GIVING WINGS TO NEW IDEAS
Wingspread Journal, Summer 1996

THE SEARCH FOR NEXT-CENTURY LEARNING

by Ted Marchese

The 21st Century Learning Initiative is being led by John Abbott. He explores the future of learning in a recent interview with Ted Marchese of the American Association for Higher Education.

MARCHESE: John, I take it that Education 2000 exists because of a certain dissatisfaction with the educational system.

ABBOTT: Yes. Leaders in Britain know our future as a society depends on the best work of educators. But, after a decade of formal education reform, they still observe far too many young people failing to acquire in school the skills, attitudes, and expertise they--and we--need for the future.

MARCHESE: What are they looking for in graduates?

ABBOTT: Creativity, enterprise, purposefulness, a good sense of community responsibility, and collaborative work. ...

MARCHESE: To American educators, it's a familiar list.

ABBOTT: As it would be to counterparts in Japan, France, Brazil, Australia ... all of us are sensing that knowledge-based societies put a premium on those higher-order competencies that traditional schools and colleges haven't been good at developing.

All this has been said before, I realize, and has been a staple of efforts to reform the schools. But even as test scores and the like inch up, we continue to get graduates who think narrowly, are teacher-dependent, and who have too little ability to tackle challenges or embrace change. The situation makes us wonder whether the traditional classroom is right for the task . . . the need may be less for "reform" than for fundamental redesign of the system.

MARCHESE: These competencies you want ... say more.

ABBOTT: There are, of course, certain basics that the school was set up to deliver, and they continue to be important: skills of numeracy, literacy, and communication. But today, people worldwide need a whole series of new competencies--the ability to conceptualize and solve problems that entails abstraction (the manipulation of thoughts and patterns), systems thinking (interrelated thinking), experimentation, and collaboration.

MARCHESE: We see all kinds of movements today to add these to the curriculum.

ABBOTT: Well, not to prejudge, but I doubt such abilities can be taught solely in the classroom, or be developed solely by teachers. Higher-order thinking and problem-solving skills grow out of direct experience, not simply teaching; they require more than a classroom activity. They develop through active involvement and real-life experiences in workplaces and the community.

MARCHESE: Granting that for the moment, why is it too much to expect that educators will help produce self-confident, self-sufficient learners?

ABBOTT: We want them to, of course. But we should understand how against the grain that expectation will be. The system of universal schooling was set up in the 19th century to meet the demands of factory-based work for people with the basic skills and attitudes appropriate to a manufacturing economy--that is, people who could follow directions and perform relatively straightforward, repetitive tasks in a reliable manner.

Schools, even colleges, were then organized around a factory model, with separate courses, departments, credits, tests, all in sequence. In this model, learning is seen as an abstract activity, separated from everyday context, and as heavily dependent on the teacher, who imparts information and routine skills, aided by textbooks.

MARCHESE: It's a system perfectly set up for the results we see ...

ABBOTT: ... which aren't those we need for a knowledge-based economy.

My concern, too, is that after decades of such a system, in which the school takes over responsibility for formal learning and social development, all too many people have come to think of learning as the school's job, so that the community, even parents, assume greatly reduced roles in the induction of the young into adulthood. Meanwhile, the young, set off in schools, have fewer chances to learn about their personal responsibility within the community.

MARCHESE: So the task is to get students out in the community, and the community more involved with their learning.

ABBOTT: Just so, and for the sake of both parties, if we want a learning society. The mistake is to think of learning as a school-based activity, rather than one of life itself.

If I might, I'd like to point out that there was plenty of learning before schools were around. Most of the people who flocked to the Globe Theatre to enjoy a Shakespearean play could neither read nor write. Even in 1830, when English inventiveness and enterprise led the world, the median level of schooling was two years. But people learned the practical and intuitive skills they needed through community life and apprenticeship; they worked collaboratively on tasks that made sense to them, and took responsibility for their work. Living, working, and learning were interdependent.

MARCHESE: I know that Education 2000 has been looking in several quarters for ideas about the redesign of learning.

ABBOTT: Yes. Before the contemporary ones, though, let's stay with history, because part of what we need may lie in recapturing successful practices of the past.

Apprenticeship is a good example. It embodied two learning principles suggestive for today. One was that when the apprentice was first starting out, the master craftsman spent a great amount of time with him developing basic skills, but always in a context of seeing where the lesson led to ... so the youngster was first taught how to square up a piece of wood, yet all the time actually seeing how that timber was crucial to the British ship they were building.

