Mini-series: Education Extinct (Episode 2)
All this week I’m digging up the bits of school that have quietly gone extinct in a single working lifetime. Today I’m going back to being a boy in the classroom, to talk about the class computer.
It got wheeled in and the room went silent, which never happened for anything else. Then the loading, off a cassette, which took long enough that you could lose interest and find it again. Two children got a go while the other twenty-eight watched and offered advice nobody had asked for. Then the trolley squeaked off down the corridor to its next appointment.
We learned almost nothing about computing. We learned a great deal about waiting your turn, which may be the more transferable skill.
Of everything this week, this one has evolved the most completely. Teacher Tapp data out this year found AI has gone from novelty to something close to routine, with most teachers using it weekly by last autumn. One machine on a trolley to a tool in every pocket, in about forty years. I wouldn’t undo a minute of it.
But the trolley did one thing brilliantly, entirely by accident. Because there was only one, it was an event. We paid attention because it was scarce and because the hour would end. Now the machines are everywhere and the attention isn’t, and I don’t think that’s a coincidence worth ignoring. With so much technology so readily available, the challenge is staying interested enough to challenge it, test it and manipulate it, rather than idly accepting what it does. Human mastery and human intelligence are where schools need to concentrate now, right alongside the tech.
Verdict: evolved.
Tomorrow’s one is different – it’s about something we all believed, at length and with great confidence, that turned out to be nonsense. Meanwhile, keep the extinct list coming. Yesterday’s comments were a “museum” in themselves.