Our whole education structure needs to be reformed on the basis of how we now deal with information, how the job market expects us to adapt knowledge. We are very much stuck in an ethos of “getting the basics right” then expecting people to filter down to one subject and to master knowledge as if retaining knowledge is the be all and end all in this information age.

I believe there needs to be much more focus not on individual subjects as we go forward, but how to access information about those subjects, how to find experts in those areas, how to find good from bad information.

If we’re to be a flexible and mobile workforce in the future, as well as simply more informed human beings that can deal with thinking for ourselves, focus needs to come down to more ideas like these. Teach people how to learn, not how to remember.

One thing I find consistently weird is the number of people who don’t understand the difference between primary, secondary, tertiary &c sources – that for example “person or organisation X says that violent crime has risen by Y percent” isn’t actually the same as producing the original data. I once had someone insist quite vocally that something was the law of the land on the basis that he’d once read a sentence to that effect in a textbook on torts.

“Teachers are worried that young people are not being equipped to tell the difference. The 500 teachers polled rated their pupils’ ability to recognise bias, apply fact checks and verify sources to be below average. ”

Hardly surprising – cynicism and healthy suspicion are things you develop with experience. Kids have been getting bad, sometimes dangerous, information since the beginning of time, whether from their parents, their peers, books, TV…

I guess this is always worth addressing, and the internet probably does add an extra layer of concern. Joe makes a good point above – my school did teach about the reliability of sources, but not until late in the day. Perhaps we should teach kids this sort of thing a lot earlier, along with other critical thinking skills like the scientific method and common cognitive biases and misunderstandings of statistics that lead people to make mistakes.

I know this is only a sketch. But I can remember similar worries being expressed 25 years ago as the internet sneaked onto the Web. My understanding of 19th century anxieties about mass literacy were also aroused by the thought of the working classes reading seditious and dishonest literature.

The truth is that knowledge, understanding and wisdom are scarce and precious – as teachers we all hope to get them one day, and we dream too, that our pupils will beat us to it.

Sadly we have a prescribed and over-tested national curriculum that inhibits the difficult pursuit of wisdom and overvalues mere performance – a programmed course in digital literacy would create more of the same, while leaving most pupils just as vulnerable to lies and dependency as they are now. Character, independence, morality, resilience – these are what protect us from the illiberal, the inhuman and the dishonest. They underlie all good teacher/pupil interactions, whatever the curriculum says. These are what remain after every scrap of “information” has been forgotten.

But let’s not forget that large numbers of children successfully avoid the strictures of the national curriculum (and its gaps) and grow up to be discerning and wise despite our best efforts.

I don’t see much evidence that you have considered the deeper analyses of literacy that could have shaken off the worries of internet fibs and could have tempered your confidence in curriculum innovation as a prescription. (Freire would be one obvious starting point).

PS “Teach people how to learn, not how to remember.” has been a rallying cry as long as I can remember. I don’t think the 19th century were ignorant of the idea either. The trouble is, it’s just a slogan and real education is tiring, long and almost impervious to shifts in policy mood.

@ 2 Joe

Another problem is that, even when the source can be presumed to be reliable, people tend to take the most dramatic interpretation of the data given. So if Brand X has been found to increase your chances of getting a particular cancer by 50%, it’s assumed that this must be a huge figure and Brand X should be taken off the shelves – but it’s not such a big deal as your chance of getting that cancer was only 0.1% to begin with. Or perhaps the newspaper headline states, accurately enough, “Scientific Study Finds Link Between Brand X and Cancer”, and the reader interprets that as “Brand X Definitely Causes Cancer”.

It’s more complex than just being a slogan, and there’s no excuse for the way we educate to not have moved with the times. For centuries we’ve been getting more and more adept at providing means of disseminating information and doing it faster too. Our education systems in this country have done little to deal with these changes. We’re taught of the differences between tabloid press and broadsheet press, but not of the flaws in the way the press report and thus why to be sceptical of claims. We’re taught to try to understand what we’re copying off the net for our coursework, but not to verify the information we’re copying.

I always thought ‘truth’ was an absolute, the difficulty is in learning the truth about anything.
Did Caesar bring prosperity, peace and civilisation to the British Isles or was he more interested in furthering his political career, winning valuable natural resources and enslaving the native people.
Many BBC programmes on early Britain would have you believe the former.
How many students of modern history know the truth of the Gulf of Tonkin incident and its repercussions.
While secrecy is the enemy of democracy, how long will the people of Britain have to wait to learn the names of people implicated in Operation Ore, or David Kelly’s post mortem report.
Should we be surprised that ‘conspiracy theories’ abound and how do we prepare our children to separate truth from fiction, when our political masters are mostly concerned with perception?

@1. Lee Griffin: “Teach people how to learn, not how to remember.”

Whilst in general agreement, sometimes you have to remember lots of complex stuff in order to learn. Whether the subject is econometrics or engineering, at degree level you have to remember a lot of maths. It doesn’t matter whether you are given the book of tables, functions and transforms for the exam if you can’t remember what to apply.

@3. Chaise Guevara: “Perhaps we should teach kids this sort of thing a lot earlier, along with other critical thinking skills like the scientific method and common cognitive biases and misunderstandings of statistics that lead people to make mistakes.”

If we provide students with a list of the 20 most common cognitive biases to avoid, are we not perpetuating biases 21 to 30?

—
I’m not a fan of Wikipedia owing to the indifferent quality of its content, but I doubt that a day passes when I do not refer to it. One of the things that I do like is the demand from editors that “hard” or questionable data should be identifiable from a primary source[*]. This tells us that Wikipedia understands its limitations. Wikipedia is a secondary or tertiary source delivering information for us to pursue; sometimes it gives us the keywords to search for better sources; sometimes it tells us that information is disputed or is anecdotal and that we should research elsewhere.

[*] It would be beneficial if the Wikipedia editors of autobiographic articles permitted subjects to speak on questions of accuracy rather than relying on a third party report. The published autobiography of a dead person is treated as a primary source. But you have to be dead.

@4: “My understanding of 19th century anxieties about mass literacy were also aroused by the thought of the working classes reading seditious and dishonest literature.”

And there were those academics in the 1960s who responded to the Robbins Report (published in 1963) on university expansion with: “More means worse.”

At the time of the report, university education only reached 4 or 5 per cent of the age group.

Our children hardly have a chance.

One third of teachers are so thick they probably believe half the conspiracy theories themselves and a re regularly taken in by pseudo-scientific crap like multiple intelligences and learning styles, another third are doing their best but being ground down by a ridiculously overbearing and counter-productive obsession with largely subjective numbers and ‘grades’ whilst the final third are the lower-than-a-weasel’s belly ladder climbing careerists who wouldn’t know the true value and meaning of an education if it kicked them up the arse continually for an entire day. Some kids perhaps manage to scrape through their five years not too damaged and a very few actually realise how it all works and become quite cynical and disillusioned, and realistically they’re the successes.

The above pejorative comments are based solely on 14 years within the education system in UK’s secondary school.

@10 – Regardless if it’s actually how our brains work or not is an issue for science. It’s of *practical use* for teaching.

Congratulations, you turned away from the people who understood how to help you, and now you’re complaining that you don’t understand. Well, yes.

