When I first encountered science in school, I thought, great, this is just how I think. Doesn’t everybody? Apparently not.

In my work, I come across many computer equipment manufacturers who market their products by saying that they can do this or that for children, or accept this or that format of information. I often ask the representatives of these companies what evidence they have that the use of computer technology has actually improved the learning or achievement of children. Perhaps surprisingly, not one of them has been able to refer me to any research that actually shows that computers have any effect at all on the educational outcome of children. It’s as if the entire industry is based on the gut feeling that if children are given access to more powerful or versatile technology, then they will learn more.

Some subjects self evidently benefit from computer technology- digital media is the basis of a huge industry today and it would be pointless to try and teach children digital photography or electronic music without access to computers.

But you’d think that it would be equally self evident that the subject of ICT, the use of information and communications technology itself, would benefit from computer provision. I suppose it is, but in this I have a lingering doubt. I work in the IT industry- have done for 20 years- but I went through school without ever touching a computer. When I entered the industry,  the computers were much more difficult to use, and much less capable and versatile than the computers of today. Why do students today require 10% of the curriculum in order to learn to do something that people of my age required no teaching at all to do?

I think it’s important to ask the question, and I’m not sure if I can tell you the answer. Perhaps it’s because when I encountered the key productivity applications- spreadsheet, word processor, presentation, database, e-mail, mobile phone, I actually had real world requirements to use these things, and indeed had done the work that these things automate the hard way. When students encounter these applications today, they actually have to be told what the applications are. They have to take for granted the physical need to automate, without having to write a thesis long hand; or type out an address list; balance books with a calculator and a lot of paper; convince an audience of something using only a flip chart or overhead projector; engage in a postal correspondence; or be tied to a phone system that was hard wired to a wall. They encounter new technology without ever asking themselves the question to which these things are the answer and so meet computers at a huge disadvantage to those of our generation. They have no knowledge of old technology.

Which brings me to the experiment of the title. We’ve inadvertently performed a perfect scientific experiment. A huge one, where everyone in the developed world completing their education earlier than the late seventies entered the adult working environment without having touched a computer, and nobody who did so no more than a decade or so later started work without having been taught something about computers in school. It’s an unrepeatable experiment, because computers cannot be uninvented. If ICT teaching in schools is correlated with more effective computer use in adult life, one would expect a huge divide in the workplace between the older computer illiterates and the new computer experts, but this effect is not that marked, at least not to the extent that it is easily separated in statistics from general ageism.

Children are often taught that doing science requires observation, hypothesis, experiment, analyzing data, drawing conclusions, etc but they are seldom taught that not all of those things are essential to the process. With computers in education, the experiment was never performed in response to observation or hypothesis. It was just an accident of history. The point of this post is that we need to take advantage of the experiment and analyse the data even if we didn’t design the experiment in the first place. If we don’t, this generation of adults will retire and the data will be lost- and the subsequent generations will not even realise the experiment took place. They will have been taught ICT in school, and will assume that was always the way. The hiatus between widespread investment in personal computer technology in the workplace and the later introduction of ICT in education will be forgotten, and the value of that education will be assumed to be proven.

What do we really know about the benefits of providing computers and ICT curriculum time to children in school? I fear that we are at an inevitable stage between the invention of world-changing technology and its proper integration into society. It’s as if we have just invented fire, in an age where educational institutions already exist. Naturally we’d add fire studies to the curriculum. We’d teach cookery to classes of raw food eaters, we’d teach metal refining to stone tool makers, we’d teach fire starting and maintenance, cave heating and ventilation, slash and burn agriculture, etc all as one subject. We would probably have no idea that household (cavehold?) fire would become as trivial as turning a knob, or even self igniting in central heating systems. We could have no idea that industry would be so specialised that families could have extensive access to metals without any knowledge at all of how they are refined and fabricated.

Nowadays fire, for all its elemental worth to our culture, is completely integrated into society without any specialised recognition of it as a subject. It is surely possible that in the future, ICT will go the same way. Looking ahead, why shouldn’t word processing and e-mail- automated ways of writing and communicating- be taught in English? Presentation applications in drama or English in conjunction with debating? Spreadsheets and databases in science or business studies? Graphic design, page layout and photo-retouching software in mainstream art? Studies in applied uses of ICT are about as logical as studies of applied uses of fire. If something is important enough to be studied, shouldn’t it be studied as a solution for a problem in a certain pre-existing subject? We don’t have lathing and drilling classes. We have design and technology classes in resistant materials where these tools are used to solve manufacturing problems.

What justification is there for teaching ICT as a subject in itself?