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

the child; but if this is not done, it becomes miserable, and as a consequence restless, troublesome, and mischievous.
    ( www.gutenberg.org/files/10985/10985–8.txt )
    There are two great themes in Wilderspin’s work that have both influenced thinking and practice in early years education in the 150 years since they were propounded and been completely – and increasingly – disregarded at the same time. Firstly, his view on education as being something that didn’t have to take place in a classroom:
    The absurd notion that children can only be taught in a room, must be exploded. I have done more in one hour in the garden, in the lanes, and in the fields, to cherish and satisfy the budding faculties of childhood, than could have been done in a room for months.
    ( www.gutenberg.org/files/10985/10985–8.txt )
    Anyone who has ever taken a group of children on a field trip or a nature walk will attest to this fact. Yet, according to a 2005 House of Commons Education and Skills Select Committee report quoted in
No Fear – Growing Up in a Risk Averse Society
published by the Calouste Gulbenkian Society there has been a general decline in both in the quality and the quantity of outdoor education experiences, the lack of which ‘impoverishes students’ learning and represents a missed opportunity for curricular enrichment’. We have a whole generation of children who will never know if they are agoraphobic or not. The report lays the blame fairly and squarely on the shoulders of the Elfin Safety, 5 pointing out that ‘some schools and local authorities are demanding excessively lengthy risk assessments and we have found evidence of unnecessary duplications in the system’, something the author of
No Fear
, Tim Gill describes as:
    A regime of secondary risk management … in which the different agencies involved – school, local education authority, destination, Ofsted and government departments – appear to be more concerned to defend themselves against accusations of poor practice than to work together to support learning activities.
    (Gill 2007)
    Gill also cites the example of the Thomas Deacon Academy in Peterborough, a stunning-looking educational building and a flagship of the academies programme but a school without a playground because, as the headteacher of the school is quoted as pointing out, ‘I think what the public want is maximum learning.’
    We couldn’t do the three Rs in anything but a formal environment so we end up with, in the words of educational technology pioneer and student of Piaget, Seymour Papert from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the classroom –‘an artificial and inefficient learning environment that society has been forced to invent’ (Papert 1993). Remember, nothing like schools exist in nature. Unless you’re a fish.
    The second string to Wilderspin’s pioneering bow was the need to teach children to think for themselves and from as young an age as possible:
    The error of the past system (for such I hope I may venture to call it) as to mental development was, that the inferior powers of the mind were called into activity, in preference to its higher faculties. The effort was to exercise the memory, and store it with information, which, owing to the inactivity of the understanding and the judgment, was seldom or never of use. To adopt the opinions of others was thought quite enough, without the child being troubled to thinkfor itself, and to form an opinion of its own. But this is not as it should be. Such a system is neither likely to produce great nor wise men; and is much better adapted to parrots than children. Hence, the first thing attempted in an infant school is, to set the children thinking, – to induce them to examine, compare, and judge, in reference to all those matters which their dawning intellects are capable of mastering. It is of no use to tell a child, in the first place, what it should think, – this is at once inducing mental indolence, which is but too generally prevalent among adults; owing to this erroneous method having been adopted by those who had the charge of their early years.
    ( www.gutenberg.org/files/10985/10985–8.txt )
    Interestingly, and in a way that seems at odds with his ideals to our twenty-first century eyes, Wilderspin is also the inventor of the ‘gallery’– the fixed rows of ascending seats, the youngest child at the bottom, whose purpose was ‘to have the children altogether, so as better to attract their