Lounge

Hi Visvanath,

Yes, you've made some very astute observations, as usual.

Michael Gove isn't exactly my hero either but occasionally even the worst of politicians get things right. For example, the Iron Lady herself (Margaret Thatcher, UK PM from 1979 - 1990) lobbied to not pass legislation to require catalytic converters on all new cars and wait for "lean burn" engine technology to mature. As it turns out, the legislation set the minimum burn rate of all internal combustion engines in the UK and the US meaning that it is now illegal to produce more efficient engines. I'm not advocating for either Gove or Thatcher, just saying that they don't/didn't get absolutely everything wrong (The sounds of Thatcher's voice still makes my skin crawl!).

On the journalism front, you're absolutely right about the article being sloppily written, which "The Grauniad" is famous for. And yes, it is about ICT classes on the UK's national curriculum, which are as terrible and laughable as the article claims. I think anything would be an improvement.

As you've astutely pointed out, the devil's in the details. Time will tell whether they're really handing responsibility and control back to schools to decide on their own ICT curriculum. I get the impression that schools will be able to choose from any Creative Commons licensed course ware (Open Courseware) available or even develop their own. If this is the case, then I think some exemplary schools will work together with other schools and universities to develop more meaningful, relevant curricula that other schools can then adopt. If it's successful, they may even consider this approach for other school subjects. Of course, the examining boards and text book publishers would fight tooth and nail to stop this.

Let's hope "special interests" from lobbies don't have too much influence and spoil what could be a great step forward (or backward depending on how you view it historically).

Running Computer Science classes is what we teachers were able to do in 1984. Then, the move towards communication and social descriptions of IT rather than actually doing things removed almost all coding from the IT classroom. 

Knighthoods were handed out to people peddling the tedious course that Mr Gove etc are now complaining about. Chief amongst these in the UK being the "4 GCSEs for doing almost nothing difficult or interesting" courses prevalent in the 1990's boom in 14-16 results.

It is nice to be back towards somewhere more sensible. 

Do you think UK school children will go from being bored to death by Microsoft products to being bored to death by Google products?