April Fool, but this isn’t funny
Today is April Fool’s day, so why is there precious little to laugh about?
To launch our new Medium publication, we could have done a silly story. We could have spent time concocting a semi-believable, gadget-based gag that you probably would have spotted was a fake, and probably wouldn’t have shared.
We’re not doing that today.
We’re not doing that because it’s hard to laugh when some teachers in the US are working not two, but six jobs, just to make ends meet. It’s not funny when schools are hoodwinked into spending precious budget buying ‘snake oil’ IT and STEAM equipment that’s has no interoperability, little educational value and locks them into one poorly designed ecosystem for good.
It’s hard to giggle when schools in the UK are facing a recruitment and retention crisis and staff are being hounded out of the profession by stress and under funding. Big belly laughs are certainly in short supply when some kids in deprived schools are pocketing food from the canteen, simply because they might not eat later, and where teachers are washing school uniforms while the kids do PE.
It’s no joke when rich parents game a broken system with dollars to ensure their kids get into college as the expense of actual people with talent. And it’s difficult to smile when the pressure of testing in India forces one student an hour to commit suicide.
Makes difficult reading doesn’t it?
Well, we live in difficult times. For some, there’s the temptation to recoil and simply accept the status quo, after all, there’s a comfort in that. But it’s cold comfort, not change. But for many others, there is genuine anger at these injustices; not the anger of hopeless rage, but the anger that hopes for change.
Not the anger of hopeless rage, but the anger that hopes for change.
At pi-top, we have a saying, we make the future. But that isn’t we the company, it’s we the movement. That movement starts with you, with your students, in your classroom, your club house or your community centre.
The problems we’re facing locally and globally are difficult, but not impossible, to solve. In many cases we actually have much of the technology and capacity to begin to address them. What we lack as a society, is the will, the funding, the drive and the leadership to do so.
So let’s try and fix things together. It’s time to get angry, get active, get engaged. We’re not joking…