@10: “Our children hardly have a chance.”

“Our children hardly have a chance.”

And over 40 per cent of young people are now going on into higher education.

“Employees with a degree earned 85% more last year than those educated to around GCSE level but the gap has narrowed, statistics show. The margin stood at 95% in 1993 when there were fewer graduates, the figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) show. And one in five graduates at the end of 2010 earned less than the average for those educated to A-level standard.” [BBC website 24 August 2011]

A series of international studies found that there were lower unemployment rates among graduates in most advanced countries and higher employment rates.

How come if graduates are paid more than non-graduates?

@8 – Hence Guivra’s call there for teaching people how to understand what is or isn’t a conspiracy theory, and critical thinking and research in general. That way, you don’t need to tell them that something is an *obvious* conspiracy theory…

@9. Bob B

Sorry Bob – my sentence has a mistake in it. It was supposed to say: “My understanding is that 19th century anxieties about mass literacy were also aroused by the thought of the working classes reading seditious and dishonest literature.”

My clumsy point was that Miller and Ryan are in the same mould – worrying that unsupervised or poorly taught people will create the wrong meanings out of what they read for themselves.

They will of course, but they will also create lots of right ideas too – such choices are beyond what a curriculum or a course can achieve. Challenging authority or authenticity in anything is far more to do with attitudes and dispositions than “skill”. There are many here among us who only use our critical faculties when our values or emotions are aroused. There are also many who set up shoddy critical barricades to everything they see, having only been taught half the cycnic’s repertoire.

I don’t have a solution here, or even a question. I’m just saying that the proposition “For digital literacy to be embraced, teachers have to be equipped with the resources, training and precious time to teach it.” is an empty proposal. Digital literacy is not, at heart, any different from any other kind of literacy – all of which are context specific, contested, and value-dependent.

I’m confused about why you mentioned Higher Education. I think my point applies to all educational levels. We seem to have a graduate Secretary of State justifying policy change with reference to a two year-old Daily Mail story today. She assured us her content had been “checked”. Presumably by graduate interns who shared her values and rhetorical ambitions. Is it a case of Media Illiteracy or Media Hyperliteracy? I’m not sure.

@10. David Compression

I’ll take your 14 and offer my 20. I winced at your accurate depiction of all the bad days. But I still cherish many good ones. Teaching contains the best and the worst.

I would go along with Miller and Ryan in looking at teacher selection, education, training and continuing development as a prority. I too have been shocked at the snake oil beng peddled on “training days” – “brain science” and worse.

@14 Sam: “My clumsy point was that Miller and Ryan are in the same mould – worrying that unsupervised or poorly taught people will create the wrong meanings out of what they read for themselves.”

Dig a little and I think you’ll find similar reservations on the part of the 19th century political elite about extending the franchise for fear of mob rule and irresistible political pressures for egalitarianism. Even JS Mill, a font of what became libertarianism, was writing: Better Socrates dissatisfied than a pig satisfied.” in his essay on Utilitarianism (1863). This was one of the reasons he pressed for: “representative government”.

After 13 years of New Labour governance, what we find is this:

The chances of a child from a poor family enjoying higher wages and better education than their parents is lower in Britain than in other western countries, the OECD says
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/mar/10/oecd-uk-worst-social-mobility

My personal concerns about extending “digital literacy” boundaries is that it stresses the prior literacy and numeracy skills needed to use computers effectively. Try this news on the BBC website from January 2006 about the findings of the HoC Public Accounts Committee:

“Up to 12 million working UK adults have the literacy skills expected of a primary school child, the [HoC] Public Accounts Committee says. . . The report says there are up 12 million people holding down jobs with literacy skills and up to 16 million with numeracy skills at the level expected of children leaving primary school.”

Btw I must confess to being among the ancients who graduated before the Robbins Report came out. What that means is that relatively few of those around my age are graduates.

@16 – Yes, there was a massive, massive amount of damage done to the basic social infrastructure by Thatcher. Labour have been playing catchup, and did a lot on child poverty (which is now being rolled back, I’d add).

That was a distraction from other tasks like being able to do more than hold the line on social mobility, at a time when the rich, like you, have been systematically pushing down the percentage of society’s wealth owned by 99% of society, and making two-incomes a necessity for a reasonable lifestyle for the middle class. (Until now, now you’re looking at massive drops even with two, especially since the Government is taking us directly back into depression)

Some form of ‘digital fluency’, encompassing both traditional critical thinking skills and specific knowledge about how the online world (say, how search engines operate) works needs to be put at the heart of education.

We can’t teach little Johnny to read or write, or do basic sums, or even to sit down and shut up, but we should spend even more of the limited time we have in the class room wasting time surfing the internet.

Is that really the argument being put here?

Here is a better way to deal with misinformation on the internet – take every single electronic device out of every single school, teach the little bastards to read and provide them with a basic level of education and literacy to make their own decisions.

Radical I know.

@18 – Making sure they can’t complete with the rich, who have computers earlier, who are literate with computers and who need ever-more guarantees that you and your kin will always be able to outperform the poor.

That state schools will have to do without IT networks, so their teachers will have to waste time with handwritten files, etc.

Yes, it’s typically radical and regressive. The whole concept that poor kids might be taught reasoning abilities is a THREAT to you…

How on earth do we teach young people ‘reasoning skills’? A pre-requisite of reasoning is to be at least half-literate as we use language to think. Unfortunately, rather too many of the children I see have never been able to read (and certainly not write) to any level that you or I would consider acceptable. Consequently they can never really ‘access’ much that is put in front of them and despite this their rudimentary literacy is never addressed so nothing ever changes. So standards drop. Curricula are ‘streamlined’ (the tricky stuff is removed) and the new curricula are hilariously termed: “less knowledge-based”.

If education is what is left behind when everything we have been taught has been forgotten, then we are sacrificing huge numbers of children to dull cultural lives on the alter of farcically subjective National Curriculum levels and % A-C grades which leave nothing behind them except a nice headline stat for the school, and we are encouraging a generation of teachers whose only function is to produce those headline figures. The real long-term well-being of children, and their ability to make sense of their world and apply ‘reason’ to their lives is way down the list of priorities.

Still, the holidays are good.

@18: “Here is a better way to deal with misinformation on the internet – take every single electronic device out of every single school, teach the little bastards to read and provide them with a basic level of education and literacy to make their own decisions.”

Used effectively, computers can be a great aid to teaching basics through self-education.

About 10 years back I was wandering around my local computer superstore – the first in Britain btw – and came upon two wee girls, tots, the older of whom was reaching up to manipulate the mouse to demonstrate an early learners counting program to the even smaller tot, probably a sibling, who was watching with rapt attention. The instructor went through the sequence of counting tests twice – and correctly.

PCs online are a marvellously accessible information resource compared with anything around when I was a student. Many academic texts and papers which we had to borrow or buy as students are available to download free of charge. And there are alternative reading lists – my political theory lecturer was obsessive about the British Hegelians, TH Green and Bernard Bosanquet.

