Via conet@ukco.org.uk - Horace Mitchell

To answer the specific question, the answer has to be <no>. School budgets historically have been 90% wages of teachers and the rest on buildings and books and consumables. To keep a PC on a desk in industry costs perhaps $3000 a year, a school needs to approach one-per-desk if kids and teachers are to integrate the computer into learning in the way we are integrating it into work. Education is information work par excellence, most industrialised countries are at or near 100% computers on desks for information workers in well managed companies, indeed in the most computerised companies its more like 3 PCs for every two people. Teachers won't understand how a PC fits into the learning of language or art or history or maths until they are spread around every classroom on at least a one-between-three basis preferably more. Conventional education budgeting can't begin to cope with this.

On Wednesday the Portugal Minister for Science and Technology talked about Portugal's ambitious <schools online> programme. In a country with about Europe's lowest penetration of PCs in private use in homes (Portugal competes with Greece for this distinction), the Government has rolled out ISDN to all schools and is on the way to rolling out access to all libraries, and putting schools and libraries on the Universities research network. To accelerate investment by citizens they have put in place a tax break - effectively 20% of the price of a computer if you buy it for use at home.

As he said, this is important to do, but even more important we need to:

(a) make a statement - we are telling citizens and teachers that this thing is important it is coming and they need to do something about it

(b) get people - including teachers and librarians - to start to change the way they look at their jobs

(c) get the telephone company to make ISDN readily available in all villages (we don't have that in the UK!)

Last week his opposite number in Egypt said much the same. However they were well ahead. He said <we started computers in schools seven years ago, three years later we learned the obvious: it no use budgeting to do it once, you have to budget to do it again three or four years later!.

<<when I asked how to to get the parents - and others

in the community - familiar with the potential of computer and the Net she had no hesitation. "I would get the children to show them".>>

Egypt went one step further than this:

"We had a problem, how to maintain and enhance the PCs and local area networks in the schools - the teachers couldn't do it and we didn't want them to become amateur computer technicians, but we couldn't afford to pay top rates for suppliers to do it. So we ran a challenge among the kids, now each school has kids who are appointed as <computer wizards> who look after the equipment and the software and help the teachers and other kids when they have problems - being selected as one of your school's computer wizards is better than becoming a prefect."

Genius I call it :-)

In some ways the less-computerised economies may have an advantage over the more computerised economies because it's easier for them to see the priorities!