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

Determination
    • Self belief
    • Creativity
    • Sheer energy.
    (Lewis 1994)
    To what extent do you deliberately build the development of such attributes into your lessons? I first came across Lewis’s work in a magazine article several years ago entitled
Unqualified Success
. It was highlightingsix wealthy and successful entrepreneurs who, between them, had just three O-levels. Actually only one of them had all three, David Crossland who created
Airtours
. The rest of them, people like publisher Felix Dennis and John Madejski of football stadium fame, had none. Elsewhere Madejski has said, ‘Education is important, but if you’re a lateral thinker and have common sense, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t get on.’ 11 With the OECD 12 in 2008 identifying that only 45 per cent of our children who leave schools without five A–Cs at the age of 16 are in employment a year later, maybe that is all the more reason to ensure our children develop such attributes. If they leave without the qualifications to get them a job, we sure as hell need to make sure they leave school with something that will. I don’t think it is a coincidence that 20 per cent of UK entrepreneurs and 35 per cent in the US are dyslexic, compared with just 1 per cent across general managers. 13 But, in our tail-wags-the-dog, upside-down, if you can’t measure it can’t be important, educational world, developing these attributes can be easily overlooked because, as Lewis points out:
    These are difficult skills to set exams for.
    Or are they? Innovations such as the RSA’s Competency Curriculum 14 and the focus on PLTS 15 – Personal, Learning and Thinking Skills – may not be everybody’s cup of tea, especially if you are a teacher who is focused on teaching subjects rather than children, but they are a long-overdue and much-needed acceptance of the fact that your personal skills and qualities – your attitude – will take you further than your qualifications, and neither is as good as both together. After all, qualified
with
attitude is an unstoppable, but often rare, combination. (Or as one executive head-hunter contributing to Radio 4’s
In Business
once said, ‘People with great skills but no attitude are nerds not leaders’.)
    In a world where the big organizations are being challenged
on equal terms
by small upstarts working out of garages, bedrooms and college dormitories, are we doing enough in the UK to encourage entrepreneurship? And at the sort of scale we are seeing in India and China? Again, a view from
The Economist
:
    The opening up of China and India is releasing millions of new entrepreneurs onto the world market. Many of them have already shown themselves able not just to translate Western ideas into local idioms but also to drive technological advance of their own. The world has only just begun to feel their effects.
    (
The Economist
, 12/03/09)
    The BRICs economies research was published before all the recent economic unpleasantness, but there is a strong argument that all that mess actually serves the BRICs well, especially if China gets back the US$776.4 billion America owes it. 16 Indeed, these four countries held their own summit in 2009 and, according to
The Economist
, they are ‘recovering fast and starting to think the recession may mark another milestone in a worldwide shift of economic power away from the West’. After years of being at the top table, maybe, just maybe, things are starting to change with, ironically, the greedy Western practices that brought about the latest recession being the seeds of a longer-term undoing:
    Almost 60% of all the increase in world output that occurred in 2000– 2008 happened in developing countries, half of it took place in the BRICs alone.
    (
The Economist
, 20/06/09)
    So, what does all this mean for you as a teacher and that set three science class whose lesson you should be preparing? It means that the children you are (1) teaching science and (2) preparing to make their way in the world are going into direct competition with amazing, wonderful, highly motivated, highly skilled, technologically savvy people from anywhere in the world, and if you don’t equip them to be world class people who else will? Furthermore, if you fail, the country fails because if the money goes elsewhere, who’s going to pay your salary? In his 1994 book the
Tom Peters Seminar
, one of the world’s leading business gurus made the claim that, in the brain-based economy,