Gilberto Teixeira (Prof. Doutor FEA/USP)

A TRANSNATIONAL PROGRAM TO SYNTHESIZE THE BEST OF RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT INTO THE NATURE OF HUMAN LEARNING, AND To EXAMINE ITS IMPLICATION FOR EDUCATION, WORK, AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF COMMUNITIES WORLDWIDE.

Mounting evidence worldwide suggests that traditional education systems are increasingly becoming dysfunctional in the face of escalating technological, social and economic change. Profound questions are being asked to why so many young people seem so ill-prepared for work, or for participation within Civil Society.

Daunting as these issues are, a growing number of world-class researchers, educational innovators, thinkers, and policymakers from various lands, together with concerned funders, have started to meet together under the auspices of this Initiative, as they believe solutions await development. They are convinced that change can and will take place if they take collective action to exploit die new insights emerging from an ever increasing array of research into just how it is that people leam-how-to-learn (and thereby develop real understanding and transferable skills), and then link these findings with the experience gained from some highly successful innovative practices worldwide.

The 21st Century Learning Initiative's essential purpose is to facilitate the emergence of new approaches to learning that draw upon a range of insights into the human brain, the functioning of human societies, and learning as a self-organizing activity. We believe this will release human potential in ways that nurture and form democratic communities worldwide, and will help reclaim and sustain a world supportive of human endeavor.

At all levels sodety is undergoing massive economic, technological, social and political changes that challenge traditional values, beliefs, and institutional arrangements.

It is becoming dearer that these changes are in themselves all interconnected and reflect the move away from the analytical and reductionist era in science towards the beginning of a more integrative and interwoven understanding of natural phenomena, social structures and the operation of organizations. We now understand more about the brain and how it grows; the mind and how it shapes itself; and intelligence and how it expresses itself. Indeed, we now have a radically different picture of ow life emerged, evolved and continues to change as a result of this interwoven web. Humankind has a new place in the universe which is more purposeful, more creative - even sacred - than that which we had previously understood. The significance of collaboration, diversity and continuous learning within organizations is becoming increasingly valued. All this changes the way we see ourselves and the way we perceive the world.

This world of endless interconnections is fast reaching a point of self- transformation. It is not just the political realm, or the economic, or even the scientific or spiritual realms, but all of these elements of human experience that are changing. Western Civilization, and probably World Civilizations, is on the cusp of a metamorphosis.

It is on our ability to grasp, to understand and to realize these ideas - in truth to demonstrate anew the power of human learning - that will enable us to change, and shape our futures.

Knowing what we now know, members of The Initiative believe, we simply can no longer do what we now do.

The 21st Century Learning Initiative held its first planning meeting in November, 1995, and a second in April, 1996. The first full Conferences then followed in July and November of 1996. So far 40 people have participated in one or more of these meetings. They have come from 10 different countries (appendix is attached). A Bibliography of more than 300 recently published books and hundreds of articles has been created as The Synthesis has developed.

On the basis of the discussions that took place during these meetings, and all the ideas and papers that members of the Initiative have exchanged between times, the following five point Action Plan has been formulated.

The 21st Century Learning Initiative, through conferences at Wingspread and in various other ways, will:

1) synthesize and clarify the ideas emerging from a range ofsdences as to the nature of human learning, and layout the implications of these for the future of a whole range of sodal and institutional arrangements.

2) share, at an early stage, its findings with a number of influential policymakers from several countries, and stimulate a transnational dialogue about the practical implications of such ideas.

3) with others, establish ways of providing initial training, stimulation, and education for a select number of "learning community fadlitators" (from several countries) on whom these ideas will be much dependent for successful implementation. Make arrangements for these people, and the programs they lead, to develop collaborative networks with access to appropriate transnational resources.

4) with others, find ways to document and evaluate the progress of these ideas, and disseminate best practice both among policymakers and educational practitioners.

5) disseminate these ideas as widely as possible to the general public so as to encourage as rapid an adoption of these concepts as possible, adapted to meet the needs of different communities.

This Paper represents the current draft of The Synthesis; that's action point one. The outline descriptions of action points two through five are expanded on page 29.

The Synthesis, as now set out on the following pages (a work in progress in draft form), is designed to assist serious readers - people able to spend two or three hours thinking deeply - to understand the nature of these issues, their essential interconnectivity, and why they impel The Initiative to say that, "with this knowledge, we simply can no longer do what we now do." Several other versions of this Synthesis will be made available, both for the more specialized and for more general audiences. This version of The Synthesis, however, contains all the essential elements of the argument, and is complete within itself.

The Synthesis comprises seven sections. It is preceded by is a collection of voices from real people, in 1996, that creates the human dynamic behind The Initiative's Purpose Statement. In trying to understand these issues, our earlier assumptions often prevent us from seeing dearly what is actually happening around us. The first section, therefore, explores the nature of "profound change" in both systems and perceptions. With such changed perceptions of how the natural world works the second section explores how these may influence just what it now means to be human.

The third section explores the impact of recent findings in medical, cognitive and pedagogic research about the nature of the brain and, broadly, why we are as we are. The fourth section gives an explanation of what we now know, again from a wide range of studies, about natural patterns of learning, and how society attempts to extend these "to go beyond what comes naturally."

The fifth section - "Knowing all this what must we now do?" - explores how, by seeing all of these issues as part of a totally interconnected web, we now have an opportunity to release human talent on a scale not hitherto thought to be possible. The sixth section describes the essential innovations necessary for the fundamental changes set-out in the last section - outcomes.

