The future is trendy

Generation after generation, our schools swing between "progressive" and "traditional". The internet may settle the argument. By Peter Wilby

Is it the purpose of education to give children factual knowledge and to transmit skills that will allow them to flourish on the labour market? Or is it to stimulate their imaginations, their creativity, their critical faculties? In either case, what is the best way of teaching? Should the teacher allow the individual child to find his or her own way to knowledge and understanding? Or should teachers lead, basing lessons on the established bodies of knowledge contained in academic curricula?

These questions - as old as schools themselves - run through this NS supplement on the future of education. The pendulum swings from generation to generation. It is perhaps in the nature of schools - which have to deal every day with a reluctant conscript army - that they should always embrace the latest solutions with reckless enthusiasm (even if they are often no more than the solutions of the day before yesterday). If it's not broke, don't fix it, they say. As schools are nearly always broke read any account of public schools in the 19th century - the temptation is to try something new. Thus, less than 20 years ago, teachers regarded it almost as child abuse to instruct a pupil in anything at all; now, the government hands out a minute-by-minute blueprint for teaching literacy and numeracy.

As the state divests itself of such public services as gas, water and electricity, and loses to the international markets much of its control over the economy, it is bound to turn to schools as an arena for political action. If we are on the threshold of a knowledge economy, governments are likely to conclude, with some reason, that its commanding heights lie within the education system, rather than in mines or steelworks.

Yet the growth of the internet, and new ways of finding information, suggest that schooling must change. We have seen this in long division, made redundant by calculators. It may seem a trivial example, but so is the dishwasher, in effect a robot and the forerunner of robots that will perform more sophisticated tasks in future. Perhaps it is annoying that children do not know the date of Charles I's execution. But we live in a world in which such information is available at the click of a mouse.

The technological revolution in education is always delayed - and subject to many false starts -rather like the age of space exploration or the era of robotics. It will surely come. When it does, the result is likely to be closer to what we now think is 1960s trendiness than the supposedly realistic grittiness of the 1990s.