4.- LEARNING 'INFANTILISED' BY RELYING ON
INTERNET
Learning
'infantilised' by relying on internet
By Sean
Coughlan
BBC News
education correspondent
12 June
2012
The
culture of clicking online for instant answers risks "infantilising"
learning, says the head of a charity which runs independent girls schools.
Helen
Fraser will warn delegates of the Girls' Day School Trust about the risk of pupils
relying on "nuggets of information" from the internet.
She says
that children should be reading whole books, rather than gathering a few
shallow impressions.
Deeper
learning takes time, she says, like a "slow casserole".
Ms Fraser
is to give her warning against the intellectual equivalent of fast food to the
annual conference of the Girls' Day School Trust, which runs 24 independent
schools and two academies.
'Switch
off'
"I do
worry that the ease of access to nuggets of information means that our appetites
are becoming infantilised.
"We're
so used to fast facts that we're in danger of losing sight of the truth that
some learning is more of a slow casserole, with knowledge stewing in our minds
to form a richer, deeper flavour," Ms Fraser will tell the conference on
Wednesday.
"So
I'm a firm believer in the importance for our students of switching off the
computer, the radio, the smartphone, the TV, and any other distractions, and
reading a whole book - I would say from cover to cover."
Ms Fraser
says she is concerned about the way that quick-fix answers from internet search
engines can leave children with a lack of awareness of different views and a
one-dimensional view of topics.
"I
want to bring back thinking - and I think a lot of what happens on the internet
is antipathetic to thinking and suggests there is no alternative view,"
says Ms Fraser, the trust's chief executive.
Learning
should be about engaging with ideas, rather than "regurgitating
facts", she says.
Screen age
Reaching
for the search engine is not the best way of finding the value of competing and
sometimes contradictory perspectives, she argues.
Ms Fraser,
a former managing director of Penguin Books, says that schools need to create
the space for children to think creatively around a subject.
But she
says that it is hard to challenge the instant gratification of online answers
when it is imbued from an early age.
"Two-year-olds
are playing with their mothers' iPhones. It's a generation which looks to
screens for stimulation," she says.
Ms Fraser
says she is not against digital technology - and that educational software can
provide useful motivation - but she is worried that an over-reliance on
computers can leave children with only a superficial understanding or the
belief that there is only one "right" answer.
"Research
shouldn't just mean 'look it up on Google'," she says.
And in her
conference speech she will speak of the importance of young people engaging
with a whole book, rather than a few highlights.
"I'm
not really bothered whether it's paper or an e-book, the important thing is
that it's read from start to finish - following an author's train of thought,
through perhaps some complex arguments and situations, from first principles
through to their conclusion.
"It's
only by learning deeply about and around a subject that you can truly hope to
master it."
© 2012 by
BBC
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