Livingstone Hopes: Why Eidos' President is opening a school

[imadaman]

[quote]Whilst his role at the company has become less involved since Eidos' acquisition by Square-Enix, Livingstone has been anything but complacent. Turning to the role of industry elder statesman, Livingstone has played a major part in the reformation of the UK's IT curriculum, advising the government on the best way to properly implement training and education in order to raise new generations of creative, technologically literate Britons to take over the mantle of established creators like himself.

In addition to that, he sits on the boards of six major UK bodies which shape industry and government policy, still managing to find time to mentor independent developers on the pitfalls of the modern industry. Oh, and he's managed to pick up an OBE and a CBE along the way. Not too shabby.

In short, he'd be forgiven for taking a well-earned rest, but instead he's taking on an entirely new endeavour: looking to found a free-school in London's Hammersmith borough, which hopes to embrace new methods of teaching to engage children with the core skills of STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Mathematics) that form the core of the needs of the modern workplace.

The Livingstone School makes its application to government today, with the hope being that a success will mean launching for the first year of pupils in September of 2015. We caught up with the tireless veteran for an insight into his motivations for entering education at the coal face, and why he thinks that things need to change.
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[quote]"The school curriculum for ICT had been letting us down as an industry and as a nation - teaching kids how to consume technology but giving them no insight into how to use it creatively - or to create their own technology."
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[quote]"People are forced to learn a multitude of facts, which are largely irrelevant, in order to pass these random memory tests, exams which are basically a lottery - far more to do with league tables than actual learning. That was fine in the Victoria era, when the talk and chalk was designed to fulfil the needs of an industrial society in which children were processed, sent to work in factories where they all needed to know the same skills."
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