It’s so much easier nowadays to access alternative and critical perspectives. Btw that political theory lecturer was a close friend of Guy Burgess at Cambridge. I joke not – references can be found in several biogs about Burgess, one of the infamous Cambridge “Five” who defected to Moscow. Burgess left Cambridge without graduating but was accepted into the Foreign Office despite that through connections.

A relevant question is whether home computers in bedrooms are used more to play video games or watch movies on DVD.

@20: “How on earth do we teach young people ‘reasoning skills’? ”

A good question, that. By running analytical exercises in the sciences and geography or history?

Too much history is taught as wrote and dates instead of probing sources and asking why we should trust the sources – or not. When I was a lad at school, we had maths textbooks which were full of questions about how many paving slabs would be needed for a garden path x yards long when each slab was y ft square, or how many men would be needed to dig a ditch etc and even about compound interest, stocks and shares and yields. How about solving simultaneous equations? Even today, I can’t remember the formula for converting temperatures in degrees Centigrade into degrees Fahrenheit and v-v so I have to work it out unless there’s a computer handy to access an online converter.

Try this example in today’s news from the FT:

The Bank of England’s monetary policy committee will decide later this week whether to create more money to pump into the economy through the purchase of government bonds. Most economists think the decision could go either way.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/2f31da20-ee6f-11e0-a2ed-00144feab49a.html#axzz1ZqXlzc6Q

If there another possibility apart from either way, I think we should be told.

@23 – It’s not that hard. There are logical exercises and so on which are designed to teach this. We walk students through them at university, and so many of them…well, they don’t get them initially, and they have problems with the fact that THEY need to take control of their learning at University.

It’s directly down to teaching to the test. This is stuff 11-year old kids should be learning. More than that, skills which USE logic are thin on the ground. Coding was taught at UK schools in the 80′s, but not today….

(Yes, you DO need to alter the school system to allow “experts” (i.e. coders) to teach some of this stuff…)

@17: “Yes, there was a massive, massive amount of damage done to the basic social infrastructure by Thatcher. Labour have been playing catchup, and did a lot on child poverty (which is now being rolled back, I’d add).”

Compare this by Sam Brittan in the FT in July:

“The relative decline of the British economy in the century up to the late 1970s has been reversed. Since then, the UK has caught up with and even overtaken its principal trading partners. The previous two sentences are neither a typing mistake nor a daydream. They are the sober conclusions of the country’s leading quantitative historian, Prof Nicholas Crafts”
http://www.samuelbrittan.co.uk/text399_p.html

I can post links to Nick Crafts papers if any here are interested.

Btw I only wish I were rich, as alleged, but I can’t see what difference that makes to the argument. But, then, perhaps that is because I graduated so long ago when the quality of the analysis is what mattered, not whether the author was rich or not.

19. Leon Wolfson

Making sure they can’t complete with the rich, who have computers earlier, who are literate with computers and who need ever-more guarantees that you and your kin will always be able to outperform the poor.

Sally’s Sock puppet, you are not really worth dealing with, it is not as if you have anything rational to say, but if the rich have computers and the poor do not, the poor will cream them in any fair educational system. Computers detract from learning. I am not even aware of a single study that says otherwise.

21. Bob B

Used effectively, computers can be a great aid to teaching basics through self-education.

Sure. As long as they come with the mandatory unicorn. In reality all computers do is enable plagiarism and surfing the net for porn.

PCs online are a marvellously accessible information resource compared with anything around when I was a student. Many academic texts and papers which we had to borrow or buy as students are available to download free of charge.

Which means students do not bother with libraries or research skills. They surf the net, cut and paste some quotes, maybe re-write them a little if they are worried about being caught, and then they submit. Make information easy to get and students will not learn. Why should they? It is all available one click away.

It’s so much easier nowadays to access alternative and critical perspectives.

Although it is meaningless as British schools have never been less tolerate of alternative or critical perspectives.

22. Bob B

Too much history is taught as wrote and dates instead of probing sources and asking why we should trust the sources – or not.

Sorry but have you been inside a class room since 1972? No one learns any history as wrote and dates. Especially dates. They are all about “criticising” the sources. Which means condemning Dead White Males. Most students would not know a date if they tripped over it. They certainly have no idea how to properly probe a source. In fact if they know anything other than the Nazis were almost as bad as Churchill I would be surprised.

@25:

Most of that is just silly dogmatic rubbish which I’m not going to waste time on.

I’ve seen people build successful careers on what they have learned online even if others waste time obsessively playing video games or watching movies and porn in bedrooms.

It’s much easier and faster to check academic references and bibliographies online than using libraries and book buying online is very much easier and cheaper, which is why so many bookshops are shrinking or closing.

As posted, in the past students were more lkely to get trapped into accepting their lecturers’ pet theories than nowadays, when some universities are putting lectures or whole courses on the internet. By observation, I make more of a habit than most posters here of putting up links to a variety of academic sources.

It’s a pity nothing much came of Gordon Brown’s idea, he canvassed in the run-up to the 1997 election, of a University for Industry (UfI) to redress our industrial skills shortages. But then, as I suggest @16, I think we need to worry about the extent of adult literacy and numeracy issues. Successive governments have spent a lot of our money trying to address the problem without much success, according to the HoC Public Accounts Committee. That is a real hindrance to the use of computers to check sources.

@24 – The bank-driven bubble which we have had in our finances is one thing.

But it can’t override the fact there was terrible damage, much of which has not been fully healed and is now being ripped open again, to Britain’s infrastructure. Especially in the North, and to the inclusion of the poor in society.

Oh, and the net /has/ caused problems with superficial source checking, but that’s a case of inadequate education into doing that properly. Which is something which, again, needs to be taught.

(I warn my University students they will lose many marks for referencing wikipedia. Not all of them believe me. The first time.)

@25 – No, Sally is just bitter. I’m spiteful AND bitter!

“I am not even aware of a single study that says otherwise.”

Well yes, and that says a lot about your learning levels. But computers are endemic in work which actually pays enough for people to live decently, and people unable to use them properly don’t get far. Which is of course fine with you, but…

26. Bob B

Most of that is just silly dogmatic rubbish which I’m not going to waste time on.

Ignoring the reality won’t make it go away.

I’ve seen people build successful careers on what they have learned online even if others waste time obsessively playing video games or watching movies and porn in bedrooms.

Sure. A few people run blogs. But by and large, computers make students dumber.

It’s much easier and faster to check academic references and bibliographies online than using libraries and book buying online is very much easier and cheaper, which is why so many bookshops are shrinking or closing.

I agree it is faster. That is why students are learning less. They don’t take as seriously. What is more, that is not learning. Learning means looking for something new. Something that almost by definition you won’t find on the internet. The more you encourage students simply to surf the net, the less they are actually learning real skills they will need to do proper research.

As posted, in the past students were more lkely to get trapped into accepting their lecturers’ pet theories than nowadays, when some universities are putting lectures or whole courses on the internet. By observation, I make more of a habit than most posters here of putting up links to a variety of academic sources.

Sorry but that is simply not true. In the past Communists could – and did – pass British schools and Universities without trouble. Because teachers were fair and only interested in teaching. Now that those Communists are largely former Communists but are in charge of education, all students have to pass de facto political correctness tests. Which is why there are virtually no conservatives or even liberals in Western Universities. Or even most schools. British education is less open now than at any time in the past.

