Master and Apprentice - The 21st Century Learning Initiative

243 Pages·2010·2.74 MB·English

Master and
Apprentice
Reuniting Thinking with Doing
John Abbott 2004
DRAFT MANUSCRIPT
NOT FOR REDISTRIBUTION
Dedication
To my three sons, Peter, David and Tom, and others of
their generation, as they seek to build a more respon-
sible, more sensitive and more self-sustaining world.
Tell me, and I forget
Show me, and I remember
Let me do, and I understand
After Confucius, China, 5th century BC
The National Curriculum sets the standards… all
schools set targets and measure their performance.
They can easily access best practice information.
They have increasing opportunities for professional
development. They are held to account through
inspections and published performance tables.
Department of Education and Employment
Schools building on Success: raising standards,
promoting diversity, achieving results.
London 2001
“(Apprenticeship) was a system of education and
job training by which important practical informa-
tion was passed from one generation to the next;
it was a mechanism by which youths could model
themselves on socially approved adults… it provided
safe passage from childhood to adulthood in psycho-
logical, social and economic ways.”
The Craft Apprentice
W.J. Rorabaugh, 1988
Acknowledgements
Firstly, and most importantly, I owe a great debt of wards, I owe a massive debt to the creative genius
gratitude to my wife, Anne, who has good-natured- of Terry Ryan, the Initiative’s senior researcher, to
ly tolerated my preoccupation with this writing Mary Robinson my secretary at the time, and to the
over the past three years, and endured much dis- staff at Rothschild Venture Capital in Connecticut
ruption to our home at the same time. Without her Avenue for the use of their offices. To Paul Cappon
this book could never have been written. Alongside in Canada as Director General of the Council of
I must thank my sons; Peter for his careful review Educational Ministers, and also to Ted Marchese of
of various books and general editorial assistance, the American Association for Higher Education; to
David for further reviews and his work on the sup- Charles Bray, the President of the Johnson Foun-
portive website, and Tom for constantly reminding dation of Wisconsin; to Stephanie Pace-Marshall
me that life is about more than writing books! To of Illinois, Dee Dickinson of Seattle, Ash Hartwell,
my trustees, especially David Peake, Tom Griffin Geoffrey and Renate Caine of California and Bob
and Chris Wysock-Wright, whose enthusiasm for Sylwester of Oregon - my absolute gratitude for
the book, and constant encouragement have reas- your help in so many ways. To Professor Dick Wil-
sured me even in the most difficult times. Special liams of Seattle, who just happened to be around at
thanks are due to my personal assistant, Doreen several of the most important parts of this story; to
Smith, who with maternal pride has seen so many Wiktor Kulerski, who did so much to rid Poland of
drafts pass through her computer; to Janet Lawley, the communist rulers and taught us in the Initia-
a Fellow of the Initiative, for much helpful advice tive so much about the art of being ‘responsible
and assistance, and to Anna South, whose edito- subversives’; to Dee Hock the founder of the Visa
rial support has been magnificent: from her I have Corporation whose life story helped us make sense
learnt the value of a thesaurus, and the magic of of complexity theory; to Ken Tolo, a senior adviser
reconstructing sentences so that the words really to the US Secretary of Education who taught me so
sing. much about the niceties of the American politi-
So many have helped with comments on the cal process, and finally to Luis Alberto Machado,
various drafts that I fear there will inevitably be former minister for the Development of National
names I have omitted, though their comments Intelligence in Venezuela, Aklilu Habte, formerly
were always taken most seriously; Tom Healy, chancellor of the Haile Selassie University in
Helen Drennen, Paul Fisher, Terry Ryan, Katie Ethiopia, Waddi Haddat, former deputy president
Jones, Glynn Scott, Bob Wolfson, Roger Nunn, of the Lebanon and Aharon Abiran, the director of
Richard Smythe, Neil Richards, Sister Theresa the Centre for Futurist Studies at the University
MacCormick, Kevin Hawkins, Keith Hildrew, John of Negev in Israel. Finally to Sally Goerner who
Quinn, Tim Baddeley, David Stein, Richard Foun- helped me to understand the history of scientific
tain, Nick Bruner, David Rosa, Lee Gibson, Daniel thought.
Wright, David Cracknell, Ann Oppenheimer, In the past four years I have been privileged to
Jacquie Hughes, Sylvia Macnamara, Kier Bloomer, work extensively with hundred of headteachers
Frank Newhoffer, Johannes Slabbert, Sue Eagle on various training programmes over a number
and Nigel Coren. of days in England, Ireland and Canada, while I
Going back over the time in which I have been have addressed more than two hundred and fifty
responsible for Education 2000 and The 21st conferences of teachers and others across England,
Century Learning Initiative there are so many oth- Wales, Scotland and Ireland. To all those I have
ers whose energy and commitment to these ideas worked with in Canada, the United States, Co-
actually created the story which this book tells. Ray lumbia, right across Europe and the Middle East;
Dalton, Andrew Egerton-Smith, Sidney Melman, in Ghana, Nigeria, Tanzania, Namibia and South
Richard Dix-Pincott, Lawrie Edwards-Major, Tina Africa; in Korea, Japan, Indonesia, Malaysia and
Taylor, David Little, Brian Corby, Keith Joseph, Australia. I hope this book, while having a specifi-
Brian Richardson, John Banham and the head- cally English focus, will remind all of them of the
teachers of the schools of Letchworth, Leeds, Ips- lively discussions that we had under different skies
wich, Loughborough, Calderdale, Bury, Tring and and in different climates – but always about the
Swindon, with whom I worked for up to ten years. same thing… empowering young people to become
In Washington as well as for the two years after- for ever better than ourselves.
