David Richardson

As I read your posting I was reminded of the dialogue between Winston and O'Brien in 1984 about whether the Party would be able to bring about a permanent change in human nature. At the time Orwell probably thought that it would, but nowadays I wonder. I'm convinced (emotionally, not rationally) that a good school system will re-emerge one day, since this control freakery ultimately doesn't work. People will, unfortunately, have to start again from Year Zero, but perhaps there'll be enough bits and pieces left behind for people to rebuild from (perhaps contained in fora like this one and certainly from all the good schools and teachers who are managing to resist Ofsted and the like). In the meantime, of course, teachers like me who also remember LEA inspectors - and, dare I say it, in-service training courses run by the ILEA - can earn money for old rope! You don't have to be very good to be better than what's currently regarded as quality! (Yes, we suffer from the same tendencies in Sweden.)

Dr Rita Dunn has been working out of St John's University in New York for years now. The website you need is: http://www.learningstyles.net/ Dr Dunn's team's conclusion about the predominant learning styles of children with attention-deficiency' problems is that their circadian rhythms are such that they tend to come 'on-line' at about 4.00 pm; and they need subdued lighting and a very calm classroom environment, preferably with soft chairs. In other words, they don't stand a chance in the standard school environment. The current practice in Sweden is to let ADHD kids sit in a cubicle on their own. They get their tasks one at a time (i.e. not 1 piece of paper with 10 questions on it, but 1 piece of paper with 1 question on it), and as they finish each one, the teacher puts it on the wall, out of sight. At the conference, Dr Dunn said something about learning styles which I found really significant. Her point was that we're all born with a tendency to one learning style or another. The point of education, however, is to have us become more proficient with the learning styles which *don't* come naturally to us. Thus, the person who learns from words needs to start learning from pictures, and the person who needs music on to learn needs to learn how to do it without the music.

I attended a fascinating conference in Örnsköldsvik in Sweden a few years ago, where the theme was Learning Styles. The guru of learning styles, Dr Rita Dunn attended the whole conference and addressed it a couple of times. One of the things which impressed me about Dr Dunn's work was a prodigious experiental base for her conclusions. I remember, for example, her relating her team's work on "attention-deficient" kids, where she refused even to contemplate a study until she had 1500 subjects who had all had CAT scans, so that she could be fairly sure that there were common features in the subjects' brains. At the time in Sweden, an 'acceptable' diagnosis was 7 'yes' answers out of 10 to questions like "does the child seem to be excitable at any time?" One of the questions from the floor was about Dr Howard Gardner's notions of the 7 intelligences (at least it was 7 at the time), and how these related to learning styles. Dr Dunn's answer was that 7 intelligences were only theory - according to Dr Gardner. He saw his job as coming up with the hypotheses - it was then someone else's job to actual test these to see if they were valid. My own feeling is that these intelligences are a little like astrology! On the one hand, it's very likely that any attempt to 'prove' anything from experimental, empirical evidence is going to fail. On the other hand, if you look at the intelligences as the distillation of our culture's 'commonsense', made into something that sounds like a scientific theory, then you're probably on the right track. In other words, the idea of emotional intelligence is a useful metaphor for people to use in a society where we can't rely on the informal networks of handed-on knowledge which used to be available.

… and the problem with most of the commercially-available VLEs is that they were developed to flog to industry (specifically to the Personnel Managers of large companies). They tend to have well-developed control functions, so that a teacher can tell at a glance which pages a particular pupil has looked at, and which exercises they have done. They tend not to have very well-developed course page and testing pages, so that course materials tend to be "book in a box" as we say in Sweden (i.e. someone's just put Word documents or Excel documents onto a computer screen). The types of test tend to be restricted to the easily-marked, rather than the educationally-justifiable (lots of multiple-choice, poor functionality when it comes to essay-type answers). I used to use a VLE which was quite good, but it's off the market now. Since then I've tended to use open web pages and put up with the inconveniences associated with that way of making courses available to people.

