I'm not in the twilight of my life, but it is lunchtime, and time to reflect on what I should do in the free periods I have after break and before home time. In this regard, perhaps, I find I have something in common with Bill Gates ... although without the money. What follows is something of a stream of consciousness, part formed thoughts rather than the definitive polemic, but I wanted to get something "out there" to declare my interest.
Having two members of my family working in primary school education often leads to anecdotes about pupils' behaviour, and - apart from the humour value this often includes - it is often striking how the *same* child can be engaged, eager to contribute and developing skills at one moment, yet distracted, disruptive and achieving nothing positive at another.
As I listed to these stories, the phrase "Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man", famously explored/validated in the documentary series 7 up, keeps coming back to me. Surely, I think, to get the best return for the huge public investment we make in education, we would do well to focus more on our children's early years.
Shockingly more than 1.1 million adults in the UK have a reading age of 5 or below. Why care about this? At an economic level (and simplisticly linking poor education with a need for welfare payments) social security payments far exceed the cost of our education system - imagine what life could be like if we could cut the need for social security to the same level as education - with tax for everyone declining. I imagine many more benefits relating to the economic improvement for the better educated beneficiaries, and associated reduction in crime, anti-social behaviour, and healthcare costs.
I am no expert on educating youngsters, but I do know a thing or two about the computers, and how they can help to "change the way the world works" - a phrase used by Lotus Development marketing both for Lotus 1-2-3 and Lotus Notes, and I do think that software can step up to the challenge. I've come to recognise that it could be a good way to use my upcoming free period to attempt to make this happen.
By no means am I am alone in thinking about this challenge, and I recently came across Education City, which is a good effort, but no matter how good an attempt this is, I see it as a fundamentally flawed approach. It is certainly colourful and designed to appeal to children, addresses SEN (Special Educational Needs) and engages on multiple levels but when I think about what would be a good place to start, a commercial, all-embracing website wouldn't be it. It's too much like trying for a Hail Mary pass, when we should be breaking the challenge down to a set of building blocks.
What we need is a platform through which to deliver a whole variety of content. I imagine such a platform will necessarily adopt a set of operating principles for it to be embraced by the educational fraternity. I haven't put these into a structured order yet - I suspect there is one, but I'm not sure it really matters, since I figure they are all necessary elements.
1) Opensource
An educational framework should be provided by a non-commercial entity. Rather like the BBC has a charter to provide a benchmark reference for media in the UK. Its not the only channel available, and it doesn't provide all of its own programs. It has many issues in how it is run, but I view it as an inspiration for how governments can enhance the lives of their population without behaving like a control mechanism.
2) Aim to be a Framework rather than a solution
Rather like Google Andriod I don't see the right answer as a set of specific content. Content should come from many sources, including both traditional educational content providers as well as new internet initiated content providers. The framework needs to set out how any and all content should support the development of targetted skills, which in turn need to be supported by the framework rather than attempt to dictate what the targets are.
3) Be Social
Bearing in mind our target age group, the opportunity for a teacher to influence development is limited by the amount of attention they can devote to their charges. Therefore the task at hand should be to (yes) support the teacher, but also facilitate the other key contributors - parents and (just as importantly) peer groups. Teachers should not be seen as simply a Project Manager, allocating tasks, providing resources and setting time limits. While some will certainly need and appreciate such a role, others will rebel against it, or potentially rebel against the authority figure a teacher represents until they recognise the value such a role can bring to them.
4) Multi-channelled
We do not all learn in the same way, not do we have the same set of interests, nor do we have the same ability to do things. The same children who achieve nothing in class, often getting disruptive or exhibiting anti-social behaviour, can be experts in a specialism like a computer game or a sporting activity. To me it therefore seems self evident that all curriculum needs to enable multiple alternate paths to be taken through the material to allow the student to achieve similar goals.
5) Declared goals
As far as I can tell there appears to be little consensus on what the purpose of education actually is, and it seems to go back a long way. I cannot subscribe to it simply being to push for ever improving exam results, but success cannot be judged without having a clear target for it. I can find no adequate definition, so I'll set up an Aunt Sally myself:
"The highest achievement of education is to instil self confidence and self targetted aspirations."
This is bordering on the philosophical or even religious, but for education to succeed there needs to be a definition of what success means. My definition avoids both the concept of "education for education's sake" and the concept of education as a means of feeding suitably qualified candidates into the labour force.
If that is the vision, the goals to support it need to be separated from the framework itself, enabling goals to adapt over time to match changes in the environment.
6) Tests
Even if we have abstracted goals from the Framework, in order to assess progress in acquiring key skills there has to be support for measurement points. These measurement points should also be open - changeable over time, not just in how measurements are taken, but what the measurements should be. The challenge with this will be no ability to rely on apples<>apples comparisons over time, but there is evidence to suggest that is a flawed concept anyway.
7) Guardianship
As the goal is to include interaction with other children (and parents) in our learning framework we need to support the teacher in ensuring order. We don't want to discourage disagreements, but we certainly want to discourage abuse and ensure any that occurs is dealt with speedily. Therefore we need to include the ability to prevent user generated content from containing abusive words, but also support flagging of anything which is upsetting or intimidating for resolution by the teacher. There would be then an opportunity to link back to content modules to help the contributor understand the issues caused by their behaviour.
My thinking in this area is incomplete. However, I view it as a long term vision - an audacious goal if you will - and not something I feel can be progressed with a magic wand. I expect to return to this topic frequently, updating my thinking in each of the pillars identified above as time hopefully brings clarity and time permits.
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