kianryan
commented
1 year ago Comment written by Simon on 07/02/2014 15:18:31
"Gove thinks that there is only one way for schools to operate, and everything else is just plain wrong"
Yes, totally. He thinks that everything should be just like his memory of school - which was a private boys school in the 1970s and early 80s, before GCSEs came along. Everything he proposes, from rote learning to removing coursework to doing away with science practicals - even his forced nationalism and patriotism, perhaps - is reminiscent of this era. We moved away from those methods because they didn't work well, and at least as importantly they worked even LESS well for the less privileged and less able - which he would never have come across, being at a private school and then Oxford.
I feel that education suffers from the same problem as sound engineering: Everybody has a hifi (well, maybe an iPod dock now) and so everybody thinks they understand sound. If you are a sound engineer at the back of the auditorium in a major show, you can guarantee that one or more punters will come up to you during the night and recommend how you should do it better.
Similarly, all politicians have been to school, and so it seems that they all think they know how to run an education system. In most cases, how they think it should be run bears a striking resemblance to how it *was* run when they were at school.....
Anyway, this is largely irrelevant to the rest of your post, which I also agree with. But, aarrgh.
Re the rest of the post: I think that if "programming" or (perhaps better) "software development" or some such is going to be taught, it should be taught as a full-on subject on a par with any other. Or possibly it could be integrated with maths, but that would require a radical re-envisioning of the maths syllabus, and I don't feel I'm qualified to speculate on whether it would work or not. And either way, obviously there'd be nobody to teach it and many years would be required to train up the teachers.
If it's not taught in that way, then... I don't think we need to teach everybody to code. But I do think that we need to give people an *awareness* of coding, so that it isn't magic to them. Relatedly they need a basic awareness of how computers work: people don't need to be able to write software, but they should understand what an operating system is, what a filesystem is, what hardware bits do what (e.g. difference between RAM and long term storage), how the internet works, etc., at a non-patronising level. In my mind this is part of a whole range of topics (statistics, scientific method, and so forth) that people don't have to develop particular expertise in, but need to be aware of, as part of basic education and citizenship. But perhaps that's a topic for another day... and it doesn't have much chance of happening if we don't start with politicians and journalists having a clue about these things and thus seeing them as important.
Written on 07/02/2014 14:19:29
URL: http://www.kianryan.co.uk/2014/02/newsnight-and-the-year-of-code/