As much as it pains me to say it, Michael The Chinless Wonder™ Gove, has the right idea in replacing the piss-weak ICT curriculum in schools with a programme in Computer Science.
Children are naturally inquisitive. They do not need to be taught how to use Excel, since any child with an ounce of sense, after being told to use the “help” feature embedded into the application, can figure it out for themselves. (If not, to be quite frank, they should qualify as ‘special needs.’)
Teaching applications is a colossal waste of kilowatt-hours, and of man-hours. Children will be far better served by this new programme in computational science. Teaching them about the workings of a computer is a far better solution: it will give students an in-depth understanding of how and why their computer works in a certain way. This, quite aside from preparing a new generation of digital pioneers, will make it easier for them to overcome problems in everyday computer usage.
Computer science is, essentially, problem solving with bells on. True, finding an army of CompSci-qualified teachers in the next nine months will be a big task (and I doubt it will be possible, possibly not even within a year and a half.) This will be especially true when many teachers are incapable of teaching basic applications work. However, I genuinely believe that, approached from the right angle, CompSci is an easy subject.
For instance, in both my primary schools (the latter of which was judged to be ‘failing’ shortly before my departure) we were taught a crude form of turtle programming with LOGO. This included using a Bigtrak, and a sort-of in-class role playing adventure game played on PCs in year 6, in which we had to (for instance) guide a boat to its destination by entering instructions and trying to avoid hitting the banks.
This was totally absent in the “ICT” curriculum in my secondary school. It was dull, “project”-based bollocks in which we were told to “make a website and some matching pamphlets,” for instance. Regularly, our teacher (let’s call her “Mrs T.”) would advise us to “really show off” in Dreamweaver, by making text bright blue on a shocking pink background and using the (deprecated) <blink> tag to make it flash. She also once opened a JPEG image in Dreamweaver’s text editor, and declared the resulting gibberish to be ‘hex codes.’
The shocking thing was that Mrs T. was qualified as an ICT teacher, while my (wonderful) primary school teachers, who inspired me to continue with computers to this day, were not specialised in any particular subject at all. I will maintain, therefore, that anyone who is willing to give the subject their attention will find CompSci easy to learn, and easy to teach.
As someone who dislikes this Conservative-led government, I am pleasantly surprised to say that this will be, if anything, a positive legacy of the Coalition: our next generation will be a generation of problem-solvers, as opposed a generation of accountants, secretaries and bullshitters. If the government is to knock a hole in higher education, this move represents a shocking return to common sense—and a new-found respect, in this government, for our heritage as a knowledge economy.
