Cyber Security
Teaching cyber hygiene in schools Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime. - Maimonides
By Emily Major-Goldsmith Ambassador and Presenter at Edith Cowan University
As of 2018, the Australian Curriculum Council implemented a mass roll out of a new element to both the Primary and Secondary School curriculums. Gone are the days when children were taught only Mathematics, English, Humanities and Science. The digital age has brought with it the need for a new generation of teaching. Children from Kindergarten through to Year 10, are beginning to be taught skills within the digital technology sphere. The new curriculum teaches elements such as; acquiring, analysing and visualising data, understanding and designing algorithms, creating user interfaces, along with much more. The previous, now reformed, curriculum encouraged students to study digital technology degrees at university. However, pupils were entering higher education with little to no understanding as to what such degrees entail. Students left high school with very little knowledge as to the content of the degrees, or what digital technology encompassed. Hence, throughout university, students would have to learn an extensive amount of both basic and advanced skills to catch up to the required level of information and understanding needed to enter the workforce. Whilst this method left students with a good amount
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of information gathered, in most cases there was a lack of knowledge about how to apply it in real world scenarios. Our new generations will now be taught a sizeable amount of information regarding some important skills needed to navigate the digital world during Primary and High School, hopefully freeing up their university studies to focus on teaching more specific subjects, providing more practical and applicable knowledge and real-world experience. Although this appears to be a marked improvement on the previous position, for me it doesn’t go far enough. The focus still appears to be on the new technologies and their merits. What we are failing to do through education, and as a society in general, is equip young people with the skills needed to understand the dangers, the loop holes and the backdoors associated with digital technology. In this changing field of education - - If you teach a man to fish, you will feed him for a life time. What happens when you teach a child about digital technology? Will they end up being someone else’s phish? Consider this – if a fish is taught to swim, probably through watching its other sea creatures and being guided by its parents it, has gained a valuable life lesson. However, if it only ever learns how to swim, it is likely to swim too far and wander into shark infested waters. Now, if the fish had been taught to swim, but also been taught not to stray too far from its home base, to stay with the other fish and not to make friends with ocean predators, they could
