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

perceptions of learning in key stage three children around the country. Through a wide range of media from online surveys to face-to-face
WIIFM?Cam
(What’s In It For Me?) interviews in a number of schools around the UK we identified three major factors that seemed to contribute to poor motivation, disengagement and disaffection in the year eight students, one of which related directly to this idea of ‘The Great Educational Lie’:
    Our research showed that students felt that education was important for their futures (nearly 70% according to the online questionnaire) but what this meant was that learning ‘stuff’ was important if you needed that same ‘stuff’ in whichever job you were going to do when you were older: ‘You need to do well in Food Tech if you’re going to be a chef’. (With the corollary ‘If I don’t want to be a chef I can just mess around in Food Tech’.)
    (Gilbert 2008)
    Another girl on one of our filmed interviews pointed out that she didn’t need geography because ‘I’m not going to be a, er, geography person’. 3
    In other words, by propagating ‘The Great Educational Lie’ and by doing so in an environment, such as school, where knowledge is demarked by department area boundaries, we have made a rod for own backs when it comes to trying to motivate children to learn a subject for which they can’t see the point. (And I was a French teacher in Northampton so I know about these things. ‘Why do we have to learn French, Mr Gilbert?’ to which you give the set reply, ‘Because you live in Northampton. And you never know … !’)
    What’s more, research on students with low self-esteem shows that they suffer most when they perceive there to be a big gap between how important they know schoolwork to be and how bad at it they feel they are. In the book
Social Motivation: Understanding Children’s School Adjustment,
the authors point out that:
    One can reduce such a discrepancy by either increasing one’s competence or by discounting the importance of the domain.
    (Juvonen and Wentze 1996)
    In other words, students will simply claim that a particular subject is unimportant if they are under the impression, misguided or otherwise, that its mastery is beyond them.
    What did we recommend to QCA as a result of our findings in the classroom?
    Grasping the opportunity to move away from the hegemony of content to a focus on skills and competences will contribute to increased commitment to learning if done well. ‘Whatever the
subject
I’m in, I’m developing skills and attitudes that will help me get a better job. Therefore, all lessons are important’ would be an important shift.
    We’re not advocating content-free lessons. The key will be to learn the content in a way that also develops the skills, attitudes and competences, something that the traditional chalk and talk lesson can’t do.
    In
Time
magazine in 2006, Bill Gates said, ‘We don’t just pick employees for the brains, but for their energy.’ 4 Are you helping children develop the sort of energy that Bill Gates is referring to? And what, exactly, is your job? To teach history? Or to teach children history? Or is it to allow children to develop the skills and all-important attitude they will need to succeed as adults a
s well as
pass their exams with flying colours?

Chapter 4
So, go on then, why do I need a teacher when I’ve got Google?
    In the good old days, knowledge was fixed. It was there, written up in big books and it didn’t really change very much. Various scholars over the years tried to record all human knowledge; and it was kept locked up in libraries and passed down through the ages, being translated as it went. Take the ninth century
Bait al-Hikma
or
House of Wisdom
to be found in Baghdad which, at that time, was the richest, most civilized city on the planet. Here scholars from around the world worked together across many disciplines from philosophy to mathematics, zoology to astrology, translating the works of the Ancients, especially the Persians and, ultimately, the Greeks. This they combined with their own thinking to produce, amongst other things, the book
Kitab al-Jabr
from which we derive the word, algebra (Lyons 2009).
    But, like the great library of Alexandria around a thousand years before it, knowledge is power and the destruction of someone else’s knowledge proves you are more powerful than they are. When the Mongols invaded Baghdad in 1258, it was said, depending on which