Why ICT will Destroy the Building and Teacher Monopoly
Introduction: Mr. Gradgrind's Legacy
I think it was Charles Dickens in HARD TIMES, in the person and regime of Mr. Gradgrind, who noticed the architectural and intellectual isomorphism between factories and classrooms. Pared down to its essentials, the two sets of institutions were concerned with the division of labour, hierarchy, management by fear and 'hard facts', tendencies later summarised in Lenin's "irrefutable arguments of concrete and steel". The Education Act of 1870 enshrined this bleak endeavour, albeit with a dash of self justifying Christian piety, and it was only with the recognition of the need for a wider variety of skills, including entry into the professions, that the 1944 Act recognised the need for a broader curriculum. Even so, almost everybody who left school before 1970 will recall the bleak uniformity of architecture, the rows of desks, the frowsy, hard backed learning manuals and the disembodied curriculum. There was an attempt in the last third of the last Century, through comprehensive schools, more creative teaching methods and a greater emphasis on continuous assessment, to fit our education for the emerging media age but this has met with a bitter and irrational backlash from unimaginative employers and politicians who want a work force that it can continue to manage through fear, hierarchy and the division of labour. This is perhaps best summed up in the perpetual sneer aimed at the discipline of media studies in an age of unprecedented media consumption. Quite frankly, when politicians and employers outside media industries say they want creative team players, most of them are lying. They still hanker after process-driven rote learning; they favour anachronistic, well formed handwriting to a well formed argument; and their definition of basic skills never includes knowing how to think. Their one gripe with which I agree is the importance of human communication and this will be a recurring theme of my presentation.