Learningforthefuture.pptVIP

“Learning for the future” John Abbott President, The 21st Century Learning Initiative ? Supporting documentation for this discussion can be downloaded from the Initiative’s Website : Email: mail@21 UK contacts: jabbott@rmplc.co.uk Telephone: +44 (0) 1225 333376 Fax: +44 (0) 1225 339133 Battery Hens, or Free Range Chickens? ? What kind of Education for what kind of world? Reversing an Upside Down ? and Inside Out System “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” By Robert Sylwester, June 1995 “This much we now know. The brain learns best when it is trying to ‘make sense’. When it is building on what it already knows. When it is working in complex, situated, circumstances. When it accepts the significance of what it is doing. When it is exercising in highly challenging but low threat environments. Children learn spontaneously. What they need, however, is help from experts in how to learn better ─ how to upgrade their own self designed but restricted capacity for acquiring information, and creating experience.” “The Future of Life”E. O. Wilson, 2002 “The mood of western civilizations is Abrahamic: “May we take this land that God has provided and let it drip milk and honey into our mouths forever.” Now more than 6 billion people fill the world. The great majority are very poor; nearly one billion exist on the edge of starvation… half of the great tropical forests have been cleared. It is the wreckage of the planet by an exuberantly plentiful and ingenious humanity… a global land ethic is urgently needed. Surely our stewardship is the onl