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‘Whatever the
subject
I’m in, I’m developing skills and attitudes that will help me get a better job. Therefore, all lessons are important’ would be an important shift.
    We’re not advocating content-free lessons. The key will be to learn the content in a way that also develops the skills, attitudes and competences, something that the traditional chalk and talk lesson can’t do.
    In
Time
magazine in 2006, Bill Gates said, ‘We don’t just pick employees for the brains, but for their energy.’ 4 Are you helping children develop the sort of energy that Bill Gates is referring to? And what, exactly, is your job? To teach history? Or to teach children history? Or is it to allow children to develop the skills and all-important attitude they will need to succeed as adults a
s well as
pass their exams with flying colours?

Chapter 4
So, go on then, why do I need a teacher when I’ve got Google?
    In the good old days, knowledge was fixed. It was there, written up in big books and it didn’t really change very much. Various scholars over the years tried to record all human knowledge; and it was kept locked up in libraries and passed down through the ages, being translated as it went. Take the ninth century
Bait al-Hikma
or
House of Wisdom
to be found in Baghdad which, at that time, was the richest, most civilized city on the planet. Here scholars from around the world worked together across many disciplines from philosophy to mathematics, zoology to astrology, translating the works of the Ancients, especially the Persians and, ultimately, the Greeks. This they combined with their own thinking to produce, amongst other things, the book
Kitab al-Jabr
from which we derive the word, algebra (Lyons 2009).
    But, like the great library of Alexandria around a thousand years before it, knowledge is power and the destruction of someone else’s knowledge proves you are more powerful than they are. When the Mongols invaded Baghdad in 1258, it was said, depending on which source you read, the Tigris either ran red with the blood of the murdered scholars or black with ink from the books thrown into the river.
    Fast forward to the early roots of the current education system and you find that the teacher’s job is to take the fixed body of knowledge and pass it on. (The word ‘teach’ comes from the old Gothic word meaning ‘token’, 1 although ‘teacher’ didn’t emerge until around 1300 to denote the person teaching. Before it meant ‘index finger’. And while we’re in etymological mode, I find it curious to note that the word ‘pedagogue’ used to relate to the slave who escorted Roman children to school. 2 )
    The teachers were the educated ones, who had been to university, and whose job it was to drip feed the knowledge back into the community for whom the teacher was pretty much the only source of such knowledge.
    But then two interesting and related things happened to knowledge. Like an egg in a microwave, it exploded and went everywhere.
    What’s the most populous country on earth? Currently, as we have seen, China with 1,338,612,968 citizens. 3 But let me rephrase the question. What is the most populous
community
on earth? The answer, by a virtual mile, is the Internet with, as of 2009, 1,668,870,408 citizens. 4 That’s a growth of over 360 per cent in less than a decade and means nearly a quarter of the world’s population is online now. As you might expect, Africa scores lowest on the penetration rate with just 6.7 per cent of its population part of the Internet population, although, that said, it’s still a growth of nearly 1,360 per cent on the figures at the turn of the twenty-first century. Interestingly, the highest growth over that time is in the Middle East, returning nearly 1,650 per cent growth in Internet users (Arabic recently knocking Russia out of the Net’s top ten most widely used languages). 5
    And which region is top in terms of sheer weight of numbers of users? Asia, with over 700 million