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EducationWorld November 07 | EducationWorld

Letter from LondonRe-engineering schoolsWhen the‚ UK government announced a few years ago that it was committing over ‚£40 billion (Rs.328,000 crore) to rebuild all its secondary schools under the Building Schools for the Future programme, it had already ‚ perhaps inadvertently ‚ exposed the short-comings of the programme. Building Schools is not the future, especially not in Britain. Education in traditional classrooms, 30 pupils to a teacher, selected by age, not ability, and passively learning set pools of knowledge has failed generation after generation.Modern Britain needs schools to produce graduates with transferable skills, with ability to communicate and collaborate, and with confidence to excel in the 21st century.What would such a school look like? This has been a crucial debate within Building Schools for the Future, and one that is unresolved. It is perhaps clearer what the school should not look like. Education of the future should not be defined by physical boundaries; it should be anywhere, anytime and lifelong. Community learning centres where adults and children learn side by side should be the norm; how long can we justify segregating children by age alone?Yet sadly, many schools continue along the path of moving students from one subject to another, from one class to another, learning passively. Many have introduced ‚Ëœnew‚ subjects such as drama, design, or physical educ-ation (they all count towards the five GCSE benchmark!) rather than looking to re-engineer their schools. Nevertheless a favourable development that the government has long acknowledged is the role that technology can play in education. Children in Britain spend much of their time outside school on the mobile phone, the internet, digital TV and game boxes like Microsoft‚s X-box and Sony‚s Playstation. All these digital toys have two facets that are now shaping how children learn: interactively and by multi-tasking. By using similar technology in education, it is possible to re-engage students and bring them back into ‚Ëœschools‚. One such solution is LP+ ‚ an education and e-learning platform built on current Microsoft corporate technologies of messaging, collaboration and workflow, but delivered through a browser. As a hosted and managed platform, it places no burdens on the school to purchase expensive and complicated servers, and it allows rapid and global deployment. Such models will bring education in line with today‚s businesses ‚ where messaging and communications have become king, where global customers and supply chains are becoming the norm and where the ability to collaborate and communicate is paramount. The model for 21st century education is still developing, but at least the sign posts are becoming clearer. (Dr. Mehool Sanghrajka is the London-based CEO of LP+, an education company)FranceSarkozy shake-upLaden with hefty backpacks, french children filed back to school in early September amid fresh agonising about the education system. Given its reputation for rigour and secular egalitarianism, and its well-regarded baccalaureate exam, this is surprising. What do the French think is wrong?Quite a lot, to judge from a 30-page ‚Ëœletter to teachers‚ sent out by President Nicolas Sarkozy. Too many school drop-outs; not

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