The Education Vector

Transcribed from the printed issue; not yet reviewed. Read it in the PDF of the issue, page 17

The Education Vector¶

July 1996

Editor Ian Clark

This Education Vector has been reprinted from VECTOR Vol.13 No.1. VECTOR is the Quarterly Journal of the British APL Association. For more information about the British APL Association, please contact: Sylvia Camacho, [address omitted]. Tel: [telephone number omitted].

Contents¶

Ian Clark
IAC/Human Interfaces,
[address omitted]

Tel: [telephone number omitted]
Email: [e-mail address omitted]

Editorial¶

The last editorial did a demolition job on OFSTED, not undeserved, but maybe unfair on its hard-working inspectors. What was not said (and what should have been said) was that OFSTED is an attempt to replace the irreplaceable — like trying to grow corn on cleared rainforest to provide ground-cover. When the local authorities were rolled back as part of Thatcher's drive to 'roll back socialism' some priceless things got rolled back with them. For instance the network of advisory units on IT. The advice dispensed was free, useful, supplier-independent, unobtainable elsewhere and locally-based. When you destroy a distributed resource you have to put something centralised in its place, even if it's there only to deflect the blame onto broader shoulders for the consequences of what you have done. Hence OFSTED. End of story. Only it isn't, because the editorial in question threw down a gauntlet and vowed to take it up in this issue.

This publication is about APL (which we take to include its new dialect, J). What it is not about is peddling a nostrum for all the ills of the educational world. Have we ever said: "APL is the solution — now what's your problem?" No, but we have explored why this country seems to be such poor soil to nourish the seeds of excellence in Mathematics, Science, Technology and Engineering, and proposed solutions. And we have an idiom for discussing these solutions. It happens to be APL.

But it might have been BASIC. What with the breakneck pace of computer technology, we are all inclined to forget what an achievement the BBC Microcomputer was. For roughly a seven-year span, 1983 to 1989 say, entrants into further education could be relied upon to possess at least one formalism in which computer ideas could be precisely discussed, viz. BBC BASIC. It made the development of effective courseware in technical subjects remarkably easy, in spite of the severe disadvantages from which BASIC suffers as a language. BASIC is too voluminous. Anything beyond the simplest arithmetic needs scores of lines of text to represent, each line by itself superficially clear, but taken as a whole so dilute that the student has difficulty seeing the wood for trees, let alone typing it all in.

Nevertheless, if you're asked for an example of where a nationwide initiative gave a real boost to education, point to the foresight of the BBC to sponsor a standard vehicle for its planned series of educational programmes. Why did it work? Not because of any unique virtue of BASIC. They used the wrong language (but we would say that, wouldn't we?).

Yet the dear old 'Beeb' was a catalyst of innovation, instead of laying a burden of paperwork upon teachers to smother initiative. Well before the National Curriculum (NC) came along, whilst the benefits of the BBC initiative were still making themselves felt, teachers were taking introductory IT courses, in their own time and sometimes at their own expense, because they felt it was empowering. What I mean is that it looked as if it might be good for their work, their careers and good for the pupils too. But there were anxious questions. What exactly was the role of computers in classroom teaching supposed to be? Was the teacher destined to become obsolete?

On my introductory IT course to practising teachers, I once opined that the real place of a computer in the classroom was not as a robot teacher, but as an administrative slave, taking the strain of routine tasks like attendance, drill, assessment, progress tracking and reporting, "leaving you, the teacher, free to do what you're good at."

One student nearly fell off his chair. "To think we've got to come on a computer course to be told that!"

The huge expenditure of time, effort and money that went into the creation of OFSTED, the NC, key stage examinations and published league-tables, not only by the government on coercion, but by every school in the country on compliance, was a total waste, at least prior to Sir Ron Dearing's revision. It remains largely futile because it makes a mockery of the teaching profession in England and Wales. What about other professions? The law of the land requires no doctor to cure me if I'm ill, no lawyer to win my case in court. But if I am a child my teachers are required by law to train me and rate me in a tightly prescribed set of attainment targets, which are supposed to define a sound education. (What is a sound education? Discuss.)

The resources to erect this monstrosity would have been better spent on commissioning and deploying a standard computer system to take the waste of teacher time out of class record keeping. Or, if that's too hard (the Inland Revenue seems to have found it so, with its PC program to do self-assessment) we could have had a national library of software to support all aspects of a recommended, or even a commended curriculum, seamlessly spliced with its delivery vehicle in schools. Much as the French government installed MINITEL and the US Defense Department installed ARPANET in their respective countries. If only we'd gone the whole hog with an empowering infrastructure like MINITEL, and tinkered with a prescriptive straitjacket like the NC, instead of doing it the other way round. Then we wouldn't have needed to take two bites of the cherry and call a moratorium on future changes to stop the project foundering. Just the opposite. The vehicle would have been a living organism, its growing tips practising teachers, instead of the withering of buds and the lopping of sound wood which has been the fruit of the NC and its gendarmerie, OFSTED.

In APL (and J) we have an empowering idiom to formulate such a vehicle. It's time we used it.