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

adhered to what
QI
creators John Lloyd and John Mitchinson call their three rules of discovery, 1 ‘Accept you know nothing; if it’s worth writing down it’s worth writing down clearly; embrace humour’. Unfortunately I sometimes failed with rule two. So, if I’m missing any references I apologize. But then, in the spirit of the book, you go and find them! 2
    To make life easier and save your typing finger, I have also put up a page on the Independent Thinking website with all of the links on there. This way all you need to do is to ‘click through’ to get to the original source of what I am describing. Simply go to www.independentthinking.co.uk/googlebook .
    What’s more, deliberately controversially, I have used
Wikipedia
very often to source and verify information. After all, despite what many teachers claim, research by the journal
Nature
found that not only did
Wikipedia
stack up well in a direct head-to head analysis with
Encyclopaedia Britannica
, 3 but also that this latter, traditional source of knowledge, was not infallible when it came to erroneous ‘facts’. If anything I subsequently quote here you know or find to be untrue, then you can not only let me know on [email protected] but you can also log onto
Wikipedia
and change it yourself immediately. You can’t do that with the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
.
    Like the brain science I so often draw on, especially the insights of Independent Thinking Associate and paediatric neurologist Dr Andrew Curran of Alder Hay Children’s Hospital, none of what I am writing here is rocket science. Nor is it startlingly new in the big scheme of things. It is, like all creativity, a new combination, and I hope you will find plenty here to feed your professional desire to do what you do even better than before, combined with a sense of urgency that time is running out. If you are a good teacher then I’m not saying you’re doing a bad job, but sometimes I am saying you are doing the
wrong
job, that the very nature of what traditional ‘teaching’ is all about may be antithetical to what is needed when it comes to twenty-first century learning. Every child that we let slip through our fingers is one child too many and every opportunity we miss to teach children to think and learn for themselves is one opportunity wasted.
    The challenges facing the world are huge and the answers lie in your hands. A report from
The Economist
, 4 commenting on the PISA tests I come back to in chapter 31 points out that two of the most significant ways proven to raise educational standards are to devolve power to schools and to empower headteachers to be able to make decisions about spending and staffing. ‘More important than either, though,’ the article continues, ‘are high-quality teachers.’ In another article, this time in
Fortune
magazine 5 (and notice how interested in education the world of business and commerce is), it is pointed out we will be paid what we are worth in the new global economy. If anyone anywhere else can do the same job, for less, they’ll get the work. The only way to compete, the article points out, ‘is by getting an education that’s world-class and
constantly improving
’. The italics are mine, by the way. The world needs you to be great at what you do. And then better. ‘Satisfactory’ is not good enough; ‘outstanding’ barely so.
    I hope this book will help you be great, challenge you to be better, and inspire you to be the best you can be. I’ve done my bit. Now it’s over to you. The future of the world could just depend on it.

Chapter 1
Save the world
    The future of the world is in your hands. I know that might seem a bit steep considering you’ve got that year ten coursework to sort out and the lesson observation on that nervous looking NQT but that’s the way it is I’m afraid. You chose to be a teacher, you mould young minds on a daily basis and those minds have got to grow up and save the world.
    There’s a line that keeps going round my head ever since I first came across it from Albert Einstein. It gets to the very heart of what education should be about, but what schooling sometimes isn’t. He said:
    We can’t solve the problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.
    We’ll play Doomsday Bingo in a minute to see how many of TEOTWAWKI (The End Of The World As We Know It) scenarios you can identify, but take a minute to reflect on Einstein’s words. How much of what goes on