Old wine in new wineskins

Anyone seen the connection? The new programme for primary school education includes blogs, tweets and wikipedia, and at the same time the Government plans to monitor Facebook and other links. If you set up monitoring systems then you need people to populate them with data! Actually I am not worried about the monitoring, I have assumed for years that anything I do with an electronic record can be accessed/traced etc. Just like every movement I make on the streets of London is captured on a video camera. I think there are more important civil liberties fights than that, and its a lost cause anyway. However I am more worried about the primary school idea. We also seem to want to teach children the technology that adults currently find exciting. I remember in 1970 being taught how to use a punch card machine on the grounds it was a key future skill and would give me a job for life.

It’s a waste of time anyway. I saw a bunch of year 9s today pick up and use novel technology very quickly, learning by imitation and exploration. By the time Primary School children grow up technology will have changed beyond recognition, or they will be living in a post-climate change world fighting within a feudal system based on control of water and land. Far better to teach, and allow them to experience human interaction and learning, give them a sound grounding in history, teach them to think. The technology will look after itself. As to teaching them about WIkipedia, well we already have a bunch of spotty libertarian teenagers who think they are Philosophers having read a few demonic novels by deranged libertarians (you know who I am talking about if you have followed this blog). Maybe dropping the age would improve things?