To summarize:

1) The Initiative's starting assumption has been that as "societies become evermore dependent on the intellectual and practical capabilities of people to demonstrate creativity and the mastery of a variety of skills, so the key objective of formal schooling has now to be to give every child the confidence and ability to manage their own learning as an on-going activity."

2) A proper appreciation of human learning will reshape the nature of family life and schools, and revitalize communities. The Initiative defines learning communities as "communities that use all their resources - physical and intellectual; formal and informal; in school and outside of school, within an agenda that recognizes every individual's potential to grow and be involved with others."

3) A recommendation that is emerging, as a first step in the creation of learning communities, is that "schools have to start a dynamic process through which pupils are progressively weaned from their dependence on teachers and institutions, and given the confidence to manage their own learning, collaborating with colleagues as appropriate, and using a range of resources and learning situations."

4) The formal school system and its current use of resources has to be turned upside down and inside out. Early years schooling matters enormously; so does a generous provision of learning resources. If the youngest children are progressively shown that a lesson about learning something can also be made into a lesson about how to "leam-how-to-learn" and remember something, then the child can increasingly become his or her own teacher.

5) We are on the brink of radical developments in technologies of information and communication which are so fundamental that they hold the power to alter, not merely our educational systems, but also our work and culture. The traditional role of education has, for too long, been predominantly instructional and teacher moderated, but the essence of the integrated, universal, multi-media, digital network is discovery - the empowerment of the human mind to learn spontaneously, without coercion, both independently and collaboratively.

There is no short-cut to understanding this Synthesis which has emerged from a non-linear argument in ways that often seem counter to how most of us have been taught to think. The Synthesis has to be read in its entirety, thought about, talked through with others, and then read again. This is about gaining layers of meaning. We have to come to terms with understanding issues in such non- linear and interconnected ways, dealing with ambiguity, paradox, high-level generalizations and genuinely new ideas.

To many readers this may seem like "something old, something new." Many may be most comfortable thinking deeply about the explanation for those parts of the argument they already understand. That would be to miss the essence of a synthesis. What matters is how these ideas relate to each other. In this way the whole Synthesis is far more significant than the sum of the separate parts. It is the new relationships that "add value" by creating new, more appropriate patterns.

It is The Initiative's experience that few people are naturally good at thinking like this, hence the construction of this Paper. It covers many topics, but only in just enough detail to draw out those elements that are essential to understand if the scale of the transformation is to be truly understood.

Dee Hock, founder of VISA and a member of this Initiative, summed the difficulties of this up best when he said, "it is a very difficult way to start thinking. I warn people: don't start this lightly. Because once you start, it will put a burr into your mental saddle. It will call into question all your beliefs about organizations and management. You will never think about them the same way again."

Put another way, "as with an impressionist painting these issues require bifocal vision—the ability to understand the interrelationship of individual blobs of color, as well as the ability to stand back and appreciate the beauty and the significance of the whole."

Only when we are able to do this, with earlier assumptions reassessed, and a clearer perception of new opportunities, will viable solutions to what for too long have been seen to be intractable problems, start to leap to mind.

"Knowing what we know, we simply can no longer do what we now do."

Why does The Initiative make so passionate a statement?

Read the following voices carefully, and ponder how the issues set-out in The Purpose Statement are reflected in everyday life. Listen for the assumptions and the disconnects between the age groups. Remember that the greatest incentive for learning is the personal decision "to make sense" and find a purpose within the society in which one lives.

 

 

1996 Voices

An 11-year old - "I wish I could still draw. When I was in grammar (primary) school I used to draw decently. I loved to draw in pencil and chalk. Art of all kinds intrigues me. I also love music, and painting, and carpentry, and metalwork, and dancing, and sewing, and embroidering. I want to dance in my own ballet dass, play my clarinet, and draw thousands of pictures. Really good ones. Create beautiful poems, cook and sew for my children, decorate my home, have a good marriage, be an active volunteer, go to church, be an astro-physidst, go to Mars and understand all my questions aboutlife.That'snottoomuchtoask,isit?"

A 17-year old - "I have had a good education. I think I know how to ask good questions; I enjoy teasing out issues to find out what they are really about. It is easy to sayl want to realize my full potential—but that is what I want. Yes, I hope it means a good job (I know something about market factors, and competition, and technological change), but that's only a means to an end. I want to live in a world that gives everyone an opportunity to make a living. A world where differences are accepted, and where conflicts are resolved peacefully. We have to shape technology to support basic human needs, and not let it twist us to become ever more avid consumers. My friends and I want time to be ourselves, to appredate other people, and to enjoy the richness of our cultural inheritance, and enjoy natural beauty. We sense we are going to inherit some pretty tough problems. That means we are going to have to be wise, not just clever. Our futures need careful thought and planning; we have to think on a global scale in a world which will be very, very different."

A 22-year old college student - "It's hopeless out there. It is just a crap game. There is no way that hard work is going to pay off. There is no cause and effect connection anymore. What you have to do is get into a system and figure out how it worlds, and then you either work the system, or you don't, but that's all it is. It's a system and you need to find your place in it. It's all about networking, and the better the school the better your chances. What's the old saying 'it's not what you know but who you know.' I think that's absolutely true. That's the way it's always been. I mean the world is made up of winners and losers. You just got to figure out how to come out a winner."

