Dramatic changes
The Agricultural Society
 This cottage
was built in 1732 by William Fell. He built it in preparation for
his marriage in 1733 to Mary Nottingham, who lived in the next village.
The cottage became their home and they would look out of the dormer
windows at the large fields and at the strips of land their two
families had farmed for generations. They saw nothing to suggest
that a way of life which had remained unaltered for centuries would
ever change. But 'Farmer'
George was on the throne and change was already in the air.
It was actually WiIliam's daughter-in-law, another Mary, who saw
the first drama unfold in1794 when commissioners arrived in the
village and the land
was enclosed amidst immense upheaval. When the dust had
settled, Mary Fell, owned a paddock opposite the cottage in place
of her strips. Her name is on the Enclosures Awards Map of 1799
and the earliest document in the cottage deeds refers to it as "formerly
owned by the widow Mary Fell".
The
Industrial Revolution
But Mary had seen nothing compared to what was to come. She died
in 1801 before the Midland Railway built its line just a mile away
and the Industrial Revolution first became visible from her bedroom
window. By 1900 the cottage had passed out of Mary's family and
most people had left the villages to work on the railways or in
the new factories and towns. In less than 200 years the entire economy
of Britain changed from an Agricultural to an Industrial economy
and the lives of ordinary people had changed forever.
The
Information Revolution
Now it is happening again. The cottage is 269 years old and is witnessing
another change. The Industrial world into which we were born is
no more, it has already become an information society although may
people don't yet realise this. Our years at school trained us to
get secure jobs with a pension but these jobs have become a rarity.
Uncertainty, redundancy and the need to constantly re-train are
the qualities we see in the press on a daily basis. And as for pensions,
we are asked if retirement should be compulsory and we're encouraged
to start building our own pensions independently of any one employer.
Unlike the Industrial Revolution, which took about 200 years to
run its course, the pace of change this time is happening within
a generation.
How do we educate children for
an information society?
We must look at the lessons of the past if we are to learn how best
to educate our children for their lives in the new world. During
the last period of change there was immense hardship caused by many
unexpected consequences. For example, when agricultural jobs were
lost the old Parish Relief system broke down because there were
too many poor people. It was years before proper state benefit systems
were introduced and in the meantime people suffered greatly. Similarly,
as people moved out of the villages and into towns overcrowding
led to slums and unforeseen disease epidemics. Again it was years
before public health gained a proper footing by which time many
had died. And there were other consequences to - education for one!
In 1788 John Byng wrote that he couldn't conceive of any reason
to teach the poor to read. Yet in 1870 the Education Act introduced
exactly that.
Computers
in schools
Which brings us to ICT in education. William Fell could not, in
his wildest dreams, have conceived of the things we take for granted
- universal education, package holidays, the magazine industry,
television, motor cars, flight, space travel, digital communications
- it's hard to stop listing things. The significance, however, is
not that William could not have conceived of these things - it's
the fact that they are absolutely normal for ordinary people of
today.
It's the same for us. We are standing, as William was, at the beginning
of a period of change and we cannot, in our wildest dreams, imagine
what the future holds. Information technologies are going to cause
changes as profound as the industrial technologies did and it's
going to happen a lot faster. So we must educate our children as
best we can in anticipation of this change. And ICT is the key.
Building bricks
The National Curriculum
describes what children must learn. The National
Grid for Learning has joined schools together into a learning
community. And the lottery-funded
training for teachers (known as 'NOF' because it is administered
by the New Opportunities Fund) is providing in-service training
for all teachers to ensure that they have the skills and capability
to educate a new generation for a new world. These are the very
first building bricks on which the current generation of children
is taking its first steps into the future.
The
future is not about learning a set of facts and then regurgitating
them in exams. People in the new world will have to be masters
of their own lives, learning and re-learning several times during
their lifetimes. And that means that education has to change radically,
moving from a system which pours facts into children into one which
enables them to manage their own lifelong learning. And that is
the underlying reason why the government says, "Education, Education,
Education" and why we all have to embrace so many new initiatives.
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