IT in school is doomed - keep a pencil handy

We became familiar with the sight of the teacher shaking those pens to get them to work. Countless duds would be tried and rejected until, eventually, the exasperated pedagogue would settle for a moribund blue. You had to squint to make out the pale script.

You would think lessons had been learned. In fact, the Labour government has since put whiteboards at the centre of its education policy. Only now the whiteboards are, magically, interactive.

As part of the same relentless drive for modernisation, £1.65 billion is spent each year to meet such pledges as one computer for every three secondary school pupils.

That this faith in IT might be misplaced was highlighted this week when the £24 million Brunel Academy in Bristol — one of the Government's flagship "wireless" schools — announced that it had reverted to pen and paper.

The headteacher, Armando Di-Finizio, described technology as a "white elephant" and complained he had yet to see a school where wireless worked. The most efficient way to keep tabs on children, he had found, was not a swipe card system but an old-fashioned register.

Tony Blair's big idea in education was never choice or access, and certainly not investment in teaching, but modernisation of precisely this sort. (This despite, or more likely because of, the fact that by all accounts he could barely switch on a PC.) We undoubtedly live in exciting times for gadgetry. But relentless neophilia distracts from the fact that new technology is expensive and fallible. Teachers constantly complain about losing control of classes as they wire up laptops, crash, click, reboot, abort

Short of being some kind of Luddite, I was among the first generation of kids to grow up with computers. When the school patronised us with IT lessons, we had a better grasp of what they could do than the teachers did — and perhaps a more sober view of their limitations.

Certainly, I consider myself lucky to have been among the last academic years to use libraries and write out essays longhand, to learn patient reasoning and research. As we seek to replace lovely durable books with expensive, expendable iPads and teachers with robots, it's worth remembering the story of Nasa's space pens. The Americans spent millions developing a writing impliment that would work in zero gravity. The Russians had a far better solution. Their cosmonauts simply took up a pencil.

Salute to straight guy Sacha

Curious to see Sacha Baron Cohen at the Evening Standard Film Awards on Monday night. When he collected the Peter Sellers Award for Comedy for his performance in Brüno, he was dressed not in lederhosen or a mankini but in an ordinary suit. He did not sodomise a Filipino, brandish an African orphan or speak through his penis, but instead appeared to be a well-brought-up Jewish man from north London, a bit luvvie-ish, but essentially down-to-earth. And yet, for some reason, this performance was completely compelling.

Broken Britain is pure Chekhov

A Populus poll published in the Times yesterday offered some fascinating insights into "Broken Britain". Some 70 per cent agreed that society is indeed "broken". However, people were generally upbeat about the future: 55 per cent thought their children's lives would be better than theirs (37 per cent worse) and 60 per cent viewed the future with optimism (37 per cent with anxiety).

The most striking statistic was that 42 per cent said they would emigrate if they could. Forty-two per cent?! Would any other Western country have such a high figure?

In sum, it paints a strangely Chekhovian picture of the country. Like the Three Sisters we pine to leave our drab surroundings and make grand speeches about the future — and yet we are doomed to stay put. It's worth remembering that Chekhov insisted that his play was "a comedy".

A prelate wasted on the church

Poor Rowan Williams. The Archbishop of Canterbury urged tolerance over the issue of women and gay bishops at General Synod yesterday. The more regressive elements find the prospect outrageous; liberal Anglicans criticise him for indecisiveness. He is bitch-slapped from both sides — and, of course, subject to the usual adolescent ridicule of the atheist movement.

And yet he remains the most sane and dignified person in high office in the country. He has spoken wisely against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, corporate greed, the sexualisation of children through consumerism and homophobia — and he does so with a subversive wit. Advising Tony Blair to read Dostoevsky after his Chilcot inquiry appearance was particularly treasurable.

No doubt his Christian critics will take the endorsement of a non-believer as proof of some failing or other. But I can't help thinking he is wasted on the church.