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

in schools is the development of children’s own thinking –‘education’– and how much of it is training them to think our thoughts – the ‘schooling’ that John Taylor Gatto refers to in the preface to this book? There’s a case for both, but the argument against doing just the latter and at the expense of the former has gone from a low murmur amongst marginalized teachers, to a more powerful and concerted call to arms.
    If the Einstein argument doesn’t sway it for you then try another thinker, Darwin. He didn’t use the term ‘evolution’ until the sixth edition of
On the Origin of Species
, although it had been around a while. The term he used was ‘descent with modification’ (Jones 1999). As the world changes, slowly and subtly over time, the living things in that world need to change, slowly and subtly over time, to survive. If they don’t then, like the camels of North America, they die. It’s the same for thinking. If children leave school only thinking our thoughts then not very much is going to change. If they learn to adapt their thinking and evolve the general body of what’s thought, we’ve got a chance.
    There are two notable James Martins that I know of in the UK today. In 2005, the one who isn’t a chef endowed Oxford University with the James Martin 21st Century School, the goal of which is ‘to formulate new concepts, policies and technologies that will make the future a better place to be’. James Martin is, among other things, a Pulitzer-prize nominee for his 1977 book
The Wired Society: A Challenge for Tomorrow
, and a technology guru who has been ranked fourth in the list of ‘most influential people in technology today’ world rankings. In his 2006 book,
The Meaning of the 21st Century
, he identifies 14 significant problems facing the world, problems from which there may be no turning back. So, without unnecessarily trivializing the end of the world, I would like to take this opportunity to challenge you to a quick game of Doomsday Bingo. You have a couple of minutes to try and come up with as many reasons that you can think of as to why humanity may be currently staring down the barrel of its own gun. See if you can hit Martin’s total of 14 (in my experience most players don’t manage more than five or six, tops). Off you go …
    OK, so how many did you get? If you had cataclysmic asteroid impact that doesn’t count because we didn’t cause that and there’s not a great deal we can do to stop it anyway, Bruce Willis notwithstanding.
    Here is Martin’s list to compare with yours (and in case you choose to simply pooh-pooh the list like some of the teachers I have shown it to, I have backed up Martin’s claims with some of the best research Google has got to offer):
    1 Catastrophic global climate change
    An easy one here, unless you are a member of the former Bush administration. Did you know, though, that Internet data centres are predicted to have a larger carbon footprint than aviation by 2020? 1 Or that a city like London has an eco-footprint 12 times its surface area? Or that China has plans to build 400 cities the size of Bristol over the next ten to twenty years? 2 And did you know that 0.2 per cent of the oceans’ energy could satisfy the entire world’s demand for electric power? 3
    2 Unstoppable pandemic of new infectious disease
    We were worried about bird flu in Chinese swans but then we were caught out by swine flu in Mexican pigs. At the time of writing, they have just discovered two turkeys with the H1N1 virus in Chile. 4 So, birds with swine flu! As William Karesh, vice-president of the Wildlife Conservation Society, who studies the spread of animal diseases, told the BBC, ‘The onlyconstant is that the situation keeps changing’. So, watch this space and, in the meantime, carry on sneezing into your own armpit as per government instructions.
    3 Destitute nations slipping into a deepening trap of extreme poverty
    You live in one of the poorest nations in the world and it would appear you have two choices – sit on the beach in Harardere whilst your family starves or grab a high-speed inflatable boat and a whole arsenal of firearms and go get yourself a supertanker and a yearly revenue of $150 million. 5 You choose.
    4 Unstoppable global migrations of people
    The key word here is ‘unstoppable’. We’re not talking about an influx of plumbers from the former Soviet bloc. According to UNHCR, the UN’s refugee agency, the number of