Dawn did a better job in her blog this week of weighing up the pros and cons.  For her, it all boils down to a matter of choice – both/and thinking, not either/or.  Although from the enthusiastic feel to her blog title – The Kindle is Reborn! – I think we can sense her positive vibes towards it.

All I want to do is quote a few relevant sentences from my main man Neil Postman.  Yes, I know I’ve waxed lyrical about his stuff before.  But, well, its my blog, frankly.  Plus a want to give another perspective from the usual technophile one that dominates the internet.

“New technologies compete with old ones — for time, for attention, for money, for prestige, but mostly for dominance of their world-view. This competition is implicit once we acknowledge that the medium contains an ideological bias. And it is a fierce competition, as only ideological competitions can be. It is not merely a matter of tool against tool — the alphabet attacking ideographic writing, the printing press attacking the illuminated manuscript, the photograph attacking the art of painting, television attacking the printed word. When media make war against each other, it is a case of world-views in collision…

“In the United States, we can see such collisions everywhere — in politics, in religion, in commerce — but we see them most clearly in the schools, where two great technologies confront each other in uncompromising aspect for the control of students’ minds. On the one hand, there is the world of the printed word with its emphasis on logic, sequence, history, exposition, objectivity, detachment, and discipline. On the other there is the world of television with its emphasis on imagery, narrative, presentness, simultaneity, intimacy, immediate gratification, and quick emotional response. Children come to school having been deeply conditioned by the biases of television. There, they encounter the world of the printed word. A sort of psychic battle takes place, and there are many casualties — children who can’t learn to read or won’t, children who cannot organize their thought into logical structure even in a simple paragraph, children who cannot attend to lectures or oral explanations for more than a few minutes at a time. They are failures, but not because they are stupid. They are failures because there is a media war going on, and they are on the wrong side — at least for the moment.”

Think about it.

This term at QUB, we have three new workshops for the working professional: Assertiveness and Workplace Confidence; Managing Customer Experience and Emotional Intelligence Goes to Work. These workshops are hosted by the School of Education, Short Courses Programmes (CPD).

For eveyone else, there is the School of Education’s Open Learning Programme.  This term, we’re running the following events:

Social Networking: Facebook and Twitter

Lies and Damned Lies: How to Become a Human Lie Detector

How to Be Funny

Welcome to the Blogosphere: Blogging for Beginners

The Main Thing: How to Find Meaning in Your Life

See Current Events Schedule for dates and prices for all events.  And, if you’d like to find out more about a particular event, please ring us on 028 9043 6634 or email info@sensei-winbeforehand. co.uk.

We’re also planning the following (dates to follow):

I Want to Speak to the Manager!

So You Want to Be An Entrepreneur?

Streetwise: How to Protect Yourself Against Aggression

Well now it seems that someone up there in the clouds of politik-land agrees with me.

Not that I can claim personal responsibility for the proposed primary school subjects overhaul.  But every little helps.  What they’re planning is to replace traditional subjects with broader ‘areas of learning’ in order to give teachers more flexibility and pupils the skills they will need – and do need! – in the real world.

What caught my eye was that one of these areas is entitled understanding health and well-being.  A government adviser said that there must be “greater emphasis on life skills, including making lessons about emotional well-being and social skills a compulsory part of the curriculum.”  Pupils should have the “personal, social and emotional qualities essential to their health, well-being and life as a responsible citizen in the 21st Century”. 

If this means a focus on personal responsibility, emotional intelligence and confidence, then its all good stuff, and about time too.  All this drivel about dumbing-down is a misunderstanding of the depth and scope of that these subjects include, as well as what the purpose of education should be.  As W B Yeats put it, Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire. They need to get their reactionary heads around this truth.

I  have only two minor concerns.

One, why is this shakedown limited to Primary Schools?  Unless the two level of education are interrelated, the leap from one to the other will completely bamboozle pupils.  Indeed, it should probably start at Secondary level – it’s there that an integrated and meaningful approach will pay the most dividends.  So why don’t they?  Slavish conformity to present qualifications, that’s why.

Two, I’m a little uncomfortable with the association of well-being with citizenship.  Let’s keep party politics of any sort out of it, can’t we?  The purpose of education is not to produce a well-oiled machine of state, but free and mature men and women who can think for themselves!

Find out what others are thinking here.

Image credit: timailius.

According to Professor Michael Shayer of King’s College London, modern education differs in two main ways from that of 30 years ago:

• First, there is a decline in higher-level thinking skills.  Pupils now lack the ability to think deeply about a topic, to refect on concepts and abstractions.
• Second, pupils are better at reacting to new information in a speedy and shallow way.  In this sense they can ‘think quicker’ than those of previous generations.

In my experience, the two are related.  I know some guys who are good at memorization and rapid recall.  They are quick on their feet in debates.  They are the grand masters of exam passing.  But when it comes to self-directed learning, creative thinking, or even post-graduate study by research, they utterly flounder.

What’s wrong with taking your time to think?  Must speed be the greatest good?

In the world of the computer, I suppose the answer is yes.  For that’s what computers themselves excel in, and all they excel in.  Information bulk and processing speed.  Nothing more.  And in a culture that worships these machines as gods, it’s only natural for our education to shape children in their image.

I consider this trend to be politically dangerous, psychologically damaging, economically suicidal.  As a trainer, my job in large part is to clean up the mess.

We’re like the Shallow Hal guy in the movie.  We want to see the ‘inner beauty’ of meaning and purpose in learning and life, but instead, we’re suckers for the cheap thrill of a flashing screen and a nice set of power points.

Traditional education is a failure because its focus is on teaching information about subjects.  We are expected to memorise this information and then regurgitate it in an artificial exam setting.  Our reward for this exercise in tedium is a pretty bit of paper certificate.  The actual information we forget at our earliest possible convenience.  Any skills we happen to pick up that might be of use after school are secondary, almost an accidental by-product of the process.

That’s why, when we start working, we realize how little prepared we are for what’s out there.  And the training process must begin all over again.  And that’s why trainers like me have to teach people the basic A-B-Cs of communication and thinking skills for work.  They are learning this stuff for the first time.  Mostly, they don’t even know it exists.

Now it seems that the government is starting to see the light.  Under the title Call for skill lessons in school a BBC article reports on the realisation that ‘school pupils in England should study fewer formal subjects to allow more time for their personal and social development’.  And in case anyone thinks that these ‘lifestyle lessons’ would only provide soft options for kids, one of the issues mentioned was ‘thinking skills’!

Well, of course!  What’s the point of providing kids with all this information if they aren’t taught what to do with it?  How do you analyse and evaluation it?  How does it relate to other information?  How can it be applied and put to use?  Is there any way to create more information of our own?  These are the right questions to challenge kids with.  1066 is not enough.  It is a mere fact.  Facts can easily be acquired anytime… by someone of skill.

Right, rant over.  I’ll go away and calm down now, using my skill of emotional management.

Which I didn’t learn at school. :/