The Great Debate UK

Silver Web surfers face unique challenges

-Matthew Bath is technology editor at Which? The opinions expressed are his own.-

Today’s children take PCs for granted. Comfortable with cursors and wonderful with Windows, children use PCs for everything from watching video clips on YouTube to logging onto school networks to virtually hand in homework.

Laptops are as essential to teaching kids as a blackboard and chalk, with interactive learning games, social networking, Wikipedia, and the astonishingly good value CBBC website forming a digital tapestry of learning that we barely give a second thought.

But a world of electronic education wasn’t always the case, as those who were the classes of the 1940s and 1950s will testify. Here is a generation of adults, now in their 50s and 60s, who simply didn’t have access to computers in the classroom. Lessons were text book rather than hypertext based, and networking was something that people did over a pint.

from UK News:

Is five too young to start primary school?

The largest review of primary schooling in England for 40 years has said children at five are too young to start formal education and that six would be a more suitable age.

The Cambridge University study says play-based learning should go on for another year. Making children start school so young was a throwback to the Victorian age when the factories wanted them to start early so they could finish early and get working on the production line sooner.