A 31-year old - "I've accepted that I won't do as well materially as my parents. I think a lot of people in my generation understand that will probably be the case, but maybe that isn't so bad. I've seen a lot of my friend's families fall apart, but I think my generation cares more about family. I think we want family and friends and time to enjoy life. In reality, all we can really do is deal with the moment and do our best to survive. No doubt it's tough out there. I've been working the same job for six years without insurance. I just don't think about what would happen if I got hurt. Man, I do get bummed out when I think about how hard it is to afford kids, but what's life without kids? I really believe I'll always get by and everything will work out. It just always has. Who says life is supposed to be easy?"

The Seer - "Do you know the old Chinese Proverb of Heaven and Hell? Hell is a large room full of starving people, with great caldrons of sweet smelling bubbling stew in the middle. But the people have such long chopsticks that however they hold them they can not get the food into their mouths. They are dying in the midst of plenty. And Heaven? It is exactly the same room, same food, same hungry people, same chopsticks—but everyone is feeding each other."

The 17-year old - "But I and my friends will be. We are told that we could expect on average to live until we are 95...If that is really the case we are going to have to totally rethink everything. It is not so much what you can help us to know that matters now, but how we can so know how to learn that we can deal with issues that haven't ever come up before. We can't afford to be so cynical and we don't want to be. We need all our wits about us."

 

 

 

Just what are these voices saying?

These voices touch on a score or more of issues - human potential, community, technology, democracy, wealth and poverty, youth and old age, profits, spirituality, ecology and especially learning - and they are all interconnected. For too long we have shunned this connectivity and attempted to manage each problem separately. This approach is increasingly failing us, and as a result we are becoming deeply cynical. It is an inevitable collapse, is the message of the 60-year old.

Vaclav Havel said recently that "...we may know immeasurable more about the Universe than our ancestors did, and yet it increasingly seems that they knew something more essential about it than we do.'" The Native American Proverb provides a clue: "we have not inherited this world from our parents, we have been loaned it by our children." Surely we have lost a sense of interconnectivity between and among the generations, as well as the essential balance that has to be maintained between our lifestyles and ecological sustainability? The cult of the individual has wrought havoc upon reality, while the cult of specialization has blurred man's confidence in seeing issues in their entirety.

Seeking to understand why apparently well-educated Germans connived with the Holocaust, Elie Wiesel recently commented, "their education emphasized theories of values and concepts rather than human beings, abstractions rather than consciousness, answers instead of questions, ideology and efficiency rather than conscience." Wiktor Kulerski, a former leading member of Poland's Solidarity Movement, lamented at a recent Wingspread Conference that "I don't understand why people can only think about the near term. They can only see what matters in terms of their own activities and non-activities. They drive forward thinking only about their immediate satisfaction without contemplating the long-term results of their thinking and actions."

"You will never solve a problem if you use the same thinking that created the problem in the first place," once remarked Einstein.

Fortunately, there are new ways of thinking about all this that requires us to escape from past myths (hat have subconsdously shaped our assumptions. "People do what they do in society because of how they see the world." We are starting to see the world differently. It is now possible to understand more about what it means to be human based on a new set of understandings about the human brain and how we learn. It is immensely exciting because, in a way never before possible, we now understand how we, as humans, can release hitherto unrealized potential. With such thinking we can literally shape our own future, as opposed to just reacting to the changes hurtling all around us.

Writing in Leadership and the New Science, in 1992, Meg Wheatley wrote "I am not alorte in wondering why organizations aren't working well. Many of us are troubled by questions that haunt our work. Why do so many organizations feel dead? Why do projects take so long, develop ever greater complexity, yet so often fail to achieve any truly significant results? Why does progress, when it appears, so often come from unexpected places, or as a result or surprises or serendipitous events that our planning had not considered? Why does change itself, that event we are all supposed to be 'managing' keep drowning us, relentlessly reducing any sense of mastery we might possess?

 

And why have our expectations for success diminished to the point that often the best we hope for is staying power and patience to endure disruptive forces that appear unpredictably in organizations where we work?"

In truth, we have to begin thinking very differently. This means really internalizing that "our mental model of the way the world works must shift from images of a clockwork, machinelike universe that is fixed and determined, to the model of a universe that is open, dynamic, interconnected and full of living qualities."

 

The pace and scale of change is simply enormous. Evolution is speeding up. We have to learn to live with this, and in seeing things differently find ways of creating a more sustainable future. As at no time in the past we have consciously to ask "what sort of world, and for what sort of people?" The Initiative is about nothing other than rethinking the most basic of human questions.

"The Institutions and instruments that exist are no longer up to the task. Why? Because the nation-state has grown both too big and too small. It is too big to deal with its citizens as individuals; that's why governments are trying to redefine their role by delegating more and more to local authorities and community organizations. And the nation-state is too small to deal with global trends; even such massive countries as the United States and Japan cannot deal with capital markets that transact trillions of dollars a day."

Raymond Seitz, one-time American Ambassador to the United Kingdom, observed that "both our countries (the US and UK) today strike me as self- absorbed, distracted and discontented. There is a disconnection between ordinary life and the institutions which govern us. Moreover, the .international economy and the international markets are so vast and so fleet that we are no longer able to predict our economic futures. The sense of structure and purpose of the Cold War have also evaporated. In both our countries, there is a perception that destiny, a long time friend, has played a trick on us."" The comments resonate in many countries.

Democracy itself, the one thing held most dearly in Western countries, is facing a crisis. Ironically, as the formal structures of democracy spread around the world more and more citizens are opting out of their responsibilities to make democracy work. For an increasing number of citizens, but especially among young people, democracy looks like "a symbolic link with the past rather than a dynamic force in the present. There are many morbid symptoms. In most of the democracies voter turnouts and party membership have gradually fallen; where they remain relatively high, levels of commitment have fallen. Incumbent governments have tended to survive not because of any enthusiasm but more from cynicism about any available alternative. Negative campaigns have proved more effective than positive ones, and negative movements of disaffection have proved more dynamic than affirmative ones."

