Education and technology go hand in hand
A great article in The Guardian, “Educating Britain’s young people for the next industrial revolution”, offers a number of ideas about how to include the computer sciences in the educational process, and which should serve as a wakeup call to many other countries, notably my own — Spain — whose education systems are failing to address the technological needs of coming generations.
In the first place, introducing computer sciences into the general education curriculum establishes the difference between them and information technology. While information technology deals with the application of computer systems to solve the problems of the real world, computer sciences aim to understand and explore the world that we live in, both real and artificial, in computer terms. The different lies in including computation in the category of the sciences, on the same basis as physics, chemistry, biology, and mathematics. We’re not going to make any progress if we continue to see computer sciences as simply learning how to use computers, as opposed to understanding how they work, and not a subject in itself that contributes to students’ grades.
Until everybody in our education system, from ministers down to teachers, understands this difference, we’re not going to be working toward any real goal. On the one hand, computer sciences actually have to be a real science. On the other, information technologies need to be consolidated as a teaching method that can be applied to other disciplines.
In the United Kingdom, the decision to include computer sciences in the curriculum is based on a 2012 policy document to which leading educational experts contributed, and that needless to say, is proving a challenge to implement. But the difficulties, although foreseeable, can and should be overcome: we are talking about an opportunity to create and deliver a huge amount of value by adapting education to create the professionals that companies of all types need. To make this essential transition, aside from training teachers, there are other tools that can be used to provide access to updated education for all in society, regardless of their income.
This is a topic that I never tire of writing about: it makes no sense at all to continue teaching children using the same methods we did in the pre-Google world. Focusing on memory skills or using outdated tools when just about anything we want to know about is a click away is crazy, all we are doing is hanging onto teaching methods that were the right way to do things… many years ago. At the same time, we are continuing to send young people out into the world without any real understanding of how the technology works that will shape their lives. We are surrounded by programmable objects that very few of us know how to program.
Understanding how hardware, software, and design works is simply preparing young people for an environment in which they are going to live in. But above all, it is trying to make education what it should be: a source of opportunities for the future, at all levels: personal, business, and national.
Examples such as the United Kingdom, where computer sciences have been taught now for many years, provide an example for other countries to learn from. Those that remain outside the loop will lose out in the increasingly competitive world of the future.
(En español, aquí)
