Don’t teach children how to twitter

Everyone knows that if you want to find out how to program the video or use a new website, you should ask an eight-year-old. Everyone, that is, except Sir Jim Rose.

A leaked draft of Sir Jim’s proposals to reform primary school education contains the suggestion that teachers should instruct children on blogging, podcasts, Wikipedia and Twitter. It’s a crazy idea.

First of all, an IT curriculum can never keep up with the pace of change. At school in the Eighties, I was taught how to program a computer the size of a fridge to calculate the seven times table: a skill that was defunct as soon as I learnt it. The internet is a social, organic anc anarchic affair – one that inherently resists the top-down approach.

Second, most websites are fantastically easy to use.

And third – frankly – can’t we afford to give our kids a break from it? The joy of learning is about being absorbed in other worlds – the worlds of butterflies, of knights in armour and so on – free from the constant distraction of emails, Twitter feeds and the rest.

Teaching should be a job for anyone with a pulse

Forget funding, class size and curriculum when it comes to delivering academic success, good teachers matter more than anything.

Research from America shows that children fare much better in a bad school with one exceptional teacher than in a good school with no outstanding staff. But there’s a hitch: no one knows what the good ones look like.

Someone who passes their training qualifications with ease may prove hopeless in the classroom; only when they start teaching do you discover who has a gift for engaging with children. That’s why the Government’s plan to offer fast-track teacher training to people looking for a new career – recruiting, say, ex-bankers to teach maths – is the right approach.

Teaching should be open to anyone with a pulse and a degree; the bad teachers can then be whittled out on the basis of their performance. This is how financial advisers are selected: companies take on a huge pool of new recruits every year, but only keep the ones who prove to have a knack for it.

Shouldn’t we devote at least as much care and patience to choosing who looks after our children?

Related articles

• Those Who Can’t Teach (meganmcardle.theatlantic.com)
• Eduset.com – A Tool For Online Classroom Communication (killerstartups.com)
• “Wake Up Mommy!” (momblognetwork.com)
• Be Who You Are (bilerico.com)