Buying a revolution
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Why are you doing this, Mr Rudd? (ABC Gippsland: Catherine McAloon, file photo)
When has a purchase order ever started a revolution?
Well you may ask, but the answer might puzzle anyone who is looking hard to find the intent and vision behind Kevin Rudd's election promise of a Digital Education Revolution.
In many ways it must be as much of a surprise to Rudd as it is to political analysts to see how little scrutiny there has been around the now, $1.2 billion investment in "giving all year 9 to 12 students access to a computer while at school". Labor must be delighted that the Liberals are so busy fighting over leadership and petrol, and that they seem to care so little about education, that they have failed voters in not at least asking some searching questions about what will be the biggest single education technology budget item in the country's history.
So what questions might they have asked? Well the first one would obviously be: why are you doing this, Mr Rudd? What actually is your vision for writing out a cheque for more than a billion dollars to buy lots of shiny new pieces of technology? There would of course be a terrible irony in that question coming from the Liberal Party, given their seemingly complete lack of vision for the country's education system beyond selling university places to the highest foreign bidders, but of all the opportunities that were presented to Rudd in his first 100 days of office, this has to be the biggest one he has blown.
Giving lots of computers to kids in schools these days is not a new idea; even a million of them. What matters most is why you are doing it. Take for instance the visionary leadership of the governor of the US state of Maine, Angus King, who more than six years ago realised his state was suffering from a lack of scholastic ambition and opportunity, with industries such as shipbuilding, logging and tourism dominating the economy. He fought a tough battle to provide every one of his Grade 7 and 8 students their own laptop computer and looked to the early pioneering experience of Australian schools in the 90s for knowledge on how best to do that.
Not only did every child in the state get their own laptop computer, but also they, their parents and teachers across the State of Maine knew why: it was to change the economic dynamic of their state, and give them a stronger employment base for the future. What a pity Labor's election policy-makers in Canberra didn't also learn from that pioneering experience. Instead, they invented some weak-worded election promise of "granting each student access to their own computer" ... announced at the time as a desktop, laptop, or can you believe it ... a thin client device. To the uninitiated, this latter option not only has no precedent success for its use in schools on any scale anywhere, but completely misses the point of exactly what access we are talking about.
Which brings us to the second question we would have loved the Liberals to have asked of Mr Rudd or Ms Gillard? What sort of access is Labor buying at a cost to taxpayers of $1.2 billion? Surely for that amount of money we are talking about changing not only access to technology, but also to looking to revolutionise - there's that word - the dynamics of where and how learning might take place? Surely for that investment the government is planning for students to have 24/7/365 access to this learning medium of their time, and not just for the 20 to 22 per cent of their waking hours per annum that students are actually at school?
In simple economic terms, such anytime anywhere access would grant a four to five times better return on the $1 billion "investment", and if that makes economic sense, it surely makes educational sense. Again, a simple discussion with Governor King would have revealed his mistake in not initially allowing students to take their laptops home as possibly his biggest error, which he later rectified, and any investigation of other 1 to 1 initiatives around the world such as that of the Uruguayan government to give every one of their primary school children their own laptop, would reveal it has become a fundamental pre-requisite for success.
Which brings us to our third question. Why did Labor decide that the students who would benefit most from access to a computer would be those in Grade 9 to 12? Was it just start at the oldest and keep going till you get to a billion dollars, or was there actually some genuine educational and economic rationale behind the decision? The answer to this question has indeed been puzzling many state education departmental people over the past few months, and it also completely defies logic. Why grant the access to students who are only going to benefit for one or two years?
Why not take a long, in political terms, four to six year view, of seeding a genuine revolution in the lower grades? This would in turn give teachers in the higher grades more chance to realise the true impact of what would be approaching them each year, if additionally the initiative was more appropriately scheduled to roll out gradually, to say Grade 5 and Grade 7 students with some consideration to Grade 9. Such an implementation schedule would then grant time to the curriculum writers at the "hardcore" end of schooling approaching VCE, and accordingly would genuinely allow time to plant seeds for a real learning revolution amongst younger students.
But then we have run out of time for the many more important questions that really should be asked before anyone embraces the "hardware from heaven" that is about to hit the press. But as they say, governments are only as good as their oppositions, and this is one revolution that will surely be well forgotten by the time this opposition gets a chance to ask any really important questions themselves. More's the pity, for the lost opportunity that we might have had to genuinely re-imagine what schooling could be in this new digital age.
Bruce Dixon is a consultant, writer, and co-founder and president of the Seattle-based not-for-profit Anytime Anywhere Learning Foundation, which seeks to ensure that all children around the world have access to unlimited opportunities to learn anytime and anywhere, and that they have the tools that make this access possible.
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