It’s a pity nothing much came of Gordon Brown’s idea, he canvassed in the run-up to the 1997 election, of a University for Industry (UfI) to redress our industrial skills shortages.

An interesting suggestion. Perhaps we could call them, oh I don’t know, polytechnics?

Ohnoes! The Red Threat!

You’ve sucked enough of our blood, you vampires,
With prison, taxes and poverty!
You have all the power, all the blessings of the world,
And our rights are but an empty sound!
We’ll make our own lives in a different way -
And here is our battle cry:
All the power to the people of labor!
And away with all the parasites!

Hmm. Gee, it’s almost like it resonates with the banking crisis and against shill bloggers.

Heh, shark jumping @28!

Surfing the net for porn….You lot make it sound like a bad thing. I am doing it right now. Pretty good if you ask me. I’ll leave you suckers to buy it from the newsagent.

@30…that bloke jumped the shark ages ago. At least Sally is funny (unintentionally mind you), but as the fonz would say, ‘EHHHH!’

If I were a motto type person mine would be – a taught fact is transitory; a learned fact is for life. Due to this apparent lack in schools whenever I’m with the younger members of my family I’ll try to edge them towards critical thinking. Whenever they make a statement (right or wrong) I’ll ask them why they think that.

Just this weekend resulted in a logic train as follows – I know it’s true as I saw it on TV. I know the TV was true as it was a documentary. I know it was a documentary as it wasn’t on a children’s channel. I know children’s channels can show true things, but those aren’t animated.

When the elder sibling pointed out that some animated shows on children’s channels are based on real things it resulted in a long period of quiet.

With limited access to the internet on occasion it’s “I know it’s true as I saw it on the internet”

Given that he’s approaching 10 why isn’t critical thinking taught at the point in time when children are most receptive to learning? Why does it appear that he’s only being introduced to it now and by me?

@ 18 SMFS

“We can’t teach little Johnny to read or write, or do basic sums, or even to sit down and shut up, but we should spend even more of the limited time we have in the class room wasting time surfing the internet.

Is that really the argument being put here?”

No, you’re straw-manning it. I could read, write, do basic sums and shut up when told to before I went to school, and so could many of my contemporaries. So what has your objection got to say about the majority of kids who can do these things? Shall we ignore all but the weakest when forming policy, drowning the education system in our own pessimism?

“Here is a better way to deal with misinformation on the internet – take every single electronic device out of every single school, teach the little bastards to read and provide them with a basic level of education and literacy to make their own decisions.

Radical I know.”

I think the word you’re looking for is “luddite”. I really don’t think we should cripple our kids’ education by artificially reducing their resources to those invented at least 150 years ago, just because SMFS has an irrational hatred of the very computer he presumably uses to post on this site…

Your entire response is a collection of snobbery against children, snobbery against technology, faux-cynicism, and probably some rose-tinted nostalgia thrown in… all with the aim of shouting at people who actually try to improve things. Must try harder.

31. BAH!

Surfing the net for porn….You lot make it sound like a bad thing. I am doing it right now. Pretty good if you ask me. I’ll leave you suckers to buy it from the newsagent.

There is a time and a place for surfing the internet. In class time, at the taxpayer’s expense is neither.

32. FlipC

Given that he’s approaching 10 why isn’t critical thinking taught at the point in time when children are most receptive to learning? Why does it appear that he’s only being introduced to it now and by me?

It is absurd to think you can teach a ten year old critical thinking. You can teach them to be cynical and untrusting, but that is not quite the same thing.

33. Chaise Guevara

No, you’re straw-manning it. I could read, write, do basic sums and shut up when told to before I went to school, and so could many of my contemporaries. So what has your objection got to say about the majority of kids who can do these things? Shall we ignore all but the weakest when forming policy, drowning the education system in our own pessimism?

It is not a majority. My objection is just as applicable to those nice middle class children of nice middle class parents who are, by and large, wasting their time in expensive day care. In that they should be going to learn more. How to spell for instance. We simply do not have enough hours in the school room to teach all we need to teach. We waste most of it teaching what we do not need to teach but which the Teachers find more congenial. The result is the waste land you see all around you.

I think the word you’re looking for is “luddite”. I really don’t think we should cripple our kids’ education by artificially reducing their resources to those invented at least 150 years ago, just because SMFS has an irrational hatred of the very computer he presumably uses to post on this site…

The problem with making assumptions is that you usually make foolish ones. The word I am looking for is not luddite – and I thought E. P. Thompson made them heroes for the Left anyway. I do not hate computers. They are very useful. In their proper place. It is not because they are high tech they are a problem. It is because they don’t work. The more computers children have access to, the less they learn. It does not cripple anyone’s education to have the chance to read, to think about what has been read and to draw their own conclusions therefrom. It cripples their education to turn learning into a colour and light show that is full of noise but signifies nothing. Not that educational outcomes 150 years ago were bad mind you. So your dismissal of them is simply bigotry.

Your entire response is a collection of snobbery against children, snobbery against technology, faux-cynicism, and probably some rose-tinted nostalgia thrown in… all with the aim of shouting at people who actually try to improve things. Must try harder.

Which simply proves you have failed to understand what is put in front of you. I guess you had plenty of access to computers as a lad.

@ 34 SMFS

“In that they should be going to learn more. How to spell for instance.”

You can teach spelling and IT – and frankly the latter is probably of more actual use in adult life.

“We simply do not have enough hours in the school room to teach all we need to teach. We waste most of it teaching what we do not need to teach but which the Teachers find more congenial.”

What’s your basis for claiming “all electronics” fall into this band?

“The result is the waste land you see all around you. ”

I don’t share your paranoid delusions / self-righteous faux-cynical pessimism / whatever. Britain is not a wasteland.

“The problem with making assumptions is that you usually make foolish ones.”

Hah! Yes! Such as “kids can’t read” or “electronics + education = disaster”.

“The more computers children have access to, the less they learn.”

Please provide evidence of this, including a demonstration that the former causes the latter, and at least an argument showing that this is a problem with computers overall instead of just a mistake in the teaching method.

“It does not cripple anyone’s education to have the chance to read, to think about what has been read and to draw their own conclusions therefrom.”

Gosh, really? I never would have guessed. Not got anything to do with my post though, has it? It’s almost like you’ve created this argument yourself out of nothing – a metaphorical man crafted from straw, if you will – so you can argue with something that nobody said because it’s easier than defending your ridiculous position.

“It cripples their education to turn learning into a colour and light show that is full of noise but signifies nothing.”

Gosh, really etc (i.e. see above).

“Not that educational outcomes 150 years ago were bad mind you. So your dismissal of them is simply bigotry.”

No, it’s simple recognition of the fact that they lacked the technological advantages we enjoy.

“Which simply proves you have failed to understand what is put in front of you. I guess you had plenty of access to computers as a lad.”

I understand you all too well, grumpy reactionary fellow. But oh noes! He used a computer as a child! Now his brain must be melted, and SMFS can use this instead of actually addressing his points! Another proud victory for misanthropic ignorance!

There is a time and a place for surfing the internet. In class time, at the taxpayer’s expense is neither….

….Well? THAT WAS RESEARCH!