During the 1996 American Presidential election "about 49 percent of the nation's voting-age population went to the polls...the lowest level for a Presidential election since 1924." The trend of the world's leading democracyelecting its President with a mere 25 percent of the available voters' vote raises some troubling questions about the future of a democracy based on the belief of self-government, in the words of Abraham Lincoln, "by the people and for the people."

The accounting firm Arthur Andersen in a recent publication said "today's extraordinary state of flux in business and every aspect of political and social life is certainly owing to new technologies and increased global economic competition; but on a deeper level, it also heralds humanity's passage into a new mode of thinking and working that offers a means of coping with ongoing turbulence and change."

In trying to understand this "passage" to some new form of organizing society earlier assumptions too often get in our way. We have a profound "crisis of perception" that prevents us from thinking about new solutions. "It's not people's ignorance that you need to fear, it's what they know that damn well ain't true anymore that causes all the problems," commented the American columnist Josh Billings at the end of the 19th century.

Since the Catholic Church called upon Copernicus to rationalize the calendar, man has looked to rational science for explanations and guidance in trying to understand great uncertainties and disequilibriums in social structures, as well as in natural systems. Economic, social and political thinkers have always borrowed from mathematics and the natural sciences for their methodologies, and to receive empirical support for their assumptions. Today, discoveries in mathematics and the natural sciences are providing us with the tools to understand complex social change. And yet our mathematics struggle to fit ideas and needs into outdated, inappropriate and downright dysfunctional frameworks that were designed for a different time, and based on "scientific understandings" from the 18th and 19th centuries. To our detriment we are discovering that no matter how hard we try to "max-out" the existing systems these outdated frameworks are proving incapable of adapting to the problems of a rapidly changing, highly complex post-industrial world. Economic and technological forces are pushing us out of the industrial age and into the knowledge age, but our standard concepts and analytic tools are incapable of dealing with this transition.

In the deepest sense our predicament is about 1) coming to grips with social and economic structures that are based on partial understandings of outmoded science, and 2) the need to construct new frameworks based on an emerging set of concepts and tools from today's science and mathematics. The approaches developed will not be the final answers to humanity's changing needs, but rather more effective solutions to the needs of today's changing societies based on our most recent scientific understandings.

For several hundred years we've lived with a view of the universe as a mechanical system composed of stand-alone building blocks. This view involves a whole constellation of concepts, values, perceptions and practices leading to a particular understanding of reality. This understanding has dominated our culture and has shaped almost all aspects of society. Among its teachings was the faith in the analytical approach which glorified the dividing of things into parts.

The analytical approach provided powerful evidence for the acceptance of body and brain as machine; of society as a competitive struggle for existence at all levels; a belief in unlimited material progress through economic and technological growth, often at the expense of the environment, and of the supremacy of the ruthlessly aggressive over the integrative and collaborative."

These beliefs and values have shaped most of our social relations and sodal organizations. They have certainly shaped our education systems and fashioned the nature of the curriculum, and the way teaching and learning are organized.

However, with the dawn of computers and other technological tools, has come the birth of a science able to explore the world's dynamic interwoven nature, and these new understandings dash with many of the older held truths. This expansion is producing a new understanding of how the natural world works. In place of the cold, uncaring, inert world described by Newtonian physics and "dockwork" thinkers over the last 300 plus years, this expanded sdence is now showing us that the physical universe, from the smallest to the most cosmic levels, is intertwined and dynamically co- evolving towards patterns of self-organization.

All living systems grow and change. They have the ability to self-organize - continually creating new structures and processes that effectively respond to current needs. We live in a world that naturally and spontaneously seeks to create order.

These new scientific understandings give us the opportunity to rethink our human and economic organizations, just as the Newtonian mechanistic revolution inspired 18th century philosophers and political thinkers such as Locke, Hume, Jefferson, Franklin, and Adam Smith to rethink their social organizations. Their new understandings, spawned by the rational science of their day, led to democracy, the Universal Rights of Man, the American Bill of Rights, religious freedom and many other values we now hold dear. We are now hovering near a similar point of transformation.

We live in an exciting time with the opportunity to shape the future in ways as powerful as our greatest forefathers. Unfortunately, this period of "big change" could also have a dark side. Least we forget, the French Revolution and Napoleon were spawned by the same intellectual forces that gave us the Bill of Rights. It could go either way. "We are on the knife's edge between institutional failure and anarchy—Existing institutions are becoming increasingly irrelevant for the solutions to any of our problems. On the other side of the knife's edge is the regeneration of individuality, liberty, community, and ethics such as the world has never known.''

In particular, values which for 200 years were seen as being totally outside the concern of science are now emerging as a central issue. In the words of the Neurologist RW Sperry "human values, viewed in objective scientific perspectives, stand out as the most strategically powerful causal control force now shaping world events. More than any other causal system with which science now concerns itself, it is variables in human value systems that will determine the future."

We are starting to look at ourselves and our world from a very different perspective. What comes out strikingly from the comments of the II and 17 year olds from the 1996 Voices is the need for a society that can satisfy its needs without destroying the prospects for future generations - a sustainable democratic society.

