21st Century Learning Initiative

About Us

The 21st Century Learning Initiative's essential purpose is to facilitate the emergence of new approaches to learning that draw upon a range of insights into the human brain, the functioning of human societies, and learning as a community-wide activity. We believe this will release human potential in ways that nurture and form local democratic communities worldwide, and will help reclaim and sustain a world supportive of human endeavor.
The 21st Century Learning Initiative was established in 1995 by a group of English and American businessmen and organizations to make sense of research on learning and learning processes that were fragmented in many different disciplines, and embedded in many different universities, research institutions and businesses around the world.

It has now reached the stage where it is offering training programs to organizations and groups in the United Kingdom and Canada.

The Initiative believes that the more that is discovered about how the brain works and the various motives which drive human behaviour , the more we are convinced that education has to be about much more than intellectual development, and that learning and schooling are certainly not necessarily synonymous. What politicians and commentators in many lands describe as being "a crisis in schools" is, we believe, better understood as a crisis in society's commitment to young people. All this is aggravated by a materialistic agenda that degrades the spiritual needs of individuals and nations to the single minded drive towards economic profitability.

The Initiative grew out of the work of the Education 2000 trust established in the UK in 1983. For four years the Initiative was based in Washington DC, and its work focused on conferences held at Wingspread in Wisconsin which involved some 60 researchers, policy makers, and practitioners from 14 countries. The Initiative established one of the first major web sites on learning to be set up on the internet. This enabled it to grow rapidly as a "virtual" organisation, frequently being quoted as source material on University degree courses, in PhD theses, in policy papers issued by government agencies, and in speeches made by educational and community leaders.