Twitter In Schools? When Will They Learn...

So the Guardian announced today that a new shake up in Primary school curriculum will teach children how to master Twitter and Wikipedia. Isn’t that rather like teaching High School kids how to source tobacco pipes, or toss off to sepia stills of half-revealed Victorian breasts?

The little nippers will ‘get’ simple interfaces like Twitter as instinctively as they’ll understand how to smear chocolate on walls, and besides, by the time this legislation comes into practise Twitter will be yesterday’s fad (my Dad has a cautionary tale about assuming things will be ‘yesterday’s fad’ and that’s Madonna, but I think it’s safe to say Twitter won’t be still ‘reinventing’ it’s self in 50 years time, dancing around younger websites in a grotesque, air-brushed bid to remain relevant – it’s just not the way the web works).


Even if they replace Twitter with whatever comes next, I still think it’ll resemble that scene in Good Will Hunting when the teacher, all long-scarfed and learned-browed, gets himself into a right tizz trying to work out a blackboard equation when Matt Damon’s wrong-side-of-the-tracks genius blurts out ‘Do you have any idea how easy this shit is for me?’ and storms off, leaving the professor a crumpled, impotent mess. I imagine five year olds across the country doing the same: flinging their mouse across the classroom with contempt and telling their doddering custodians: ‘This is a piece of piss: don’t you REALISE you need to download the latest Java Script here?!’

The second money-shot in the Guardian’s report is that news that the Second World War and Victorians will no long be compulsory – outrageous! you may cry - but it goes on to explain that this is to prevent ‘duplication’ with secondary school education in which WW2 is covered extensively.

I remember with great poignancy being taken on that school trip everyone goes on to Belgium: the one where they show you the rows and rows of perfectly lined white grave stones and make you listen to the old bloke play the bugle at the same time every day to honour the fallen. Deeply moving that, tracing the engravings with your puffy little finger tips, trying to locate your own surname in the endless deaths sprawled out before you in the brittle stone… I remember looking out over the sea of graves and stumbling down the remains of the trenches with a lump in my stomach, over-awed with feelings of empathy and guilt and pity that I couldn’t quite understand... I also remember seeing my first vagina after Matthew Brown bought a porn mag from a dodgy Belgian newsagents and spending all my travel money getting vaguely dizzy on cans of lager from a vending machine outside the hotel – the point is, none of these experiences should be denied tomorrow’s youth by a right-on liberal curriculum, so it’s good news ole’ WWII is still on there.

Other proposals put forward by former Oftsed chief Jim Rose – a man with a name so rounded, wholesome and cheerful you’d probably nod warmly if he tried to introduce sadomasochism and bull-fighting onto the national curriculum – are apparently to teach children to “use a spellchecker alongside how to spell.”…

Does anyone else see the folly in this? It’s like showing them how to ‘use the answer sheet to a math test alongside how to pass without cheating’, or how to ‘cleverly smuggle a playback device in your pocket and mime during recorder practice alongside how to play the instrument with discipline’. Presumably in P.E. they’ll be showing them how to inject steroids into their thighs before getting the hula-hoops and bean-bags out, with the optional knowledge of how to train to develop geniune hand-eye co-ordination. At worst they’ll produce a generation of Dwain Chambers and at best a generation of me, who long ago decided learning to spell properly was pointless because the spell check does it all for you.

Finally, and perhaps most perplexing of all, the report contains a single line bullet point that frankly couldn’t be more incongruous, either in level of detail or in general spirit:

“Less emphasis on the use of calculators than in the current curriculum.”

What an anomaly! What a strange, dull note to sound in the midst of this hip melody of progressive reforms. ‘Less emphasis on calculators’, with no clear indication of what will be used instead: presumably just an abacus and a cane. It’s as though some aggravated conservative nipped into Jim Rose’s office the night before this report came out, heard the mounting footsteps of a security guard and hastily scribbled into the margins the first thing his fusty brain could think of before ducking out again. ‘Less calculators! They won’t have calculators when they’re buying their tights and dripping in the shop!’ Well they will, actually, on their touch-screen mobiles, but never mind…
All in all and taken into context, the full curriculum shake-up sounds like a good thing. I just wonder why when putting together these reports, the government includes such silly lines like ‘teaching them to use Twitter’, inviting off-focus headlines in papers and easy lampoonings from members of the public like me so that the essence of what they’re saying gets lost.

Perhaps the reality that politicians reluctantly face up to these days is that without inserting these ready made headlines and mild controversies, no one in the media would give a shit and award any coverage to their hard work at all. Maybe they ought to start releasing their important papers with an appendix of naked celebrities - now there might be a way to politicise an apathetic generation - they'd just have to make sure it's someone like Chanelle from Big Brother, and not a chubby 1860's burlesque model.