35. Chaise Guevara

You can teach spelling and IT – and frankly the latter is probably of more actual use in adult life.

No you cannot. There are only so many hours in the day and we don’t manage to teach people how to spell. Given we cannot do the core tasks properly, it is foolish to take more time away from them and give it to something else like IT. A group of IT professionals in Britain recently said that a University degree in IT was largely useless in the work place. Something I would agree with. Certainly asking some third rate Fine Arts graduate to teach IT is an utter and total waste of time. It will provide no skills useful in later life, well some experience of Word and Excel perhaps, but nothing a bright student could not pick up in ten minutes on their own.

What’s your basis for claiming “all electronics” fall into this band?

Experience. Try some.

I don’t share your paranoid delusions / self-righteous faux-cynical pessimism / whatever. Britain is not a wasteland.

Nor do I live in your fairy land. I did not say Britain was. But the British State education system certainly is.

Please provide evidence of this, including a demonstration that the former causes the latter, and at least an argument showing that this is a problem with computers overall instead of just a mistake in the teaching method.

How about this one?

http://www.columbia.edu/~cp2124/papers/computer.pdf

This paper uses a regression discontinuity design to estimate the effect of home computers on child and adolescent outcomes. We collected survey data from households who participated in a unique government program in Romania which allocated vouchers for the purchase of a home computer to low-income children based on a simple ranking of family income. We show that children in households who received a voucher were substantially more likely to own and use a computer than their counterparts who did not receive a voucher. Our main results indicate that that home computer use has both positive and negative effects on the development of human capital. Children who won a voucher had significantly lower school grades in Math, English and Romanian but significantly higher scores in a test of computer skills and in self-reported measures of computer fluency. There is also evidence that winning a voucher increased cognitive ability, as measured by Raven’ Progressive Matrices. We do not find much evidence for an effect on non-cognitive outcomes. Finally, the presence of parental rules regarding computer use and homework appear to mitigate the effects of computer ownership, suggesting that parental monitoring and supervision may be important mediating factors.

Insulated from teaching methods as they all got the same level of teaching. Clearly showing a significant reduction in the important subjects of Maths, English and, if you’re Romanian, Romanian. But on the other hand they could surf the internet and thought they were hot. So that’s all right then.

Gosh, really? I never would have guessed. Not got anything to do with my post though, has it? It’s almost like you’ve created this argument yourself out of nothing – a metaphorical man crafted from straw, if you will – so you can argue with something that nobody said because it’s easier than defending your ridiculous position.

Why are you trying to re-write what you said? You specifically said restricting students to books would cripple their education – your word, not mine, in case anyone objects to the disablism. So it is precisely relevant to what you said.

No, it’s simple recognition of the fact that they lacked the technological advantages we enjoy.

Hardly crippled their education though did it?

@34 SMFS

It is absurd to think you can teach a ten year old critical thinking

Please explain why rather than making it a statement of fact.

@ 37 SMFS

“No you cannot. There are only so many hours in the day and we don’t manage to teach people how to spell.”

This is yet another of your sweeping, unsupported statements. But even taking it at face value, I’d say spelling is not the most important lesson – partly thanks to IT, which has software support for poor spellers. And this comes from someone who cringes when he sees bad grammar.

Anyway, it’s not necessarily a case of cutting back spelling lessons and replacing them with IT lessons, is it? How about removing RE and French lessons in primary school and replacing them with IT?

“Given we cannot do the core tasks properly, it is foolish to take more time away from them and give it to something else like IT.”

How do we determine what is treated as “core”? Based on your personal preference?

“A group of IT professionals in Britain recently said that a University degree in IT was largely useless in the work place. Something I would agree with.”

Was that because IT degrees are inherently pointless, or because the ones we teach now happen to be crap? Any road, a degree is at a very different level to a school classroom. Almost everyone will benefit from basic computer skills, but teach too many people elite computer skills and the available jobs will dry up quickly (another possible reason that these professionals dislike IT degrees).

“Certainly asking some third rate Fine Arts graduate to teach IT is an utter and total waste of time.”

Agreed.

“It will provide no skills useful in later life, well some experience of Word and Excel perhaps, but nothing a bright student could not pick up in ten minutes on their own.”

I suspect you’re not familar with the full functionality of those programs. I’ve used Word all my life, but was unaware of what it could actually DO until I took a job that required me to learn. And many people think of Excel as a way to arrange data neatly.

“Experience. Try some.”

Boring ad homs are boring.

“Nor do I live in your fairy land. I did not say Britain was. But the British State education system certainly is.”

I don’t share your pessimism about that either.

“How about this one?”

Okay… that shows that home computer ownership can have a negative effect on non-IT skills, but it doesn’t show that teaching IT would have the same effect. Most likely it’s due to kids at home playing games and browsing sites instead of reading and so on. So you answered one out of the three points, in a way not relevant to this conversation.

“Why are you trying to re-write what you said?”

You were the one trying to rewrite what I said.

“You specifically said restricting students to books would cripple their education – your word, not mine, in case anyone objects to the disablism. So it is precisely relevant to what you said.”

I did. What I didn’t say is that giving people the chance to read would have that effect – that was a lie on your part. I’m not bound by your false dichotomies.

[BTW, I think it would be a bit much to brand the use of the word "cripple" as a verb applied to an abstract concept "disablist".]

“Hardly crippled their education though did it?”

Well, no, because very few Victorian job specifications including programming skills and a working knowledge of MS Excel. Can you figure out why?

SMFS – Can’t Understand New Technology.

This article sums it up nicely and provides a near perfect example of being the problem.

Given:

1) 12-15 year olds
2) a quiet lesson
3) An Inspector Calls

Spot any flaw? (anxious pause) ..anyone…?

Hello everyone – thanks for your comments. Some great ones, some very poor ones.

Sorry I don’t have time to respond to them all. Jumping onto a few of the earlier ones, before the threat became more discursive:

@4 Sam – absolutely – critical thinking and sceptical engagement are nothing new (we take pains to emphasis this in the paper, but alas, the blog-length word limit…) – although in addition to these (and I think they are sorely needed), there is a body of specific Internet-specific skills that are necessary to learn – such as how search engines rank results.

@6 “It’s more complex than just being a slogan, and there’s no excuse for the way we educate to not have moved with the times. For centuries we’ve been getting more and more adept at providing means of disseminating information and doing it faster too. Our education systems in this country have done little to deal with these changes. We’re taught of the differences between tabloid press and broadsheet press, but not of the flaws in the way the press report and thus why to be sceptical of claims. We’re taught to try to understand what we’re copying off the net for our coursework, but not to verify the information we’re copying.” –

Absolutely, couldn’t agree more.

@16 A pity you have such a dim view of the Internet’s capacity to teach. In my view, the Internet is an incredibly powerful way to help little Johnny read, write AND do basic sums. As @21 says.

@Carl Miller

Besides teaching tots to read and do numbers, the internet is a regular source of hot news and briefing for those working in computer services.

I regret the passing of Compuserve – which predated the internet – following its acquisition by AOL.

