Bob Harrison, a well-known thinker and speaker on the UK’s educational technology scene, has warned against building schools that are fit for the past rather than the future. Apparently as a result of this, he has been removed from the programme of a forthcoming conference.
For more information on this, read the following:
- Education in brief: Kingsdale School verdict (scroll down to ‘Criticism not welcome’
- Read Bob’s offending (and, apparently to some, offensive) comments, as well as those by Neil Hopkin. Both talks show excellent insight: Why I was banned from speaking at the Building Futures Event
I take my hat off to Bob (and Neil) for telling it how it is, and to Bob in particular I offer this tribute, a poem by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, called ‘Talk’. You may care to bear in mind that this poem was originally written in the context of living in the Soviet Union.
You’re a brave man they tell me.
I’m not.
Courage has never been my quality.
Only I thought it disproportionate
so to degrade myself as others did.
No foundations trembled. My voice
no more than laughed at pompous falsity;
I did no more than write, never denounced,
I left out nothing I had thought about,
defended who deserved it, put a brand
on the untalented, the ersatz writers
(doing what anyhow had to be done).
And now they press to tell me that I’m brave.
How sharply our children will be ashamed
taking at last their vengeance for these horrors
remembering how in so strange a time
common integrity could look like courage.