This is what we do here in Kalmar! I've been working with a team of Internet tutors in New Zealand, Australia and Spain since 1996. It's a really interesting experience, since, when it works, you can bring expertise from wherever it happens to be directly to the students, wherever they happen to be. We've just started developing an in-service training course for teachers who suddenly find themselves faced with teaching English as a foreign language. Many of them lack the basic university courses they need in order to be eligible for the more advanced courses which will gain them promotion (as well as giving them more of what they need). The problem is that, by definition, they can't take time out and study full-time (since they've got jobs and lives somewhere else). They're also spread out over a wide geographical area. Now this is the sort of situation that gets the bureaucrats salivating. Problem is that they can nearly never get the actual teaching and learning to work. You can put on a good show at a conference describing the opportunities IT *can* provide … but it all usually falls apart when you try to apply the practices of the call centre to education. Our solution has been to empower Internet tutors, making them feel part of the team, which often involves conference calls to Australia just to chat. The campus-based teachers need to take them seriously too … which in turn requires those teachers to be empowered. Maybe that can only happen in Scandinavia? My explanation for the recurring disasters which have occurred with on-line education is that the educational bureaucrats see computers as yet another way of *disempowering* teachers … It's easy, and sexy, to put in an order for a technological system - and it saves you from having to deal with a bunch of teachers moaning on about the importance of teaching skills and all those other things you don't understand and have no power over. When it comes to language learning by machine, my take on it is to look at Linguaphone. It's been around for about 100 years, hasn't it. If Linguaphone actually worked for any but a very small minority of people, language teachers would have been replaced by 78 rpm records, let alone CDs! Since we haven't been, I conclude that machine learning has got some very serious and fundamental problems!!

I am another participant on The Education Forum. I'm a teacher of English at a university in southern Sweden, and we use IT a lot in our teaching. One example is our use of Internet tutors. I've been working with an English teacher in Queensland for nearly 10 years now. He marks send-in tasks for Swedish students, and is an incredible asset to the courses he works on. When a Swedish student gets something back from Bruce, she knows exactly what her English is really like, since, so far as she knows, Bruce doesn't speak Swedish. However, I'm very sceptical of the various attempts which are made to have computers do what people do best, and people do what computers do best. I often use a short story written by E.M. Forster in 1909 to introduce this point on distance courses. Here's the beginning of the first chapter of The Machine Stops: THE MACHINE STOPS by E.M. Forster (1909) I THE AIR-SHIP Imagine, if you can, a small room, hexagonal in shape, like the cell of a bee. It is lighted neither by window nor by lamp, yet it is filled with a soft radiance. There are no apertures for ventilation, yet the air is fresh. There are no musical instruments, and yet, at the moment that my meditation opens, this room is throbbing with melodious sounds. An armchair is in the centre, by its side a reading-desk - that is all the furniture. And in the armchair there sits a swaddled lump of flesh - a woman, about five feet high, with a face as white as a fungus. It is to her that the little room belongs. An electric bell rang. The woman touched a switch and the music was silent. 'I suppose I must see who it is', she thought, and set her chair in motion. The chair, like the music, was worked by machinery and it rolled her to the other side of the room where the bell still rang importunately. 'Who is it?' she called. Her voice was irritable, for she had been interrupted often since the music began. She knew several thousand people, in certain directions human intercourse had advanced enormously. But when she listened into the receiver, her white face wrinkled into smiles, and she said: 'Very well. Let us talk, I will isolate myself. I do not expect anything important will happen for the next five minutes - for I can give you fully five minutes, Kuno. Then I must deliver my lecture on "Music during the Australian Period".' She touched the isolation knob, so that no one else could speak to her. Then she touched the lighting apparatus, and the little room was plunged into darkness. 'Be quick!' she called, her irritation returning. 'Be quick, Kuno; here I am in the dark wasting my time.' But it was fully fifteen seconds before the round plate that she held in her hands began to glow. A faint blue light shot across it, darkening to purple, and presently she could see the image of her son, who lived on the other side of the earth, and he could see her. 'Kuno, how slow you are.' He smiled gravely. 'I really believe you enjoy dawdling.' 'I have called you before, mother, but you were always busy or isolated. I have something particular to say.' 'What is it, dearest boy? Be quick. Why could you not send it by pneumatic post?' 'Because I prefer saying such a thing. I want----' 'Well?' 'I want you to come and see me.' Vashti watched his face in the blue plate. 'But I can see you!' she exclaimed. 'What more do you want?' 'I want to see you not through the Machine,' said Kuno. 'I want to speak to you not through the wearisome Machine.' 'Oh, hush!' said his mother, vaguely shocked. 'You mustn't say anything against the Machine.' 'Why not?' 'One mustn't.' 'You talk as if a god had made the Machine,' cried the other. 'I believe that you pray to it when you are unhappy. Men made it, do not forget that. Great men, but men. The Machine is much, but it is not everything. I see something like you in this plate, but I do not see you. I hear something like you through this telephone, but I do not hear you. That is why I want you to come. Pay me a visit, so that we can meet face to face, and talk about the hopes that are in my mind.' (the rest of the story in in the public domain - just put The Machine Stops in as a search condition) ------- If you want to see how I've developed this idea of learning technology with a human face a bit further, take a look at some of my contributions to The Education Forum (particularly in the ICT Forum).