There is something about these new understandings of the Universe that we feel we already know. We are finding ourselves rediscovering philosophies that are as old as recorded history, and which are cherished in various forms, throughout the world. New insights are merging with older truths to form new frameworks around which new social structures can be built. Natural systems, including human learning, now seem to be far more dynamic, vibrant, and interconnected, and far more responsive to local and unique phenomena - and therefore less predictable in their outcomes - than we had earlier understood. This appreciation of diversity is all part of the- transformation." The Newtonian predictable, mechanical universe replaced the earlier notion of an organic, living, spiritual world that had existed for millennia. As far as ordinary people's understanding was concerned, that organic world was replaced with a reductionist, atomistic world which immediately seemed so rational and so manageable, that it became all pervasive. It enabled us to see detail with incredible clarity. In our own times it got man to the moon, developed the micro-chip and the technology to see inside the brain. It also produced the cynical 60-year old in the 1996 Voices, and tens of millions of others like him, whose "apres moi ie deluge" mentality wreaks havoc on a world deeply dependent on mutual collaboration for survival and common prosperity.

Where the old science focused on breaking the world apart, the new science is all about dynamic relationships. The insights come from four different branches of science. In mathematics, models based on self-referring systems reveal incredible complexity arising from simple algorithms. In physics, the study of energy flows in open-systems reveals that emergent order - the compliment to the Principle of Entropy - is a central feature of cosmic and terrestrial evolution. In biology, many are coming to believe that co- evolution and collaboration are as important as, and inseparable from, competition and the survival of the fittest. Studies show that evolution is not simply random, but is driven by natural principles of self-organization heading towards increasing complexity; that genetics don't determine everything, and that the role of mind (both individual and group) is critical. In brain-research, scientists are also discovering that we are not simply selfish grasping creatures of Darwinian theory but, rather, we have two deeply embedded cultures, one mutualist and one hierarchical and defensive. "

We have to rediscover the basic interconnectivity upon which all living systems depend—And "go with it" at all levels of existence, both organizationally and individually. The young child, seeking "to make sense" of its own immediate experience, is dealt a shattering blow to its sense of order and purpose when a parent it loves and admires is made redundant because the corporation needs to downsize to improve its short-term profitability. Too much of that, and the web of life is shattered, and life becomes a crap game where the lasting lesson is take all you can, and put nothing back.

Some people will see this as an inevitable consequence of the market economy; others will simply deplore it; others will see that assumptions about the economy are but part of a still wider set of assumptions that we have come to accept as part of the natural order. The inevitable fact, however, is that such behavior has direct consequences on young people that now has to be confronted.

It is impossible to bring up children to be intelligent in a world that is unintelligible to them.

This challenges the assumption that has guided formal schooling for a century and more in its search to identify those relatively few people with "natural (academic) intelligence" worthy of evermore extended educational opportunities. This system largely ignored the less obvious and more diverse skills to be found widely in the majority of the population, and sought to limit these to those basic functional skills needed in a large scale manufacturing economy. Within such aneconomy learning and schooling were seen to be synonymous: the ability to think for yourself was not only ignored, but actually seen as a distraction. This is in stark contrast to the needs of a "knowledge society" in which it is essential that everyone's skills, however diverse, are developed in ways that create personal confidence in the individual's ability to be sufficiently flexible, and have all their wits about them, so as to seek out and exploit change. Such people need to know how to learn new skills, develop new attitudes without waiting to be told - in a word, they have to be "enterprising."

In addition to changing perceptions of the natural world, we have also to rethink just what it means to be human, just how our brains work, and how it is that we actually learn.

Why do we think and feel as we do, and why is human activity so often highly predictable? We arc used to remarking that young Sam's temperament reminds us of his maternal grandfather, but that we just can't understand where Erin gets her musical sensitivity. We ponder if it is in some way related to a distant ancestor. But such thoughts confuse us.

In the rational mind of only a few years back this was virtually the stuff of superstition. Babies were thought to be born free of any significant inheritance and were simply waiting for the impact of the environment to mold their personality. Nurture was thought to be far more important than nature in all forms of behavior.

Recent research shows that things are far more complicated. The complexities of our minds and bodies are witness to a long history of subtle adaptation to the nature of the world by our innumerable ancestors. Literally every child is born with a mind and body that recreates the imprint of the history of our species.

It is a humbling, yet immensely exciting experience to recognize that each one of us is the latest version of "the leading edge of co-evolution of man with his environment." Put simply, each and every one of us is the end product of a biological and cultural evolution so long that it is hard to comprehend. Within the general species this incredibly long process of evolution means that each of us is, in significant ways, unique. However, the more we learn about heredity (nature) and the influence of the environment (nurture) on each generation, the more we are coming to recognize the deep significance of each.

Humans don't exist in isolation. While cultural evolution may proceed rapidly, even within a single generation, biological evolution is a vastly slower process. Many scientists speculate that our limbs and our brains reached their present operational level some 30,000 years ago, at a time when virtually everyone lived in relatively small groups/families/tribes. There is abundant evidence to suggest that every baby born today has a sequence of development that would fit it well for those earlier environments. Some will have the artistic predisposition to create works of art comparable to the amazing cave paintings at Chauvet, or the inquisitiveness to record the phases of the moon as found on a bone in a stone-age encampment in France. Biological evolution has, as it were, to catch up on cultural evolution. Not for nothing do we still like sitting around campfires with our friends, singing songs and plotting tomorrow's project.

In past generations, as now, it seemed that human babies were born with an innate ability to learn language (any language) through "immersion" in the first four' or five years of life. They have particular predispositions to learn social collaborative skills by seven or eight and, we suspect, to carry out calculations shortly thereafter. We have evolved big brains so we are able to talk a lot, share ideas and develop fields of knowledge in common. This encourages our brains to grow still more. Despite our dexterity with language we still seem to think in pictures - hence the significance of stories (and of television). We understand immediate crises better than long-term problems. It seems that we have at least seven forms of intelligence which help us to make sense of our environment in different ways.

