have. If ever it was true that a people who forget their history
simply live to make the same mistakes all over again, it is now.
The situation is serious.
Remember Bronowski’s “The Ascent of Man”
Civilisation can never be taken for granted for it depends on a
constant supply of responsible and tough new adolescents to
replace the worn-out skills of their elders. Education is a
multifaceted process that policy makers in many countries
simplify and codify at society’s peril, for to put excessive faith
in a highly prescriptive form of schooling inhibits the very
creativity and enterprise needed for an uncertain future. This
process has been exacerbated in recent years at National
politicians have sought to take ever greater control over its
delivery, almost regardless of what might be the specific
circumstances of individual communities.
It is not simply a crisis of schooling that has to be faced,
but the much more serious problem namely a collapsed
families and the emasculation of community.
Over the past decade several English
speaking countries, have focused
their reforming strategies on
‘breaking down’ the old structural
arrangements in the hope that this
shakeup will induce reform right
across vast systems.
The alternative is to concentrate on the minutiae of
improving the personal motivation of individuals at all
levels so as to ‘build up’ a widespread sense of
community ownership, to create the energy for
continuous improvement.
The larger the unit to be reformed, the
more difficult it is to invest in a ‘building
up’ strategy, yet it is only by investing in
the intrinsic motivation of individuals in
each community that entire systems
develop the capacity for continuous
development. Most regrettably
England and the United States have progressively
removed the control of education from local
communities, thereby directly being answerable to
large scale national directives, applying the ‘break
down’ model of development.
This documentary aims to help the English find a way out
of the ever deeper hole they have dug, by concluding
with a study of the Canadian province of British
Columbia. This province has progressively reinforced
local community ownership as a way of reaching
standards of achievement already well in advance of the
English and United States systems. With only 4.5 million
people – one twelfth of the population of the United
Kingdom but scattered over the land area three times
that size - British Columbia has no difficulty in finding
sufficient people to stand as trustees of the 60 school
districts, each administered with apparently greater
efficiency than England can do with its ever more
centralised government.
In placing its faith in local decision-making British
Columbia is far better able to innovate than is possible in
more congested England, where economies of scale too
often prove to be a dangerous illusion. 20 years before the
English established a tripartite system of secondary
schooling in 1944, British Columbia had already started to
adopt John Dewey’s belief that “education is life, not a
mere preparation for life”.
There is a technical challenge, people are losing patience with
printed text when there are more immediately attractive
technologies. People look to television to give them quick, straight
forward explanations. While a television documentary is the most
appropriate of the present media to deal with
this issue it has always to be remembered
that if the audience’s attention is lost for
even a couple of minutes they can simply
turn it off... long before the main point has
been concluded. The delivery of such
material as this has always to be
fascinating, fun and mentally challenging...
which is itself, a challenge when we are
aiming to change the very way in which
people look at an old problem but with
new insights.
The first four parts of the documentary will be
about the universality of what we know about the
learning process, mixed with the history of the
development of the English model of education
and how it has influenced the education system
throughout the English speaking world.
It is the fifth part which you
need to concentrate on.
Currently, in the possible
television text it is entitled
“British Columbia has the XFactor”
Editorial Explanation
the current script is hypothetical at this stage, but the
kinds of scenes are most likely those that will be
required to consolidate the programme – they
will be recorded pieces, when
edited would probably be less
than ten minutes in total. 3-4
mins each. two or three students
*to act rather as a kind of Greek
chorus, throwing back to the
participants the kind of ‘gutsy’
reactions that the audience might
be wishing to make themselves*
Episode 42
A Conversation between Steve Cardwell, a
number of students, and teachers as they
introduce Tony Little (Headmaster of Eton) to
British Columbia.
Episode 43
The monthly meeting of the Gulf Islands School
Board
Episode 44
A simulated meeting of the ministry of Education
staff explaining how B.C. has both held on to the
distributed authority of sixty school boards, and is
capitalizing on the wealth of intellectual thinking to
be found across the province.
Episode 45
The Faculty Club of University of Victoria, under
the chairmanship of Dr. Ted Riecken, Dean of the
Faculty of Education.
Episode 46
The Minister’s office, Legislative Buildings. This
discussion can not be scripted in advance, but the
contributions of each individual will have to be carefully
thought through in advance. They will discuss Fullan’s
report.
• when dealing with schools the best teachers are just like the
best pupils... they give of their best when they are captivated
by the excitement of what they are doing, feel totally in
control, yet confident enough to ask for help when they need
it. poor teachers, like poor pupils, however perform even
more sluggishly when they are swamped by a veritable
tsunami of instructions and directions that mean very little to
them and to which they cannot emotionally commit.
• Intrinsic motivation is critical to raising the bar for all students
and giving them those higher order skills and competencies
needed to become successful world citizens.
• Fullan says of programs based on top-down directives, “I say
flat out that there is no way such ambitious and admirable
nationwide goals will be met... for they cannot generate on a
large scale the kind of intrinsic motivational energy.”
For further information:
Web
www.born-to-learn.org
www.21learn.org
Email
[email protected]
The 21st Century Learning Initiative www.21learn.org