Second, as the apprentice got older and more experienced, he had less and less support from the master; so that when the apprentice reached 18 or 19, he was expected to be self-sufficient. Note how different this is from the way schools operate, where the context and purpose for learning are typically missing, and where teacher dependence is in full flower even at the university level.

MARCHESE: Fine example, John. Apprenticeship enacts key principles of what U.S. theorists call "situated learning." Tell me where else Education 2000 is looking for ideas.

ABBOTT: A chief emphasis these next two years will be to see what synthesis and "informing principles" we can draw from the new science of the brain. There are quite remarkable findings coming forward here, findings that intersect with many of the ideas about learning we've discussed thus far.

MARCHESE: "Sciences" might be a better descriptor.

ABBOTT: Yes, important new work on the brain is being accomplished by neurologists, evolutionary psychologists, systems theorists, anthropologists, and a broad array of cognitive scientists, ever so many of whom--and this is our point--work in separate fields with different vocabularies, at remove from one another, and often from societal concerns about learning.

Our plan is to bring fifteen or so of the best of these thinkers from around the world together in three- to four-day meetings at The Johnson Foundation's Wingspread conference center to tease out common lines of thought and the practical implications from them.

MARCHESE: I know you've already begun inquiries into this back in Britain. You've had your initial Wingspread meeting this past November and another this July. What excites your interest in this research? How is it different from previous decades of educational research?

ABBOTT: Most of the educational research we've had has been that of behavioral or cognitive psychologists, who drew inferences about mental activity from the observation of behavior under controlled conditions. These inferences, whatever the claims for them, had to be taken as tentative and imprecise.

What's different today is that new imaging technologies--PET and CAT scans, MRI, and the like --now make it possible to actually watch a living brain at work. This has led investigators to revise many assumptions about how individual learning takes place.

MARCHESE: Example?

ABBOTT: Studies in neurology challenge the common metaphor that the brain is like a linear computer, waiting to be programmed.

MARCHESE: When I turn my computer on, I've never had to worry about its motivation or self-confidence!

ABBOTT: Quite. So the metaphors of choice are increasingly biological--that is, the brain as a flexible, self-adjusting organism that grows and reshapes itself in response to challenge, with elements that wither through lack of use.

MARCHESE: There's little support in this for the idea that intelligence is something fixed, unidimensional, and normally distributed.

ABBOTT: Most of the best people working in these fields believe that human intelligences are multiple, and that even "ordinary" people, as measured by the narrow tests we have, are capable--in rich, challenging, nonthreatening environments--of extraordinary feats of intellectual or creative activity. We see just this, in fact, every day in our best workplaces, though too infrequently in our schools and colleges.

MARCHESE: Which remain devoted to instruction.

ABBOTT: Most cognitive scientists will tell you that knowledge can't simply be poured or programmed into the brain; instead it is "constructed" by the learner, often through a purposive activity done with others, and takes root with use. This sense is one of the things that leads us to look again to the workplace and community for the learning we need, especially for students' later school and college years.

MARCHESE: A lot of the work I've seen points to the importance of early learning ... even in the womb. A fetus responds to music, for example.

ABBOTT: Yes, and, incidentally, response to music is one of the last things to go in Alzheimer's patients.

Insights from the hybrid science of evolutionary psychology show how brain function has evolved over eons of time in ways that equip every newborn with a kind of biological "power pack" of potential social and intellectual predispositions.

"Predispositions" are like encoded sets of processes, ways of thinking or doing things, that seem to represent a set of inherited "appropriate practices" transmitted from generation to generation. Whether or not they are used in a generation depends on the environmental challenge and other motivations.

They open up like "windows of opportunity" at stages of life that evolution has found most appropriate to individual development. If they're not used at that stage, a kind of "neural pruning" occurs, the easy learning is lost and the brain grows in different ways.

MARCHESE: Again, an example?

ABBOTT: Language acquisition. Very young children pick up language almost effortlessly, without formal teaching. In parts of Belgium, you find 5-year-olds handling three languages, as you will also see in many of our larger cities, with ethnic-minority children. But learning a foreign language even as a teenager is sheer hard work!

MARCHESE: Is it all over by the age of 5?