Are you allowed to include blogs (web logs)? Here's a site in the USA which collects educational blogs: http://educational.blogs.com/edbloggerpraxis/

US history has its moments too, you know! What I find interesting about the USA is its status as a state consciously constructed by people. When the US Civil War took place, many people in Europe watched with interest - perhaps this was as far as such a state could go before it tore itself apart. Nowadays it's interesting to see what happens when you try to run a democratic country with no real opposition - the US situation is an object lesson for us here in Europe, and a warning signal. Radical used to be a really left-wing term in Europe in the 19th century. The Swedish evening newspaper, Aftonbladet, which is now social-democratic was founded by such a radical, who fought for the right to publish an opinion which the King didn't like. When the trades unions finally gave up on the Radicals (because they chickened out and made too many concessions to the right), the radicals became 'borgerlig' - rightists. The former Swedish radical party is actually called Folkpartiet - the People's Party - despite being well to the right now. All over Scandinavia you find these contradictions in the names of political parties. Venstre (Left) in Denmark is one of the right-wing parties, as are Radikalerna in many countries. The Swedish conservatives, who used to be called Högre (Right), changed their name to Moderaterna (the moderates) in a desperate attempt to avoid annihilation (since no party called conservative or right would stand a chance in Sweden!).

One of the messages I have for my students in Sweden when they're trying to understand US society is about the virtual absence of left-wing political parties. Just about all European countries have a political spectrum where there are parties of the right and parties of the left (yes, I know that parties aren't always what they say they are!). In the USA, on the the other hand, in European terms, I don't really think there is a party of the left. It's part of my explanation for why participation in US elections is so much lower than in European elections. Now, I know that parties often aren't what they say they are, but the presence of left-wing parties on the political scenes of many European countries helps to keep the political spectrum far further to the left than in the USA. In Sweden there are plenty of politicians who would really like to, say, abolish publicly-funded universal health care and replace it with a US-type system … but the issue is a non-starter, thanks to the fact that there is an influential political 'home' for the left.

One of the common strands within conservatism has been an antipathy towards organised collective action by the 'lower classes' (collective action by the 'right sort of people' is the 'natural order of things'!). For example, one of the recurring themes for the Swedish right is to try to repudiate industry-wide agreements concerning pay and conditions of service. They'd like them replaced with contracts between employers and individuals … and guess which side would have all the power in that exchange! George Orwell had something interesting to say about British conservatives in the 1930s: "The existence of these people was by any standard unjustifiable. They were simply parasites, less useful to society than his fleas are to a dog. "… But the British ruling class obviously could not admit to themselves that their usefulness was at an end. Had they done that they would have had to abdicate … Clearly there was only one escape for them - into stupidity. They could keep society in its existing shape only by being unable to grasp that any improvement was possible." The Lion and the Unicorn, Part IV (The US, in Orwell's view, was a 'robber baron' society.)