We are, in the main, better at working collaboratively than alone. We endlessly imitate people we respect. There are real, and potentially useful, differences in the perceptions between the sexes which show up most strongly in emotions, in spatial understanding and in forms of sociability. Unless we are able to form strong emotional bonds with relatively few people when we are young, it is probable that most of us will find larger, more loosely structured groups difficult to relate to.

We relish the feeling of being part of a team. We have predispositions towards Savannah type landscape - grass, woodlands, lakes and meandering paths. Paradise is a Persian word that describes a small walled oasis deep in the hottest most inhospitable desert with running water, trees, shade and birdsong.-a vision of something intensely comforting that has to be struggled for. These are more than cultural accretions; they are part of our inherited nature.

While the human race is empowered by its ancestors, it is certainly constrained as well.

We are, it seems, impelled to make sense of things and ideas, and search for ultimate meaning. We speculate about abstract ideas, we stand in awe of beauty, and respect heroism. We can't always handle such ideas, and when they go wrong our inhumanity so exceeds levels of cruelty in the rest of the animal world as to leave us doubtful of the very humanity of which we boast. "We are endowed, it seems, with contradictory impulses—our survival as individuals has more to do with social attributes such as love, pity, generosity, remorse, friendly affection, and enduring trust (something based on what biologists call tit for tat strategy, which has been applied in various forms in the sodal sciences), than on competition or aggression."

It is on man's willingness to sacrifice immediate self-interest in favor of properly nurturing its young that makes the human species so distinctive. Humans have to do this for a long, long time. It is not simply altruistic. Old people need young people to care for them as much as the youngest children need older people. Young and old have been totally interconnected since the beginning of time in a web that saw learning, working and living as totally interconnected. This web has been severely torn asunder in the last three or four generations, with implications that we are only just beginning to comprehend.

We are endlessly adaptable but, it seems, only up to a point. Driven to live in ways which are utterly uncongenial to our inherited traits simply drives people mad. That is why the breakdown in intergenerational support is so dangerous.

Medical and cognitive sciences, new technologies and a vast array of pedagogic research is helping us to appreciate far more how the brain works. The brain is, literally, the most complex living organism in the Universe ("The Cathedral of Complexity"). Although it weighs only about three pounds it is made up of roughly one million million cells. The total length of the "wiring" between the neurons is roughly one hundred thousand kilometers. The number of connections between the neurons is about one thousand million million. The number of neurons is over one hundred thousand million. The possible number of synaptic connections is more than all the leaves on all the trees on the face of the earth. Hard as it may be to fathom, every human has just such a brain!"

A wealth of research is showing the breathtaking complexity of the brain, both biological and functional. When the brain is subject to a rich sensory environment there is an increase in the number, strength and speed of synaptic connections. This results, literally, in the physical growth of the brain - it gets bigger and heavier. Most growth in neural tracts occur in childhood, but it can be restarted at any stage of life and in brains that have received very little earlier stimulation. There are, of course, negative factors: dietary deficiencies limit neural development; certain drugs severely restrict synaptic activity; and certain chemicals added to food are thought to overstimulate or suppress the brain's indexing capabilities.

There is increasing concern that the lack of proper stimulation may indeed be damaging brains of children from birth on. The same may be true of too much exposure to the wrong kind of stimulation, such as violence. Indeed, in the last 25-years there has been a doubling of the rates of crimes of violence, of suicide, and of drug and alcohol abuse. The culprit, many neurologists now fear, may well be brain cells that do not learn what they are supposed to do because they have been deprived of normal stimulation on the one hand, and over exposure to violence and stressful events on the other. For millions of children in America, and in other industrialized countries, the world they encounter is relentlessly menacing and hostile. So, with astounding speed and efficiency, their brains adapt in an effort to protect them by preparing for battle. Cells rewire trillions of connections that create the chemical pathways of aggression.

While it is essential for scientists to understand the molecular details of brain chemistry, for all practical purposes it is the science of complexity that enables us to make greater sense of the numerous layers of organization within the brain that act together, apparently miraculously, to handle not only memory, but also vision, learning, emotion and consciousness. This is the ultimate in self-organization as the brain seeks the best possible response to a particular environment.

The human brain, in all its structures and processes, is a direct response to the complexity of the interaction of all those factors in the environment that man has had "to know what to do about" since the beginning of time. The human brain and the interconnectivity of the natural environment have evolved together. We are, as it were, made by and for each other. It's a marriage. That is why we go mad if the disconnect between our actual lives and our inherited expectations and predispositions becomes too great.

Contrary to the limited perception of only a generation ago, the brain is characterized by potential growth, not inevitable decay. While the brain is economic in its use of resources and, therefore, continually rids itself of excess neurons before and after birth, its prime characteristic is its ever increasing ability to self-organize and create ever more novel and denser networks of neuronal connections. If the brain is active it even gets heavier. It is essentially organic not mechanistic.

The brain is adept at handling a variety of situations simultaneously. This makes it possible for each of us to react, moment by moment, to our imillcdiate environment whilst also thinking about a number of abstract matters, while concurrently keeping ourselves alert to peripheral activity. The brain handles this complexity through several layers of self-organization whereby vast interconnecting networks are established; it is as if the brain is  constantly "re-tooling itself" to work effectively in new and emerging situations. Once established, traces of these networks appear to survive almost indefinitely, and are frequently used as solutions to new problems. It is these earlier traces that give the brain its ability to build new ideas.

