Internet education / inted

While schools teach online safety, which is obviously a very good thing, they don’t currently teach children about what the internet actually is and offers, such as…

• New and emerging employment opportunities

• The best publishing platform ever invented

• Perfect to pursue and profit from your passion regardless of your age, background and budget

Plus, consider these stats:

• By 2030 e-commerce will account for around 40 per cent of all UK retail sales (source: smallbusiness.co.uk)

• 70% of adults in England use social media (source: gov.uk)

• Half of young Brits aged between 25-35 are planning to transform their hobby and passion into an online business (source: taxassist.co.uk)

•Technology has created more jobs than it has destroyed in the last 144 years (source: Deloitte)

•“Over the last fifteen years, the UK has benefited from a technology-driven shift from low skill, routine jobs to higher skill, non-routine occupations. 800,000 jobs have been lost but nearly 3.5 million new ones have been created. On average, each job created is paid approximately £10,000 per annum more than the lower-skilled, routine jobs they replace, resulting in a £140 billion net boost to the economy. Every region has benefited from employment growth in higher-skilled occupations. Almost three quarters of UK businesses surveyed say that they will, net, employ more people in future and most think that technology will have a significant or very significant impact on their businesses. In the future businesses will need more skills, including: digital know-how, management capability, creativity, entrepreneurship and complex problem-solving. The UK’s continued success will rest on the ability of businesses and organisations, educators and government to anticipate correctly future skills requirements and provide the right training and education.” (source: Deloitte)

Who else thinks formal education needs a rethink?

Seth Godin, one of the world’s most respected writers and experts specialising in marketing and culture, said:

“Education can no longer be done to people, it has to be done with them. A kid is now capable of sitting through almost any class and not getting it, because if they don’t want to get it, they’re not going to get it. But if you’re into baseball cards or into Magic: The Gathering or into Game of Thrones, because you’re into them – because you’re enrolled in this journey – it’s done with you and you eagerly suck it all up.”

Derek Lewis, a writer, said:

“The education system – university – doesn’t teach you how to start and run your own business. It teaches you how to manage someone else’s business.”

And Sir Ken Robinson, who “works with governments, education systems, international agencies, global corporations and some of the world’s leading cultural organizations to unlock the creative energy of people and organizations”, gave a very popular TED talk on schools and creativity (below), in which he said:

“If you were to visit education, as an alien, and say, “What’s it for, public education?”, I think you’d have to conclude, if you look at the output, who really succeeds by this, who does everything that they should, who gets all the Brownie points, who are the winners, I think you’d have to conclude the whole purpose of public education throughout the world is to produce university professors. Isn’t it? They’re the people who come out the top. And I used to be one, so there.”

It’s time to educate for the year 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.

What about media studies and computer science – don’t they cover it?

One of my daughters recently completed her GCSE computer science course – which was great but didn’t touch on anything like I believe schools should be teaching.

As for media studies, I haven’t seen the topics mentioned above listed anywhere in current school teaching.

I believe internet education should blend elements of media studies with computer science and also business studies.