So what have you changed your mind about ?

Reading the intro to Futurelab's Vision magazine had me very, very excited.

Vision Magazine 7 link here.

Annika Small (read her here on Al Upton's blog), the outgoing CE of Futurelab, championed the cause of disruption and variation - something I have been doing ( without the platform) for many years now. She begins by quoting from a question asked by the Edge Foundation (hence my title to this post): What have you changed your mind about and why?

She highlights that changes of the mind lie at the core of almost every breakthrough in science, art and thought and further comments that lasting innovation rest on a rupture with the principles of the past.

This philosophy is so close to the thoughts and outpourings that I have bored people with over many, many years I was just emotionally heartened to hear someone else expounding similarly.

It is, as she says, obligatory on our part to institute a total re-think as to the purpose and nature of education and learning. It is only by unlearning what we think we know and what has plotted the map of our current progress that we will be able to move forward.

The current FutureLab magazine has an article on building primary schools for the future and intimates at the need to utilise the £7 billion effectively. It asks, as FutureLabs project on re-imagining learning spaces for open-minded flexibility and points towards the fundamental questions such as - from Hannah Jones (special projects director leading the Building Schools for the Future (BSF) Programme at the National College for School Leadership (NCSL) - what sort of learners would we like? and, from me, how and when and where and from whom would they wish to learn?

The article examines the fundamentals of educational development and poses the thought that - the classroom itself is seen as the final stumbling block to the imagination ...

We need to re-think before it is too late and another generation moves through our institutions without access to means that should be universal. We need to think what the purpose of our systems are and to take account of student voice. We have not done this yet.

So what do we need to change our minds about and how do we move on?