Previous Publications
The Earth’s Changing Surface, 1975
with Michael Bradshaw and Anthony Gelsthorpe
The Iranians: How they Live and Work, 1977
Learning Makes Sense, 1994
The Child is Father of the Man: How Humans Learn
and Why, 1999
The Unfinished Revolution: Learning, Human Behav-
iour, Community and Political Paradox, 2000
with Terry Ryan

Contents
Preface “Master and Apprentice; Reuniting Thinking with Doing.” i
Introduction Starting points iv
Chapter One A Week in Venice 1
Part One The Distant Past 14
Chapter Two Telling Stories about Creation 16
Chapter Three Telling Stories about Rocks and People 26
Part Two Our Recent Past 35
Chapter Four The World we have come from 39
Chapter Five From apprenticeship to the playing fields of Eton, and the Crystal Palace 49
Chapter Six The Age of Reform 60
Chapter Seven The Growth of Empire 70
Chapter Eight American “thinkers”, and English Social Confusion 81
Chapter Nine 1944 and the Birth of a New Order 95
Part Three The Here and Now 105
Chapter Ten The Child is Father of the Man 107
Chapter Eleven Learning to be one of the players 120
Chapter Twelve On my own with a Vision 133
Chapter Thirteen Discussions in the Great Hall 141
Chapter Fourteen High Politics and Responsible Subversives 153
Chapter Fifteen Face to Face with the Stone Age 164
Chapter Sixteen The Inner workings of the Brain 176
Part Four Our Possible Futures 189
Chapter Seventeen Pilgrim or Customer? 190
Chapter Eighteen Honouring Adolescence 202
Chapter Nineteen Into the Dark, to see the brilliance of the Stars 213
Postcript Heirs to a mighty inheritance 227

i
Preface
It’s strange the comments we remember from long experience was a poor teacher1. He claimed that a
ago. student could learn more from books in a single
In my case it was the sergeant major shouting month than he could from twenty months of learn-
at us young cadets as we struggled to understand ing on the job.
the finer points of map reading. “If you don’t know This tension between matters of the mind and
where you’ve come from and you’ve no idea where those of the hand continues to distract the Eng-
you need to be then, lads, you’re well and truly lish as we struggle to find an appropriate balance
lost.” To a soldier who had fought across North Af- for everything we believe should be involved in
rica and up the length of Italy, not knowing where education. It’s my belief that Roger Ascham set up
you were meant you were in Big Trouble. Not a false antithesis. Successful individuals, as with
being able to describe your present position meant successful societies, need to be both thoughtful
no one could rescue you. and practical. They need to dream big dreams,
That’s a good metaphor for this book. If we but to have their feet well grounded in reality. In
don’t understand where our ideas about education the currency of education there are many issues
have come from, and we’re not sure of the kind of to consider; as with a coin there are frequently
society we should be trying to build, then we are two sides to each issue and often these represent
literally and metaphorically lost. Be we parents, contradictions – ‘heads you win, tails I lose’. Educa-
politicians, students or teachers, if we can’t locate tion is full of such apparent contradictions. The list
where we are, we go off aimlessly wandering in is long; thinking and doing, formal instruction and
circles, unable to connect with those who might be informal experience, the classroom and the world
able to help us. Many people sense this is the case outside, the home and the school, teachers and the
with the way we currently bring up children. After influence of the child’s peer group, the objective
fifteen years of successive education reforms, and and the subjective, analysis and synthesis.
extensive legislation affecting all aspects of young As long as we keep these coins spinning we see
people’s lives outside school, we urgently need a the complimentary nature of every issue, but if
profound reappraisal of who we are as a people we once allow the coins to fall flat then each will
and what we expect from our culture. We need that reveal only one side of a complex issue. In society’s
clearer sense of direction as we struggle to provide urgent search for solutions we may be tempted to
young people with what they most need. do just that, to over-simplify what is not so much
So just where have we come from? There is no a complex as a messy issue. For learning is essen-
doubting that the English are an amazingly inven- tially a messy process; it is never simply linear or
tive and creative people. They pioneered parlia- indeed logical, and we trivialise children when we
mentary democracy, led the world into, and out of, try to make it so.
