Sesame Street: is it the greatest educational innovation of our time? "Yes, I would make that claim," says Milton Chen. "In terms of reach and creativity, it was."
I've just reminded the Fulbright Scholar and executive director of the George Lucas Educational Foundation (GLEF) of something I read on his website, and he's obviously detected a note of scepticism in my voice. Chen has a vested interest - he spent five years working for the Children's Television Workshop, which made the programme. But he puts forward a good case: "It was a major investment on the part of government agencies and foundations to bring the best talent together in that medium," he says. "What was amazing was that what we were creating in June was on air in September, reaching millions of children. Education reform is so slow. It takes decades to have an innovation make its way into schools".
By comparison, Sesame Street was instant. And Chen is all about getting new ideas into education.
His role in the foundation set up by Star Wars film-maker Lucas is to look at innovation in US schools and colleges, but also to look further afield. What brings him to Scotland is admiration for the landmark scheme currently being established throughout the country as schools link up to a digital network now known as Glow.
In terms of rapid educational reform, the foundation hasn't seen much like it - and the not-for-profit organisation recognised the achievement by naming Laurie O'Donnell, director of learning and technology at Learning and Teaching Scotland, as one of its elite "global six" educational pioneers last month.
Chen can barely contain his envy at the ambition shown in Scotland. "You have a different way of looking at education policy - and, in particular, a willingness to invest. In the US we often look as investments as too expensive." A national schools intranet makes perfect sense, he says. In fact, anything else is crazy. "If you were operating an organisation of 100 different offices around the country, you wouldn't allow each to make its own decision about what hardware and software they use."
Nevertheless, the US schools system would never sanction the cost of a national intranet, Chen says. Even the schools of San Francisco Bay, where he is based, and which has a population roughly equivalent to that of Scotland, couldn't do it. "Any proposal to do so would be ridiculed as too risky an investment," he sighs. "And this is the home of Silicon Valley."
So what can Scotland learn from the US? He doesn't hesitate. "One thing is our premium on individuality and creativity." Of GLEF, he adds: "Our goal is to show how technology can be used for individual expression." Indeed, education should be more individualised, he suggests. "I want to see schools helping pupils identify their passion and build learning around that."
Thus a teacher of the young George Lucas might have used his love of automobiles to achieve numerous learning goals in topics such as history, design, marketing and engineering (it wasn't until university that the director discovered a passion for film-making).
One can imagine some teachers rolling their eyes at more talk of a brave new world of technology, and particularly the idea of creating bespoke curricula tailored to the obsessions of individual pupils. But Chen insists that education is about to be transformed beyond all recognition in the UK and US alike. "It shouldn't be left to individual teachers to create the curriculum. We would like to see those responsible in education agencies and other organisations such as textbook publishers take up the challenge.
"But the way a teacher thinks about their role in the classroom is going to be very different than in the past 25 years. For a 21st-century school system you have to have 21st-century teachers."
Schools are moving away from a curriculum that has been largely about memorisation to one that is more about thinking, he says, before claiming - probably rather unfairly - that past lessons about the solar system would have been full of facts but left students with no understanding of the relevant science. (He has just visited a primary school in Dundee that was using Glow for a lesson on the planets.) Assessment should change too, he says. "The role of assessment should be constant improvement in performance. In sports and the arts, you don't take a test to indicate what you can do. It should be the same thing in learning."
So as Scotland bids to make its educational intranet available to teachers and pupils across 3000 schools, it is worth getting an idea of "how others see us". And when the verdict of this prestigious international foundation is that we lead the world and that Glow is a "wonderfully ambitious and pragmatic tool", as the foundation said when naming its global six, it has to be flattering.
But Chen is pragmatic, too. Misuse of technology is inevitable: "We shouldn't be surprised that people who bully in the playground are taking it on to the internet," he says. But he stresses that schools should not reject technology for that reason.
He quotes the woman he describes as his mentor - who else but the creator of Sesame Street, Joan Ganz Cooney. "She said that just because children read comic books outside school, no-one has ever argued that you should do away with the books in school."
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