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

past, on the rare occasions where there was some form of teaching children how to learn work going on in the odd isolated school, it was usually carried out by an odd and isolated teacher.) That the idea of actually teaching children how to do the thing we expect them to do every day of their school careers is self-evident is, even now, not always the case and I still do get asked in schools whether I think it is a good idea. It is a question that even now I am unsure how to respond to since ‘Well duh!’ never seems that professional.
    In 2001, a four-year research project looking at the nature of ‘learning to learn’ in schools in the UK was launched by a team that linked King’s College in London, the Institute of Learning, the University of Reading, the Open University and 40 primary and secondary schools across five education authorities around the country. 2 The project was under the auspices of a better-eight-hundred-years-late-than-never Cambridge University.
    Part of their findings was that learning to learn was not a single discrete skill but rather ‘a family of learning
practices
that enable learning to happen’. They then plumped for the accurate but less catchy LHTL over L2L adding, ‘the HOW word seems important’. This is something echoed by think-tank Demos 3 in their 2004 report entitled
About Learning
and commissioned by the then minister for schools standards, David Milliband. Exactly what the members of this ‘family’ are, the report doesn’t make clear, but Demos quotes from the Royal Society of Arts’
Opening Minds
project where there is a detailed range of ‘competencies’ including:
    • Understanding how to learn, taking account of one’s preferred learning styles, and understanding the need to, and how to, manage one’s own learning throughout life
    • Learning, systematically, to think
    • Exploring and reaching an understanding of one’s own creative talents, and how to make best use of them
    • Learning to enjoy and love learning for its own sake and as part of understanding oneself.
    This idea of a ‘competency curriculum’ is one that has gained good ground in schools across the UK in recent years, transmogrifying into the important but difficult to pronounce acronym PLTS or ‘personal, learning and thinking skills’. 4 (Notice it is ‘personal, learning and thinking skills’ and not, as some have read it, ‘personal learning and thinking skills’.) That said, as I write these words there has just been an election in the UK and with the change of government we could be back to drawing reeds with exam questions written on them again soon.
    According to the RSA, the
Opening Minds
project 5 was developed because they felt that ‘the way young students were being educated was becoming increasingly detached from their needs as citizens of the 21st century’. The feeling was that developing ‘real world skills or competencies’ was the way forward in schools, not just the teaching of facts and it is a project that is proving to be both popular, successful and terrifying in equal measure. One of the fears is that schools are being asked to focus on skills at the expense of knowledge, in particular ‘subject knowledge’, the great untouchable of the educational elite.
    The battle lines between the teachers of subjects and the teachers of children were drawn up well before recent innovations such as the PLTS framework or the
Rose Review
into primary education. As long ago as 2002, Prince Charles had waded into the fray, arguing that:
    Many of those who leave school with good qualifications nevertheless have an education which is somewhat shallow-rooted.
    ( http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/2301259.stm )
    In particular, and if you were to be cynical you may say unsurprisingly, he was concerned that British children were not taught enough British history. ‘They lack valuable and essential knowledge and understanding about their national history and heritage’ (to which another cynic might add, ‘You learn about my family and I’ll learn about yours’).
    Since then Prince Charles has established
The Prince’s Teaching Institute
, 6 the aim of which is, among other things, ‘to promote the idea that subject knowledge, subject rigour and the enthusiasm for communicating them are essential requirements for effective teaching’.
    As you would expect, then, the late, lamented
Rose Review
, 7 where 13 stand-alone subjects would have become merged