School and home

When I was at school in the 1950s, there were hard boundaries between school and home. At the beginning of secondary school (aged 11), I took a geometry set that had belonged to my grandfather into a mathematics class to show the teacher, and I was severely rebuked for showing off. I can still feel the embarrassment today, and I learned the hard lesson that out-of-school life should be kept separate from in-school life. This raises the issue of the difference between everyday and school objects, between everyday and school knowledge.

A Victorian geometry set carries with it the knowledge of the inventors of geometrical instruments: the protractor, the set square, the pair of compasses. Each instrument has a particular function that relates more to the practical geometry of the Victorian age than to theoretical and academic geometry. Geometry was part of the school curriculum in the late Victorian period, and was still an important part of school mathematics when I was at school in the 1950s.

If the Victorian geometry set is a tool of the Victorian age, what are the tools of the 21st-century digital age? The portable computer, the mobile phone, the tablet? Like the Victorian geometry set, these tools are also portable and can be taken back and forth between school and home. But mobile phones are being banned from schools, considered to be disruptive and not relevant to the purpose of schooling. However, schools are more positive about tablet computers and are beginning to experiment with equipping groups of students with such mobile devices for work at home and school. As discussed in Chapter Two, digital devices are multipurpose, they can be used for leisure and for work, for production and consumption, and the more portable and the more multipurpose the device, the more it can be used within every aspect of our lives.

Research has uncovered a variety of ways in which young people use digital technologies in their out-of-school lives, which includes writing for pleasure, playing computer games, using social networking sites and computer programming. There is evidence that young people draw on their out-of-school uses of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) in the classroom, and this can sometimes support in-school learning and is sometimes at odds with what the teacher intends to teach.