My big idea for 2006...
...Close down the schools (and open up the city). My old paper the Sunday Herald asked me to come with a wizard policy wheeze for their 2006 supplement, and my piece opened their 'Big Ideas' section (on extended post below). It's partly based on research I've been doing for Urban Learning Space in Glasgow - report coming soon - but also is inspired by that visionary last chapter in Ivan Illich's 1970 classic Deschooling Society, 'the Learning Web', as well as continuing work in cutting-edge education from people like Stephen Heppell and Nesta Future Lab. Appreciate all comments.
Sunday Herald - 01 January 2006
PAT KANE
CLOSE DOWN THE SCHOOLS (AND OPEN UP THE CITY)
A FEW weeks ago, I spent a few afternoons with some fifth and sixth-year kids, whose school is situated in a notoriously troubled area of Glasgow. My brief was to talk to them about the role that digital technology played in their lives. All of them had broadband at home. All of them regarded computer games like CSI and Sim City as having the same complexity and resonance as novels or movies. All of them were actively involved in digital creativity in one form or another – from making fan websites with up to 60,000 hits, through coding Flash animations for their friends, to arranging music downloads for underground Glaswegian rap artists.
But none of them saw any connection between this intrinsically motivated, rawly enterprising lifestyle – where trade, hacking, self-skilling and peer-to-peer co-operation was the norm – and any part of the curriculum they were receiving at school. And this was a computer studies class.
My bet is that, with a few honourable exceptions, this is the majority experience for many children in Scottish schools. In their own lives, they are drawing down and seeking out information – facilitated by the great god Google – with as much rapidity and comprehensiveness as a research scientist had at their fingertips 10 years ago.
They’re doing this at home with their cable services, in the high street at web cafés and libraries, and (if they’re particularly savvy) from their wireless laptops in Beanscene. With the arrival of the Xbox 360 and the coming of PlayStation 3, even those seemingly fast and furiously pointless computer games will become an internet experience, with tens of millions already living a “second life” in online gaming.
Yet the rhetoric around our schools is mired in stasis. It’s all about “employable skill-sets geared to existing labour markets”, “unruly classroom behaviour transformed by emotional intelligence”. Kids are looking at a curriculum that moves at a porridge-like pace, compared to their own rich, convivial cultures of informed ducking, diving and searching.
So let’s close the schools down. Of course I don’t mean let’s stop education – but let’s send education to the places, and through the methods, whereby kids are actually seeking out knowledge in the digital age.
The resources we put into maintaining these draughty old disciplinary institutions could be easily redeployed, making our cities, town centre and suburbias into urban learning spaces.
Kids should be developing understanding about where the action of their society is – in hospitals, factories, shops, artistic communities, laboratories, old folks’ homes, indeed their own homes. And a combination of portable computing and ubiquitous wireless networks would allow as much scholarly back-up in these situations as any breeze-blocked edifice would. Of course, it would need some pro active legislation and investment from local and national government – some regulatory incentive whereby organisations in the city would both facilitate, and welcome, noisy posses of mobile learners in their midst. It would also need some direct funding for novel fusions between the old disciplines and the new technologies.
If more than 70% of children are active computer game players, where are the world-creating games that can help teach history, geography, languages, physics?
But it might also need a major mental reboot from teachers and parents – primarily a shift from fearing the future to embracing it (and truly embracing, rather than demonising, the children that embody it). And I suspect we’re still a few more crises away from the day that happens.
Pat Kane is author of The Play Ethic: A Manifesto For A Different Way Of Living (Macmillan, £12.99)