I work now as a teacher of English at Högskolan i Kalmar, a university college in southern Sweden (something like a polytechnic in the old system in the UK). I've worked as a teacher nearly continuously since 1972, when I took a gap year to work as an unpaid assistant unqualified teacher in Bradford, working with the children of immigrants. I trained at Goldsmiths', worked three years in Dartford and then took off into the big wide world. I've worked in Sweden, Turkey, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Angola and Trinidad and Tobago in various jobs and on various assignments. Nowadays I specialise in distance education, which makes me a regular user of information technology (the kind that comes as computers, rather than the kind that's pencils and paper). The bottom line for me, though, is still something that my deputy head in Dartford once said to me when he thrust me in to cover 4th year Chemistry. "But I don't know anything about Chemistry," I said. "David, you don't teach subjects, you teach children" was his reply. You can see how old-fashioned he was, referring to 4th year hooligans as 'children', but the sentiment was right!

There's a very useful distinction in Swedish between 'borgerlig' and 'icke-borgerlig' political parties. This is usually translated as 'bourgeois' and 'non-bourgeois', but I feel that those terms are too loaded in English. In Sweden, the Conservatives (Moderaterna), Liberals (Folkpartiet), the Christian Democrats (kristdemocraterna) and the Centre Party (Centerpartiet - the old farmers' party) are borgerlig. The Social Democrats (Socialdemokraterna) and Communists (Vänsterpartiet) are icke-borgerglig, whilst the Greens (Miljöpartiet) have to be regarded as icke-borgerlig, since they are supporting the Social Democrats in Parliament this term, even though they hate being labelled. One of the most important factors in making the distinction is what you consider the role of collective action to be. If you basically think that collective action is at very best a necessary evil, but should really be dispensed with altogether, then you're borgerlig. Those parties would really like trades unions to disappear, and are generally in favour of individual solutions (and against collective ones). I remember last year causing great consternation to visiting Americans when I was briefing them about Swedish society, by pointing out that 'liberal' in Europe generally means being on the right, and that Americans had a long way to go before they could be considered as being on the left. This is why I have no problems with the Liberal Democrats in the UK. They're a borgerlig party, so I don't even need to think about them being on the left.

This problem of e-mail being hijacked is one of the reasons I sometimes advocate using a platform programme for running on-line courses. The problem is that most of the modern platform programmes want users to use their current e-mail address … which is why I'm much less interested in platform programmes these days. We try to sidestep the e-mail hijack problem by publishing the classlists as .pdf documents …

It seems that the trick in many different questions is to get from the anecdotal particular to the general level, where you can shape policies and arguments which actually change the lives of individuals for the better. Some research results have just been published in Sweden which show (the sample was large enough to be able to draw meaningful conclusions) that children born to teenage mothers are twice as likely to be injured by their parents than children born to older mothers, and 40% more likely to be involved in an accident at home which needs hospital treatment. The conclusion the researchers drew, and the public debate this generated, was that poverty was the decisive factor for this difference, and the questions now being raised here are all about how to help young mothers to avoid their children being hurt. You couldn't possibly use these research results to conclude that "teenage mothers hurt their children" - the actual incidence of injured children is still very small, even when their mothers are teenagers. On the other hand, the research has definitely highlighted an area where societal action has a very good chance of producing good results. It's a bit like the perennial arguments about speed limits. We know that enforcing speed limits rigorously reduces significantly the number of people killed and injured on the roads. Any individual driver can rightly claim that his car, or his way of driving, is perfectly safe at higher speeds than the speed limit. The point is, though, that roads are made for everyone, and the fact that the speeder hasn't been killed yet proves absolutely nothing.

