The ‘Shock of the Old’ in Education — 21st Century Learning remains stuck in the past
The debate about so-called ‘21st Century Learning’ came back again recently with the comments of the Shadow Education Secretary, Kate Green, to the TES. Ben Newmark brilliantly demolished the arguments made by her in this piece, so I won’t rehash all that here.
What I did want to do was to pick up one or two of the points she made and think about these in light of my reading of a brilliant history book by David Edgerton, called The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900. These ideas have been brewing in my head for a while. I’m no expert on education technology (other than I’ve been a High School teacher for 13 years) by any means so I may make some mistakes here, but hopefully the broad thrust of what I’m saying holds up.
It’s a brilliant book, and as per usual with Edgerton, staunchly revisionist (see also books like Britain’s War Machine which take a very different angle on Britain’s experience of the Second World War that very much challenges conventional narratives). If you follow my twitter you’ll be aware that I’m a big fan of his work. In The Shock of the Old, Edgerton makes a number of convincing arguments:
1. We get far too obsessed with innovation when we explore the history of technology — in essence, technology is far too closely associated with the ‘future’.
2. We therefore miss out on exploring the role of ‘use’ in technology, which changes our understanding massively, as it brings in issues like imitation, maintenance and repair.
3. We’re better off talking about ‘things’ rather than technology as it is much closer to our own frame of reference.
The book itself is full of fascinating insights, especially for Humanities and Science teachers. The very first question asked at the start of chapter 1, ‘is the condom more significant in history than the aeroplane?’ is one that you could probably discuss for hours. I want to know a lot more about the Suame Magazine in Ghana, a place where 6,000 people were working by 1971 on repairing and maintaining old cars for their continued use across West Africa (surely a fascinating topic for a Geography case study). It questions our assumptions about the Second World War as a war of technology, with reference to the significant early successes of the technologically inferior German Army, which in itself was defeated primarily by a country that started even further back industrially than they did, which was the Soviet Union.
I could go on. But I wanted to briefly consider how some of the points made in the book might be linked to one or two of the debates in education, particularly this notion of ‘21st century learning’. This is especially relevant in light of Kate Green’s comments yesterday (and I’ve copied and pasted the relevant bit from the TES article):
“We’ve got a curriculum now that’s information-heavy. It’s traditionalist in its approach and while, of course, you do want children to acquire a high level of the basic essential skills they need all through their lives and for their future studies and employment, education has become a bit joyless, and that’s not the fault of schools.”
and
““There needs to be less rote-style learning and more help for children to develop their own faculty for critical thinking, asking questions and interrogating data, and working collaboratively with one another.
“[Education secretary] Gavin Williamson is quite a fan of children sitting facing the front in rows, whereas I’m quite a fan of children sitting in groups and working in teams and learning to cooperate and work on a basis of helping each other to share their learning experience and support one another to learn and improve.
“What we have now is quite a narrow curriculum. I want to see something that is much broader that gives proper recognition to and space to the arts, culture, wellbeing, health and sport [and a] wider understanding of the world which children are growing up in.
What we have here are lots of references to essentially traditionally ‘old’ ways of doing things (such as ‘rote learning’ and an ‘information heavy curriculum’ inferred as being ‘bad’, and a desire for presumably ‘newer’ approaches that emphasise critical thinking, asking questions and teamwork. As many people have pointed out this is somewhat of a false binary (many traditional teachers use group work from time to time and want more space given to the arts and culture, and many progressive educators want children to know lots and lots of things that they wouldn’t otherwise encounter unless they were at school) and it was disappointing to see these tired old tropes being trotted out by someone who hopes to be the Education Secretary in 2024.
While the phrase 21st Century Learning is not used, it is clearly inferred if you know anything about these debates in education. So what is it? The presentation linked to here from the OECD highlights many of the key themes. The need for ‘problem-solving’, ‘creativity’, ‘team-work’, ‘critical thinking’ and ‘ICT skills’ are common ideas. The need for learning to be relevant to problems of tomorrow that are often not yet even known is also referenced.
Yet, far from being new or innovative, these ideas are extremely old — perhaps nearly as old as the traditional model of education they criticise (and which now is enjoying a renaissance in certain parts of the English education system — another example of the ‘shock of the old’ of course). These can be traced back easily as far as nineteenth century educators like John Dewey, if not before. The desire to develop these skills can be seen in the Steiner schools of the early twentieth century. Both so-called ‘traditional’ and ‘progressive’ conceptions of education are intrinsically very old in their approaches.
