Transcript Manchester Urban Conference

Gloucester Association of Primary Heads’ Annual Conference 2009
“What does the future hold for us?”
“What is IT all about”
John Abbott
President, The 21st Century Learning Initiative
Supporting documentation for this discussion can be downloaded
from
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6th November2009
Cheltenham Chase Hotel Brockworth
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“Do not confine your children to your
own learning, for they were born in
another time.”
ANCIENT HEBREW PROVERB
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“We have not inherited this world from
our parents. We have been loaned it by
our children.”
NATIVE AMERICAN TRADITION
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“I
call
therefore
a
complete
and
generous education that which fits a
man to perform justly, skilfully and
magnanimously all the offices both
private and public, of peace and war.”
JOHN MILTON, 1644
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“... The work of the Department of
Education and Employment fits with a
new economic imperative of supply-side
investment for national prosperity.”
MINISTER OF EDUCATION, 2001
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Why Education?
In 1948 some three years after he had been appointed Chief
Education Officer for Hertfordshire to begin implementing the 1944
Education Act John Newsome wrote a remarkable book, The Child at
School, to help parents understand what education was all about.
In the Introduction he wrote: “Always remember this: a child is a
child first, and a school child second.”
Answering his own question, why education?, he wrote: “Education
is ultimately a political issue, for it is concerned with the child’s
relationship to the world both as a child and as a future adult. In
other words, until you have decided what the relationship between
man and God or man and other men should be, and what form of
political and economic society you would like to see, you cannot tell
what sort of education a child should have.”
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George Baines: Obituary in The Guardian 27th October 2009
George was the youngest of 13 children and lost his father, a farmer, when he was four.
He was brought up by his sister as their mother was disabled. He attended Newland
Park Training College in 1951-53, taught in primary schools in Buckinghamshire and
was appointed Headmaster of Brize Norton Primary School in Oxford in 1962 and died
in September 2009.
“I am sure that teaching is an art and that teachers are artists.
The teacher teaches what he is, more than what he knows, and
as an artist involves and gives of himself with love.”
His children would begin the day with whatever task they wished. There was a strong
sense of direction, with teachers supporting each child to acquire the six “selves”: selfawareness, self-confidence, self-direction, self-discipline, self-criticism and self-esteem
– acquired in that order. The whole school community, adults and children, were
encouraged to work with Industry, Integrity and Imagination.
“If the three I’s and six ‘selves’ were developed well with good
teaching the 3 R’s would follow, Baines believed .”
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“Classes are boring, ‘cos we don’t
have to think about what we are
doing. We’re just told to copy stuff
down off the board or from what the
teacher tells us. It makes us lazy… in
fact, sorry to say this, but it’s you
teachers who make us lazy.”
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I learned most not from
those who taught me
but from those who
talked with me.
St. Augustine
6th Century
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Some learning experiences... For all
•
•
•
•
•
•
The dawn of the day
The ebb and flow of the tide
The opening of a flower
Strength and fragility
Conformity and protest
Permanence and transience
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"To us the sun appears to be the largest and brightest of
the stars, but it is actually the smallest and the faintest.
There are many billions of galaxies in the observable
universe. Our planet Earth is a puny object in a violent,
unbelievably vast and expanding universe. Our very
existence is a consequence of stability of the sun, which
has been burning long enough to allow life to evolve and
flourish on our planet. It is that violent and blazing star
whose light and heat comes to us from ninety-three
million miles away that makes it possible for us to sit
comfortably in our homes thinking about it all”.
(Continued)
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“That act of thought is almost as great a miracle as
the universe itself. We are a submicroscopic dot in
a tiny corner of a small galaxy in a universe
containing billions of galaxies, but in us the
universe has become conscious, has started thinking
about itself. The sun is not thinking about itself as
it burns; the universe is not thinking about, is not
conscious of itself as it explodes through space; but
we are. Something is going on in us that is as
wonderful and extraordinary as the universe itself”.
Doubts and Loves: What is left of Christianity, Richard Holloway, 2001
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The Creation Story (Part 1)
To demonstrate how late the human species arrived on Earth the
environmentalist David Brower in the 1990s devised an ingenious
narrative by compressing the age of the planet into the six days of the
Biblical creation story.
