‘Where did the idea for this book come from and why did you write it?’

For the Love of Learning: how the book came about

I have spent almost all my life in education, more than 70 years in fact. So, when I retired from consultancy for the third and final time in July 2023, I spent weeks cleaning out cupboards and decluttering books and professional papers in my library ready for… I knew not quite what.

My subconscious must have known differently, because during this time of clearing out the old, stories from my childhood and early learning and teaching years began calling, clamouring to be written. Such was their noise I didn’t plan them; my fingers seemed to communicate with the keyboard to write themselves.

A few weeks later, there they were. 40 pages of learning, teaching and schooling memories and experiences from a bygone era brought vividly to life, representing what we now understand to be an age of CONFORMITY.

Might this become a memoir, I wondered? No, because whose needs would it meet? Mine more than anyone else’s, I realised, so… what useful purpose might it serve?

And there was the thought, clear as day: these stories can help us understand our heritage, how and why schooling evolved this way. These first CONFORM chapters can help us compare the learning of yesterday with what’s needed today and for the future, to understand why some schooling traditions no longer serve the young people whose future flourishing is in our hands.

And so began a much longer and deeper writing journey across tumultuous seas of change that took education and learning into the age of REFORM - from early efforts of the ‘60s and ‘70s into more complex times through the1980s, 1990s and 2000s. Times where teachers and schools and systems were awash with multiple, ongoing reforms, all microcosms of exponential change on a societal and global scale.

Learning, teaching and whole school improvement became the prime focus; the basic structure of schooling remained unchanged.

From the 1980s onwards, I worked across Australia, New Zealand, and in more than a dozen different countries, learning from remarkable teachers and school leaders whose ground-breaking learning, teaching and capability development stories are captured in the REFORM chapters of this book.

At a time when powerful world authorities are calling out the urgent need for learning transformation and the flourishing of self, others and our planet, these stories and their accompanying Lifelong Capabilities framework offer us precious ‘gold’ draw on. They offer practical strategies, processes and guidelines to help shape the development of young people and their futures.

For the future isn’t something that is happening to us, it’s something we can contribute to influencing and shaping. Indeed, when we care about the future flourishing of young people, we have a moral responsibility to do so.

And so, following extensive research, the TRANSFORM section brings to life practical pictures of possibility where we step into the future to create new purposes and visions that transform learning for young people and teachers alike.

These are places where transformative capability development is a priority for human flourishing. Places where learning truly belongs to students, teachers and communities.

To me, teaching has never been a job, it is a calling. This book invites you to take up the call to reimagine education and enable flourishing in ways that equip learners for their futures in the new world to come.