Simon Morris's Blog

August 2007 Archives

The Lost Generation

It's exam results season once again in the UK, and as usual newspapers are complaining how easy modern exams are. If they're to be believed in days of yore a Mathematics pass grade involved proving Fermat's Last Theorem — today one merely need find the exam room and spells one's name correctly.

A junior school teacher recently told me current practice advises against correcting more than five spelling errors in a pupil's text, for fear of smothering their creativity with a smog of red ink. Initially I reacted with incredulity, but upon reflection I realised each generation's education slaughters a few sacred cows of the previous generation.

In the final three years of high school my own "Eng Lit." education took in three Shakespeare plays, a couple of Arthur Miller offerings, some Orwell, brief excursions into Dickens and Brontë, a smattering of Dylan Thomas, and sundry other classics (To Kill a Mockingbird and Hobson's Choice stick in the mind.) And that's just the stuff I can remember! I considered this modestly taxing, until I recalled my father's generation apparently studied Latin and learnt their poetry by heart. Much as I appreciated "Under Milk Wood", "If", etc., I'm eternally grateful I don't have them etched indelibly onto my brain.

Times change, priorities change. Education is shaped by the present, and in turn it helps shape the future. Nothing demonstrates this more than the World Wide Web revolution of the past decade (just in case you thought I'd forgotten this is technology blog!)

If environment shapes our learning, what has the last decade done to today's programmers? And if the internet is now to be nudged back towards the (neo-)desktop via RIAs (Rich Internet Applications), how might that web-centric education obfuscate, or even hinder, that transformation?

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