Turning pages
Anastasia De Waal, 9 June 2010
The chair of a lecture at a Hay festival last week commented that the event had become a job interview: Niall Ferguson had been asked by Michael Gove, sitting in the audience, whether Harvard would allow him spend more time in Britain ‘to help us design a more exciting and engaging history curriculum’, writes Zenobe Reade.
The press furor that followed focused on Ferguson’s ‘imperialism apologist’ views and intention to tell pupils the big story of western ascendency over the last 500 years. They seemed to have taken the coalition’s rhetoric of cuts too far and imagined Gove would be composing a new curriculum with the help of only one advisor; my biggest concern was lest we lose any earlier racy and racist imperialisms, such the Romans over our blue brethren.
While Gove didn’t openly recruit any other advisors to government while at Hay, he could have gained much from listening carefully to Nadine Gordimer, who gave the Hamelin lecture. Entitled ‘The Image and the Word’, she used the platform to talk about how literature is transformed by technology. Bucking a trend whereby technology is heralded as a means of distributing resources ever further afield and so delivering greater equity and access, she commented that ‘there is no substitute for the book and it would be a great deprivation and danger if the book should disappear and be replaced by something with a battery.’
So much can be put in store for books – a technology in themselves – designed ‘not to fall apart’ but be ‘read as easily on a mountaintop as in a bus queue’. Gordimer lamented that bookshops remain scarce across swathes of her native South Africa. Yet enthusiasm about the role electronic technology can play in education is irrepressible, both abroad and in the UK. The One Laptop Per Child initiative is undoubtedly inspired, but ignores the fact that that in Africa far more people have access to a mobile phone than the electricity grid, though this is necessary to power a laptop. The BBC World Service’s programme in Bangladesh, which allows people to access English lessons on their mobiles for a small fee, has reportedly been so successful that the BBC hopes to replicate the scheme in Africa. The Hole in the Wall project which inspired the film Slumdog Millionaire is now being piloted in three primary schools in NW England. Here, a ‘Self-Organised Learning Environment’ is created, whereby children work unaided on a computer in groups to answer a Sats or GCSE question.
Despite the diversity of resources which access to the internet affords, technology’s troubling legacy for education is that it too often pertains to be the teacher. There is no doubt that human interaction is conducive to the best possible education in maths, history, textiles – and most obviously, languages. It is dispiriting to think that we are unable to see the benefits of technology as conditional on their context.
Evidence remains compelling to suggest that those children who do best at school, read the most – research by the National Literacy Trust last month found that 80% of children with better than average reading skills had their own books, compared with just 58% who were below the level expected. This jars with a survey by British Educational Suppliers Association which found that state nurseries are increasingly reliant on using technology, such as computers and interactive whiteboards, to deliver the Early Years – ‘nappy’ – curriculum implemented by the Labour government. This is evident of a mindset which perceives that higher achievement is facilitated by more sophisticated technology. Yet ignoring our greatest resource it is to our detriment.