the first Industrial Revolution, and created in the In the past twenty years developments in bio-
nineteenth century the greatest Empire the world medical technologies, in the understanding of how
has ever known. From Shakespeare and Milton, systems work and in evolutionary psychology, have
to Isaac Newton, Adam Smith, Charles Darwin started to show that who we are as individuals has
and Francis Crick, this relatively tiny island has been shaped in very specific ways by our evolution-
made an enormous contribution to world culture ary history. Until very recently the most significant
and scientific thought, and made its language the of these antitheses was seen as being nature versus
lingua franca of international trade, diplomacy and nurture, only recently reconfigured in the public
science. The English, it seems, know how to use mind by the scientist Matt Ridley, in his cleverly
their brains well. The question is, how do they do titled book ‘Nature via Nurture’2. The clever substi-
it, given this is a society that for generations has tution of ‘via’ for ‘versus’ puts a whole new com-
ascribed a low status to technologists and academ- plexion on the question of how children should
ics, and an even lower one to schoolteachers. The be brought up. No longer is it a fruitless argument
pattern seems to have been set more than four about the comparative values of school versus
hundred years ago by an Elizabethan classical home, objective versus subjective, or even of the
schoolmaster, Roger Ascham who, in his book academic versus the non-academic. For years many
‘The Scholemaster’ published in 1570 believed that of us have known that humans weren’t that dumb.
master and apprentice: reuniting thinking with doing ii
We know, probably intuitively, that we have each real to our generation, one already in possession of
become who we are because our nature has been the technology to clone human beings.
shaped – both consciously and subconsciously - by Morality, and with it a sense of purpose, comes
our culture and by the way we were brought up. out as the second key theme of this book. The be-
We now understand that thoughtfulness comes liefs that society in the past gradually formed in or-
as much through our experience of dealing with der to make sense of who we are, why we are here,
such conflicting cultural expectations, as it does and how such thoughts should influence the way
through the interaction of these with the individual we treat each other, are the oldest of mankind’s
characteristics we have each inherited from our questions. The extent of our technical knowledge
ancestors. This makes a mockery of any belief compels our generation to go many a step further
that the home, or the school, alone can do it all. than our forebears and, with all the wisdom and
The educational agenda of the future has to be as knowledge available to us, develop a philosophy
much concerned with community issues, as it is that honours both our scientific as well as our
with schools. Critically it is as much to do with the spiritual natures. Old stories were reassuring but
children of the wealthy as it is to do with children we want to argue with them. It’s simple really.
living in poverty. The former may have everything The better we use our brain, the more we want to
so well delivered to them in pre-packaged form challenge the boundaries of an earlier generation’s
they have no incentive to work things out for knowledge. The very sciences that are helping us to
themselves, while the least privileged may be good understand ourselves better are becoming a source
at working things out but not have the means to do of inspiration for the reconfiguration of narratives
anything about it. that combine with a new sense of our commonality
This interplay between culture and human and mutual purpose. After more than one hundred
nature, shaped by millions of years of evolution and fifty years, theology and biology are beginning
in the brain, is certainly fascinating stuff. More to talk to each other again. But will our model be
is being discovered every year, as a visit to any that of the pilgrim constantly trying to improve
bookshop will show. The diversity of such knowl- himself or herself or that of a customer, always
edge however presents each of us with a problem. looking for the best bargain? Whichever it is will
The more specialised these studies become the profoundly influence the way we educate young
more difficult it is for the layman to draw together people, and that in turn will shape our future
all the pieces of information and data. Rather than culture.
seeing things more clearly, we tend to flounder in Despite the magnitude of the task facing us I
the detail, and this is the problem I’ll address here. believe these to be immensely exciting times. That
I will do so first by looking at our rapidly growing may of course sound like the ancient Chinese
understanding of the evolution of the human race, curse but knowing what we now know many of us
and of the mental predispositions that shape our believe we no longer have the moral authority to
behaviour. Then I will explore the way in which carry on in the way we used to. In a democracy that
English culture has, over the past two hundred and is a challenge to every one of us for, ultimately,
fifty years, conditioned many of the assumptions politics does reflect what the people will tolerate.
we still make today about our social policies. This Without a vision, prophets both old and new tell
should help each of us to construct accurate ‘back us, we go around in circles for lack of a sense of
bearings’; in other words to be more precise about direction – the Old Testament prophet Isaiah was
where we each – as members of a specific culture more poetic; “without a vision the people perish”.
– have come from. Very simply it should help us to Which way to move forward is the challenge that
know ourselves better. necessitates both individual and collective resolu-
So what of the front bearing and the way we tion. Of one thing we can be certain, there is no
should go? Just what kind of society are we educat- standing still – the maintenance of the status quo
ing people for, and do we anticipate that children is not an option.
will grow up to be the equivalent of either bat- This book is intentionally written in a way that
tery hens or free range chickens? I think it comes combines the anecdotal with the theoretical and
down, as it has from earliest times, to fundamental the profound. The origins of this book go back
beliefs. “What is man that Thou art mindful of a long way. As a child I was encouraged to work
him?” questioned the Book of Proverbs thousands things out for myself, and my thinking was eclectic
of years ago. As then, so now, the future is not in- from the start. I am an unrepentant hoarder, and
evitable, it’s very much what we decide to make of from childhood have kept a diary, and drawers full
it for ourselves. The challenge should be even more of trivia. My interests never fitted easily into the