|
|
Putting computers in school is a really dumb move
An interview with Peter Cochrane, founder of ConceptLabs
By Kim Thomas |
Peter Cochrane isn't terribly impressed by much of what he sees in today's education system. Schools, he says, are a "sausage machine" with a "one size fits all" mentality: "Children come to school energetic, lively, full of enquiry - they're innovators, all ready to go. And when the education system's finished with them, it's all been beaten out."
In particular, he argues, the current obsession with testing and measuring has had very detrimental effects: "If you set targets, people will achieve them - so the kids start fiddling, the teachers start fiddling, the heads of departments start fiddling, the school starts fiddling and the government starts fiddling."
Peter has particular concerns about science education which, he argues, has lost much of its ability to communicate the thrill of discovery that he felt when he was at school. One of the reasons for this is what he calls the "blight" of health and safety regulations: "To reduce science teaching to a Blue Peter level is quite criminal. You would have thought that a small blob of mercury was plutonium. If you go back to the basics of science, when you encounter anything, you try to describe what it looks like, what it feels like, what it smells like and - in the old days - what it tastes like."
These days, Peter points out, school pupils no longer learn even to use a forge or a lathe, which has the counter-productive effect of making children less able to handle dangerous equipment safely when they reach adulthood.
Things are changing, however, and Peter welcomes some of the recent developments in education, particularly towards a more personalised approach to learning. It's what he calls "the transition from a sage on the stage to a guide at the side." Children, he argues, have different abilities and develop mentally at different rates. In the modern world, there are plenty of opportunities for children to learn independently, with guidance, rather than instruction, from a teacher. In languages, he says, there are good learning packages that enable students to learn at their own pace while the teacher helps out with any difficulties.
Computers, if used correctly, can also help children work at their own pace. Peter is scathing, however, about the idea of putting computers into schools, which he describes as "a really dumb move." The problem, he argues, is that computers are then under the control of the school, expensive to purchase and maintain and, more importantly, out of the control of the pupils: "It would make far more sense to have an environment where kids own their own laptops. Laptops are now very cheap. IT is a personal thing - it's very difficult to work in a corporate environment where the machine isn't yours, so every time you want to do something it's a different machine."
Many children, he says, already use computers at home, and computers are relatively inexpensive. Those parents who couldn't afford them could have state help. The advantage is that students would not only take better care of them than they would a school laptop, they would be able to treat the computer as their own personal workspace, storing their files and projects, without any possibility that the teacher might delete them. "Technology for technology's sake is just silly," he says. "If students need computing power, there comes a transition when they need their computing power all the time."
One of the huge problems currently facing schools is the shortage of science teachers, particularly those with expertise in physics. Peter's vision of "the guide at the side" will, he says, be supported by developments in video-conferencing, which allow students to have direct access to the expert view: "In the UK on a Monday morning you will get 100 mediocre teachers talking on a topic they know nothing about. It could be easy to videocast a lecture and then engage in discussion with the students afterwards."
Peter believes that podcasting (in which audio recordings of lectures are made available as downloadable MP3 files) also has the potential to change the nature of teaching and learning dramatically, because it allows students to refresh their memories and test their understanding: "One of the interesting things about going to a good lecture is you think, 'That was brilliant', and then an hour later, you think, 'What did he say?'"
You don't necessarily have to use technology to give children access to an expert point of view, however. Many industry experts and academics, argues Peter, are keen to put something back into the education system when they reach the end of their careers. Many scientists, he says, have had plenty of experience, not only of giving lectures and presentations, but also of bringing up their own children. Unfortunately, he points out, it is currently very difficult for a scientist who has been working in industry for 30 years to qualify as a teacher, because they are expected to gain a PGCE qualification: "It would be really interesting to set up a fasttrack for mathematicians, scientists and engineers and technologists who would, especially towards the back end of their careers, like to move into teaching. It ought not to be a two-year trial by strength. It ought to be three or four months of training."
It works the other way round, too - students can be teachers, he says: "When you go to universities and schools, the staff habitually complain about being under-resourced, yet they're sitting on top of a massive workforce called the student body. As students get towards the last year of their courses, it's very easy to give them assignments that involve creating teaching materials for Year 1. You think you know something until you try and teach it, so if you can get students who think they understand it to create teaching materials, they derive a lot from it."
There are, he says, grounds for optimism. Somehow, he says, children manage to get through the education system, and universities and colleges are full of enthusiastic young people. Peter believes that the trend towards greater personalisation and devolution of teaching responsibility is going to be instrumental in changing the current system: "A school in the outback of rural Sussex is entirely different to an inner-city school in London with 16 different ethnic groups. A little customisation will go a long way."
Links
ConceptLabs: www.conceptlabs.net
December 2005
|
|