Neurologists are now beginning to see some forms of memory in operation. (i.e., they can literally watch specific patterns of activity within the brain light up on a computer screen as a result of functional MRI or CAT scans). To the researchers' surprise memory does not exist in just one, but throughout the brain. Rather memory traces seem to follow those neural-networks which the individual - at the time of original thought - found most to his advantage. The neural-network might have been activated for only a short time, and been designed for a specific purpose which is no longer applicable, and may well cross many "domains," but even when that route is no longer needed a trace of its past activity is still present. If part of the network is later activated, it may well "question" why it is not being asked to complete the set of original connections.

The Western World is only slowly coming to recognize what earlier cultures knew intuitively; for instance, Asian people have known for a long time that it will improve the brain of the developing fetus if the mother is relaxed by fine music, and stimulated by rich conversation. Too much stimulation, however, at any stage in life, turns a challenge into a threat The brain deals with this easily. It just "turns off." To effectively work at challenging tasks, research is now suggesting, requires significant amounts of reflective time. Learning is very much a reflective activity. "I need to go away and think that over" is a critical part of brain functioning." It is not a practical strategy to apply in a normal classroom!

All this is done spontaneously in response to challenge. The brain does not have to be taught to learn. Learning is what it does - automatically. To thrive it needs plenty of stimulation, and it needs suitable feedback systems. Effective learning is dependent upon emotional energy. We are driven (the ancestral urges of long ago) as much by emotion as by logic. Children who learn because they simply want to work something out because it matters to them, are far more resilient and determined when they face problems than children who seek external rewards. The same goes for adults. Intrinsic motivation is far more significant' than extrinsic. When in trouble the first group searches for novel solutions, while the latter looks for external causes to blame for their failure. The brain is essentially a survival system; it takes seriously those things which matter to it. Emotional well-being may well be more essential - to the brain - for survival than intellectual.

Since no two brains are exactly alike, no enriched environment will completely satisfy any two individuals for an extended period of time. No matter what form the enrichment takes it is the challenge that matters; passive observation is not enough, it is interactivity that is so essential. "Tell me and I forget. Show me and I remember. Let me do and I understand," says the ancient Chinese proverb.

The brain learns best, and learns to grow more, when it is exercised in highly challenging but low-threat environments. Learning and emotion cannot be separated."

With these new understandings of the brain, and the reinforcement these give to earlier theories about learning that grew out of cognitive science, we are now in a far better position to fuse formal learning structures onto natural learning predispositions that extend them "beyond what comes naturally." Simply put, we now know how to make it possible for people to become better learners. The implications of this for society and the economy are massive. This will change everything. It is both exciting, and possibly terrifying. Remember, all of this is interconnected; someone once commented, "if we are to have criminals in society, pray God they be not too intelligent."

The human brain is so large that, unlike other species, most of its growth has to take place after birth...otherwise the child's head would never get down the mother's birth canal. The human baby, therefore, remains dependent on its mother for longer than any other species while the mother remains dependent on others to support her during a long period of succor. However, in modern societies more and more parents leave their infants in the care of "nurseries" several weeks after delivery in order to return to the workplace. Unfortunately, "there is an increasing number of reports demonstrating that extensive non-maternal and non-paternal care in the first two years of life is a risk factor for the increased development of insecure patterns of attachment and elevated levels of aggression" later in childhood and adulthood.

As the human race has evolved so social bonds have become increasingly essential. Neurologists suspect that there is a direct relationship between big brains and speech. Speech has given humans the unique ability to share ideas, and from this we have evolved to become the planet's preeminent learning species. "I don't know what I think until I speak," said another perceptive ll-year old.

The process of learning is as old as life itself. It has passed from simple self- organization to a collaborative, social, problem-solving activity much dependent on talk, practical involvement and experimentation. Formal schooling, dependent as it is on instruction based around simulated reality, is so recent (five or six generation in most places) that it is unlikely to have had any impact on our inherited predisposition to learn in ways that our ancestors found so useful. Adults assume that learning and schooling are synonymous. Young children certainly don't. To them the world is open to endless investigation - as far as Mars and astro-physics for the ll-year old, while also including poetry and music, a family—and ultimate questions.

Good as they are, our natural predispositions to learn are no longer adequate to the needs of our present world. Ways have to be found of extending them so that we can "go beyond what comes naturally" if we are to respond effectively to the 17-year old's plea: "How can you help us to so understand how we learn that we can deal with novel situations when there is no one around to tell us what to do?"

This is the central issue. It is called meta-cognition; the ability to think about your own thinking, and the development of skills that are genuinely transferable and not tied to a single body of knowledge, and so can be applied in different settings. It is linked to a form of intelligence that is becoming known as reflective intelligence. In a world of continuous change this has to be the fundamental factor, so fundamental that it all too easily gets taken for granted.

Natural systems of learning culminated in every known culture in some form of apprenticeship - be it among Pacific Islanders, Native Americans, Europeans or within the Brazilian jungle. Apprenticeship incorporated two aspects of our evolutionary inheritance - the "predisposition" to learn such things as language, calculation, social skills, and the less well understood nature of 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 how to direct it While modem parents and teachers find adolescence disruptive, earlier cultures directed this energy in ways that developed those key 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.

