Devil in the detail

So psychologist Guy Claxton believes that erasers are an instrument of the devil. I can understand why he thinks so. After all, erasers (or to use a term that Americans titter over - rubbers), cover up a multitude of sins. Children can quite easily work their way through a problem, erasing their mistakes as they go, and end up with a seemingly perfect piece of work. Claxton believes that erasers 'create a culture of shame about error' and believes it promotes dishonesty. OK, so this very much sounds like a storm in a teacup and a seemingly trivial battle to fight when there are much more important areas of concern to engage with in education. And yet, some would argue that Claxton has made an important point. Students can, and should, learn through their errors, and sometimes, showing a full working of a problem complete with errors, has a certain pedagogical power. Should errors be covered up? Students should sometimes be given permission to fail, because in so doing they learn how to do something better the next time. I wrote about this some months ago when I bemoaned the fact that only children's perfect pieces of art are seen on display in school reception areas. Little Sarah's picture looks wonderful, but you don't get to see the five previous, crap attempts she made to paint that beautiful swan. The school celebrates the product of her learning, but conveniently hides the messy process.

But if we start banning erasers from schools, what then do we do with computers? Will we need to remove the delete and backspace keys on all the keyboards in the ICT Suite? Do we need to deprive students of the provisionality that all wordprocessors offer? There would be Hell to pay if we did. After all, the ability to continually iterate versions of text or image is part of the creative process. Even better if each version can be preserved to be shown as a process of discovery or creativity that is equally valued alongside the finished product.

Clearly it is nonsense to ban any technology, even simple tools such as erasers, just because they seem to pose some threat to authentic learning. The product is important but so is the process, so why can't both be celebrated equally, and the technologies that brought our students to the point of success not acknowledged? Erasers, just like pencils, computers, whiteboards, sugar paper and pinboards, all have a role to play in the education of our students. The best teachers know that each resource should be used wisely for specific purposes, and none should be overused. There are often simple solutions to the complex problems academics raise. So for now, let's not ban the eraser, but if you insist, perhaps you should ask your students to work their problems through in indelible ink? The devil is in the detail.

Photo by Alex Morfin on Wikimedia Commons


Devil in the detail by Steve Wheeler was written in Liberec, Czech Republic and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.