Via Graham Attwell’s The Wales Wide Web, is a report from the Independent newspaper, School’s Out Forever. Knowsley Council in Merseyside “is taking the dramatic step of closing all of its eleven existing secondary schools by 2009. As part of a £150m government-backed rebuilding programme, they will reopen as seven state-of-the-art, round-the-clock, learning centres with the aid of Microsoft. The style of learning will be completely different. The new centres will open from 7am until 10pm in both term-time and what used to be known as the school holidays. At weekends, they will open from 9am to 8pm. Youngsters will not be taught in formal classes, nor will they stick to a rigid timetable; instead they will work online at their own speeds on programmes that are tailor-made to match their interests.

Children will be able to study haircare, beauty therapy, leisure and tourism, and engineering as well as the more traditional academic subjects.
They will be given their day’s assignments in groups of 120 in the morning before dispersing to internet cafe-style zones in the learning centres to carry them out.”
“Let’s stop right now building new old schools,” said Nick Page, who is in charge of transforming children’s services in Knowsley. “We’re building for the next 25 to 50 years and 25 years is a hell of a long period if we get it wrong.”
Is this the way of the future? The key phrase in this article is “The style of learning will be completely different.” I’ll be curious to explore further exactly what this means.
Self-proclaimed cynic, Mr Read, writes: When you read the material supporting the ‘Knowsley Experiment’ it really is the proverbial Curate’s Egg. There’s some progressive educational theories, spin, Blairite ‘newspeak’, consultants’ verbal diarrhoea, paying homage to Microsoft and the downright dangerous. No teacher who has lived through the arid desert of testing could disagree with ideas about independent learning, problem solving, scrapping rigid timetables and changing the school day. However, at the heart of the ‘Knowsley Experiment’ is an over-reliance on computers and ICT. There’s a great book by the American academic Larry Cuban – ‘Over Sold and Under Used’. He writes about how ‘Integrated Learning Systems’ were promoted as the solution to educational under achievement, all you needed to do was place a pupil in front of a computer with a diagnostic learning system, teachers would become redundant, all you would require is technicians to keep the machines running.”
I don’t think that any thoughtful proponent of ICT has every suggested that “all you needed to do was place a pupil in front of a computer with a diagnostic learning system, teachers would become redundant, all you would require is technicians to keep the machines running.” Teachers using technology are well aware that so-called digital natives’ ability to operate numerous programs, or to listen to itunes while IMing does not equate deep thinking or the development of research skills or being able to communicate complex ideas.
This is articulated by Sylvia Martinez, in Facility Vs Fluency: “We confuse kids’ facility with technology with fluency. We go on about how “tech-savvy” kids are, how the “digital natives” outpace us oldsters in what they can do. In my experience, kids who really know what they are doing technology are the exceptions, the rest of them just muddle through, doing just enough to get by. They just do it quickly, don’t get married to one service or system, and don’t get upset when things don’t work.”
“We wonder why students don’t have good information literacy skills, but we reap what we sow. School has traditionally set itself up to be the single, unquestioned authority – teacher, curriculum, textbook, test — all taking place in a closed classroom, the beginning, middle and end of what the student needs.”
Clay Burrell also voices the frustration teachers feel with confines of the school as we know it, in Goodbye to All of That, where he writes:
“It’s about not being “a Nobody doing anything” when my students are looking for “Somebody doing something” about what they care about. It’s about inviting them to discover that they have the power to do something too. It’s about being a community leader more, and a teacher less. It’s about extending my relationship with these young adults beyond the nine-month term (if church youth group leaders can do it, so can teachers). It’s about re-conceptualizing schools as community action centers instead of walled gardens (or day-care centers, or juvenile detention centers). It’s about designing relevant experiences and projects in which any metaphors or synecdoches that, god help us, they learn, will have a purpose and meaning beyond an alphanumeric grade.”
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