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Kim Thomas

We all hold certain cherished ideas about education: young children should be taught in small groups; the best way to learn is from an inspirational teacher; the earlier you learn to read the better… and so on. Donald Clark, an e-learning pioneer, doesn’t have time for any of these, or for a whole number of other educational sacred cows.

The main problem with education stems from its unrelenting focus on teachers, says Donald. Teachers are regarded as ‘sacrosanct’ and it is generally believed that “the only way people learn is through teaching”. The government is “so wedded to the classroom model of teaching that they can’t see past it”.

But this emphasis has had disastrous results, he argues: “The spending in this area has more than doubled since 1997, with almost no improvement. That’s because it’s spent on the same model: pay more teachers, give them more money, test kids to death. If that’s working, show me the evidence.”

Instead of pouring more money into a teacher-centric model, argues Donald, government should be developing an educational system that enables children to learn independently. Pupils learn best either on their own or from one-to-one tuition, yet the opportunities to do this are being removed: some secondary schools have dispensed with textbooks, while homework is “fast disappearing because teachers don’t want to give it”.

As an example of how a system focused on teachers fails, he cites mathematics: primary school teachers are ill-equipped to teach numeracy, he argues, few having any mathematical qualification beyond GCSE. Yet many children are now acquiring numeracy skills by playing with Nintendo’s Brain Training – software prepared by professional mathematicians: “Why are we not doing something like that in primary schools? If you gave every kid in Britain a little application like that it would solve massive problems, but there is still this fundamental belief that someone has to stand there talking mathematics.”

Similarly, language learning could be immeasurably improved by using some of the immersive environments available on the internet: “Language teaching is just hopeless in schools, nobody learns a thing – they learn how to pass the exam, they don’t learn how to speak the language at all. The twinning of schools and having IM chat in French would be a good thing, but the only thing schools can think of is a two-day trip to Normandy, and then they take them to Disneyland in Paris where they all speak English.”

So why the resistance to change? The biggest obstacle to progress is teachers themselves: they have been taught to regard themselves as ‘auteurs’, whose job is to create inspiring lessons, which means that they spend far too much time planning lessons instead of sharing material on the web: “They have to reinvent the lessons when the same lesson has probably been given better by other teachers a million times before. There’s no other area of human endeavour where there’s more duplication of effort, where everybody wants to reinvent the wheel every lesson.”

Donald also gives short shrift to the idea that primary school children work best in small groups: “I think the day Vygotsky got introduced into pedagogic theory was the beginning of the end. You get this myth of learning, which you can witness in any primary school. You’re destroying motivation by allowing children to turn face-to-face with other kids in the group and do what they normally do – which is not learn.” There is little educational value in group learning, he suggests, particularly for young children: “Collaborative learning is such a stupid idea for basic skills – the idea that a group of kids who can’t do something will learn from each other magically.”

So instead of children being allowed to learn at their own pace, they are held back or hurried forward: “Most classes go belly-up at one point or another because a class of 30-odd kids all at different stages of development need to be going at their own pace, not the pace of the teacher. The whole system is designed to dampen differentiation down.”

The problem is compounded by this country’s emphasis on teaching numeracy and literacy to very young children: “There’s a very British obsession about getting your kid to read the Narnia books by the age of 3 and impress people at dinner parties, but that’s a very middle-class British way of looking at education. Nobody ever says later in life, ‘Do you know, I learnt to read when I was 3? When did you learn to walk?’”

Luckily, says Donald, resistance from schools and teachers to a learner-centric model may be soon overcome by the rising tide of technological innovation. Children go home and carry out research on the internet, where they have ready access to ideas and information. He points to a recent CBI survey that found a majority of employers complaining about young people’s lack of literacy and numeracy skills but only 9% complaining about their lack of ICT skills. Those ICT skills were not acquired at school, he says, but at home: “By the time they leave school, most kids now are more IT-literate than their parents and their teachers, so haven’t we learnt a lesson from that? When you become an autonomous learner, and you’re motivated to do it, then you learn. So why don’t we just start stretching that into other subjects, especially maths?”

Donald believes that children are becoming increasingly sophisticated, and their exposure to other media outside school enables them to learn new skills on their own. Technologies such as e-mail and instant messaging, for example, have created a resurgence in writing: “My kids communicate massively daily. They write screeds. I’m 50 years old, and I think the most I ever wrote in a year was three letters to my pen-pal in France.”

On the question of how long it will take education to catch up with the rest of the world, Donald is optimistic: “Go to any organisation and people use technology in a very sophisticated manner. The last siege tower is education. The tide isn’t going to go out, schools are up to their knees because the kids are using it, and they’ll soon be up to their waists. It’s the only way forward.”

The way we teach children has remained essentially the same for 2000 years, he argues, but change is now inevitable: “Technology is the big spoiler. Technology shows it can be done better, quicker and cheaper. To ignore it is just plain stupid.”

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