Marxist Educational Resources

Google's Schmidt 'flabbergasted' at British science education

Google Chairman and ex-CEO Eric Schmidt took to the podium to give the media industry's MacTaggart Lecture in which he criticised the British education and blamed it for the "throwing away your great computing heritage."

Schmidt expressed his dismay at learning that computer science was no longer part of the curriculum in British schools, despite past efforts he hailed such as the 1980s BBC computer tie-in.

"Your IT curriculum focuses on teaching how to use software, but gives no insight into how it's made. That is just throwing away your great computing heritage," he said.

"Over the past century the UK has stopped nurturing its polypaths. There's been a drift to the humanities - engineering and science aren't championed. Even worse, both sides seem to denigrate the other - to use what I'm told is the local vernacular, you're either a 'luvvy' or a 'boffin'."

Schmidt said that the UK needed to rekindle youngsters enthusiasm for science including engineering, maths and computers. Citing the US government's plans to train an addition 10,000 engineers per year, Schmidt said the world needed more engineers.

The Google man took aim at British entrepreneur Alan Sugar's claim that "engineers are no good at business," saying "I don't think we've done too badly." Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin were both Stanford computer science PhD students when they founded Google and Schmidt himself holds a PhD in electrical engineering and Computer Science.

Revealing that Google TV is to launch in Europe early next year, Schmidt criticised government interference with the development of online TV. He took aim at the delayed YouView service saying that without government interference "you'll still have thrown away several years when the UK could have been in the lead - a lifetime technologically."

Schmidt also criticised recent overtures made by the coalition government to control social networks when they are used to organise acts of social unrest, as seen in the spate of riots.

The European Curriculum – A Call for Papers « All that is Solid for ...

Professor MORITZ ROSENMUND, Universities of Vienna and Zurich

The EERJ works within the idea that European education exists today within a borderless space containing significant flows of ideas, policies and academics, between countries, in networks and associations, and in projects. From the beginning, it has encouraged research across European borders and across the field of educational studies: it has published symposia and network papers in a range of fields on European education policy, market reforms, travelling policies, public education, social capital, the technology of numbers, mobility, didactics and social justice.

This Call for Papers is focused on current processes and programmes of curriculum reform as a key problematic in understanding knowledge formation and education policy steering inEurope. Indeed, the dominance of the knowledge economy paradigm as an organising policy principle for education has accentuated research attention to comparisons of performance, policy learning, and technologies of governance like the Bologna Process and OECD PISA. However, curricula and their associated pedagogic practices remain under-researched as elements in the shaping and governing of a European education policy space.

After a long dominance of national reform efforts and decentralised decision power, Europeanisation and cross-national comparisons are becoming more central in the national educational policy agenda. New qualifications frameworks acrossEuropedraw attention, not only to quality processes, but to common interests in curriculum and evaluation. From kindergarten to higher education, policymakers and practitioners discuss what knowledge is of most worth, how to think about the curriculum, and how it should be evaluated and assessed to facilitate new ways of learning. The formation of knowledge is the core of this activity, and concentrates attention on schooling and new flexible learning pedagogies.

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