Still divided on whether teachers, parents or politicians are to blame

This week's Register Debate tussled over the motion Technology widens the education divide. The results are in, and as you can see, we have a clear winner. Education is always an emotive topic. Throw technology and the pandemic into the mix, and you can guarantee The Register readership will shoot a metaphorical forest of …

[JohnSheeran]

Two key themes continue to pop up in these conversations; exceptionalism and inequality. Neither of these terms is to be taken at face value and an entire article could/should be written on each of them. Please don't think of either of them in the pop culture sense but in the literal, clinical sense.

FWIW, it was one of your UK commenters that opened my eyes to exceptionalism in regards to how my country is handling so many of the challenges it is facing today.

I've personally lived through the world of inequality and it's not just a matter of race, religion, sex or socioeconomics. I'll only say that everyone should consider that biology, geography and genetics all seem to contribute.

[fra]

Yikes!

[Anonymous Coward]

Technology can be useful, but I've argued before that it really needs to be barred from the educational world until at least high school. Technology skills aren't that hard to pick up, otherwise my generation (approaching 40) and those who came before wouldn't be able to use the technology of today.

Learning the core skills of English (or insert language of country/choice here) / Maths and the 3 base Sciences along with the necessary skills to think in a critical manner, research skills and ability to listen to others is way more important

You can't build castles in the sky, unless your feet are planted firmly on the ground.

But politicians of all stripes have cut funding and salaries for teachers to the bone in most cases for providing real teaching and seem to cconsider it a vast exxpense, rather than an investment that has good returns & instead have decided "tech will fix all, so say we all". Till we get rid of that attitude, nothing will change.

[tweell]

Dad was a science teacher. He told me that 10% of his students were going to learn, whether or not he actually did any teaching. Contrarywise, 10% weren't going to learn, no matter what he did. He pointed out the material to the top 10%, kept the bottom 10% from bothering other students, and did his best to explain the lessons to the 80% in the middle.

The self starters will do fine with distance learning. The losers are actually easier to deal with when distance learning, as they have less ability to cause trouble. However, the children that can learn but have a few problems are much harder to help and have more distractions with distance learning. In person, a teacher can see the blank looks and modify their presentation accordingly, that's a lot harder to do when you have little faces (or more often just a blank spot with an identifier) to go on. Minimal feedback = poor outcome, in classroom or electronic circuit.

A teacher I know does special needs kids. Her students were utterly unable to handle distance learning, and have regressed for the most part. It's hard enough for her to get progress in person, doing it long distance was simply impossible.

[fra]

Bad teachers ignore "bad" kids

My auntie is a teacher and says bad teachers blame their students, and if we fired all of the bad teachers and just got better educated teachers the education system would actually work.

And the children who struggle (who are often from the poorest backgrounds and in most need of a good education) wouldn't just be ignored, dismissed and remain uneducated because bad teachers want to have an easy life and steal their wages.

[Terry 6]

Re: Bad teachers ignore "bad" kids

There's some degree of truth there. Of course there is. There are poor teachers/doctors/lawyers even coders!

But to say the education system would just work is arrant nonsense. Which educations system? What does "just work" look like? Do we even all know or agree what we want from the education system? Would it mean every kid getting 5 A*? Would it mean that kids in inner city schools that have lousy facilities, large classes in small over-crowded rooms and constant changes of teachers will do as well as motivated kids in fee paying schools?

Does it mean learning "skills" and behaviour to become good little workers or thinking individuals who challenge what they're told? And so on. This too is a debate that's been going for centuries, arguably millennia. I recommend John Locke as a useful starting point.

[Anonymous Coward]

Downvote me as you will but doesn't this simply demonstrate that teaching them in the first place is not worth the time, trouble, or expense?

[Terry 6]

Vested interests

That phrase, almost slipped in there, needs a lot more consideration. How much of education policy is now decided by a combination of moral panic and vested interest.

For a start, claims that standards are falling go back to at least the 18th C. And since by that measure they've been falling for around 300 years we really must be standing on the shoulders of giants- since everyone then who had an education must have made Bertrand Russel look like Winnie the Pooh for standards to have fallen for so long. But using that claim and the moral panic it feeds, allows vested interests to ride in and take control of the lucrative educational business. Ever more detailed, prescriptive and ever changing National Curriculum, removing teacher training from Local Authorities and the requirement for using various "Off-the-shelf" packages, not least authorised Phonics schemes, puts an awful lot of money into the accounts of big publishing companies etc.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Vested interests

When I were your age lad, I killed twenty persians at Marathon, and marched forty mile back to Athens for a beer. Your uncle Philip ran 'hundred mile to Sparta, and was propping the bar up when we got there.

[Terry 6]

Re: Vested interests

Ah! But did you know how to do "Linking ideas across paragraphs using adverbials of time"? (Yr 5 English)

[Commswonk]

Re: Vested interests

But did you know how to do "Linking ideas across paragraphs using adverbials of time"? (Yr 5 English)

No; WTF does it mean?

Commswonk (year 70 +)

[Terry 6]

Re: Vested interests

That's the thing. Almost no one needs to know these phrases ( there are many of them in the Primary School National Curriculum English) or indeed consciously know how to use them. They should be taught by introducing (and discussing imho) good models of writing and speaking. .

But these isolated "skills" can be rote taught, tested and compared. As can "skills" such as using "wow words" to write a supposedly good opening paragraph. The N C is chock full of travesties of teaching and learning designed by people who value what can be measured. The result is a generation of 11 year olds who can read mechanically as long as the language is regular, but don't much want to read at all. And who write in a narrow, forced, stilted way that lacks originality, spontaneity or fun.

[J.G.Harston]

How can we expect any sense from politicians when they can't tell the difference between IT and STEM? And keep stuffing the confusion down people's maws. It's like declaring that "modern houses all have electric lights" therefore all kids must be taught electrical engineering, rather than being taught how to use a light switch.

[Terry 6]

I'd agree, other than to amend that to knowing when to use a light switch.(Deep sigh as turns off daughter's light in the middle of the day, again.)

[Anonymous Coward]

$BIG_TECH education taxes

I run an after school coding club at a local school on their discarded core 2 duo desktops running lubuntu 20.04.

Minetest, scratch, python, java, arduino, PCB design, GIMP, Inkscape, Libreoffice, Octave, etc are all used easily without any internet access or cloud services required.

A constant source of frustration is the idea, often pushed by IT support types, that you need a brand new cloud connected lab running commercial operating systems and commercial software to be able to teach STEM. Discounted licencing for education is quite an insidious practice too.

Imagine if the money spent on licences and planned obsolescence of hardware in education could instead be spent on competent IT support and educators....