What's the difference between education and training?Teacher: (Standing in front of a group of children) "I'm a PC and I teach them."
(The children cheer.)
What's the message here?
Is it that, as children are the future (1), the future belongs to PCs?
Is it that the role of the teacher has now been expanded into dictating children's future life choices? Choose what I choose and you won't need to choose for yourself?
Is it just illustrative of the ill-conceived and generally rather lazy way that ICT (2) is taught in schools?
Intended or not, all of these elements are implicit in the message here, though it is the last one which gives me most cause for concern.
Allow me to explain.
My children are taught ICT as part of their regular curriculum and yet I regularly find what they have not been taught at least as notable as what they have been.
You see, my children's school has made them into expert Microsoft users.
Need to create a pretty document using Microsoft Word, Word Art and Comic Sans? No problem.
Need to render that investigation of the life cycle of a bottlenose whale in Powerpoint? It's all good.
Indeed, First Born has become so accomplished at using Microsoft software that he was able to show me a very passable mock-up he had made of the opening credits to Star Wars using only Powerpoint.
If the aim of ICT teaching in schools is to ensure that children know how to use Microsoft Windows and Office, then it is working perfectly.
But is that the aim? If it is, should it be? And, if it isn't, what's going wrong?
It seems to me that, when it comes to ICT, too many educators have forgotten the very basic distinction between education and training.
Education is preparation for life. It opens the mind to as yet undiscovered possibilities. It stimulates questions which can't always be answered and then motivates the quest for answers. Training is preparation for a job.
Education is general and lasting. Training is specific and ephemeral.
Education engenders independence. Training fosters dependence.
Being an accomplished Powerpoint user may not be the life skill it is all too often assumed to be.
If the only constant in human endeavour is change, then we can be sure of only one thing - our children's future lives cannot be predicted. We need to prepare them through education, not training.
When I was perhaps 10 years old, my school organised a trip to the local coal mine. It was not an educational trip, but was intended to be preparatory. You see, I grew up in a rural part of the North East of England where the only industry was coal mining.
It was assumed that all boys would become miners and so we were taken to the local coal mine with a single purpose in mind, to show us all what we would be doing for the rest of our lives (after the age of 14, that is).
There's no coal mining in the North East now. The pits all closed in the 80s and the pit heads with their winding gear which used to dominate the skyline have long since been decommissioned.
I knew at the time I was taken to see the mine that this was not my future, but many - perhaps most - of my comrades took the visit at face value and discarded ambition right there and then. Their future in coal mining was short lived and turbulent and their education left them ill prepared for life afterwards.
It is to protect children from this sort of legacy that we must reassert the need for a truly educational approach to ICT in schools, even though this may conflict with some vendors' short term commercial interests.
See also: MS tax on new computers for Australian schools
Category: Misc
Technorati: Microsoft I'm+a+PC Education Training
1. Jack Dausman22/09/2008 17:18:37
Homepage: http://www.leadershipbynumbers.com
All good points, and I love the metaphor. I always think of education as something general and training as something task-oriented. That said, I think it needs to pointed out that Microsoft is so mainstream, that even though there are FOSS choices (which I believe are significantly better), there is one, big hangup to the adoption of FOSS in education.
In order for FOSS to take hold in greater numbers (http://www.workswithu.com/the-works-with-u-1000/ ) the supporting organizational structure has to adapt to it. So, despite that fact that, for instance, Ubuntu is free and comes with OpenOffice, Firefox, etc. -- the educational governing body of the school administration isn't using FOSS and would have to make changes to become familiar with it.
2. Chris Linfoot22/09/2008 19:31:54
Did I mention FOSS?
The issue is not the use of one brand of software over another. It is the uncritical way in which the tools provided by a computer are used in schools.
Children are not challenged to question what they are doing with the computer, whether there might be another or a better way, or even whether the computer truly is the right tool for the task in hand.
They are not taught what it does or what it does not do.
And they are not taught about the wider social context in which modern computing operates, which is perhaps the most troubling omission. No school child with whom I have discussed any aspect of computing has ever indicated even the faintest glimmer of understanding that their computer could be used against them. There is little or no awareness of, for just a few examples:
- grooming in chat rooms (despite government noise on the matter)
- social engineering
- malware
- effective security
- the importance of patching (new vulnerabilities emerge constantly)
- the fact that not everything you read on-line is true
I'd like to see FOSS in schools, certainly, but let's start with this list before insisting that all the children use Ubuntu.
3. Dennis Ellison23/09/2008 16:41:16
Great perspective, I thought it was just me. Told me wife that the class my kids were taking should be named Microsoft Office Training vice the ICT title. Nebuchadnezzar will be along shortly to collect you.
4. Jerry Carter23/09/2008 18:20:02
Homepage: http://datatribesoftwerks.com
Excellent post. I Couldn't agree more. This is precisely why we are home schooling our children. The emphasis is on learning to think, not learning to repeat what has been demonstrated. When I begin my computer training for my children, the focus will not be on learning windows or Ubuntu, that will be expected learning of course just to get into the tools, but rather the focus will be on understanding the concepts behind technology. Where we go from there depends on their interests and abilities. My goal is to show them where the open doors are - and to take pains to illustrate there are a great number of them to choose from.
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