Updating education

Press, 17 August 1983, Page 13

Updating education

, New Zealand needs to rethink the kind of education being offered in schools to meet the challenges of the technological revolution. This change is seen as vitally necessary both by Jack Shallcrass, reader in education at Victoria University, and Marie Keir, social scientist with the D.S.I.R. in Wellington. Jack Shallcrass says that most formal education is done by people processing information. When we are able to do this more efficiently through electronics, we will not know what to do with people in the educative process. “We will have to give up treating them as though they' are minicomputers. No-one has started to think seriously about what humans can do that computers cannot, and how that should affect the educative process.” It will mean developing the imaginative, creative, intuitive processes in humans, learning how to make judgments, how to discern and act accordingly. Some people are thinking about it in New Zealand, Jack Shallcrass says, and some teachers and schools are doing it — “Hagley High is trying to adapt quickly.” Marie Keir sees most education

in schools as still “a factory system,” where one teaches many. People are not being educated to use inter-active technologies which require much question and answer, probing, and selection of information appropriate to needs. “If the education system does not fit the possibilities put by the new medium, only a few will learn how to make the best use of it,” she says.

“Hence there is a need to change the education system to help people select what their needs are, what information they must have to meet these needs, and then perhaps what technologies will provide those needs.”

This will depend very much on educational background, the way in which people have been trained to think, the value placed on information — and this all relates to the education system. Like Jack Shallcrass, she considers that in education it is important to encourage questioning, selection, analysis of needs, rather than encouraging people to sop up information fed into them by someone else.

How practical is it to talk in such terms? Jack Shallcrass says

the inertia of a big system is powerful as many people have a stake in what is being done at present. “For anyone to suggest that they will have to give up what they have been doing for 25 to 30 years is quite impossible. “I know how you get the kind of change needed, but there is no evidence we have a Minister who understands this, or that the Education Department knows how to handle it.”

He also is aware that a different thrust to a curriculum would pose a challenge to old hierarchical authority structures. The basic message of this kind of structure was that if one did as one was told, there would be a pay-off. “If you have a structure encouraging a much greater level of insight, perception, and imagination, of commitment, of personal responsibility, it must be reciprocal, riot hierarchical.” In practical terms what does this require? “It means that our systems, from the Minister down, will have to start committing decisions to lengthy public discussion at all levels, with a devolution of power from the centre to the edges.”