Ministry of Education

1. Ministry of Education British Columbia February 27th, 2012

2. The Innovation Conference of 2004 and the paper “Peter Puget, Adolescence, and the Grain of the Brain” • Subsequently asked to address the BC School trustees Association; through the Canadian Council on Learning spoke in some 20 districts across the province; two separate presentations to the Superintendents’ Conference • January 2009: publication of Overschooled But Undereducated; • April 2009: addressed some 400 members of the BC Ministry of Education and subsequently (June) circulated the paper “Schools for the Future” • Several visits to school districts on Vancouver Island and specifically to the Gulf Islands School District; wide-scale international circulation of the paper “No Small Matter” • October 2011: visit to BC culminated in a presentation with UVic and members of the Ministry: “you need to knock your heads together more often”

3. Ted Riecken, Dean of Education at UVic, issued an invitation to come back for a three week period – invitation supported by the Ministry” • In the four months that followed, in addition to much else, I prepared for this visit by publishing “Why is School Reform Difficult and often Problematic” and then prepared a script for a possible television series, based on these ideas, to be entitled “The Brilliance of their Minds” • In preparation for the visit, I set up four set-piece lectures: • “It’s your world to shape, not just to take” (a student presentation) • “British Columbia and the Future of Teacher Education” • “Why is School reform Difficult and Often Problematic” • “The Narrative, necessary to change the future” (as seen from the perspective of the Anglo-American model of education) • Unfortunately this three week period has been more segmented most, which has made it difficult to build up a consistent argument, leaving many participants excited, but disconnected from the main themes

4. Who is doing what… and does it add up to very much? "This is what we are about. We plant seeds that one day will grow. We water seeds already planted, knowing that they hold future promise. We lay foundations that will need further development. We provide yeast that produces effects far beyond our capabilities. "We cannot do everything, and there is a sense of liberation in realising that. This enables us to do something, and enables us to do it very well It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning, a step along the way, an opportunity for the Lord's grace to enter and do the rest. We may never see the end result, but that is the difference between the master builder, and the worker. "We are workers, not master builders, ministers, not Messiahs. We are prophets of a future not our own". Archbishop Oscar Romero, 1980

5. No Small Matter… Beyond Technicalities , to Matters of Substance A society that has still to rediscover reasons for its faith in the future is a mean place in which to bring up our children.

6. Beyond the nursery or the classroom, two narratives are competing for our support. The stronger, more apparently attractive and certainly the most strident since the 1980s is that life is improved by maximising your wealth so as to participate as fully as possible in the good life. The second, upon which the future of our planet and the survival of the human race may depend, has emerged progressively over the past five years; it is about the need to adjust individual life aspirations so as to achieve ecological and social sustainability. These are very different, and competitive, narratives – the first argues for the rights of the individual, the latter for interdependence and community.

7. The struggle is being fought over the remains of much older narratives, well-known in their different guises to our ancestors. These older narratives had been about moderating and civilising the competing drivers of human behaviour that would otherwise bring chaos to individuals and societies by establishing a sense of the common good. In today’s “let’s have it all now” society we have forgotten the social significance of those spiritual traditions which in the past sought to “bind” the individual and community together for mutual benefit and create a sense of meaning.

8. Like an Impressionist painting composed of thousands upon thousands of apparently disconnected dots, we only understand the brilliance of the artist when our focus shifts from seeing the separate dots to suddenly appreciating the picture as a whole. Even when we have the whole picture nothing can be achieved without a fundamental change of heart on the part of the people themselves.

9. A campaign to reverse an overschooled but undereducated society cannot be masterminded by any single, brilliant strategist. It requires distributed leadership, and for that to be effective everyone needs to be really knowledgeable about why they are involved and the rightness and urgency of the cause.

10. For young people to utilise their innate predispositions to the full, they need both a formal, rigorous curriculum and a whole experience of life that will later sustain and make them strong enough to deal with all the vagaries of life. John Milton, a man of towering intellect and much practical common sense, spoke from a time before reductionism sought to undermine the glory and complexity of what being human could mean. He gave a definition of education nearly four centuries ago that we need to rediscover: I call therefore a complete and generous education that which fits a man to perform justly, skilfully and magnanimously, all the offices both public and private, of peace and war.

11. That pedagogy has to honour the principle of Subsidiarity… It is wrong for a superior to hold to itself the right of making a decision which an inferior is already qualified to do for itself. This is hugely challenging both to the current structure of education, and to the public’s perception that schools should be the place to do with children what adults now think they are too busy to do for themselves.

12. Civil Society… “We have left undone those things which we ought to have done, and we have done those things we ought not to have done; and there is no health in us.” (Book of Common Prayer, 1662) In 21st Century language; to fail to do something which you are required to do is one thing. But not to do something which you know ought to be done makes a person equally culpable, in a covenantal relationship, of letting other people down.

13. This has nothing to do with performability, or regulation. Policy-makers have frequently forgotten that most day-to-day activity has nothing to do with the law; it is about getting on with our neighbours and creating a quality of life that depends on our access to people we trust, like, admire and find fun. Children need to learn this everywhere – from their mother’s knee, to the nursery, to the playground and in all their interaction with members of the community.

14. Society is “an aggregate” (something formed from a mass of loosely connected fragments) of people living together in more or less orderly communities, held together through its own natural, organic procedures. Being an aggregate is society’s strength; or, put another way, society is the aggregate of what people think for themselves. Through the sharing of our thoughts we come to appreciate the diversity and the collective of society as a whole.....and are the richer for that.

