Letters: screens in schools are not a problem

Screen tests

Sir: As somebody whose teaching career coincided with the digital revolution, I must take issue with Sophie Winkleman’s well-meaning but blinkered views on screens in schools (Actress’s Notebook, 30 March). I shall ignore the several familiar yet unsubstantiated opinions presented as facts, but I cannot let ‘straight back to books, paper and pens’ go unchallenged. Adults involved in education have often, lamentably, seen it as their job to prepare children for the world they themselves grew up in, rather than the one that awaits the next generation.

The comment, ‘Well it worked for me!’ boils my blood. Any perusal of the current school curriculum would have visitors from outer space rolling their eyes in disbelief at how irrelevant to a child’s future much of it is. ‘Right, children, today we’re going to be learning how oxbow lakes form.’ Bafflingly, we don’t seem to have recognised that almost anything a child wants or needs to know is now at their fingertips. The world has moved on at lightning speed and preparation for inhabiting that world must be the priority. Once public examinations complete their transition to digital only, children in schools and the adults they will become will rarely, if ever, need paper and pens again in their lives. Sad? Perhaps. But inevitable nonetheless.

David Edwards

Norton-sub-Hamdon, Somerset

Passion project

Sir: Charles Moore would love to see a film approaching Jesus’s Passion through the eyes of a practising Jew (Notes, 30 March). He might also be interested to read M. Kamel Hussein’s City of Wrong: A Friday in Jerusalem (1959), a very sympathetic Islamic look at the Passion. Sadly I suspect that it would be unlikely to be written today.