Adolescence: A Critical Evolutionary Adaptation (Conference Paper)

In this article, commissioned for OSI's 2005 Education and Open Society Conference, John Abbott, president of the 21st Century Learning Initiative, draws on a range of recent research in several disciplines on how the brain functions and how humans learn (and how children are taught). It challenges an overdependence on outcome-based strategies to raise levels of educational attainment, arguing that an outcome-based system drives up standards of numeracy and literacy for some at the expense of the development of the whole child.