In this scenario Earth is created on Sunday at midnight. Life in the form
of the first bacterial cells appears on Tuesday morning around 8:00am,
and for the next two and half days the microcosm evolves. By Thursday
at midnight it is fully established. On Friday around 4:00pm, the
microorganisms invent sexual reproduction, and on Saturday, the last day
of creation all the visible forms of life evolve.
Around 1:30am on Saturday the first marine animals are formed, and by
9:30am the first plants come ashore, followed two hours later by
amphibians and insects. At 10 minutes before five in the afternoon the
great reptiles appear, roam the earth in lush tropical forests for five hours
and then suddenly die around 9:45pm.
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The Creation Story (part 2)
Shortly before 10:00pm some tree-dwelling mammals in the tropics
evolve into the first primates. An hour later some of those evolve into
monkeys; and around 11:40pm the great apes appear. Eight minutes
before midnight the first Southern apes stand up and walk on two legs.
Five minutes later they disappear again. The first human species,
Homo Habilis, appears four minutes before midnight, evolves into
Homo Erectus half a minute later and into archaic forms Homo
Sapiens 30 seconds before midnight.
The Neanderthals command Europe and Asia from 15 to 4 seconds
before midnight. The modern human species, finally, appears in Africa
11 seconds before midnight and in Europe five seconds before
midnight. Written human history begins around two-thirds of a second
before midnight.
Story is paraphrased from Fritj of Capra
The Web of Life, 1996
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The Descent of Man
Studies in genetics suggest that the split with the
Great Apes occurred seven million years ago. At
twenty years to a generation that is three hundred
and fifty thousand generations ago.
In all that time the genetic structure of us humans
differs from the Great Apes by less than 2%.
Three hundred and fifty thousand generations is, at
a minute a generation, equivalent to the number of
minutes we are, on average, awake for in a year.
See Before the Dawn: Recovering the lost history of our ancestors
by Nicholas Wade, an Englishman and Science Correspondence for the New York Times
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To MEANDER... To follow a winding course; to wander aimlessly.
A MEANDER (geographic term)... A bend in a winding river, resulting
from helicoidal flow.
HELICOIDAL... A movement of water like a corkscrew, eroding from
one side, and building up on the other; a natural process of adjusting to
constantly changing conditions.
HELICOIDAL THINKING ... is dynamic; instantly reacting to changing
circumstances. Over hundreds of thousands of generations the human
brain has come to work in such a natural, dynamic, meandering way.
The Danish Nobel winning Physicist, Neils Bohr, understood this as he
remonstrated with a PhD student... “You’re not thinking, you’re just
being logical”.
So this lecture will, for very good reasons, be a “meander”... taking
ideas from one place and building them up in another in response to
changing circumstances, and creating new meaning.
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“Learning about Human Learning” —
The emergence of a new Synthesis
Drawn from several disciplines
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
Philosophy, and later pedagogy
Evolutionary Theory
Psychology (Behaviourism)
Cognitive Science (Metacognition)
Neurobiology
Evolutionary Psychology
Anthropology and Archaeology
Genetics
Values (philosophy, purpose); Nature via Nurture
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Nature via Nurture
Genes are designed to take their cues from nurture. To
appreciate what has happened, you will have to abandon
cherished notions and open your mind. You will have to
enter a world where your genes are not puppet masters
pulling the strings of your behaviour, but are puppets at the
mercy of your behaviour, a world where instinct is not the
opposite of learning, where environmental influences are
sometimes less reversible than genetic ones, and where
nature is designed for nurture… the human brain is built for
nurture.
Matt Ridley
Nature via Nurture 2003
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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
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“You can take Man out of
the Stone Age, but you
can’t take the Stone Age
out of Man.”
Nigel Nicholson, Harvard Business Review
July / August 1998
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A Short Walk through Economic History
The graph depicts the growth of world population and some major events in the history of technology.
The graph comes from Robert William Fogel. The Fourth Great Awakening & The Future of
Egalitarianism, 2000.
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Evolutionary Intelligence
"Human beings, together with all their likes and
dislikes, their senses and sensibilities, did not fall
ready-made from the sky; nor were they born with
minds and bodies that bare no imprints of the history
of their species.