The ‘newer’ aspects of 21st Century Learning I think revolve around the need for the incorporation of ‘technology’ into the classroom. This of course has been particularly relevant at the current time during the COVID-19 crisis, as more of us have been relying on Zoom and video lessons and so on and so forth. What was remarkable here was how teachers adapted their old ways of doing things to these ‘new’ technologies (although, of course, we’ve had lessons delivered in ways like this for years — I remember by Mum and Dad using the VCR to record Open University lectures on BBC2 broadcast in the middle of the night for their own degree courses back in the early 1990s).
Education technology, to me at least, conjures a number of (admittedly no doubt stereotypical) images, all very much associated with innovation:
· All children using iPads or other analogous devices in lessons.
· Children ‘just googling it’ rather than reading it in a book.
· Interactive whiteboards.
· The use of Virtual Learning Environments, such as Google Classroom.
· School spaces built to facilitate ‘innovative’ pedagogies, as seen in some of the BSF building projects (including a school I used to work in that had ‘open-plan’ break out spaces and innovative learning spaces and a library with no books in, yet was heavily reliant on knackered out laptop trollies in order to for kids to use ICT in lessons outside of ICT).
Yet I would argue the most commonly used education technologies in most secondary lessons are as follows (forgive me if I forget something obvious):
· Paper.
· Books.
· The biro pen (and Edgerton has an interesting anecdote about Laszlo Biro — the most famous Argentine inventor of all time who was actually a Hungarian Jew who fled there as a result of the Nazis).
· A desktop computer (used by one person, the teacher).
· An overhead projector of some description.
Of course, for most teachers, the piece of technology they engage with in school the most, other than the computer, is the dreaded photocopier, an invention dating back to the 1940s. The maintenance of which (to go back to Edgerton) is a very important concern for us all!
In some subjects, there are very specific technologies. Mathematics have their calculators for example. Science teachers and learners use a range of technologies including Bunsen burners, beakers, petri dishes and so on (the petri dish of course being a hugely important piece of technology as those of us who teach the History of Medicine GCSE course are aware). ICT and Computing teachers use rooms full of desktop PCs. Art and Media teachers, if they are lucky, might have snazzier Apple-branded machines in their rooms, but this is by no means the case in all schools.
And yet many people are incredibly concerned with a seeming shortfall in teacher and student capability with technology. There are loads of organisations and charities devoted to getting ‘more’ ed tech into schools. Apple and Google have enormous armies of people working to promote their technologies in school. We saw in October calls for the creation of a government ‘Ed Tech Ministry’ . There is a hugely influential lobby of people, backed by powerful multi-national corporations, who continue to demand more and more technology in our schools (forgetting that they are already littered with technology).
I would contend, however, that the obsession with using technology ‘innovatively’ in schools has blinded us to the widespread use of it already taking place, and the fact that the technology being promoted is not all that new. Indeed, as Edgerton points out about society more generally, “By the standards of the past, the present does not seem radically innovative. Indeed, judging from the present, the past looks extraordinarily inventive. We need only think of the twenty years 1890–1910 which gave us, among the more visible new products, X-Rays, the motor car, flight, the cinema and radio, most of them expanding technologies to this day.”
Probably, the area where we need to concentrate our attention, is on access to these pre-existing technologies. The failures seen in the COVID-19 crisis are not caused by teachers not being au fait with the possibilities of technology, but the failure to get fairly old hat technologies (such as a laptop) in the hands of the people who need it (children from deprived backgrounds who do not have access to such devices). Interestingly, we find that most children have access to fairly snazzy smart phones, but that these are not effective for the delivery of remote learning compared to some slightly older technologies.
Rather than getting children upskilled on so-called innovative technologies, I think we’d be better served making them better equipped to deal with ones we already have. Something simple like teaching children to touch-type, an old skill which a quick Wikipedia search suggests dates back to the late-nineteenth century and yet is largely absent from schools, might have a huge impact on the ability of children to remote learn effectively by enabling them to speed up the production of their work, and might therefore enable them to produce better work. [I’m sure I’m not the only to have sat with children in a computer room frustrated at the glacially slow pace in which otherwise highly literate children get words down onto the Word document in front of them].
In addition, the fact that the concept of an adult teaching a class of children sat in front of them, imparting their expert knowledge to them and then checking that those children have understood it, has been one used for centuries (surely the oldest idea of all in education), is perhaps not something we should disregard so lightly. These are very old ideas that have stood the test of time for a reason.
