Conservative backlash against online learning

Onetime leftie Frank Furedi is writing today the predictably vexatious and stuffy online rag Spiked! The man is recently striking the pose of an arch reactionary on education (See Wasted etc) - and now he's laying into the young generation of "digital natives" who use the web to educate and broaden themselves in ways that traditional top-down education never permitted or imagined.

Furedi's been moaning about education in general for a long time, and now wants land a hit on digital learning. This is how he headlines his sentimental thesis

Let’s give children the ‘store of human knowledge' !

In flattering kids as ‘digital natives’ for whom the past is irrelevant, we degrade a vital adult mission: transmitting knowledge.

Come on Frank, this is drivel and you know it. Digital Natives may well care as much or more about the past as the mythical chalky old profs you nostalgically evoke. Online kids certainly chew over the past in many more ways than you'd imagine, and not just through games. Look at one normal school history site and I guarantee you'll be astonished by the high quality of analysis and thought that every school kid now can and does access. (Example here)

And anyway on what rational grounds can we say that knowledge of the past is more crucial than knowledge of the present ? All human eras are well larded with bunkum. At least the digital world programmes its natives to question what they read, seek out contrary opinions, and resist the channeling of their mind by the most immediate sources of authority.

If you wish to expose the links between "digitally driven society" and "present educational fads", Frank, that's wonderful. I'm ready to listen. There is plenty of digital garbage masquerading as education. Most of it produced in fact by respectable publishing conglomerates. Please get on and lay into it.

But cut the misty-eyed sentiment. The digital genie will not go back into its bottle and grateful youths will not start to sit at the knees of the elders, intently absorbing every word.

You also say that modern schooling has lost touch with basic fundamentals of education, such as subject based knowledge or theory. You say "Curriculum engineers often display indifference, if not contempt, for abstract thought".

Sorry, but your prejudices are running ahead of your knowledge.

Look at the case of science. You probably got taught a lot of stuff about periodic tables and newtonian theory etc. (So did I btw). Now look at what 15 year olds do in the Twenty First Century Science curriculum developed by the University of York. Go here and see the enormously challenging mix of theory, abstract reasoning, empirical knowledge, and data-handling skills that are required. This rich synthesis is exactly what the digital generation excels at. It is building citizens who are scientifically literate. It's miles better than the dry and inherited school science you and I learned.

So Frank please do better than this. I welcome you writing about digital natives it's an important theme and the networked information age does create problems for learning, that is sure. We need intelligent people like you to stop being lazy luddites and to start writing properly informed critiques.