Why ICT will Destroy the Building and Teacher Monopoly
Transition: Another Brick
Pink Floyd's The Wall was more culturally acute than a thousand tracts from educators. Here are five factors which partly explain why the wall, physically and pedagogically, is going to disintegrate over the next ten years:
- First, and this is so obvious that almost all policy makers have missed it, the falling age of puberty is wrecking our static, classroom model, particularly in the case of boys; there is no point whatsoever blaming children because they do not find formal education either useful or engaging
- Secondly, the high and ubiquitous production values of our mass media industries, including games, make our teachers and their materials look shabby and amateur.
- Thirdly, and more important, the basis of the deal between teachers and children has broken down. In the old model teachers were allowed by children to pass on supposed wisdom and actual folk lore because it came packaged with genuinely useful, oligarchically supplied knowledge essential for higher qualifications and/or employment.
- Fourthly, always on broad band connectivity, allied with multi channel television, the growth of intelligent search engines and the skills gap between teachers and the taught are all destroying the classroom and the teacher monopoly.
- Finally, machine processing is making a nonsense of basic skills policy; almost everything we count as a basic skill is performed more efficiently by machines than by human beings.
Personally, I would like us to adopt the village college model pioneered successfully in Cambridge whereby all community teaching and learning, formal and informal, take place in one centre open for 15 hours per day. In my own village I tried but failed to persuade the primary school, the library and the Village Centre, all on one geographical site, to merge into one organisation so that children could move easily from being taught by adults to teaching adults; but instead, the three installations, all owned by the County Council, have their own cleaners, opening hours, rules and IT suites. As a result, among other things, the physical environment forces us to maintain the traditional boundary between play and work, long gone in creative industries. I will come back to this at the end of my presentation but, meanwhile, I need to make a substantial diversion into the technological environment.