Jottings on science, religion, technology, pop culture and faith from the Antipodes.

General, Research

‘We are at risk of losing our imagination’

Recent opinion piece in the Guardian on technology and education by Baroness Susan Greenfield (author and professor of pharmacology at Oxford University). See EducationGuardian.co.uk | E-learning | ‘We are at risk of losing our imagination’

We must choose to adopt appropriate technologies that will ensure the classroom will fit the child, and buck the growing trend for technologies – including drugs – to be used to make the 21st-century child fit the classroom. The educational needs of the individual are changing, and the very nature of the classroom needs to change, too.

Does this mean young people are acquiring or will need different skills? Memory, for example, may no longer be as essential as it was for those of us who had to learn reams of Latin grammar, but with everything just a click away, perhaps we are at risk of losing our imagination, that mysterious and special cognitive gift that until now has always made the book so much better than the film.