There was a community spirit among Compuserve users which I’ve not seen emulated in public internet forums. There was a particular example in the mid 1990s I saw of someone – inevitably from America in the context – who posted a request for help in solving a cubic equation (= an equation with a term raised to the power of 3). Someone, most likely an academic, posted a long reply explaining how to tackle the problem – this was years before Wikipedia or even software like later versions of Excel were around.

The internet is a truly magnificent information resource about almost any subject and users are seldom constrained to one particular source so it’s almost always possible to check for consistency between sources or to seek clarification and reading lists.

As mentioned, some universities – such as the MIT – are starting to put lectures and courses online. There was nothing like that prior to the internet. Try doing a search in YouTube for the Google lectures, many of which were delivered to university audiences. There is a wide selection.

38. FlipC

Please explain why rather than making it a statement of fact.

At the risk of being blatantly obvious – it is because they are ten. A child that age has trouble understanding a simple moral dilemma like whether it is all right to steal bread to feed your starving family. There is a well known and often studied change in children’s brains some time between 10 and 12. Even a lot of adults have problems with the concept of critical thinking.

39. Chaise Guevara

This is yet another of your sweeping, unsupported statements. But even taking it at face value, I’d say spelling is not the most important lesson – partly thanks to IT, which has software support for poor spellers. And this comes from someone who cringes when he sees bad grammar.

It hardly needs support. Look out the window. I am sure you would say it. So much for your opinion. This is a basic function of education. You can’t have spell checkers everywhere you go. They are not infallible either. And if the schools can’t teach this, what else can’t they teach?

Anyway, it’s not necessarily a case of cutting back spelling lessons and replacing them with IT lessons, is it? How about removing RE and French lessons in primary school and replacing them with IT?

I would say foreign languages are a core subject. RE is mandated by law still isn’t it? By all means, cut back on that. But they won’t. It is simply the case that the more garbage you introduce into the curriculum, the less time you have for the important stuff. There are only so many hours in the school day.

How do we determine what is treated as “core”? Based on your personal preference?

I can see why you would want to change the subject but this is absurd. There is probably virtually universal agreement on the core subjects. There are just some things that people will need almost every day of their life for the rest of their life and it must be taught. I was at a University a few years back and I foolishly ate in the student canteen. The serving staff took any note greater than about 10 pounds, worked out the change using the machine – but then they had to check with a colleague if they got it right. It was clearly policy as they all did it. And they were using the cash register to tell them. It was tragic. They had been badly let down by the education system. Now basic maths – you think it is not a core subject?

Was that because IT degrees are inherently pointless, or because the ones we teach now happen to be crap? Any road, a degree is at a very different level to a school classroom. Almost everyone will benefit from basic computer skills, but teach too many people elite computer skills and the available jobs will dry up quickly (another possible reason that these professionals dislike IT degrees).

I have no idea. I have not talked to employers. I think that Comp Sci degrees vary enormously over the UK. If you have spent your degree writing essays on the ethics of computer use in modern Britain, as you may if you had been to, say, Queen Mary, then the degree is probably pointless. Even if you had been to a different sort of course, what academics teach tend to be things that academics are interested in. That is not necessarily what employers want.

Everyone will benefit from being able to connect their Sky box too but that does not mean we should teach it in school. Basic computer skills are not worth precious class room time.

It may well be that more professionals would generate even more demand and not push down wages. Like lawyers do. The more lawyers you have, the more demand there is for their services. I am not sure if it is true of IT but don’t assume it isn’t.

Boring ad homs are boring.

Pot, Kettle etc etc.

I don’t share your pessimism about that either.

From which I can only conclude you have limited experience of the system or the graduates thereof.

Okay… that shows that home computer ownership can have a negative effect on non-IT skills, but it doesn’t show that teaching IT would have the same effect. Most likely it’s due to kids at home playing games and browsing sites instead of reading and so on. So you answered one out of the three points, in a way not relevant to this conversation.

On the contrary, I was asked about my claim that the more computers students had, the worse they did. And I showed it. It is true that you are now moving to a different and ultimately unproveable claim – because when I trivially show that if taught in class the same effect applies, you can just claim it was not taught “properly”. But I showed what was asked.

I did. What I didn’t say is that giving people the chance to read would have that effect – that was a lie on your part. I’m not bound by your false dichotomies.

Then your comment was irrelevant. Students with computers have a chance to read. Which they usually fail to take. You claimed that restricting them to reading would cripple their education. All evidence to the contrary.

Well, no, because very few Victorian job specifications including programming skills and a working knowledge of MS Excel. Can you figure out why?

Very few modern British jobs require programming skills. Working knowledge of things like Excel is usually taught in a few days in secretarial courses.

40. Cylux

SMFS – Can’t Understand New Technology.

Having a balanced view of technology is not the same as not understanding it.

42. Carl Miller

A pity you have such a dim view of the Internet’s capacity to teach. In my view, the Internet is an incredibly powerful way to help little Johnny read, write AND do basic sums.

It is a pity that the internet has such a low capacity to teach. It would be lovely if it didn’t, but it does. You are entitled to your view. I learnt a lot from David Attenborough’s TV programmes. But most people do not. They simply sit in front of the box and watch crap. Just as they do in front of the TV screen. The fact that the Open University provides people with a chance to do more does not mean that TV is a positive force for most people’s education.

43. Bob B

The internet is a truly magnificent information resource about almost any subject and users are seldom constrained to one particular source so it’s almost always possible to check for consistency between sources or to seek clarification and reading lists.

Although that is not what it does. The internet is also a massive information resource for fruit cakes and fringe theories and so on. Which appear on the same level of credibility as any other source. So students can and do find all sorts of crap which they tend to believe. A library or a book provides context with which the material can be judged. The internet does not.

As mentioned, some universities – such as the MIT – are starting to put lectures and courses online. There was nothing like that prior to the internet.

I dimly remember Charles Darwin and his supporters giving public lectures. These may be more readily available but what else has changed.

@ 44 SMFS

“It hardly needs support. Look out the window. I am sure you would say it. So much for your opinion.”

This is incoherent.

“This is a basic function of education. You can’t have spell checkers everywhere you go. They are not infallible either. And if the schools can’t teach this, what else can’t they teach? ”

Problem is, to accept this question I’d need to accept your premise that schools can’t teach people to spell. Which I don’t.

“I would say foreign languages are a core subject.”

Firstly, it’s not “foreign languages”, it’s French. Why is this core? Why is French so necessary to adult life? It’s no longer the Lingua Franca, in case you hadn’t noticed.

“RE is mandated by law still isn’t it? By all means, cut back on that. But they won’t. It is simply the case that the more garbage you introduce into the curriculum, the less time you have for the important stuff. There are only so many hours in the school day.”

Thing is, y’see, I’m not arguing that we should introduce garbage to the curriculum. But I’d agree that we hold onto pointless subjects that are mainly a waste of time, RE (as currently taught) being among them.

“I can see why you would want to change the subject but this is absurd. There is probably virtually universal agreement on the core subjects.”

Are you appealing to your assumption that everyone thinks like you, or are you appealing to the idea that the majority must be correct? Do you think either of those positions are sensible?

“There are just some things that people will need almost every day of their life for the rest of their life and it must be taught.”

Indeed. Such as basic IT skills.

“Now basic maths – you think it is not a core subject?”

