The Key (board) To Learning
Sydney Morning Herald
Thursday September 25, 1997
IT USED to take a Telecom ad to make me cry. You remember the ones where white-haired European peasants crowd around the phone as if it's a space ship and burst into Mediterranean sobs when they hear their granddaughter's voice? These days, though, it's always computer ads that melt me down. They're so "global" - so full of innocent wondering children and ecstatic people of every colour communicating and thousands of tiny Triumphs of the Human Spirit.
It's enough to make you want to put Intel inside everything.
Given their spectacular effect on me, I can only imagine the impact these ads must have on anyone with a kid. Their message is quite clear: computers are the future of our world and if your child doesn't have one, he or she has no future in this world.
Computers are the Encyclo-pedia Britannicas of the '90s - with a crucial difference. When parents bought their kids' educational books, they could see what the kids were learning. But they can't follow their kids' progress through the World Wide Web - in fact, many children are already more computer-literate than their parents.
Computers are much more than an educational tool - they're a gateway to new kinds of literacy and ways of thinking. They don't supplement traditional methods of education - they point to a future where traditional methods of education will be obsolete.
If the Three Rs have been the backbone of mass education in the print-dominated 20th century, the media of the coming century will demand different skills, including the ability to think in a lateral rather than a linear manner and a high degree of visual literacy.
It's not a shift many people seem terribly comfortable with yet. Hence, the bizarre double-speak we're always hearing about education. On one hand, we're constantly told it's imperative to get computers into schools and give our children access to the online world. On the other, we're told literacy standards have gone through the floor and we need to get back to traditional educational values.
If we go back to genuinely classical ideas about education, we wind up back at the Socratic method and the idea that learning is about learning to learn.
Education, in this light, has no necessary connection with particular subjects - and certainly nothing to do with the improving powers of literature. Plato was highly suspicious of poetry and other mimetic arts. Of course, reading and writing remain essential communication skills - ones which are even more important in the information age. But there's a difference between acknowledging their ongoing importance and making fetishes of a series of educational goals enshrined in the print era.
Many traditional educational goals are simply no longer relevant to our modern workplaces or lives - goals like the ability to memorise textbooks or concentrate on one task to the exclusion of all others.
Most parents are still inclined to think there's something inherently better about their child being absorbed by a book than captivated by a video game.
Yet, the video game is also teaching the child literacy skills; they're just different ones from the kind we need to sit quietly and contemplate a book.
Even in the most academic of environments, the ability to think laterally - across disciplines - is becoming increasingly important. It's a logic that multimedia implicitly demands.
The arrival of computers in schools and the homes ofmiddle-class kids is triggering enormous social ambivalence. There's a strong belief that computer-literacy gives children a crucial educational advantage. But there's also a fear that computers are bringing trash culture - the world of video game arcades - into the home.
Distilling the educational value of computers - in traditional terms - is not easy. The World Wide Web does not divide neatly up into leisure and work or education and entertainment. And it combines text and image in ways which often privilege images or sound over the written word.
The kinds of skills required by computers often directly contradict the kinds of skills we've been taught to value. Certainly, they make it much harder to police what kind of skills and information our kids are acquiring.
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© 1997 Sydney Morning Herald