| By and large, the technical
aspects of teaching have not figured largely amongst the principal concerns of
FORUM writers or readers. From line making with sticks in the sand, to chalk on
slate, wax crayon on paper and the electronic bells and whistles of the present
day whiteboards, mark making and meaning have been an assumed given with its advantages
and drawbacks. ICT has speeded up many processes and opened up new possibilities
but none pose basic questions about education or human values such as truth, compassion,
tolerance or fairness. Nor is it expected that they should: we use our tools as
we will and if they serve our purposes in helping to ask such questions or encouraging
our children to ask such questions, so much the better. The creative and imaginative
uses of ICT, particularly and appropriately for older children, can be most impressive. This
is the point where educationists may take their eye off the ball, however; in
welcoming, adapting and using new technologies to serve the interests of educating
their children, the increasing administrative use of ICT is just seen as an additional
onerous chore. Specious data collection is resented as time wasting on the part
of teacher and pupil alike, the repeated testing which generates much of the data
being known to have a downward spiral effect on motivation, particularly on groups
of their vulnerable pupils such as those with low self esteem. Teachers
grit their teeth though, deliver the data and try to turn to more constructive
uses of their time but it is essential that this side of ICT is seen as becoming
more and more dangerously influential in shaping what actually happens in schools.
Electronic technology is becoming the engine that drives the curriculum. Learning
becomes performance. It doesn’t ask the big questions, because in its 21st century
version of Gradgrind’s approach to ‘education’, there are none to be asked. It
can only ask the little questions that can have numbers attached, but it asks
them loudly and insistently until they sound important. To those in the
present Government to whom micro-management is seemingly the ultimate and unquestioned
goal, it is presenting a level of unprecedented control that should be creating
increasingly deep unease amongst all educators, to say nothing of all citizens.
Only pre-World War II Germany and Soviet Russia have seen bureacratisation refined
to such an exquisite degree. Thus it is that Tony Blair can promise ‘greater
dialogue with parents and to address the weaknesses as well as the strengths of
the individual in a more customised fashion’. (Guardian, March 3, 2005).
This is not just vote-grabbing. His civil servants have told him that schools
and teachers now collect, indeed have to collect, sufficient computerised data
on each pupil, primary and secondary, so that this ‘customisation’ is now possible.
Children and teachers are now effectively electronically tagged. It can tell us
that Darren is still confused about colons and semi-colons but it will never be
able to tell us that he knows the names and ways of all the fresh water fish in
the rivers around South London. Saheel may be failing on her grasp of clause analysis
but tests say nothing about her exquisite Arabic calligraphy. Subsequently parents
are to be encouraged to think that the trivial is all that matters; it must be
important, we have the print out. Would that it stopped there though. Another
side to this control now offered by electronic devices over school children’s
lives is no longer the stuff of over-heated imaginations. Many larger secondary
schools use swipe cards for registration, dinners, etc. but a recent technology
conference by the Specialist Schools Trust (Times Educational Supplement,
March 4 2005) was informed about a device, up to now used by industry, called
radio frequency identification (RFID). The potential for monitoring practically
every aspect of a child’s, and indeed teacher’s life, is quite breathtaking and
creditably it was suggested by the managing director of one of the leading multinational
networking companies, Bill Fowler, that schools actually need to grapple with
the ethics of this potential before they use it. Ah, yes, ethics – a dimension
that does not appear to have occurred to the Government in the similar contexts
mentioned above. But perhaps in the area they are wont, and indeed have a fondness
for, calling ‘blue-sky thinking’ they already have their sights on the ultimate
solution. Where America leads it has not gone unnoticed that Tony Blair is unaccountably,
quite pathetically even, drawn to follow. A solution by an American company, Applied
Digital Solutions, (already given approval in the USA) is to insert such a radio
controlled device, the size of a grain of rice, under the skin of every pupil.
Sounds outrageous? So did league tables once…. Annabelle
Dixon |