Many of our abilities and
susceptibilities are specific adaptations to ancient
environmental problems, rather than separate
manifestations of a general intelligence for all
Seasons."
John D. Barrow
The Artful Universe, 1996
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Pregnancy and the Developing Brain
"There is no period of parenthood with a more
direct and formative effect on a child's brain, than
the last three months of pregnancy leading to the
birth of a full term baby. The mother's emotions
affect the fetus, and so do her general habits and
the parent's physical environment. (Probably) half
of birth defects are due to avoidable exposure to
medicinal drugs, recreational drugs, alcohol,
tobacco smoke, and toxic agents at work and at
home.”
Marian Diamond
The Magic Trees of the Mind, 1998
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"We have unequivocal evidence that breast-fed
children are physically stronger than
nonbreast-fed children, that they have greater
verbal, quantitative and memory abilities as
pre-schoolers, and significantly higher I.Q.
scores during their school years. This is due
not simply to healthy substances in the milk, as
many assume, but also to the early motherchild relationship that breast-feeding implies."
Karl Zinsmesiter,
The American Enterprise, May/June 1998
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Mechanisation? Big Brother?
"Almost three hundred American employers, including
Aetna, Eastman Kodak, Cigna and Home Depot, now offer
"Lactation Support Rooms" where female employees can
now take regular breaks to attach electric pumps to their
breasts in order to collect milk in bottles for their infants in
day care. Some companies, aside from the 'pumping rooms',
have "lactation consultants" to help mothers solve breastfeeding problems."
Original quotation in “There's No Place Like Work” by Brian Robertson,
and re-quoted in “Nasty, Brutish and Short”, an article by Richard Lowry
in National Review, May 2001
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“Why Love Matters: How Affection
shapes a baby’s brain”
“Our earliest experiences are not simply laid down as
memories or influences; they are translated into precise
physiological patterns of response in the brain that then
set the neurological rules for how we deal with our
feelings and those of other people for the rest of our
lives. It’s not nature or nurture, but both. How we are
treated as babies and toddlers determines the way in
which what we’re born with turns into what we are.”
Sue Gerhardt 2004
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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
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“As we build networks and patterns of synaptic
connections when we are very young, so we build
the framework which will ‘shape’ how we learn as
we get older; such ‘shaping’ will significantly
determine what we learn – it will be both an
opportunity, and a constraint. The broader and
more diverse the experience when very young, the
greater are the chances that, later in life, the
individual will be able to handle open, ambiguous,
uncertain and novel situations.”
The Neural Basis of Cognitive Development: A Constructivist Manifesto“ by Stephen J.
Quartz and Terrence Sejnowski, The Salk Institute, San Diego, California
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Adolescence
Adolescence is currently seen as a "problem" in Western
Society; that excess of hormones leaves the rapidly
maturing child unaware of its new physical strength, and
confused as to how to direct it. While modern parents
and teachers find adolescence disruptive, earlier cultures
directed this energy in ways that developed those skills
on which the community was dependent for its ongoing
survival. In doing so it also ensured that young people
learned, and practiced, what was seen as appropriate
social behavior.
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Are Teenagers Necessary?
Modern society seems to have moved, without skipping a beat, from
blaming our parents for the ills of society, to blaming our children.
For most of our history, the labours of young people in their teens
was too important to be sacrificed – ‘schooling’ for teenagers
remained a minority activity until well into the twentieth century. In
fact teenagers can be seen to be an invention of the Machine Age. It
was Roosevelt’s solution to the Depression years to take teenagers
out of the jobs that could be done by formerly unemployed family
men by requiring all early teenagers to attend High School. “But, for
very many youngsters, High School, which virtually defines the rise
of the teenagers, is hardly an exalted place”.
