The past year has caused millions of young people to discover that without their schools they have learnt nothing new, and that they do not know how to learn effectively alone. Before becoming a head of mathematics at the official British European School, I had discovered that the greatest damage caused to young people‚’s confidence is the common bureaucratic presumption that children at the same age must all have the same degree of the same intelligence. When taught accordingly, a few will believe that they understand their instruction; a majority will learn systematically to pretend that they do, leaving the rest believing the others are more successfully dishonest, and their teachers are complicit. These divisions damage societies. Being encouraged by the EU Education Commission to develop ‚’a more effective method of mathematics education‚’, I began to teach my pupils to learn by participating in discussion of the meaning of whatever they needed to learn – of any subject. This engages them all at the own level of intelligence in the most enjoyable and productive fashion. For the next twenty years my senior pupils consistently achieved amongst highest Baccalaureate grades of all thirteen European Schools. Since I retired, notice has been taken of this approach all over the world under the general title of ‚’Participatory Learning‚’. In 1996 I was awarded the annual prize of OU Philosophical Society for pointing out, apparently for the first time, that the early Greeks made mathematics and democracy successful by people learning the same three-step argument of description, connection and conclusion. This also teaches people how to argue, not to win, but to learn from each other. In 1999 I Sinclair Upton Sinclair awarding United States in the United States for innovation in education. I was also nominated for a Canadian Canada Parliament peace prize.
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