You beat me to it, John. I was going to post the conclusion of Sue Gephardt's article … and to take up the question of what we can afford. One of the majors I work with in the Swedish Army has a photo he took himself as a screen saver. It shows a 155 mm shell about 5 metres away from the muzzle of a Bofors cannon. I asked him how many pictures he'd taken before he got this perfect one - "about 40" was his reply. Now each of these shells costs 1000 euros … and the cannon itself costs about 2 million euros. The JAS Gripen fighter that crashed into Riddarfjärden a couple of years ago costs about 20 million euros (the Swedish Airforce has about 200 of them on order) and a nursery nurse costs about 50,000 euros per year. It might sound a bit facile to contrast spending on childcare and education with spending on the military, but these are two of the major items in the budget of any country. As Sue writes, can we afford not to spend money on decent childcare? The recommendations she makes in the last paragraph of her article are more or less what we have in Sweden now. Things are far from perfect here, but it's interesting seeing what happens to a society when the base line is set at good childcare for all. What happens here is that people complain when the adult-child ratio in day nurseries goes over 1:4, and they find it incomprehensible that you can have junior schools where there are more than about 23 children in a class. We had a Thatcherite Conservative government here between 1991 and 1994 and they made short work of the Swedish economy by cutting taxes and services. They were the ones who managed to get interest rates up to 500% and negotiated the pitiful terms of Sweden's entry into the EU. They cut back on schools and day nurseries in a major way, reasoning that if schools in other countries like Britain could continue to function with lower provision, they could here too. (They also made major increases in military spending, but that's another story.) What they missed is that there's a difference between schools functioning and schools doing well … It's taken these last 10 years to repair the damage … What's interesting, though, is that Swedish electors consistently rate good welfare services over lower taxes by enormous margins, and it's probably this factor which is decisive in making the parties of the right virtually unelectable in Sweden (since 1932 the left have held power for 63 years and the right for 9).

I've had time to go a bit deeper into the Swedish statistics, and found these disclaimers on BRÅ's website: 1. Attempted crimes are counted as crimes in Sweden. Thus, if the burglar is frightened off before he's managed to steal anything, this is still counted as a burglary (i.e. Swedish statistics are based around what people perceive as having happened, rather than around property having being stolen, etc.). 2. If several crimes are committed at the same time, Sweden counts them all, not just the most serious, as happens in other countries. Thus, if someone i) steals a car, ii) drives it without a licence, iii) gets drunk and drives, and iv) knocks someone down, this is four crimes in Sweden. 3. Serial occurrences of the same type of crime against the same victim are counted separately in Sweden, instead of being counted as one crime as happens in other countries. 4. In Sweden crimes are recorded as soon as they are reported. In some other countries, it's only a crime if the police have completed an investigation and taken it to court. The net effect of all this is that the incidence of crime can appear higher in Sweden than in other countries (just like the suicide figures I mentioned in an earlier posting).

John, The Brottsförebyggande Rådet (National Council on Crime Prevention) keeps the crime statistics in Sweden. Their website is at http://www.bra.se/ If you can read Swedish you can find the statistics for the first half of 2004 in graph form (click on Nyheter -> Ny statistik -> Visa -> Läs mer). If you click on the Union Jack, you come to the pages in English. Choose Publications there and you'll be able to download the statistics for 2001 in English. There were 599,000 reported crimes in the first 6 months of 2004, and the population is a few thousand short of 9 million. Of course, you have to treat these figures with a bit of caution. Sweden is reputed to have a high suicide rate (Portugal's actually got the highest in Europe), but this is almost completely wrong (it's got one of the lowest). It's just that Swedes are world champions at keeping records, so they actually know how many women aged 21, with one immigrant parent, killed themselves by throwing themselves under a tram!

One common observation about the Swedish education system from visitors from the UK is that in Sweden we spend the largest chunk on the pre-school and years 1-3 sectors and the smallest chunk on the universities, whilst in the UK it's the other way round. One of the roots of this policy is in a view of the labour market which was developed after WW2. The prevailing idea here is that the 'natural' state for both men and women is to be in employment. Unemployment pay and maternity and paternity benefits are thus seen as forms of insurance to 'tide people over' the period when they can't work for one reason or another (such as unemployment or child-rearing). The idea is that employment is what really makes it possible for people to participate fully in society. Although it still happens, discrimination against women with children is as much a sin against this view of employment as against equality. (Swedish has two very useful words, 'jämställdhet' and 'jämlikhet' to cover the English 'equality'. The first is an active concept, bringing about equal treatment, whilst the second is the 'passive' concept that 'equality' is in English. The debate here, as in the UK, should be about 'jämställdhet', the active concept, rather than 'jämlikhet', the passive one, since it's all about fighting the situations which actively bring about inequality.)

