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

neuroscience tell us about separating children by age? Well, for starters, when we put adolescent males to work with younger children there is not only a reduction in testosterone levels butalso a rise in prolactin 13 (a chemical associated with breastfeeding), children with the same birthday can have as much as a two- to three-year spread in terms of brain maturation (Jensen 1996) and the brains of boys and girls mature at different rates with girls entering the adolescent stage of brain maturation earlier than boys (de Bellis
et al
. 2001).
    So, maybe it is time to start rethinking how we organize things in education. Doing it because we’ve always done it is one thing, but doing it because we sort of stumbled across it and it seemed like a good idea at the time and it seemed to stick even though we live in very different times now is something else altogether.

Chapter 20
Educated is not enough
    Who are you most proud of? One of your students came from a good family with their own business, did well at school and later went on to get not one but two doctorates, the first in anthropology, the second in medicine, as well as becoming an officer in the army. Another of your students in this imaginary class, a girl, was home taught on a farm for a while before joining school where she eventually dropped out to care for her ill mother and grandmother. She later worked as a seamstress and was once arrested for breaking the law.
    Which one of these would be on a plaque in your school hall?
    In case you don’t know your biographies of famous – and infamous – people, the second one is Rosa Parks 1 ; the first one is Dr Josef Mengele. 2
    Five hundred years ago the French writer Rabelais wrote, ‘Science without conscience is the ruin of the soul’, and that is as true now as it was then. Maybe more so. The bankers whose greed was at least partly to blame for the global economic downturn were qualified and educated people. Some of them have even apologized for their actions (which is more than Mengele ever did). In the summer of 2009, the chief executive of Goldman Sachs, one of the world’s most lucrative companies, announced:
    While we regret that we participated in the market euphoria and failed to raise a responsible voice, we are proud of the way our firm managed the risk it assumed on behalf of our client before and during the financial crisis. 3
    ( http://dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/16/goldman-regrets-market-euphoria-that-led-to-crisis/ )
    The ‘market euphoria’ he was referring to was the sub-prime mortgage market in the US where billions of dollars were loaned to people who couldn’t really pay and whose debts were then wrapped up and hidden away in financial deals so complex that most of the people who ended upowning the debt, often big pension and insurance companies around the world, didn’t know where the debt came from in the first place. That is, until it all came tumbling down. Goldman Sachs, for their part, underwrote $76.5 billion of the overall mortgage-securities market or 7 per cent according to Matt Taibbi, a journalist and blogger with
True/Slant
, an online ‘original content news network’ and a great example of Web 2.0 in action, bypassing traditional print media for news. 4 Of that figure, $29.3 billion was sub-prime – people who probably couldn’t pay – but there was also a further $29.8 billion that were what was called ‘Alt-A’ mortgages, a new class of definition somewhere between ‘prime’ and ‘sub-prime’, which Taibbi describes as ‘characterized, mainly, by crappy documentation and lack of equity: no income verification, no asset verification, little-to-no cash down’. In other words, clever, educated people whose only goal was to generate wealth for themselves and their clients, were behind giving mortgages to people who couldn’t afford them and whose homes were subsequently repossessed (the number of homeless families went up in 2008 in the US with a growth in the number of families who were not previously seen as ‘at risk’ 5 and there is also the threat of worse to come) and selling the newly hidden and repackaged debt onto people like, in Taibbi’s words, ‘some Dutch teacher’s union’ that had prior to that been investing in safe government bonds.
    As part of their ‘apology’ Goldman Sachs has apparently set aside $500 million a year for five years to help 10,000 small businesses according to
The Economist
who added that ‘Some were