In a debate I sponsored last week in the House of Lords, Estelle Morris pointed out: "The subjects we teach, what we call them, how we arrange them in the school day and even the amount of time we allocate to each discipline area has barely changed in almost a century." At the beginning of the 21st century, technology, alongside our understanding of how the brain works and how learning takes place, offers us unprecedented opportunities in learning and education.
All at once, science is delivering a diverse range of biotechnology, nanotechnology and information technology with a speed and convergence we could not have predicted even a decade ago. And, as always with new technologies, surrounding the opportunities are numerous pitfalls.
Already there are reports of an alarming increase in the use of prescribed and black market drugs medicating the classroom, whether it be Ritalin for enhancing concentration, Prozac for enhancing mood or Pro-vigil for extending alert wakefulness.
The problem with these drugs is that they do not target a single trait, such as mood, or concentration, or wakefulness - partly because we do not yet understand how these functions are generated as a cohesive operation in the brain. Rather, drugs manipulate, in a very broad way, the chemicals in the brain. And that, in turn, could have widespread and long-lasting effects.
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