I think not. 'Private' schools should be private and they shouldn't receive taxpayers' money at all - whether directly through subsidies or indirectly through charitable status or tax rebates. I base this view on the fact that all governments oblige children to attend school up to the age of 16. Parents and children are therefore not consumers in the same way as they are when they buy DVDs, sweets or hamburgers from MacDonalds. I.e. they can't choose *not* to buy anything. In my view, if the state requires my children to attend school, then the state has the responsibility to provide the schools. If the state condones the existence of schools which you can attend if you pay, then I see this as the state avoiding the responsibility it took upon itself by making school attendance compulsory.

There's a Director-General of a Swedish government agency who refuses to contact other people or be contacted except by fax and snail mail: no telephone, no cellphone, no e-mail, in other words. Her reasoning is that people don't think through what they want to say unless they write it down - and she doesn't want them wasting her time. She also wants a paper trail she can refer to later. In the interview with her I heard on the radio she said "I've heard so many dumb decisions being made on cellphones at Brussels Airport."

Interesting ideas. I'm not qualified to comment on the scientific and medical information … but I'm fascinated by the way the biologists' arguments about what we're born with forming our character keep getting 'polluted' by other arguments about the way we're treated once we've been born being influential in shaping our characters. Where I'm a bit sceptical about John's line of argument is in the implication that child-care by people other than the mother (parents?) is harmful to the children. I think that it all depends exactly how it happens. I live in a country where day nurseries are well-staffed, cheap and plentiful, and where there's also a very generous provision of maternity and paternity leave. I'll try to give some exact details, so that you can see what I mean. It's a bit of a complicated system, but basically you get 480 days of parental leave, 60 days of which have to be taken by the father, 60 have to be taken by the mother and the other 360 can be spread between the two parents. In addition to this, the father gets a specific allocation of 10 days which have to be taken early on in the child's life. During this leave you get paid 80% of your 'pre-parental' salary. You can take further days at a basic, subsistence level too. You can take these days at a variety of rates, down to one-eighth of a day at a time. If I were to, say, work a six-hour day, instead of an eight-hour one, my 60 days would stretch to 240 days in practice (i.e. 60 x 4, since I'd be taking my days one-quarter at a time). I'd be paid 100% of my salary for the six hours a day, and 80% of my salary for the remaining 2 hours a day. Day nursery fees have been capped nationally at something like £200 per month for full-time attendance. If you balance your parental leave against day nursery attendance, you end up paying around £100 per month. The staff-child ratio at most day nursery is low (4 staff to around 18 children is fairly common), and the staff are highly-trained and have a career structure. It's rare for children to start at day nurseries before they are 12 months' old - lots of kids don't start until they are two or three years old. Research in this area is notoriously difficult to be categorical about, since it's so easy to compare apples with pears. However, the studies which have been done here in Sweden suggest that children who attend properly-funded and -staffed day-care centres actually do better on all the available indicators than children who are cared for by their parents at home until they start pre-school at the age of 6. My explanation for this state of affairs is that Swedish society makes it possible for parents to survive financially and emotionally staying at home with their children until the kids are about two or three. (There are 'open day nurseries' in most towns, where home-based parents can meet with other parents and nursery teachers two or three days a week at no cost.) At about that age, children start benefitting from contact with other kids - which is difficult to bring about if you're sitting isolated at home.

I teach English as a Foreign Language at a university in Sweden. I've been working with distance education since 1981 and with computer-assisted courses since … well … at least 1990. The teams I work with use a variety of different techniques and techologies, including the web, video conferencing, language practice programmes, virtual learning environments. We've been working with an international team of internet tutors since 1996, and have had thousands of students on our ICT-based courses. I've been concentrating on holistic approaches to ICT-based courses, developing a course-design tool which I call 'The Cone of Input' to try to understand and integrate the various forms of interaction available, from face-to-face contact, through technologies such as video conferencing, right down to the paper we're all still using. If anyone has any specific questions, I'll be happy to give them my best shot!

