Never mind the technology, where’s the learning?

I don’t know whether you read Phil Beadle’s article in Tuesday’s Education Guardian entitled, “Not OK computer: Whiteboard wizards would be better off with a book”. Phil was Secondary Teacher of the Year in 2004, and was the inspirational English teacher who appeared on the “Unteachables” getting disaffected kids to recite Shakespeare to cows, and since then has created a sub-career for himself in the media.

Either John Clare is now ghost writing under his name, or Phil has been taken hook, line and sinker by the notion that a journalist gets noticed if he attacks a ’status quo’, then builds an argument on supposition and anecdotes.

Firstly, he berates the use of PowerPoint (something most of us would agree with) but then seems to take Clare’s line that there has been little debate on the desirability of so much technology in schools, and repeats the assertion that it’s all part of a conspiracy by equipment manufacturers to sway the argument.

“… it is difficult to dispense with the suspicion that schools packed with computers are, to an extent, the government caving in to the pressures of powerful corporations.”

Phil claims that teachers have neither had their say, nor is there a forum for doing so. He then repeats some well worn Clare fallacies:

• “ICT has been presented to the education community as a panacea, and if you are not using it to its full capacity you are left feeling the aged inadequate.”
• “.. the fact that the stuff [ICT] it is replacing - books, human contact and language” - was so well designed in the first place”
• “… it’s been thrown at us with neither instruction manual nor time to read one if one existed.”
• “… children are quiet and controlled while tranquilised by this modern-day soma that it has been sold to us as a cure-all for the problems of male under-attainment. ‘They must be learning. They’re quiet, aren’t they?’”

Phil admits that ICT may be a fantastic tool, but like so many teachers he claims he does not have the time learn how to use it. Well Phil, perhaps you need to find that time, because pupils in your care deserve a 21st century education in which ICT has and will not replace books, pens and pencils, but is just as relevant in a literate society. To not be engaged in the forms of communication that this technology affords means, as an English teacher, you are unable to inform and educate students on how to become a constructive member of today’s society.

Blogged with Flock