On being visionary...

One thing about Microsoft impresses me more than any product I've ever seen them ship: their company motto is "Change the world, or go home". I love it because it is instructive, inspirational and visionary. Its a kind of BHAG - big, hairy, audacious goal to "serve as unifying focal point of effort, and act as a clear catalyst". We need these in life because our natural state is inertia which manifests itself resistance to change. I'm pretty resistant to change myself being part technophile and part luddite, but in the case of primary education I'm in favour of a revolution, and you can't do that without change.

Well I've just read the Cambridge Primary Review - Towards a New Primary Curriculum, which was produced to influence the latest government initiative to move the whole topic forward - sadly both fail to be remotely visionary and seem unlikely to inspire any kind of change for good. I even fear that what they propose - encouraging primary school children to access sites like Wikipedia - may backfire on them, much as I admire the sites themselves.

Where's the problem? The content will certainly have been written by well intentioned academics, they will have done formal investigations on the topic, which (at least at the time of writing) I have not, but the phrase "sticking plaster on a gaping wound" springs to mind. They want primary school kids to learn about IT (apparently at the same time as teachers, but we'll skip over that), but miss the point that children don't see IT as a topic in its own right at all - it is a consituent of all they do. Children do not see the magic in computing that I do - they expect it to work, whereas I am constantly amazed that it does.

And that's my fundamental problem with the initiative. It treats IT as a subject that should be part of the curriculum and completely fails to appreciate that it should be part of the education process itself. It is particularly disappointing to see the government's press release quote Stephen Crowne, Chief Executive of Becta, the government agency for technology in learning:

“There is no substitute for good teaching but technology is a vital tool which can develop knowledge and understanding and provide children with real skills for their future education. We want to see all young people leave primary school knowing how to put technology to best use in a way that enhances and advances their learning through secondary education and beyond.”

The irony of it - the government vision for young people to leave school knowing how to put technology to best use when the government itself doesn't know how to do that.

A lack of vision, I'd say.