When the usual suspects orate about how the internet is going to "revolutionise" education, I am interested, but it usually turns out to be an exaggeration. Some promising and/or worthwhile stuff is being suggested or offer, but the world is not going to be transformed. But when the US Navy says things like this, I find myself being more impressed.
I think that the reason for the contrast between these two reactions is that the US Navy, unlike civilian educational organisations, makes a point of dishing out orders to people, and of being obeyed. Not orders to everyone, of course, but to a lot of people. "Now hear this!", as they say over their ship's loudspeakers. (They do in the movies anyway.)
So, when US Naval officers announce that naval medical education is going to be revolutionised by being made available on line, there is an air of "whether you like it or not" about this pronouncement that is absent when civilians talk about revolutionising things.
This last stricture does not apply to actual revolutionaries. They cannot yet give orders but they mostly intend to. Civilian educators, on the whole, disbelieve in giving orders. They believe in things like arousing enthusiasm, and in attracting attention with pretty little pictures. They believe in "engagement". They believe in the voluntary principle.
The US navy believes in pretty little pictures also, as the particular pretty little picture that I have used to decorate this posting illustrates. But read what it says. It says: "Naval Medical Education and Training Command." Command. Civilian educators don't like to use words like "command" these days.
Personally, I think that the civilian educators are a lot more right than wrong. But I further believe that following the logic of not using the word "command" will have revolutionary consequences, and that a lot of these same civilian educators are liable to end up as revolutionees.
Last night I attended a talk given at the Evans household by Max Gammon, one of the regular Friday evening meetings that Tim Evans and I take it in turns to host (he on the second Friday of the month and me on the last). It eventually became an argument between Christians and Atheists, but before that, Gammon made many interesting points about the degeneration over the years of the National Health Service.
One point of relevance to this blog he made with particular force, which is how bad it was when nurses stopped being trained in wards, doing nursing, and instead did an "education" in classrooms and seminar rooms. In Gammon's mind there was clearly a direct relationship between what many people regard as "education" and that other, much more malign modern tendency, "bureaucracy".
"Education", in other words, came across as more like malignant disease than as a modern blessing.
As for the ruckus about Christianity, I felt, as the devout Atheist that I am, that if Gammon had confined himself to saying that Christians make better nurses, or that a revival of Christianity might make it easier to run hospitals, I might have gone along with him. But instead he went out of his way to present Christianity as the logical outcome of his analysis of the NHS. Paul Coulam, veteran of many Samizdata comment wars, was present, and he put the case against Christianity with his usual lack of equivocation, egged on by the likes of me growling from the floor, and by Patrick Crozier, who pointed out that an identical nationalised degeneration had occurred in the railways and nobody blamed that on the decline of religion.
Nevertheless, a most stimulating and enjoyable evening.