15. In 1946 John Maynard-Keynes said: “the day is not far off when the economic problem will take the back seat where it belongs, and the arena of the heart and the head will be occupied or reoccupied by our real problems – the problems of life and of human relations, of creation and behaviour and religion”. As the sense of civil society weakens so the social contract on which the bringing up of your own child is assigned to someone else can all too quickly lead to education becoming a matter for private gain, not for public good. When that happens civil society is still further undermined. Functional civil society and genuine democracy walk hand in hand, if they don’t, one or each stumbles.

16. The Brilliance of their Minds… This possible television documentary has a most serious intent. Too often in the past education reform has been more concerned with addressing the obvious symptoms of a problem, rather than addressing the cause of the problem itself. Now in the early 21st century the present arrangements are so overlaid by layer upon layer of ‘quick fix’ solutions that to cut through to the underlying causes requires a level of knowledge and background most people simply just do not have. If ever it was true that a people who forget their history simply live to make the same mistakes all over again, it is now. The situation is serious. Remember Bronowski’s “The Ascent of Man”

17. Civilisationcan never be taken for granted for it depends on a constant supply of responsible and tough new adolescents to replace the worn-out skills of their elders. Education is a multifaceted process that policy makers in many countries simplify and codify at society’s peril, for to put excessive faith in a highly prescriptive form of schooling inhibits the very creativity and enterprise needed for an uncertain future. This process has been exacerbated in recent years at National politicians have sought to take ever greater control over its delivery, almost regardless of what might be the specific circumstances of individual communities. It is not simply a crisis of schooling that has to be faced, but the much more serious problem namely a collapsed families and the emasculation of community.

18. Over the past decade several English speaking countries, have focused their reforming strategies on ‘breaking down’ the old structural arrangements in the hope that this shakeup will induce reform right across vast systems. The alternative is to concentrate on the minutiae of improving the personal motivation of individuals at all levels so as to ‘build up’ a widespread sense of community ownership, to create the energy for continuous improvement.

19. The larger the unit to be reformed, the more difficult it is to invest in a ‘building up’ strategy, yet it is only by investing in the intrinsic motivation of individuals in each community that entire systems develop the capacity for continuous development. Most regrettably England and the United States have progressively removed the control of education from local communities, thereby directly being answerable to large scale national directives, applying the ‘break down’ model of development.

20. This documentary aims to help the English find a way out of the ever deeper hole they have dug, by concluding with a study of the Canadian province of British Columbia. This province has progressively reinforced local community ownership as a way of reaching standards of achievement already well in advance of the English and United States systems. With only 4.5 million people – one twelfth of the population of the United Kingdom but scattered over the land area three times that size - British Columbia has no difficulty in finding sufficient people to stand as trustees of the 60 school districts, each administered with apparently greater efficiency than England can do with its ever more centralised government.

21. In placing its faith in local decision-making British Columbia is far better able to innovate than is possible in more congested England, where economies of scale too often prove to be a dangerous illusion. 20 years before the English established a tripartite system of secondary schooling in 1944, British Columbia had already started to adopt John Dewey’s belief that “education is life, not a mere preparation for life”.

22. There is a technical challenge, people are losing patience with printed text when there are more immediately attractive technologies. People look to television to give them quick, straight forward explanations. While a television documentary is the most appropriate of the present media to deal with this issue it has always to be remembered that if the audience’s attention is lost for even a couple of minutes they can simply turn it off... long before the main point has been concluded. The delivery of such material as this has always to be fascinating, fun and mentally challenging... which is itself, a challenge when we are aiming to change the very way in which people look at an old problem but with new insights.

23. The first four parts of the documentary will be about the universality of what we know about the learning process, mixed with the history of the development of the English model of education and how it has influenced the education system throughout the English speaking world. It is the fifth part which you need to concentrate on. Currently, in the possible television text it is entitled “British Columbia has the X-Factor”

24. Editorial Explanation will be recorded pieces, when edited would probably be less than ten minutes in total. 3-4 mins each. two or three students *to act rather as a kind of Greek chorus, throwing back to the participants the kind of ‘gutsy’ reactions that the audience might be wishing to make themselves* the current script is hypothetical at this stage, but the kinds of scenes are most likely those that will be required to consolidate the programme – they

25. Episode 42 A Conversation between Steve Cardwell, a number of students, and teachers as they introduce Tony Little (Headmaster of Eton) to British Columbia.

26. Episode 43 The monthly meeting of the Gulf Islands School Board

27. Episode 44 A simulated meeting of the ministry of Education staff explaining how B.C. has both held on to the distributed authority of sixty school boards, and is capitalizing on the wealth of intellectual thinking to be found across the province.

28. Episode 45 The Faculty Club of University of Victoria, under the chairmanship of Dr. Ted Riecken, Dean of the Faculty of Education.

29. Episode 46 The Minister’s office, Legislative Buildings. This discussion can not be scripted in advance, but the contributions of each individual will have to be carefully thought through in advance. They will discuss Fullan’s report.

30. when dealing with schools the best teachers are just like the best pupils... they give of their best when they are captivated by the excitement of what they are doing, feel totally in control, yet confident enough to ask for help when they need it. poor teachers, like poor pupils, however perform even more sluggishly when they are swamped by a veritable tsunami of instructions and directions that mean very little to them and to which they cannot emotionally commit. • Intrinsic motivation is critical to raising the bar for all students and giving them those higher order skills and competencies needed to become successful world citizens. • Fullan says of programs based on top-down directives, “I say flat out that there is no way such ambitious and admirable nationwide goals will be met... for they cannot generate on a large scale the kind of intrinsic motivational energy.”

31. For further information: Web www.born-to-learn.org www.21learn.org Email mail@21learn.org The 21st Century Learning Initiative - www.21learn.org