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I am only slightly joking about the fountain pen and I am old enough to remember vividly the arrival of the biro. As I recall, in my grammar school, the Latin teacher said, “Not in my work, thank you,” and the biologist said, “Oh, all right then,” and the headmaster said, “But not in public examinations.” But I was also there when the UCAS form was born. UCAS forms were new and scary and important all at the same time, and they called for black ink. The head refused to sign or send a form if it had not been completed in deep black fountain pen ink – I qualify ‘black’ to show how much it matered to him, if not us, and quite possibly not remotely to the universities to which we – carefully, hardly-daring-to-breathe for a spelling mistake or a smudge – applied. Are UCAS applications done on line now? I suspect they are. Like the marking of exam papers, and I did that, too, in the Dark Ages. A recent glance at an exam board website was an education: these days they are so open about the process, formerly deeply mysterious and inexplicable, that they freely display sample marked papers, so teachers and, presumably, students who care can gauge exactly what an A* or a C looks like. What I saw struck me as revealing marking not as thorough as my own – I remember being hugely conscientious about writing enough comment to explain or justify the mark I had reached, lest any future challenge be made. These days a lot more challenges are made, and the papers, scanned in to the machine, are less at risk of loss and a lot more open to scrutiny. But I honestly thought some of the detail and rigour had gone, perhaps reflecting the new demands on candidates, which may be different from the old. Certainly, in my day, marking English papers, writen accuracy seemed to mater more; it looks as if now the quality of thought is more important than its expression. If I were to say that the quality of thought is poor if the expression is weak – well, that’s probably another dinosaur bone to which I cling. Mine is the generation which ‘picked


up’ computer skills as we went along and the machines themselves shrank from the Enigma-cracking Colossus to the mobile devices which sing, dance, cook supper and photograph the result before sharing it with the entire world. Before we were married, my husband did planning for big construction projects on a computer which had to be booked in advance and filled whole rooms. But he was an engineer, and somehow computers belonged to him and his mathematical mates. At the same time, on my master’s course in modern English and American literature, I was considered ahead of the game because I had a portable typewriter and could type prety damn fast. Term papers had to be shared with the group, so were typed on stencils and run off for distribution – how antique! The three of us who could type had very special status and many meals masquerading as adequate recompense for hours typing 5,000-word essays. Our children took to the new technology via games and keyboards lighter to the touch than my ‘sit up and beg’ portable. Our BBC (remember them?) was so old when our eldest child went to


university that we were happy to let her take it with her – she said there was absolutely no fear it would be stolen. In fact the question she was most asked was which school did she pinch it from. And now her toddlers peck confidently at dinky litle screens and really do have the world at their tiny finger tips. I had my doubts about computers in classrooms, and I lived through the years of schools having one computer room, which you could book if you really, really needed it, and the technician was usually contemptuous and the kids were diverted into whatever they could open before you got their atention, and then half of them had their backs to you, or you could not see the screens and it was generally a


nightmare. But just watching Educating Yorkshire shows you what appear now to be all students with a laptop each, and they and the teacher seem to make it work. What the position of a teacher is – he who used to be the fount of all knowledge, indeed that was why he was there, and students sat in front of him in order to be taught what the teacher knew – when at a click or a flick the student can access all there ever was to know about whatever the topic is – well, that is a litle harder to define, surely? Perhaps one would say that now teachers ‘mediate’ – yes, all that stuff is on the laptop, but it’s indigestible and bewildering because it’s too much. Most students will be glad of the figure in front of them (is that where they still are?) helping them make sense of it all. If ever I set a class to read the first chapter of a new text, I was always amazed by how I could ask about something which was in the first couple of pages, and students would say, “Is it? I didn’t notice that!” Or I would read a short passage, and they would say, “Oh! Now I get it ..!” And I’m thinking, “But it


was on the page – how could you miss it!” I recently saw an


app which I think would


have made me redundant if teaching a Shakespeare play – actors talking the lines straight out to you: apparently we understand that beter than actors talking to each other. The text was crystal clear – great cries all round of “Now I get it!” On the other hand, if you really do need an inspirational teacher, the technology now exists to make that teacher available on screen, in a classroom next door, down the road, round the world, any hour of the day or night at a stroke. Now that does have potential, perhaps even to change the world. iE


Hilary Moriarty is national director of the Boarding Schools’ Association.


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