“The Rise and Fall of the American Teenager”
Thomas Hine, page 1-9
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Adolescence
and
Apprenticeship
forms
of
learning
Thomas Hine writing in 1999 on the rise and fall of the
American teenager noted, “the principle reason high schools
now enroll nearly all teenagers is that we can’t imagine what else
to do with them.” That is a shocking conclusion by a man who
spent years studying the issue. Modern society, by being so
concerned for the well being of adults tries desperately to ignore
the adolescents’ need to explore and do things for themselves, by
giving them ever more to do in school. It is as if modern society
is trying to outlaw adolescence by over schooling children. That
is not education. There is a frightening manmade hole in the
desirable experience for adolescence - there are simply not
enough opportunities for them to learn from doing things for
themselves in a modern society.
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Crazy by Design
We have suspected that there is something going on in the brain of
the adolescent, apparently involuntarily, that is forcing apart the
child/parent relationship. What neurologists are discovering
challenges the conventional belief held until only a year or so ago,
that brain formation is largely completed by the age of twelve.
Adolescence is a period of profound structural change, in fact “the
changes taking place in the brain during adolescence are so
profound, they may rival early childhood as a critical period of
development”, wrote Barbara Strauch in 2003. “The teenage
brain, far from being readymade, undergoes a period of
surprisingly complex and crucial development.” The adolescent
brain, she suggests, “is crazy by design.”
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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,” could be 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.
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DON'T FENCE ME IN
(Cole Porter)
Oh, give me land, lots of land under starry skies, Don't fence me in
Let me ride through the wide open country that I love, Don't fence me in
Let me be by myself in the evenin' breeze
And listen to the murmur of the cottonwood trees
Send me off forever but I ask you please, Don't fence me in
Just turn me loose, let me straddle my old saddle
Underneath the western skies
On my Cayuse, let me wander over yonder
Till I see the mountains rise
I want to ride to the ridge where the west commences
And gaze at the moon till I lose my senses
And I can't look at hovels and I can't stand fences
Don't fence me in, no
Pop, oh don't you fence me in
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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.
Overschooled but Undereducated calls for these
assumptions to be reversed in the light of modern
understanding about how humans learn.
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“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
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To remain a pupil is to
serve your teacher badly.
Friedrich Nietzche
1844-1900
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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
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Tell me, and I forget;
show me, and I remember;
let me do and I understand.
Chinese Proverb
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“How the well-being of British children compares”
Unicef used six categories to judge young people in 21 countries
Dimensions of child
well-being
Average ranking
position (all
dimensions)
Dimension 1
poverty and
inequality
Dimension 2
Health and safety
The Independent 14/02/07
Dimension 3
Education
Dimension 4
Family and
friendships
Dimension 5
Sex, Drink,
drugs
Dimension 6
Happiness
Netherlands
4.2
10
2
6
3
3
1
Sweden
5.0
1
1
5
15
1
7
Denmark
7.2
4
4
8
9
6
12
Finland
7.5
3
3
4
17
7
11
Spain
8.0
12
6
15
8
5
2
Switzerland
8.3
5
9
14
4
12
6
Norway
8.7
2
8
11
10
13
8
Italy
10.0
14
5
20
1
10
10
Ireland
10.2
19
19
7
7
4
5
Belgium
10.7
7
16
1
5
19
16
Germany
11.2
13
11
10
13
11
9
Canada
11.8
6
13
2
18
17
15
Greece
11.8
15
18
16
11
8
3
Poland
12.3
21
15
3
14
2
19
Czech republic
12.5
11
10
9
19
9
17
France
13.0
9
7
18
12
14
18
Portugal
13.7
16
14
21
2
15
14
Austria
13.8
8
20
19
16
16
4
Hungry
14.5
20
17
13
6
18
13
United States
18.0
17
21
12
20
20
-
United Kingdom
18.2
18
12
17
21
21
20
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Education is what remains after
you have forgotten everything
you ever learnt in school
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“I call a complete and generous
education that which equips a man to
perform justly, skillfully and
magnanimously all the offices public
and private of peace and war”
John Milton, 1644
As quoted in The Child at School, J.H. Newsom,
1948
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Education is the ability to
perceive the hidden
connections between
phenomena.
Vaclav Havel, 2000
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There
aren’t
any
great
people out there anymore –
there’s only us.
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For further information:
Web
Email
www.21learn.org
[email protected]
Website:
Email:
UK contacts
Telephone:
Fax:
www.21learn.org
[email protected]
[email protected]
01225 333376
01225 339133
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