A Luddite, an Education Department and a Tellytubby

by Matthew Andrews

Why is education trying to follow every trendy new area of social and economic development?

Politicians, business leaders and community leaders often pay lip service to the latest trends, Tony Blair and his meeting with the Spice Girls, Boris Yeltsin and his bag full of Tellytubbies merchandising after the most recent of the G8 conferences, and Paul Keating's fascination with the "information super highway" and other new technologies. However, it is a worry when these trends take a place in policy formation. Tony Blair hasn't introduced a policy on Girl Power in any of his ministries, and although there are reports that Boris Yeltsin has plans to replace his entire cabinet with Tellytubbies this is unlikely. But, and I use this word ungrammatically, but, in Australia, and particularly in Western Australia, we have turned the "information super highway", new technology trend into an education policy!

The current state government has decided to close down a number of schools and replace them with computer facilities and internet access for all schools. Of all the education policies in the state governments current budget computers and internet access gain the highest portion of funding. For instance recently a number of West Australian primary schools have begun to use CD-ROM technology in their Safety House projects to help children and parents improve the programme. Why? According to the Minister for Lands, Doug Shave MLA, it is partly so that "...information can be constantly updated and displayed in school offices and classrooms (Melville Matters, Edition 3, May 1998, pg 1)". Surely information can be delivered in a more effective and less costly way, especially considering a few flaws with using CD-ROM's in this situation. Most significantly is the fact that a CD-ROM can only store information and cannot be updated, after all ROM stands for Read Only Memory, eg. no writing or changing of the discs memory can take place. Therefore surely a map on paper would be better, it is easier to access, it is easier to read and comprehend, it is easily changed and it is a lot cheaper. So you get the same effect for a lot less expenditure, but no- CD-ROM's are all the craze and therefore the Education Department must use them.

This is not the only instance of new technology fads taking the place of sensible policy, instead a good chunk of Western Australia's education policy has done precisely this. In the 1998 state budget the state government has outlined plans to begin spending the first of four annual instalments adding up to $100 million on computers and new technology for education at both primary and secondary levels. When the rest of the education budget for this year adds up to $62.2 million this means that up to 29% of this years state education budget is spent on providing students with compute and internet skills.

Why spend $100 million for computers, information technology and training in West Australian schools? The state government wants to have 1 computer for every 5 high school students and 1 computer for every 10 primary school students. This will mean that there will be, as the state government boasts, "..a ratio of students to computers" that is "...amongst the best in the world". $100 million dollars! This sort of money could pay for around 2800 extra nurses or policemen or firefighters or even ...teachers!¹. Maybe I am alone in thinking that teachers are more important to school education than are computers. The budget also outlines plans to $21.2 million on constructing 6 new primary schools, the $100 million to be spent on the current computer trend could build us an extra 30 primary schools or maybe stop the need to sell Swanbourne, Scarborough, Kewdale and Hollywood High Schools! The state government is also giving $20 million of our hard earned education budget on giving computers to "needy" private schools! So we give fee charging, private education business's the equivalent of 6 primary schools. The education budget includes a $1.4 million increase in funding for language teaching between years 3 and 10, now this is a useful skill to teach our children, allowing them to communicate with people from other cultures and societies, instead they are encourage to lose any ability to communicate with anything but an inanimate piece of electronic equipment that will probably be seriously outmoded next year. Other spending plans , such as $23.9 million to provide shaded assembly areas and $11 million to reduce average class sizes are far more comprehensible and laudable.

I find it difficult to understand how $100 million spent on Taiwanese, Japanese or American electronic hardware is meant to "secure our future" as the Premier puts it. This money will be spent teaching our children how to use computers and programs that are probably going to be of no use to them in terms of employment prospects. What a waste of money. Added to that is the rapid obsolescence of any computer hardware, software and skills. The sort of computer skills I learnt in High school (during the late eighties) are about as useful to me now as the ability to ride an elephant ( which are more technologically advanced than are the Microbee's that we used to learn our "skills of the future"). Basically it is ridiculous to teach school students how to use technological artefacts that will be outdated by the time they get to use them in their particular line of employment. Besides anyone who uses a Macintosh know's that you don't need to be taught how to use a computer.

Our schools are not there to equip people to fit in with the latest commercial or social trends. Our schools are there to outfit young people to become members of society and to help discern which of those students will go on to further education and the pursuit of knowledge,and generally what field of employment the others will go into. This may not be a popular view today, rather people will talk about the need to move with the times and equip our children to cope with this amazing world of the future. Let us not fool ourselves, the necessary skills of the future will be more similar to the necessary skills of today than will be the technology of tomorrow to the "future technology" of today

1 This is assuming a wage of around $35,000 a year.