Supporting Acquisition of Basic Skills

• FOr teaChers Teachers and parents have two educational roles with respect to their charges: instructor and mentor. Instructors induce aptitudes: abstract skills and knowledge. Mentors foster attitudes: social skills and graces. In my experience of school, starting 70 years or so ago, quite regimented instruction predominated in the earlier stages, with the aim of developing basic skills by repetition. My strong impression is that the pendulum has now swung to the opposite extreme, at least in the countries most familiar to me. This is tragic, as both abstract and social skills are left greatly underdeveloped in many young people when they leave school. Because the development of attitudes depends on the possession of abstract skills such as oralcy, numeracy, and literacy (both grammar and vocabulary), teachers and parents are greatly restricted in fulfilling the mentor role. In failing to influence their attitudes, they let children’s minds become dominated by their senses and perceptions rather than by their social imagination and sensitivity. This has led to young people nowadays often being referred to as the “me first” generation. The pity of this is that computers can deliver traditional drill automatically and vastly more effectively than teachers. Such automatic drill and practice can be designed to adapt to the capabilities, moods, and interests of individual learners and to collect data on learners’ progress that mentors can use in designing social activities and selecting subsequent areas for drill. This would let individual learners develop their basic skills in different ways and at different rates, and it would let teachers detect and act to remedy defects and imbalance as they become evident. The implications are profound. The traditional class structure becomes irrelevant if not obstructive, and the traditional periodic tests and examinations become pointless. The teacher’s role becomes communal and participative rather than individual and supervisory.