In this way apprenticeship was a cultural extension of those "predispositions" that facilitated learning in younger children. It blended the development of practical and social skills in ways that effectively ensured that, by late adolescence, the young person was fully equipped for all aspects of adulthood. They were, in all senses, weaned of their dependence on others for instruction but, importantly, viewed their future success as being dependent on their ability to share responsibility within the community.

Apprenticeship type learning (Rudyard Kipling's what?, why?, when?, how?, where?, who?), has existed since the beginning of time. Only very recently, however, has it merited attention. In recent centuries we know that apprenticeship extended over several years. Most young people were apprenticed outside their immediate families to a craftsman who probably had several other apprentices of various ages under his direction. Essentially instruction took place "on the job," and was given by a man or woman who, making his own living at the saipe time, had quickly to ensure that the apprentice became a developing asset. From the start the apprentice was encouraged to see the importance of each sub-task to the final product. He could not produce the magnificent carving on which the master was working unless he first learned to sharpen his chisel, and select appropriate timber; or he could not hunt without first understanding how to shoot the bow, knap the flint of the arrowhead, and understand the migration and breeding habits of many animals.

In Europe apprenticeship involved the master modeling basic skills that the apprentice then had to learn to do for himself. Initially the apprentice received much support from the master but, as he became increasingly competent, that support was continuously reduced and the apprentice became evermore responsible for the completion of those tasks that were within his own competence. Progressively the apprentice as learner became part of the economic process. "The better the apprentice the more time, in theory at least, the master could spend on those advanced tasks that only he could do. Critical to effective apprenticeship was endless feedback - feedback from master to apprentice and discussions between apprentices. It was talk essentially about "know-how," those intuitive understandings that mattered so much but which often defied logical explanation.

By definition an apprenticeship was completed when the construction of the "masterpiece" made by the apprentice showed that "Jack was as good as his master." He was now qualified to set-up his own business." Almost identical processes are found in all other cultures. They have been built over eons of time. This involved the mastery of much implicit and explicit knowledge; the master craftsman was a deeply knowledgeable person, but he was also reflective. The Master of Invention he had always to make his knowledge work flexible.

Apprenticeship learning essentially "made thinking visible." It was about the development of expertise, not just specialization. It was a natural development of inquisitiveness, and of collaboration. At its finest it created within each community numerous sub-groups that were themselves knowledge sharing communities who supported each other in the construction of new ideas and techniques, and developed a very specific form of collective expertise that was beyond the scope of a single individual." Continuous learning was, to them, essential to good work, and good work was an integral part of living. As experts they were always curious, they knew their own affairs so well that - paradoxically - they had an empathy with others who were good at other things which today's specialists seem unable to achieve.

They were humble, but rightly proud. They left their marks, but in places few would ever see. "Leo Me Fecit" is to be found underneath the base of a beautiful Roman statue. "Leo Made Me." Innumerable other such marks speak to us from men who delighted in their skills. People who reflected on what they were doing; people striving to improve themselves. People who held themselves responsible.

 

Apprenticeship gave birth to the Industrial Revolution in Britain, Europe, America and elsewhere, but such was the pace of technological and social change that it largely perished as mass manufacturing replaced the small craftsmen, and learning ceased to be an activity that involved the whole community 'in real time problems, and instead became the concern of formal instruction in schools.

Formal schooling as we know it is largely the creation of the last 100 years. Its achievements have been immense, and it has been widely replicated around the world. Yet, for all its achievements, it is eventually limited by the technology of the classroom, formal instruction, uniform stages of progression, prescribed knowledge, and a curriculum of self-contained bits. "When the factory was touted as the ideal organization for work and when most youngsters were headed for its assembly lines, making a mass public education system conform to the model of the factory may have seemed like a great achievement. But the old fashioned factories are dead, or dying and they will not be resurrected as we know them. The limitations of the traditional factory model of education have become manifest and, they are crippling. The traditional model of schooling is, therefore, incompatible with the idea that students are workers, that learning must be active, and that children learn in different ways and at different rates."

'Today, what business is seeking is not just a docile workforce with only a range of basic skills, but a creative workforce of competent, self-starting, quick-thinking, problem-solving and risk-taking individuals who can operate in collaborative situations." This too is what is lacking in many a broken and dysfunctional community.

Writing recently on the significance of understanding self-organizing, non- linear, complex systems in the natural world Kauffman states in The Origin of Order: "If the dynamics of the system are too chaotic no learning occurs because there is not enough stability to conserve information. If the dynamics are too static, no learning occurs because no change occurs in response to new information." Powerful learning, it seems, occurs at the junction of chaos and order. Properly applied this leads to the principle of the "chaord" - organizations that tolerate and exploit both chaos and order.-.in other words learning systems that value equally both formal and informal strategies. "The essential thing to remember, however, is not that we have become a world of expert managers, but that the nature of our expertise became the creation and control of constants, uniformity and efficiency, while our need has now become the understanding and coordination of variability, complexity and effectiveness."

Put another way it is essential for educational reformers to recognize "that learning is an immensely complex business that we seek to simplify and codify at our peril. To put faith in a highly directive, prescriptive curriculum is to so 'go against the grain of the brain' that it will inhibit creativity and enterprise—the very skills needed in the complex diverse knowledge society we desperately need to prepare our children for.'"

If we apply the wrong model of learning for the best of reasons we will not get the results we seek.

As we come to terms with a new way of thinking about ourselves as humans; about the way in which the natural world self-organizes and co-evolves through support for diversity; about natural intelligence, the process of learning and the significance of environmental stimulation, so our view of what is needed to support learning changes radically.

This Initiative has an immediate concern with the learning of young people as an essential first stage in the creation of a more thoughtful, r