It’s scarcely possible to open a newspaper or magazine these days without reading an article about how the latest technological gizmo has rendered traditional education obsolete.
According to Justin Webb, a presenter on the Today programme, it’s no longer necessary to commit any facts to memory thanks to the never-ending miracle that is Google. ‘Knowing things is hopelessly 20th-century,’ he wrote in the Radio Times. ‘The reason is that everything you need to know — things you may previously have memorised from books — is (or soon will be) instantly available on a handheld device in your pocket.’
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The same view was expressed by Ian Livingstone CBE, one of the pioneers of the UK games industry. In a recent interview with the Times, he said he intends to set up a free school where children will learn how to ‘solve problems’ and be ‘creative’, rather than forced to memorise ‘irrelevant’ facts that can be accessed ‘at the click of a mouse’.
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