Heading for BETT, Hoping for Better

Posted on | January 12, 2010 | 7 Comments

One year ago, I posted my thoughts on my return home from the BETT Show, entitled: Impoverishment of the Educational Imagination.

I wrote:

Stand after stand at the BETT Show this year seemed to bear witness to a concept of schooling that is just about as far away from the joy of learning as it appears possible to get – it could really only get worse if we were to go back to thrashing kids. Everywhere I wandered I came across little gaggles of people listening intently to someone demonstrating yet another ticky-boxy piece of junk designed to rank and grade kids, to label them, to monitor them and to ‘protect’ them.

It is in such products, and in the school-based practices that depend on them, that we can see the true extent of the malaise that affects so many schools today. On display were the instruments that subjugate learning to that same level, to those same reduced visions of the miserable gradgrinds who would turn our schools into factories for the production of hard-working passive subjects ready to serve our economy and little else. They are also shackles that ensure our teachers find it difficult to build or retain any genuine professional autonomy in the classroom

As an optimist, I head for BETT 2010 tomorrow morning in the hope that fewer of these passionless instruments of institutionalised education will be apparent this year, all of them designed to produce legions of passive, tractable, target-attaining school pupils across the land. I hope there will be a few more enthusiastic teachers, vendors and manufacturers who understand the crying need for genuine passion, love for learning and a freeing of the imagination!

I will be searching out the convivial!

I’ll let you know if I find it.

Technorati Tags: BETT Show, education, technology, gradgrind

Category: children, education, freedom, identity, learning, passion

Comments

7 Responses to “Heading for BETT, Hoping for Better”

Alan Coady
January 12th, 2010 @ 10:43 pm

Well said! I hope you find it.
David Gilmour
January 12th, 2010 @ 11:26 pm

Good luck John, I hope you’re not disappointed and that it has improved. Last year was my first visit and I felt like a fish out of water.

It was fascinating to see the sheer scale of the industry Britain’s education budgets support, but alarming how little sense there was of the industry understanding education’s emerging needs – as you noted.

Maybe, of course, that’s not what matters: it exists to sell what people want to buy here and now. Last year’s parking signs told people it was a trade show: that revealed a mindset that was part of the problem.

The Teachmeet Takeover is a tangible sign that attitudes are changing. I hope suppliers suppliers use the opportunity to listen to the needs of up-to-date teachers, not just show existing products to those with budgets to spend.
Joe Nutt
January 14th, 2010 @ 5:55 pm

John, my guess, after a day and half there this week is that you could simply post last year’s text again. At one point I stood on the balcony and the sight of all that misguided investment just dismayed me. If the same money and energy just went into recruiting great teachers, imagine the difference!

What especially galls me is the use of pupils as marketing props by so many companies now. In my last role I insisted that if we took children out of school, then we had to provide teachers to teach them, and teach them properly, not leave them to play or sit mindlessly in front of some demo.

I know from hard earned experience how incredibly difficult it is to persuade what is essentially a technology company of any kind, to design and build something which is educationally meaningful. That dreadful synergy between the quango and the sales director has a lot to answer for!
21st Century Trivium Man
January 15th, 2010 @ 10:51 pm

“Passive, target attaining students” – brilliant!
My thoughts exactly.

I’ve written a couple of thoughts on my blog about how ICT is taking over schooling and the pride that some schools have in saying goodbye to books…

terrible days
John Connell
January 16th, 2010 @ 10:49 am

My piece above is not intended as a general rant against the use of ICT in education. Far from it – I remain a strong advocate for the human and convivial deployment of technology across all aspects of teaching and learning. My particular distaste is for those who would use ICT as a means of dehumanizing and trivializing the educational processes, often in the name of administrative efficiency.

The question of the future of school libraries is one that is worthy of careful consideration – perhaps I need to revisit the subject.

As for Joe’s ‘dreadful synergy between the quango and the sales director ‘, I could not agree more – but again, I know of many genuine examples where the industry has dug much deeper than the quango to find precisely those people who can help to build the kind of human and convivial tools I mention above.
Joe Nutt
January 16th, 2010 @ 11:01 am

Last year I worked on a new school build project and at a very late stage in the design it was announced that they were reducing their library book collection from 12,000 to 5,000 books. When I asked why, I was met with a row of utterly blank faces. Until I’d asked the question, no one else had even thought of it!

I’ve written about this before because the way PfS and others have run with the idea of the learning resource centre, using new university libraries as their models, is a scandal. What they never bothered to find out was that the only reason the new university libraries were designed the way they were, was because the architects were told we don’t a book collection and aren’t going to amass one, so design accordingly. Now that may be fine when your students are supposed to be near adult, skilled readers, but when they are children still learning to read!
21st Century Trivium Man
January 16th, 2010 @ 11:30 am

John,

I am not against ICT at all. What I am against is the blinkered way it is being introduced, which is not about enhancing or serving the curriculum but replacing it.