Cairo Association of Teachers - Newsletter

CAT Tracks for March 26, 2009 BRITS ALL A-TWITTER

...over proposed education changes.

Exit Winston Churchill, enter Twitter ... Yes, it's the new primary school curriculum

By Tamara Cohen

Primary schools could ditch traditional lessons in favour of teaching children how to use social networking sites such as Twitter, it emerged yesterday.

In the biggest education shake-up for 20 years, pupils would no longer have to learn about the Romans, Vikings, Tudors, Victorians or the Second World War.

Instead, under the blueprint for a new primary curriculum – which was drawn up by former Ofsted chief Sir Jim Rose following a request from Children's Secretary Ed Balls – they would have to be able to master websites such as Wikipedia, as well as blogging and podcasting. Compulsory sex education will start from five and children as young as nine will be taught to make 'informed decisions' about taking drugs and drinking alcohol.

As swathes of prescribed knowledge in science, history and geography are stripped back, schools will be encouraged to put a big emphasis on internet skills, environmental education, healthy eating and well-being.

'English will cover 'media texts' and 'social and collaborative forms of communication' alongside traditional works of literature.

These should include 'emails, messaging, wikis and twitters'. Wikis, as in the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, are information databases that rely on being edited by the public, regardless of whether they have any specialist knowledge in the subject being discussed. Twitter is the latest phenomenon in social networking that entails writing short messages of just 140 characters to update other users of one's activities, feelings or thoughts.

Sir Jim's proposals are the biggest shakeup of primary schooling since the Tories introduced a national curriculum in 1988.

But the final draft, which was leaked yesterday, was last night branded 'dangerous' and an assault on knowledge, while critics said children were accustomed to using modern media at home and needed no encouragement at school.

Robert Whelan, deputy director of the Civitas think-tank, which published a damning critique on the curriculum two years ago, said: 'This is yet another step on the journey to drain all academic content from the school curriculum and to replace discrete bodies of knowledge, which have been organised under subject headings for hundreds of years, with a lot of social engineering and flabby attempts at feelgood philosophy.

'These proposals will only serve to increase the educational apartheid between the state and independent sector, because the latter will retain traditional subjects.'

Pointing out the need for greater historical education, not less, he said he had recently asked a group of pupils in their late years at primary school when Shakespeare lived, and the answer came back as '50 years ago'.

Sean Lang, senior lecturer in History at Anglia Ruskin University and secretary of the Historical Association, said: 'This is part and parcel of a general trend both at primary and secondary level to downgrade knowledge, as if all you need is techniques, and knowledge is just stuff you get from the web.'

The Conservatives' education spokesman, Michael Gove, said: 'Sir Jim Rose's review of the primary curriculum has already promised to teach our children less. Now it proposes to replace solid knowledge with nods towards all the latest technological fashions.'

Under the proposed curriculum, children must also gain 'fluency' in keyboard skills as well as handwriting, and learn to use a spellchecker as well as learning to spell. Meanwhile a physical development, health and wellbeing programme will make sex education compulsory in primaries for the first time.

From around the age of five, pupils will be taught about gender differences while at nine, they will learn about 'the physical changes that take place in the human body as they grow and how these relate to human reproduction'. They will also be told 'how new relationships may develop'.

Under this section, schools will be required to cover healthy diets but will able to offer less variety of competitive sport. Schools Minister Jim Knight said: 'Sir Jim Rose's report has not been completed let alone published yet – but we are already getting stories about dropping this or removing that from the curriculum.

The bottom line is that we are working with experts to free up the curriculum in a way that teachers have asked us to do but British history has, and always will be, a core part of education in this country.

'Of course pupils in primary schools will learn about major periods including the Romans, the Tudors and the Victorians and will be taught to understand a broad chronology of major events in this country and the wider world.'

And, an op-ed piece from the Telegraph...

Proposals to introduce web lessons to primary schools are desperately flawed, says Ceri Radford.

By Ceri Radford

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. In a novel reversal of the usual format (perplexed adult, know-it-all child oozing condescension), his review of primary education suggests, according to the leaked draft, that teachers will one day instruct children on "blogging, podcasts, Wikipedia and Twitter". I can almost see the look of fear on poor, technophobic Miss Jones's face as class 3A steadily ignore her because they're too busy updating their MySpace pages on their mobiles.

Well-meaning as the proposal may be, it raises several problems. The first is that by the time the lumbering, flat-tyred juggernaut of Government education policy has unloaded these half-baked ideas on to the curriculum, the nimble motorbike of online fashion will have zipped off elsewhere. Twitter, the micro-blogging site, launched in 2006; two years later people were already complaining of "Twitter fatigue". The common principle that underpins this kind of website – that people benefit from forming online networks to share information and experiences – isn't going to go away, but a new way of doing it will have come along before the spine on that new textbook is bent.

And even if Twitter could be pickled in formaldehyde, to be studied in years to come, there is no point teaching anyone about it, because it's so easy. I know, because I have just joined. You go to www.twitter.com and click the big green box that says "Get Started – Join!". The registration process is so easy that not only today's primary schoolchildren, but also today's grandparents, could handle it. The web has developed at such astonishing speed that tasks that 10 years ago were the province of bearded programmers fluent in HTML can now be accomplished by inept arts graduates like me, who don't even know what HTML stands for. Websites have evolved to make life easy for the lowest common denominator of internet dummy. This is no thanks to the education system. I took compulsory IT classes in the Nineties, the decade the World Wide Web took off, an era fizzing with new ideas, expanding horizons. Yet all I learnt was how to program a robot car to drive along a hexagon. The way people have learnt about the web reflects its nature – social, organic and a bit anarchic. It inherently resists the top-down approach.

Finally, although the internet can be a valuable educational tool, I also wonder if it isn't worthwhile having a little time off from it in the classroom. The adult world is so suffused with hyper-connectivity – emails landing every second, invitations to follow the sender on Twitter, colleagues pinging messages from their BlackBerries when they're in a meeting or at the doctor's – that I envy schoolchildren their brief window when they can concentrate on the task in hand. Part of the joy of learning is being thoroughly absorbed in another world, whether it's a medieval battlefield or the chrysalis of a grub turning into a butterfly.

However, if children are going to be taught about these fast-moving online phenomena, please God let them be taught the pitfalls. Give them a class on how not to blog like a screaming self-obsessed narcissist, a seminar on how not to drive your friends mad by inviting them to join 1,047 Facebook groups, a crash course on when to put down that BlackBerry. And, more seriously, teach them how to protect themselves online, to avoid giving out too much information or striking friendships with dodgy strangers. Sensible guidance, rather than sticking a few buzzy new websites on the curriculum, would be valuable. The internet is easier than ever to use, but it's not child's play.