ABBOTT: By no means; various dispositions open opportunities for learning at different points of the life span. The first ten to twelve years are the most significant, though. Think of how 12-year-olds pick up computer skills so much more rapidly than their parents. Learning to drive a car at 17 is easy, it takes twice as many lessons when you're 34.

As we learn more about these predispositions and their pruning, we should be able to devise structures of learning that "go with the grain" of the brain, and bring far more people to the higher levels of thinking needed in a complex society.

MARCHESE: Our ancestors empower but also constrain us.

ABBOTT: That's the insight.

Let me add a point here. Twentieth-century thought describes human nature as selfish, its instincts as base. But evolutionary psychologists claim the human race has significant, inherited predispositions to be social and collaborative, which need tending to by caring adults in the early primary years. When children's need for close social interaction and relationships isn't met in those early years, we then create learning problems that defeat the efforts of later teachers, and that leads also to social problems.

MARCHESE: John, let's return to our theme, Education 2000's search for new ideas. So far we've looked to the history of schooling, and to brain science.

ABBOTT: We also, of course, are very eager to learn from the experience of perceptive teachers and innovators, who have known long before this interview of the dysfunctions I've described. Our intent is to convene, alongside the scientists, a parallel group of practical innovators, people from many countries, often working outside the system, who often aren't connected with one another and not at all with the theoretical researchers. We need their insight.

MARCHESE: I know you've been on four continents looking for approaches that capture the interplay you'd like between living, working, and learning. Perhaps you'd have an example that would be unfamiliar to North American readers.

ABBOTT: There's a most interesting development in Denmark I might share. Three or four years ago they looked at their system, came to many of the conclusions we have in Britain, and introduced one change that represents a big difference.

What they've decreed is that every student leaving secondary school--these are 18- and 19-year-olds, like your freshmen and sophomores--must in the final year complete three challenging, self-directed projects related to real-world problems, with reports to be prepared in three different media, these to be judged acceptable or not against high expectations by juries drawn from the wider faculty and community. Some of these projects might be done in teams, but the emphasis throughout is on "metacurricular" abilities.

MARCHESE: Those graduates should be ready for that country's Aalborg University, with 10,000 students, all problem-based learning. Americans, I might add, marvel intellectually at Aalborg, then hasten to say, "Our students wouldn't be ready for this."

ABBOTT: Recently I was visiting with the vice chancellor of a university at home, trying to converse with him about the need to think more carefully about learning. (It was a bit beyond him, you need to know.)

He told me of cutbacks in government funding, and how they had so reduced staff that tutorials were increasingly impossible; students were accusing the institution of having invented the "FOFO principle"--"F*** off, find out yourself."

"You know," the vice chancellor said, "if they'd learned how to find out for themselves before they got here, this would be a much better university." Which is, of course, what I'd been trying to say to him!

MARCHESE: This reminds me of Alan Guskin's articles in Change magazine [July/Aug. and Sept./Oct. 1994], in which the key to a more productive learning system becomes student self-sufficiency.

ABBOTT: Recalling that piece, Guskin was very keen on the role of technology. To my mind, it's on a collision course with conventional education systems. Schools and colleges for generations have been instruction- and teacher-centered; but the essence of the emerging technologies is discovery, the empowerment of the human mind to learn spontaneously, without coercion, both independently and collaboratively.

MARCHESE: John, your ideas raise daunting agendas.

ABBOTT: But the eventual prize will be glittering: a transformed educational system, and generations of competent young people eager to take responsibility for the future!

This article was excerpted, with permission, from the March 1996 issue of the "AAHE Bulletin." Special thanks to Ted Marchese and the American Association for Higher Education.

John Abbott can be contacted at the 21st Century Learning Initiative, c/o Rothschild Natural Resources, Inc., 1101 Connecticut Ave. NW, Suite 700, Washington, DC 20036; e-mail: polska@erols.com.

John Abbott directs The Education 2000 Trust, a British not-for-profit entity that links leaders from education, industry, and the social sector on behalf of "whole systems change" in education.

For these next two years, from a Washington, DC base, Abbott leads an international effort to link experts in disciplines such as neurology and evolutionary psychology, and leading educational innovators in a search for new learning strategies that "go with the grain" of the brain. The Johnson Foundation will support multiple Wingspread conferences of this "21st Century Learning Initiative." Information on the initiative is available at: http://www.newhorizons.org/ofc_21cli.html.