Mainstream media is a different beast today compared with the 1970s and ’80s, when I was growing up.
Back then, we had three channels on the telly in the UK – the fourth arrived when I was 10, in 1982 – very basic games consoles, a VHS player, a landline and a kettle. Oh, and a talking cartoon bird which was used to advertise British Telecom.
Today, we carry a computer around in our pockets that’s so clever it can help me learn Spanish, check my bank balance, check in to a flight, listen to the radio, book a cab and make almost-free phone calls to the other side of the world using wifi.
But in the decades between those times, schooling has barely shifted.
Ofcom reported in April 2018:
“People need the skills to question and make judgements about their online environment.
These skills are important as they enable them to keep themselves and others safe, to understand when they are being advertised to and how their data is being used, and to know when something could be biased or misleading.
Our research shows that many people struggle with at least some of these elements.
It’s time to educate for the times we live in.
In October 2015, the London Evening Standard reported that:
“Two-thirds of parents say their biggest fear is that their child will not find a job when they leave education, with most believing the problem is that they are not being taught the skills needed to reflect 21st-century working Britain.”
Four years earlier, Google chairman Eric Schmidt said:
“If I may be so impolite, your track record isn’t great. The UK is the home of so many media-related inventions. You invented photography. You invented TV. You invented computers in both concept and practice. It’s not widely known, but the world’s first office computer was built in 1951 by Lyons’ chain of tea shops. Yet today, none of the world’s leading exponents in these fields are from the UK.”
Schmidt also observed how the British education system had divided science and arts, and suggested it’s time to reunite them.
In the “glory days of the Victorian era”, as he described it, Lewis Carroll wrote one of the classic fairy tales, Alice in Wonderland, while he was also a maths lecturer at Oxford University.
One of my daughters recently completed her GCSE computer science course – which is great but it didn’t touch on anything like I’m proposing.
As for media studies, I haven’t seen topics such as the long tail, AI and fake news listed anywhere in current school teaching.
Formal education needs to wake up and catch up.
Learn more about the inted campaign at paulparry.com/inted.