There's another forum with quotes in it (thanks for the congrats, by the way, Graham), but Graham's post reminded me of one of the books I read when I was studying politics. The author started each chapter with a quote from Snorri Snurlasson's Saga. One of them fits ICT in education particularly well: "It looks like snow, said the Lapps, who had skis to sell."

The quote I'd like to contribute is from 'Working Class Hero' (John Lennon, for the youngsters). You could include the entire song (lyrics via: http://www.lyricsdepot.com/john-lennon/wor...class-hero.html, but the lines I keep remembering are: As soon as you're born they make you feel small By giving you no time instead of it all The reason this is so pertinent for me is that we had a little girl just two months ago! OK, there's a lot of 3 am wake-up calls right now, but there's also the magic of seeing a little person opening up to the world and starting responding. Right now she's just learning who mum, dad and big sister are, and discovering all sorts of things about sunlight, softness, voices … You can see that what she needs most is … well, us. To be noticed, to be included, to be talked to - you could just dismiss these as mere survival tactics by a hungry organism, but I think that's missing the whole point of what it means to be alive! Big sister's 12 now, but she still needs inclusion, affirmation, sharing … She's doing well at school right now, but we know that it's a day-by-day, moment-by-moment process, which balances between success and failure all the time. It also isn't a purely personal matter - in fact, as a dad, I often feel that my contribution is almost irrelevant at the moment. It's what her friends and peers think that makes all the difference. Of course, I know (somewhere) that this isn't true … but this brings me on to my other quote: There is no such thing as society. There are only individuals and their families. (Margaret Thatcher, of course - used to be Prime Minister of the UK, kids) How utterly wrong can you be! Unless we're part of a society, we can't even be individuals - we're just organisms struggling to survive. So what should schools do? Help kids to become strong, independent members of a society? Or force them to struggle just to survive?

I feel that the negative reactions from many teachers towards ICT are mainly justified … simply because the official government advocates are simultaneously quite hostile to good teaching, because good teaching requires empowered, well-paid, fairly independent teachers. Sometimes ICT fails because politicians try to solve budgetary problems with supposedly educational means. I read about the 'Arnold Schwarzenegger Math Program' in Newsweek many years ago (around 1982 … but I've lost the original reference). In the New York public school system it was very difficult to recruit maths teachers. I don't know exactly why, but I'd put my money on poverty, poor resources, inadequate back-up - in other words, all those issues which politicians would like to avoid. The 'solution' was to fund the writing of the 'world's best math course', written by outside academics, which would be made into a series of TV programmes, hosted by someone the kids of New York would see as a role model: Arnold Schwarzenegger. These programmes would then be broadcast to each classroom from the principal's office via the school's closed-circuit TV system, and, hey presto, there's the problem solved. Guess what, it didn't work! The other problem I've come across is the desire to ignore the limitations of ICT in specific educational situations. "In Search of the Virtual Class" (Tiffin and Rajasingham, RKP) is an excellent book on ICT-based education. Here are two accounts from the book which highlight what I'd call the limitations of ICT: In the 1970s, the Brazilian government shipped TVs out to the Amazonian jungle and started educational TV courses without qualified teachers (because there weren't any). Tiffin once witnessed a discussion about equilateral triangles in which the majority of the class won over a dissenter who maintained that the sides of such triangles had to be straight lines. No, said the majority, can't you see that they're curved (like the TV screen)? In the 1980s there was a similar scheme in Mexico, where rural pupils, who didn't have access to proper schools, could follow the national curriculum via educational TV programmes. One year the pupils who performed best of *all* schools in Mexico (conventional and 'TV'-based alike) came from one of these groups, who lived in the shadow of a volcano. This meant that they could only receive sound on their TVs, no pictures. It seemed, in other words, that the rich visual medium of TV was actually inhibiting education, not promoting it. Now I use ICT a lot on my courses - but I emphasise the 'C' (communication), rather than the 'I' (information). The question is: how do you encourage critical and open communication between people so that they learn things? It strikes me that this is essentially a pedagogical question, not a technological one. But in my experience you can only start to use ICT effectively when you start with this question.