Basic maths is. Trigonometry probably isn’t. Most of your school maths career is not spend learning how to add, subtract, divide and multiply.

“Everyone will benefit from being able to connect their Sky box too but that does not mean we should teach it in school. Basic computer skills are not worth precious class room time.”

Difference being that nobody fails a job interview when it turns out that they can’t connect a Sky box.

“From which I can only conclude you have limited experience of the system or the graduates thereof.”

Kettle, pot, SMFS, pot…

“On the contrary, I was asked about my claim that the more computers students had, the worse they did. And I showed it. It is true that you are now moving to a different and ultimately unproveable claim – because when I trivially show that if taught in class the same effect applies, you can just claim it was not taught “properly”. But I showed what was asked.”

Okay, I re-read my questions, and fair enough. But we were talking about computers specifically as used in schools, and when I asked the question I assumed that would be taken into account but failed to specify. So: same questions, with that clarification, so that it’ll actually be relevant to the conversation.

“Then your comment was irrelevant. Students with computers have a chance to read. Which they usually fail to take.”

Um, we were talking about whether IT should be taught alongside English etc. And now it’s irrelevant to discuss whether or not it’s a good idea to teach IT alongside English? Whatever, I’m not following you down this rabbit hole.

“You claimed that restricting them to reading would cripple their education. All evidence to the contrary.”

Let’s see some, then.

“Very few modern British jobs require programming skills. Working knowledge of things like Excel is usually taught in a few days in secretarial courses. ”

As in “check it out, the number at the bottom of the column is the total of all the other numbers!” An actual professional knowledge of Excel requires programming skills (and maths, come to that). And loads if British jobs require programming skills. How many require spelling skills? I don’t know which is higher, but they’re probably in the same ballpark.

@44: “Although that is not what it does. The internet is also a massive information resource for fruit cakes and fringe theories and so on. ”

That’s just silly rubbish by someone who is plainly ignorant and dogmatic.

While sat at home, I can and do easily find, download and read academic papers by Nobel laureates in economics. I can download rated, peer-reviewed academic papers faster than I can read them, which is not something I was able to do before the internet.

Sat at home, I can read or watch commentary and debates on current affairs issues in leading world media by widely respected pundits. I can search, as I do, to see if there are university standard lectures or courses posted on subjects of personal interest. As mentioned, some world class universities are putting courses on the internet. I’ve previously posted here links to Roger Farmer’s lectures on macroeconomics.

To dismiss all that as for “fruitcakes” is a fatuous statement.

Flourishing careers in computer services have been developed on the basis of papers and briefing available on the internet – even if some computer studies degrees are not worth much, personal ability shines through.

In the mid 1980s, The Economist had an illuminating article on what became of philosophy PhDs in America where the annual output exceeded the numbers of academic posts becoming vacant. What use is a high-powered philosophy degree? By the report, many of the PhDs went into the burgeoning computer industry at the time where aptitudes for analytical thinking and logical reasoning were and are valued.

Btw it happens that I attended the same school in London that Tim Berners-Lee, who devised the web, went to many years later. Strictly, the internet is the wired network while the familiar world wide web is software which runs on the network, along with much else, including private, security protected networks, email and data services.

@44 – Information Technology is a very different degree to Computer Science!

False equivalence, of course…

And you’re just advocating force-feeding facts to students rather than giving them the analytical tools to be able to do their own research and come to evidence-based conclusions.

You proved that giving kids unrestricted access to PC’s in their homes meant they spent less time on school work. This, of course, has nothing outside your paid shilling against the non-rich on the use of computers in the classroom.

Gotta keep the proles dumb and controllable, after all.

@44 SMFS. Other than conflating morality and critical thinking this could be a cause and effect argument – young children aren’t taught critical thinking and thus do poorly on tests to display it; therefore aren’t taught critical thinking.

Personally I think it may well simply be that studies are testing the wrong thing – i.e. they’re testing for adult-style critical thinking examples rather than child-style critical thinking examples.

Tell me that a child asking how Santa Claus can visit every house in one night isn’t spotting a flaw in a piece of received knowledge and that such can’t be considered to resemble critical thinking.

@ FlipC

“Tell me that a child asking how Santa Claus can visit every house in one night isn’t spotting a flaw in a piece of received knowledge and that such can’t be considered to resemble critical thinking.”

Actually, the illogical, ad-libbed answers we give to kids who ask questions like this may very well discourage them from applying critical thinking: the answer isn’t logical, it’s magic! Not that I’m saying we should stop telling kids about Santa of course.

Carl Miller

A really good idea.

But when would be the best time to teach it? KS3 (years 7-9, age: 11-13) would seem to an adult a sensible time, but might be *too late* given kids’ getting online much earlier. But then… you hardly want to be looking at 9/11 Truthers at primary school, do you?

45. Chaise Guevara

Problem is, to accept this question I’d need to accept your premise that schools can’t teach people to spell. Which I don’t.

Well if you insist on being willfully ignorant, there is not a lot I can do about it. You have no first hand knowledge yourself and you are refusing to accept the opinion of those that do. Take the word of someone else:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/11/01/comp_sci_graduates_need_more_skills/

Thing is, y’see, I’m not arguing that we should introduce garbage to the curriculum. But I’d agree that we hold onto pointless subjects that are mainly a waste of time, RE (as currently taught) being among them.

Having some third rate Arts student teach you about computers is garbage whether you argue it or not. So why even bring it up?

Indeed. Such as basic IT skills.

Now you’re just taking the piss.

Basic maths is. Trigonometry probably isn’t. Most of your school maths career is not spend learning how to add, subtract, divide and multiply.

No, but a reasonable number of students in British state schools do not get that far.

Difference being that nobody fails a job interview when it turns out that they can’t connect a Sky box.

No one learns enough about computers at school to get a job. Any more than they learn enough French to translate the Song of Roland.

Kettle, pot, SMFS, pot…

I would not underestimate the experience I have.

Let’s see some, then.

Gibbon. He did not have computers. Strangely enough it did not cripple his education. Darwin. Einstein. We could do this all day.

46. Bob B

That’s just silly rubbish by someone who is plainly ignorant and dogmatic.

Come on Bob, you may not like me or my argument but it is counter productive to deny that the internet is a massive resource for fruit cakes.

While sat at home, I can and do easily find, download and read academic papers by Nobel laureates in economics. I can download rated, peer-reviewed academic papers faster than I can read them, which is not something I was able to do before the internet.

Indeed. Nice isn’t it? You can also watch endless conspiracies about 9-11. And on the internet you have little in the way of context to tell which is more trustworthy than the other.

To dismiss all that as for “fruitcakes” is a fatuous statement.

Good thing I didn’t say it then.

By the report, many of the PhDs went into the burgeoning computer industry at the time where aptitudes for analytical thinking and logical reasoning were and are valued.

Yes. Well. I would love to see what sort of philosophy graduates went into computer. Analytical thinking and logical reasoning not being all that big in all parts of the field these days. While logic is still part of the Philosophy course.

48. FlipC

Other than conflating morality and critical thinking this could be a cause and effect argument – young children aren’t taught critical thinking and thus do poorly on tests to display it; therefore aren’t taught critical thinking.

Could be. But it is more likely that their brains are still developing.

