Redesigning Schooling – 2: What kind of teaching for what kind of learning?

Schools are in urgent need of redesigning. While some are giving their students a genuinely fitting start to life in the 21st century, many are not. We have not yet achieved the critical mass of thinking and practice that will change the system as a whole. The people who will be doing the requisite thinking, and exploring the necessary and effective shifts in practice, are head teachers and their staffs. Politicians are not in a good position to do this, because their time horizon is based on the five-yearly election cycle. Genuine radical change is certainly too slow and too complicated to be reduced to sound bites and election winners. Even academic educationalists, sadly, won’t do it either, because they do not have the requisite sense of urgency. Their bent is mostly to be cautious, balanced, analytical, argumentative and reactive, rather than committed, imaginative and practical. With a few exceptions, they will not take the lead.