ABSTRACT
Over three decades, an organization called ASDAN, which the author helped to found, has promoted co-operative skills and co-operative learning and teaching which have had a direct impact upon the personal development and the academic attainment of young people. Educational innovations, such as co-operative approaches to teaching and learning, cannot be isolated from their social context. Thinkers such as John Dewey, Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg have all recognized in different ways that, within systems of social relationships, people obey the same obligations not out of fear but from mutual respect. The English education system has systematically failed hundreds of thousands of young people over the years through the administration of an ungenerous and limited view of what it is to be able and to be intelligent. By contrast, ASDAN materials and programmes incorporate design features which provide a systematic nurturing of confidence to combat failure.
