January 27

BUT WHY STOP there? Why only seven classes? Surely the number of classes to which a teacher can broadcast his lessons via a video screen is unlimited?

Why, in that case, not have one teacher broadcast the physics lesson for the day to all physics classes in that grade throughout the whole school system? It would be a real time and effort saver.

And why not go one further step? Why not record the lecture and then we will need the teacher only once.

After that we can play the same recording on the appropriate day every year.

Of course some students may not understand the lecture entirely and may want to ask questions.

City University's approach addresses this problem by allowing questions on its seven-class video sessions after screening of those questions by teaching assistants placed in every classroom.

But it is only partially solved this way as it is a daunting challenge for any student to stand up, ask for a microphone, and then risk showing his ignorance to seven classes by asking a silly question or, worse yet, risk antagonising the teacher by asking a question that may very publicly display the teacher's own ignorance. We cannot have that.

The problem is fully solved quite easily, however. Instead of playing the lecture through a video screen at the front of the classroom, equip each desk with a cheap computer and run the lecture on these, directly in front of each student. Surely the education department has enough funds for this. It is big on IT education after all.

What we can then have is a little FAQ (frequently asked questions) box at the bottom of every screen. Monitor the questions, analyse them, and after a few years you will know what 98 per cent of the questions will be, all of them pre-answered through the FAQ box. Students will rarely need to ask questions any longer. They can just scroll down the FAQ box. The few who ask questions even then are probably just troublemakers and easily dealt with.

And why have classroom teaching assistants? Classroom discipline can be easily maintained by mounting a little camera (they are also dirt cheap now) on every one of those desk computers. Discipline assistants can then sit at some central location in the education department's offices and randomly monitor the students - 'Johnny, get that bubble gum out of your mouth!'

What a shock that will be to Johnny, a reprimand directly delivered to his personal screen in a big flashing red box. Will he dare offend again when he knows that Big Brother could be watching everything he does?

But why force Johnny to sit in a classroom at all? The personal computer can easily be placed in his home and attendance verified by requiring him to place a thumb-print on a thumb-print reader in the way that the immigration department now does things. The peep camera will take care of the rest.

And exams will be so easy too - multiple choice on screen. Potassium is (A) an element, (B) saltpetre, (C) a metal, (D) a component of fertiliser, (E) essential for neural transmission. Just tell Johnny to click the right box and disable Google searches (Beijing knows how) while he does it.

Johnny can have his score back within nanoseconds of finishing the test, all checked and marked automatically by a central computer. We will have perfect bell curve central marking on a worldwide basis with no possible errors and no teacher required anywhere. In fact we can have tests like this run at the end of every class. Goodness knows most students do little more than sit for exams these days anyway.

We can even teach English this way. The education department itself admits that most English teachers in this town cannot themselves speak English properly. Might as well give the computer a chance then.

And if English teachers say it will not suffice for writing and marking an essay on James Joyce, well, James Joyce himself couldn't write English properly. Have you ever tried to read Ulysses? In any case, communication has become verbal these days, not written. Everyone knows that, kinda like you talk, like you know, like.

Oh yes, I think it is a wonderful road on which City University has set its foot. Just a little further down that road and we can liberate millions of students all over the world from classroom bondage, leave alone liberate their teachers.

Who knows? At the end of that process we may even be able to do without students. We will just have the computers learn and do everything. There will not be much difference between students and computers by then anyway.

Bring it on, City University. Some ideas have logical conclusions. Yours certainly does.

Hurrah for robots.