 So we're faced with a problem. Why is school reform difficult? Why is it frequently problematic? And its roots lie deep in our history. Education hasn't in a sense changed its assumptions of 100 years ago. Age-related classes, skills and knowledge developed for subject-specific disciplines, a custodial role, more funds allocated to the older pupils and the younger pupils, the increased marginalisation of home and community, and the overt training of teachers being more concerned with subject material than is in Finland, where they have to spend as much time on the development of social maturation skills of young people. We need to know a lot more. The basic model hasn't changed and it won't change just by tinkering around the sides. Twenty years ago, the Santa Fe Institute, people invented the atom bomb, came up with this interesting statement. The method people naturally employ to acquire knowledge is largely unsupported by traditional classroom classes. You all know that. What are we going to do about it? The human mind is better equipped to gather information about the world by operating within it by reading about it or studying abstract models. Nearly everybody would agree that experience is the best teacher, but what many fail to realise is that experience may be the only teacher. Education should not be drudgery and that was a theme that came through to me constantly in reading over school but undereducated. At every level, whether you're at strong start and digging around in the sand or you're building with blocks in kindergarten or whether you're in grade 12 and you're building a canoe, education should be fun, it should be exciting and at every level, whether you're completing grade 4 or whether you're completing grade 12, at every step education should leave you hungry for more knowledge. That, I think, is the magic of what John has to say in his very important work. Are you in British Columbia ready for this challenge? I actually believe you are uniquely prepared and equipped by the fact that you are a relatively small province and, I now call you Minister rather than George, you still hold to the concept that having 60 semi-autonomist school districts is the key to the future because you can carry out innovation in small districts that you can't carry out on the scale of a massive country at the same time. You, George, and the 60 superintendents in this room are the unique resource that this province has got. You need to understand each other, you need to communicate and you need to empower the superintendents to create within each district something really wonderful. That, in logistical terms, is quite a problem, 1 to 60, but it's there. What we have in British Columbia, and obviously I'm remarkably pleased that John agrees with this proposition, I think what we have in British Columbia is the opportunity to create some magic. Having a Ministry of Education which can provide not only funding but direction, provide focus, provide support, but having school districts and school boards that bring some local and regional value added to the policy that is generated at the Ministry of Education. I think, again, it is through that local knowledge and that regional understanding that we get not only good policy from the centre, but local adaptation of it. We still think that as children get older, the class size should go down and we still work on this old assumption that little children, because they are more amenable, don't necessarily need the best teachers. And all of that is what is upside down. Now, if you look at the way the Scandinavians handle this, they actually work on a weaning principle and I think this is very interesting. They're actually saying, look, the job of the teacher is vital, the job of the child to learn as much from the teacher as they can and how they can do things for themselves when they have got past the school is vital. Now, I think when you start looking at like that, the job of the school is not to produce good pupils, it's to produce good citizens for the future who can drive their own learning. And if you look at the more exceptional countries such as Finland, they always have very, very small classes when children are young. They have their best teachers when children are young and they don't swamp children with too much stuff from outside that actually destroys the child's sense of confidence of mastering it. In fact, I've often used a rule of thumb which says that class size should never be more than twice chronological age. So 10 at the age of 5, 20 at the age of 10, 30 at the age of 15. Why? Does that mean 36 or 38 at the age of 18? Nonsense. If we get it right at the beginning, then in fact, as many of you are discovering, the older the child gets, the more they need to be able to have the freedom to learn that stuff for themselves in a variety of learning type situations rather than being stuck in a classroom. And the frustration that teachers have is being stuck in a model which is still based on tell, tell, tell. And the model you're developing in a world in which so many children now have open access to so much technology that actually they can go far further than you ever thought they could, you no longer control the key to the door of the classroom. So really the issue is actually a very big structural one. And the Scandinavian countries don't do what you do, they don't do what my country does. They don't split education into elementary and secondary. They actually have an all through school. An all through school from 7 to 16 where the teachers literally have the ability to be at any part of that sector. And sometimes the teacher who has brilliant understanding of children's learning actually is using that with some of the older children. It's a growing up situation. It's where everybody is pulling together in the same way. When we launched the BC Education Plan, we launched it with the group Student Voice because we thought that was absolutely the right place to begin a discussion about renewal of Education in British Columbia. Anybody over the age of 30 in this room, which is most of us, has suddenly begun to realise that actually Student Voice is not just a nice thing on the side, it is actually an essential bit. Because students do see things from a very particular perspective. And that does not mean to say they see them from a naive perspective. They do see them from the way in which the rubber hits the road. And this is what actually happens. And therefore I think the world we're moving into is much more about genuine intergenerational understanding. I'm hoping that in concert with the neighbourhood learning centres, with other initiatives that try to bring the community and the schools closer together, that we will see more and more parents feeling very, very comfortable in grade 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, coming to school, working as volunteers, helping not only their kids but other kids and really closing that gap between a school and community. Many of you heard me talking about balanced education, aiming like a three-legged stool. A three-legged stool can balance on any surface providing the legs are of the same length. Your four-legged chairs there are pretty useless and it's got a flat bottom to them. What are those three legs, the home, the school and the community? And over the years, and I've been as guilty of this as anybody, as homes have got a little weaker and communities have got a little weaker, the school is launched in and said we'll do this and we'll do that, to the point at which the task of the school becomes almost impossible. However hard schools try, you can't literally or metaphorically put your arms around the kid. But kids do need arms put around them. They do need what the home can provide. They do need the challenge that the community can provide and all those professional people in the community who've never been asked to help provide the most magnificent mentors at an apprenticeship level. If you can do in your small school districts here, create a really vital three-legged stool in which each part is working to support the other, then your children will grow far faster and you teachers won't be quite so tired because other people will be not sharing the load, they'll be sharing the fun as well.