Tell me that a child asking how Santa Claus can visit every house in one night isn’t spotting a flaw in a piece of received knowledge and that such can’t be considered to resemble critical thinking.

How many children do unprodded though? But I would sort of agree with that – if you could do a double blind test with no parental or sibling prompting.

@ 51 SMFS

“Well if you insist on being willfully ignorant, there is not a lot I can do about it. You have no first hand knowledge yourself and you are refusing to accept the opinion of those that do. ”

Are we in a grump because people won’t accept our Very Important Opinions on face value?

“Take the word of someone else:”

Gosh, another chap with an opinion, complaining that people don’t use spellcheck. So: an anecdotal source that actually support MY point. Well done.

“Having some third rate Arts student teach you about computers is garbage whether you argue it or not. So why even bring it up?”

I didn’t. Using third-rate Arts students was your idea, which you’re now straw manning me with for some reason.

“Now you’re just taking the piss.”

Yawn.

“No, but a reasonable number of students in British state schools do not get that far.”

How many? Would a large proportion of these students be helped by more teaching, or are they fundamentally bad at numbers? Would it be worth letting the whole class miss out on a vital modern skill just to help these few?

“No one learns enough about computers at school to get a job. Any more than they learn enough French to translate the Song of Roland.”

Then we ought to start teaching them more about computers, right? Not true in any case. A working knowledge of programs commonly used in offices, taught to you at school, can be enough to swing a job interview in your favour. Some admin job interviews include Excel tests.

“I would not underestimate the experience I have.”

I bet you wouldn’t.

“Gibbon. He did not have computers. Strangely enough it did not cripple his education. Darwin. Einstein. We could do this all day.”

Do I really have to point out the fundamental error in this unbelievably moronic point for a second time? Those guys didn’t live in a world where computers were a part of everyday life and a vital element of our economy and infrastructure. Modern kids do. This is like arguing that missing out Shakespeare will have no effect on someone’s Literature education because Homer never read Shakespeare and he turned out all right.

@51 SMFS:

But it is more likely that their brains are still developing

Yet isn’t that the best time to teach this? Even if they can’t quite comprehend it yet a pattern can be set.

How many children do unprodded though? But I would sort of agree with that – if you could do a double blind test with no parental or sibling prompting

An example:
Father: “Oo look a unicorn!”
5-year old turns around “Where?”
Father: “You’ve just missed it”
5-year old looks at father with narrowed eyes and then starts laughing “Daddy’s being silly!”

Now whether she’s picking up on non-verbal clues or not the hard work is done in that she’s determining that her father is ‘being silly’ how much more of a step is it to ask why she thinks that? Sure she might just shrug or get bored, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t have the capacity just that her attention isn’t being grabbed.

Heh. Can’t believe I got away with that one.

It’s a good general principle to teach kids to look for the original sources, to check the facts, to not believe the most sensational stories, but shouldn’t that be the tabloids that you should teach kids to be skeptical about? Much cheaper than computers as well.

@ 55

“shouldn’t that be the tabloids that you should teach kids to be skeptical about?”

Ultimately, yes… but not directly, I don’t think it’s a very good idea to explicitly teach kids not to trust the Sun. Better to teach them the fair rules of logic and let them make that discovery for themselves.

@55. KB Player: “It’s a good general principle to teach kids to look for the original sources, to check the facts, to not believe the most sensational stories, but shouldn’t that be the tabloids that you should teach kids to be skeptical about?”

I don’t think you should ask young people to be skeptical about tabloids; we *all* have to be skeptical about *all* media. Newspapers that I used to admire such as the Times or Guardian regularly report “facts” that can quickly determined to be opinion, ignorance or outright falsehood. Given that readers have quick access to primary sources, I am puzzled that writers presume that they can pull the wool over our eyes.

Skepticism has to be balanced because events happen in real life which shatter our perceptions. Sometimes the outrageous is true. Journalism has always been perceived as a dubious occupation but few people imagined that phone hacking was so common. Most people assumed that MPs would work their expenses in a beneficial way but few expected deliberate mortgage fraud to be revealed. And nobody expected that the newspaper to reveal the names of the alleged murderers of Stephen Lawrence would be the Daily Mail.

Just a couple of points. My perspective is the view from a teacher’s desk.

Firstly there has been a lot of reported work on teaching philosophy in primary schools (particularly in Scotland). This seems to show that even quite young children have and can develop thinking that would form the basis of sophisticated discrimination and understanding. Age is not so much of a barrier as one or two have suggested here.

Secondly there seems to be an assumption that simple sentences can be transformed into simple understanding and application in a pupil or student’s mind. The reality I have experienced is that learning is a creative process that has the learner’s interests, experiences and dispositions at its heart. However hard you try to insist on what it is they ought to learn, they will learn what they will – and be as clever or as stupid as they like when it comes to convincing an examiner that the right sorts of responses have to be given. Teaching and learning are tangled, unpredictable and complex activities that will elude all simple prescription. The end never matches the intention in any but approximate form.

If none of this were true, how else could we explain the obdurate stupidity of Michael Gove as Secretary of State for Education? His own exceptional successes as a pupil, then student, seem to have given him (and others) the idea that his proposals for improving the world are sane and reasonable.

@51: “Come on Bob, you may not like me or my argument but it is counter productive to deny that the internet is a massive resource for fruit cakes.”

As a fact of life, half the world has less than average intelligence.

How else could I at home access this illuminating presentation with slides reviewing recent trends in the American economy after the recession by Laura Tyson, now an economics prof at UC Berkeley, at one time chair of Clinton’s council of economic advisers and later Dean of the London Business School?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWn1AWG_8-w

I can add a host of other – some conflicting or critical – presentations by other illustrious commentators such as Martin Wolf, Joe Stiglitz, Paul Krugman, Roger Farmer or Keith Olbermann as well as download countless peer-reviewed academic papers on economics, economies and current affairs. How else can I browse on most days leading press from around the world or check on topic reading lists and fleeting memories of book titles?

With that and grade inflation, students today have it easy. In my time as a student, there weren’t even electronic pocket calculators, let alone personal computers with internet access, and most of my fellow students were guys, not young women. Only 4% to 5% of my age group went into higher education.

Companies and professional associations increasingly use private networks, running over the internet, to brief staff and members. The internet has longed ceased to be an optional extra for computer hobbyists.

With many public libaries providing access to computers online, the effective constraint on wider computer use in Britain is mostly deficient adult literacy and numeracy skills.

59. Bob B

“As a fact of life, half the world has less than average intelligence.”

Perhaps in wishing to be less wrong tham the rest of us you are throwing comments like this in the hope that the wall will eventually be covered wiht mud? As a philospoher you will know, deep down, that your statement is axiomatic, not factual.

This is not to deny your own knowledge or wisdom – I am just pointing out that such ideas as the one originally posted have the evidence of the centuries running against them. Humans do not learn by any simple process of accurate transmission from teacher to learner, or one curriculum to its intended population. Even the properly schooled, for one reason or many, just make it all up as they go along. This doesn’t make “effective teaching” difficult – it makes it impossible. “Good enough to do well in exams” is the best we have achieved so far – and as a result the debate has had to moved on to question the exams.