Making Minds

Paul Kelley

Routledge

ISBN 978-0-415-41411-1

 “What’s wrong with education and what we should do about it” is the subtitle of Paul Kelley’s book “Making Minds”, a confrontational title for a book designed to make the reader reflect.

 Unlike most commentators on education Kelley is a hands-on-head who is running a school, modestly described in the book as “an average state school in the north of England”. Excited by what he does, the book transmits the energy to the reader. “Understanding learning is mankind’s greatest adventure because it will lead to understanding our minds, how they are made and their potential.  The biological complexity of the human brain can now be understood using the knowledge and techniques created by the relentless advances in science, scientific technology and ICT.”

 Much of the book is concerned with the impact of ICT on learning and is all the more valuable coming from someone whose own use of ICT has transformed what he does, how he teaches and how he runs his school.

 Kelley’s American background means that he looks at education in the UK with a freshness that is both refreshing and sometimes unnerving. He sees things that we take for granted.  Kelley admires the OU and has worked imaginatively with the University to offer degrees to his own students.  He has the independence to look at initiatives like Curriculum Online (he judges it as a failure); the whiteboard fashion (a waste of money in terms of its impact on learning).  Becta is not mentioned at all!  According to Kelley, all we have done is digitised the traditional ways of teaching and the traditional resources.  “Technologies,” he argues, “do not solve the problem of education systems unless they are used within a new world view of learning.”

 The new view of learning according to Kelley will come from an understanding of neuroscience. “Advances in neuroscience and social sciences mean that this is an era when the fundamental understanding of learning will change.”

 Academics with hazy memories of the classroom are the usual authors of books like this.  Kelley stands right in the centre of the classroom and the book is readable, original and relevant. 

 Jack Kenny

Jack Kenny is one of the UK's best-known reporters on ICT