You can see the government's point of view. Why waste a year training someone to be a teacher when everyone knows it only takes half that? I mean, what's to learn? Any halfwit can stand in front of a class of 13-year-olds and teach them basic maths. You just hand the kids a calculator and tell them to get on with it. And if that doesn't work, you start shouting at them. Easy.
So easy, in fact, that you're probably starting to wonder if maybe six months isn't a ridiculously indulgent waste of time. How about you get fired from RBS on a Friday afternoon and start teaching the following Monday?
In fact, who needs a real teacher when now you can just as easily get a robot to do the job?
A professor at Tokyo University has just built a life-like robot teacher, tenderly named Saya, who comes pre-programmed with six different emotions – five more than the average government minister – and can easily deal with the demands of taking the register and keeping the kids under control. "Children even start crying when they are scolded," Saya's creator, Hiroshi Kobayashi, said proudly.
It's not hard to imagine the excitement all this could cause in the Department for Children, Schools and Families, not least because Kobayashi also went on to say: "The robot has no intelligence. It has no ability to learn. It has no identity. It is just a tool." As this just happens to be the DCSF's idea of the perfect teacher, it's only a matter of time before it comes here.
