Why Do I Need a Teacher When I’ve Got Google

‘education is economics and economics is education’ (Peters 1994).
    Now, this is the point where you tell me about your targets and the pressures on you from your school leaders, from the local authority, from the Department, from the government to get kids through the exam hoop and I agree with you. There is a tremendous amount of pressure on you. But the government has got hold of the wrong end of the stick and should be prodded with it. More more-qualified people does not a thriving economy make. Unemployed accountants will receive the same Jobseeker’s Allowance as an unemployed car worker. A qualified population where everyone has been to something calling itself a university and everyone is ‘above average’ (the target for schools it seems) makes for good statistics and is certainly better than the reverse. But it guarantees nothing. Why? Because qualifications alone aren’t enough, as we will see in the next chapter on ‘The Great Educational Lie’. Your job isn’t to school your children. Your job is to educate them. Friedman says, ‘Being adaptable in a flat world, knowing how to “learn how to learn” will be oneof the most important assets any worker can have.’ To what extent are you contributing to this? There are many who have passed through our teacher hands who are schooled but uneducated and very many more who are neither. And neither option is enough for us to go into battle in the twenty-first century with the rest of the world.
    At the foot of the BRICs report, its authors pose one question, ‘Are you ready?’
    Well, are you?

Chapter 3
‘The Great Educational Lie’
    In a conference room in London in 2004 the great American business guru Tom Peters addressed 500 of the UK’s top business leaders, the future employers of your students (people like Woolworths, MFI, Northern Rock, Whittards, Principles, you know the sort … ). But I don’t think they listened. One of his messages was this one:
    Never hire the people with exceptionally high grades at university and secondary school.
    (
Tom Peters, Live in London
, Red Audio)
    His argument revolves around a basic syllogism that I develop further in chapter 7 :
    To do well at school means you play by the rules.
    To succeed in business you need to break the rules.
    Ergo
    If all your employees did well in school, your business is doomed.
    Tom Peters’s message is reassuring for me as it resonated with what I had been trying to get across to the educational world for a long time, something I call ‘The Great Educational Lie’.
    We tell our children, ‘Do well at school and you’ll get a good job’, but there’s a twist in the logic there that just doesn’t hold water. I have met too many young people who simply expect to be ‘given’ a good job just because they’ve done well at school. We’ve all met people who are qualified but haven’t a clue. ‘Big hat, no cattle’, as they say. And then when they fail that first job interview they are devastated. ‘How could this happen, I did everything I was told to do and I’m a straight A student?!’
    What’s more, just because you
get
a good job doesn’t mean you get to
keep
the good job, especially if you’re not up to scratch. We’ve, also, all met people who are as qualified as they are incompetent. When was the last time you heard the personnel department discussing a dubious employee and reassuring themselves, ‘She’s costing the company thousands but you should see her key stage two SAT results’?
    Of course, having great qualifications can open up many great jobs in the same way that having no qualifications can lead to a life of poverty and underachievement. But there is not a direct causal link, at least not in the West. There are people with great qualifications and no jobs, or lousy jobs, and there are many, many examples of people with no qualifications and great jobs. In other words, qualifications alone are not the maker or breaker of careers. We’re back to attitude and a whole range of other skills like emotional intelligence, communication and creativity.
    And if you decide you would rather not take the word of some American business guru, then how about this from David Frost, the head of the
British Chamber of Commerce
speaking in August 2007:
    Employers want someone who does the job and if necessary they will train them to do a particular task and give them one to one training … Qualifications actually come pretty low down the agenda.
    Yet, in