In This Episode
For this week’s Edition, William Moore is joined by the Spectator’s commissioning editor Lara Brown, Financial Times columnist and peer Camilla Cavendish and broadcaster and former Labour MP Gloria De Piero.
This week: are screens creating a new education divide? Lara examines the growing backlash against technology in schools. What began as an attempt to create a generation of ‘digital natives’ has left children as young as four doing reading and maths on gamified apps – despite little evidence that they improve learning. State schools are spending hundreds of millions of pounds on ‘EdTech’, while some of Britain’s leading private schools are moving back towards books, handwriting and screen-free classrooms. Are we creating a two-tier education system – books for the rich and screens for everyone else?
Also: why aren’t young people having children? Camilla discusses her new book Generation Maybe, which investigates falling birth rates around the world. She argues that the problem isn’t simply that women are choosing careers over motherhood: millions of people would like children but cannot find someone to have them with. Are we living through a ‘relationship recession’? Have men failed to keep up with women or have expectations changed? And can governments actually do anything about it?
Finally: why are we so nostalgic for the 1990s? The panel look back at Tony Blair, boozy lunches, and the millennium bug – a world before smartphones took over.
Produced by Patrick Gibbons.
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