I was aghast, aghast I tell you, when I saw this piece in the Guardian that it's taken me almost a fortnight to actually say anything about it.

Pupils to study Twitter and blogs in primary schools shake-up, the headline shouted. If I wasn't in Starbucks at the time I would have shouted NOOOOOOOOO... and this is coming from a person who chanced upon an old episode of Dancing with the Stars on the weekend and suffered the agony just to watch Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak embarrass himself (think John Sergeant) and he made it all worthwhile when he said, "The geeks shall inherit the earth!"

Curriculums definitely need to be overhauled from time to time to meet new demands, but jumping on the Web 2.0 (I hate that phrase) bandwagon is such a horrifically bad idea. Impressionable young minds need to learn as much about history as they always did - what needs to change is how they learn.

There's absolutely no point 'teaching' kids how to use Twitter, Wikipedia and other social media - they're already conversant (fluent, eloquent, and so on) in all these technologies, it's the teachers who are catching up. What students need to learn is how to use them as tools and how to distinguish fact and rigorous study from rumour and outright lies. And that's what traditional study can give you.

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