£30,000 to teach pupils how to use Wikipedia: Fury after council pays IT expert to show children…

A £30,000 scheme to teach schoolchildren how to use Wikipedia has been condemned as a waste of taxpayers’ money.

An IT expert is being paid the sum by a council to visit schools and show pupils aged 13 and 14 how to “critically engage” with the online encyclopedia.

The children will be taught how to search for entries and look for mistakes and bias in articles. The scheme is set to begin at secondary schools in Leicester later this year.

Council leaders say searching for information online and evaluating its reliability is “an essential skill for all citizens”.

But Chris McGovern, chairman of the Campaign for Real Education, said: “This is a complete waste of money. Wikipedia is an intellectual crutch, often full of mistakes, and encouraging pupils to rely on it does not help them.” …

Even after the questions about whether this should be taught, one question was completely missing from the article: “How many students?” If you are teaching thousands of students with the £30,000 then it seems like a reasonable figure. On the other hand if it costs £30,000 for a couple dozen students then a lot of money is being wasted. Any time you see a headline with an amount of money which is supposed to outrage you, always ask for the divisor.

As a history teacher with a definite conservative bent, I think this is a good idea - although the cost of it seems rather high. Kids are going to use Wikipedia whether we like it or not, and teaching them how to tell the difference between reliable factual information and how to detect bias is something I spend a couple of lessons on at the start of every year. And once you can do that, it’s an extremely useful site in many ways. It often contains information that isn’t in many more traditional sources.

I’m a big supporter of the Campaign for Real Education and have been for a long time, but on this issue, Chris McGovern has completely missed the point. These are not lessons in ‘how to use Wikipedia’ in the sense he seems to think they are. They are lessons designed to teach kids to be critical of Wikipedia and identify its flaws. And students in Singapore and Taiwan are most certainly getting lessons in how to do this (I can’t speak for Hong Kong, given the influence of the Chinese government) and that’s actually a large part of the reason they are ahead of students in Britain, because it’s about teaching them how to learn for themselves, and think for themselves, rather than expecting to be spoon fed a list of facts deemed acceptable by the people who wrote the curriculum.

99% of my students perform above the 80th percentile each year compared to other students in my state. 95% perform above the 92nd percentile. I’m a good teacher, but I’m not that brilliant - my kids do it because I’ve taught them how to extend themselves beyond just what I teach them. By teaching them how to use all the tools they can find around them. I also do lessons on how to use traditional encyclopedias, how to use a library catalogue, how to use Google and other search engines effectively, and how to search databases of journal articles.

In the very first sentence I wrote, I said "the cost of it seems rather high" but with the disclaimer that I'd like to know exactly why it's that expensive, yes, I think the government paying for this is a good idea. These are government schools we are talking about and the government pays their costs (ultimately the money comes from taxes, of course). People can rightly disagree with the existence of government schools (and for the record, I teach in a private school) but given that they exist, I think they should be funded well enough to do a good job, and this looks like a good program.

Bring in outside educators can be a very good idea if you're trying to teach specific skills that can be taught in a short time framework.

As for the cost, my concern with that is largely because nearly all of these programs seem to cost far more than they should. As KarlInOhio points out, whether the cost is reasonable is in large part linked to how many children are being taught and we don't have that information, but experience tells me that in most cases, these programs wind up costing about three times what I think they are worth (that's a personal opinion, but it's not entirely arbitrary - I've looked at how much the educators are typically paid compared to a teacher's salary for example - and I've taught such external programs myself and was paid nearly four times the hourly rate I get for normal classroom teaching. I took it, because it's what I was offered, but to a large extent, providers of these courses don't seem to be in a very competitive market, and schools and school systems don't negotiate that well to bring prices down).

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