I have been trying to visualise what new Rudd year ten classrooms will look like: 25 laptops with their screens up, students hiding behind them, and teachers talking to what they can see — 25 machines.
What a depressing sight.
Today's teacher has to survive in a world of gimmickry. Students pay better attention to ringtones than to the human voice. They expect colour pictures and flashing graphics rather than pen and whiteboard. So a good teacher must learn to tap into short attention spans. In my case, an Irish accent and some quaint expressions helped, but teachers must use whatever they can.
I knew some senior boys once who kept a note of the odd statements of their favourite teacher. At the end of the year they presented them to him. Did he change? Not on your life — if his class remembered his bizarre comment on a passing helicopter it was possible they might also recall his enthusiasm for Jane Austen.
Good teachers need to be good actors. They must be able to do comedy as readily as drama, whispers as well as shouts; to be Jim Hacker one day and Sir Humphrey the next. Absentmindedness and even crankiness, real or feigned, can be effective so long as they are not overused.
Over time the teacher will create a mystique about themselves, a set of stories to be passed on. They will let slip that they follow Essendon or South Sydney, can't stand boy bands or Kylie Minogue or Big Brother, but love pan pipes and Scottish dancing — the more uncool the better.
Whether these preferences have any bearing on fact is irrelevant: they are ways teachers reveal themselves. They give students the impression that they know the teacher and can tap into a weakness. Frank McCourt, who survived in New York schools, put it well: 'They may like you; they may even love you. But they are young and it is the business of the young to push the old off the planet.'
I applaud Mr Rudd's belief that modern education has to deal with the world of ringtones and Facebook. But while the promise of a laptop for every student in their last four years of high school was politically smart, it was educationally naive.
That the states would come up with a shopping list of extra money to get the scheme to work