The BBC website recently carried a report on Google Chairman, Eric Schmidt’s MacTaggart Lecture at the Edinburgh International Television Festival.
The report is headlined with Eric Schmidt criticising education in the UK and how it is holding back the country’s chances of success in the digital media economy.
Somewhat predictably, the report and the web audience comments that accompany it focus on the sterile debate about the UK’s ‘failings’ or otherwise with regard to the teaching of science. In so doing, some key issues in Schmidt’s speech are overlooked.
First, he used the occasion to announce a partnership with the UK’s National Film and TV School, to help train young online film-makers. Now it seems to me this is a field of education that might come under the category of ‘Media Studies’, one that is constantly labelled a ‘non-subject’ by our press and politicians. Media communications and technologies are likely to be key areas for economic growth and yet our ‘vox pop’ tabloids constantly berate education’s attempts to engage with developments in this field.
Second, Schmidt also pointed to the need to bring art and science back together as was achieved in the heyday of the Victorian era. Now I’m sure Schmidt isn’t arguing for a return to Victorian values; rather he seems to be arguing for a more balanced approach to education. It is not about privileging science over the arts, or vice versa. He makes the point rather neatly when he observes: “Trust me – if you gave people at Google free rein to produce TV you’d end up with a lot of bad sci-fi.” It is important that we educate our young people to think creatively and imaginatively as well as analytically and logically.
It is telling that Schmidt picks up on our IT curriculum as being too focused on teaching how to use software, rather than with giving insight into how it’s made. But this is the downside of what is referred to as our Victorian heritage. What the Victorians achieved was arguably right and good for its time. However, a regimented, mechanistic, tick-box approach to education which effectively ‘programmes’ people in the use of tools, be they factory or IT software tools is no longer good enough. It may have been suited to the industrialised, factory regimes of the 19th and much of the 20th centuries, but it is no longer suited to the dynamic information and energy-flows that now characterise the 21st century. (Basically, Schmidt’s argument mirrors that which was the topic of our posting on 17 August 2011)
One of the reasons Google has been so successful is that it has provided people with the tools to retrieve information and organise their activities. But now, Google seem to be focused on going to the next level: encouraging people to develop their creative abilities and imagination that will be the key to delivering products and services better suited to a digital media age.
