Comments on: Education since the Internet

By: Stuart

Stuart — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 17:50:02 +0000

Much of that, *I* don’t know – not off the top of my head, at least. I don’t think the current system helps in that respect, which is why travel guides get written and bought.

And I never said “don’t teach the facts”, only “teach based on skills”. You need facts with which to develop skills…

By: Andrew

Andrew — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 17:22:49 +0000

The end result is people who walk through a city and can’t grasp the cultural influences that affected the architecture; people who don’t understand historically important events that changed their country eg. nationalisation of health services, fluctuating importance of unions; people who don’t know that South America has rainforests.

Because they *never thought of googling it.*

By: Stuart Cuthbertson (via Facebook)

Stuart Cuthbertson (via Facebook) — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 10:38:00 +0000

I wasn't really saying we should completely stop teaching facts: only that lots of them are a) uninteresting and b) not useful, to people who's academic/career interests lie in other directions. So the teaching should be somewhat more optional – as a science-type, I had no interest in learning the *details* of environmental geography. But the "outline" facts were still worth having presented to me.Sorry I didn't make that all to clear. The main point about the internet is that the facts are available, so we don't necessarily need to learn facts by rote, only learn them once so we know they exist. If we forget them later, it probably won't be too hard to look them up if/when we ever need them.

By: Stuart

Stuart — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 10:18:42 +0000

I agree there are plenty of facts in Geography and History (and other subjects) that still need teaching, even when the skills are extracted. But why teach economics and politics under “Geography”? Why not under “Economics” and “Politics” classes? Ditto culture/history studies – it’s becoming hugely important to understand how different cultures and religions work in different parts of the world, and why they work like that, historically speaking; but that’s no more “history” than it is “geography” or “religious studies”. I suppose what I’m really after is mainly relabelling of subjects, rather than complete reorganisation. (Though a large amount of reorganisation will result from relabelling.)

By: Damian Robertson (via Facebook)

Damian Robertson (via Facebook) — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 00:24:00 +0000

I don't like the assumption that since facts are readily available online, we don't need to learn them, only how to tie them all together.An analogous situation would be the popularisation of calculators and the teaching of mental arithmetic. In my experience, the education system tried to fight the pupils' attitude that they can just use a calculator, but I find that our generation is still significantly worse at mental arithmetic than the previous few. If schools had allowed mass use of calculators throughout, a valuable skill would have been severely undermined.Saying that technological improvements mean we can do away with old practices that have decades of demonstrable results, and instead trying to adopt a new approach is playing with fire.

By: Robert Crowston

Robert Crowston — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 22:22:14 +0000

I’m not convinced about how much wiggle room we have here in terms of removing some subjects completely, or reducing time dedicated to facts:
* Geography contains quite a lot of facts which people should know. People should be able to know which countries and which. They should understand the water cycle (OK, maybe this can be pushed into Science, and would probably be better taught there). It also has quite a large requirement for looking at economic and political factors – this is again something that needs to be retained. (Probably with less time assigned than currently).
* History – already highly skill focused, the study of Germany 1919-1946 should be imported, kicking out some of the English History, and this gives a large body of facts which people should spend time understanding.
…
Hmm, I don’t think I’m going to make a list of every subject now. The point is, there is quite a lot of facts that people should be understanding, and this still requires quite a bit of teaching time. I agree that this material should be critically looked at, and cut down, with more time dedicated to skills.

Then there are the obvious disclaimers about this being implemented efficiently. IMO, they haven’t got the teaching/assessment of ICT (even when I remove my concerns that far too much of a Microsoft-focus can occur, which causes the learning to be focused on how to user a small set of applications – always picking one of them, instead of the ability to find the right tools for the job) anywhere near correct yet, a maturing, almost-entirely skills based subject. The government trying to rejig teaching around has the potential to fail quite spectacularly (*)!

(*) Although looking at the state of the current National Curriculum, I’m not sure how much damage they can do – ultimately there are (usually) decent educators actually interpretting the documents eventually.