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

schools, we still perpetuate ‘The Great Educational Lie’–do well at school and you’ll get a good job.
    Remember, nobody is saying here don’t bother getting qualified. There’s a great line from Bill Gates I share with young people, ‘Get the best education you can and keep on learning’ and that’s relevant whether you’re 7, 17, 27 or 57. Another thing I do is get them to write the word ‘learning’ on their paper and then ask them to put their finger over the ‘l’. ‘What have you got?’ I ask them. (‘Ning!’ came back the reply once. Pesky kids with mittens … .)
    An article in
The Economist
in 2006 entitled ‘The Battle for Talent’ stated that, ‘The bottom line is you can buy almost ten Indian brains for the price of one American one’ 1 and this is something supported by a story in
Fortune
magazine that same year. The biggest threat from outsourcing wasn’t to factory workers but ‘those college-educated desk workers’ who were looking ‘more outsourceable by the day’. After all, as the article points out, you can’t outsource truck driving. In 2004, graduate earnings had dipped by 5.2 per cent whereas the pay packets of high school graduates had risen by 1.6 per cent. Again, the article wasn’t encouraging people not to get an education, but it was a shot across the bows of those perpetrating ‘The Great Educational Lie’:
    Higher education still confers an enormous economic advantage. Just not as enormous as it used to be!
    (
Fortune
, 20/3/06)
    Several years ago I interviewed James Dyson and posed the following question to him. You have two students in front of you about to leave school – one has stacks of qualifications, all A grades, and the other, Mr Dyson, has none. (Interestingly in schools we talk about young people who leave the education system ‘with nothing’, when what we mean is they leave with ‘no qualifications’. If you have over a decade of failure in the same system, you don’t leave with nothing do you? Have a think about what is in the ‘emotional suitcase’ if you will of the children who leave our care with no qualifications. I suggest that what they leave with is no qualifications and a whole crate full of baggage about how bad they are. Which isn’t ‘nothing’. ‘Nothing’ would be us in education, who oversaw that decade, getting off lightly.) Anyway, Mr Dyson, what would be your response? To the students with the grades he said he would say, ‘You’ve shown you’ve got a brain, now go away and use it.’ In other words, you’ve shown there’s something there, now the work really starts.
    Before I tell you what he said he would say to those with no qualifications let us look at another, more hidden, more pernicious conclusion to be drawn if we choose to promote ‘The Great Educational Lie’. If you can only get a good job by doing well at school then, because I haven’t done well at school, it is clear that I will
never
have a good job. How many people leave your school at the age of 16, about to set off on life’s path, less than a quarter into their one chance on this planet, but already feel they are doomed to a life of failure, lack and subservience? How many people have you met who see themselves as thick or stupid or incapable of achieving anything of any worth because ‘I didn’t do very well at school’? What is your message to the young people, the ‘sweetcorn kids’, who have gone through the entire system and come out pretty much in the same state as when they went in? Serves you right? You should have listened? I can’t help you now! Or maybe you can tell them what Mr Dyson would tell them if he were there: ‘It doesn’t matter.’
    Now, again, before you throw out your dual cyclone, he’s not advocating widespread academic failure. The James Dyson Foundation website 2 encourages people to apply to them for jobs ‘if you are a graduate’. But he’s also a realist and a pragmatist who knows, from his own experience at school apart from anything else, that school is a narrow little academic tunnel and there is a far bigger picture out there once you get out of school if only you can hang onto your self-worth and your sense of ambition as you go through it.
    School, in other words, is just a phase you’re going through.
    Just before Christmas 2007, I was approached by the then exciting and vibrant QCA to explore the issue of ‘Commitment to Learning’, looking at motivation towards and