Three Cheers For The Second R
Sydney Morning Herald
Tuesday July 29, 2008
SCHOOLS fall over themselves to sell high-tech education to prospective parents. Some boast of extensive computer networks and laboratories. Others insist pupils buy laptops, and submit exercises online. Even Kevin Rudd's Labor Party used a policy of increasing the number of computers in schools as its education centrepiece at last year's election. Now, as the Herald reported yesterday, the emphasis on computers in schools is turning out to be something of a double-edged sword: today's school leavers can type well enough; increasingly, though, they can't write.
Many parents will feel that insisting teenagers learn about computers at school is rather like insisting they be taught to eat chocolate. That is, their natural enthusiasm for anything high-tech means they need no encouragement. Certainly it is good that children, particularly those with limited access to computers at home, learn familiarity with technology that in one form or another is now almost universal in working life. But when over-enthusiasm for the new eclipses familiarity with the old, as here, much is lost. In particular, HSC candidates suffer when faced with examinations they must answer in longhand. Education administrators are now considering ways to computerise these exams. This, surely, is putting the cart before the horse - it smacks of NASA's hugely expensive attempts to invent a ballpoint pen that would work in the weightless environment of space - a problem the Russians solved by using lead pencils. And might a computerised HSC be more vulnerable to hackers?It is no hardship, nor is it Luddite neophobia, for a school pupil to be expected to be able to write legibly at length using a pen and paper. Excuse the scribble? No, let's not.
© 2008 Sydney Morning Herald