This is opinion from The Machine Zone Director, Adrian Bailey
What follows is one opinion. While arguing for that personal opinion, the main purpose is to demonstrate that different question s and answers about ‘gambling harms education’ (1) can exist (rather than assuming things are really rather simple). A big question is about who has the right or the power to ask and answer such questions, design educational strategies based on what policies and on what values?
Education in schools about the risks and harms incurred from gambling and other products from industries that deliver harms needs to include all of the following:
- It must be embedded in a curriculum that develops from age five to eighteen.
- It must have a cross-curriculum approach (and not random ‘dropped in’ sessions ‘here and there’.)
- It must be consistent with the values and policies of the whole development of personal, social, health and economic education.
- It must be continually evaluated, and all evaluations must be continually evaluated.
- It must be generated and delivered by professional educationists within statutory services.
- It must be completely free of any industry involvement, including industry funding.
- Rather than ‘standing alone’ specific curriculum design should unify all major commercial determinants of harms (alcohol, tobacco, harmful food products and gambling). Education must aim to provide students with skills to interrogate industry strategies of promotion and influence such as advertising, sponsorship, marketing, political lobbying, and public relations rhetoric.
- At appropriate stages of education, students should be introduced to the scale of human pains caused by harm industries, and the economic costs to society such as through treatment and loss of productivity.
- The design and delivery of gambling products with addictive attributes should receive attention.
- No student should ever receive the messages that someone who suffers harms from gambling (or any product from harm industries) is solely responsible, bearing a personal pathology, being morally flawed or of weak character. This is particularly important in supporting students who may suffer harms already, and also who already or in the future will have close relationships with others affected. Reducing stigma is an aim of gambling education.
- Across all delivery, policies and deliveries must be precisely sensitive to the individual situations of students, a large number of whom will already be affected by industrial harms. Here, integration of pastoral resources is vital.
- Delivery should not be confined to one strand of the curriculum. For instance, media literacy and digital literacy would complement the complex strata of written and spoken word literacy(1). That is, there should be an emphasis on ‘language’ across the curriculum.
- Again, rather than being an isolated ‘subject’, learning about gambling and other industrial harms should be both an example of learning from other area, and also a springboard to discuss and learn about all aspects of students’ lives. Here, for instance, students have opportunities to consider and discuss the general scope of health determinants (including the commercial), questions of freedom and responsibility
- Much of the foregoing represents ideal aims. As with all areas that address reducing gambling harms, progress is slow, uneven and difficult. As elsewhere, in the field of education there are competing discourses, views, opinions, arguments which – as is the common way in human life – themselves impede progress. However, in practical terms, an important step would be for local education authorities to begin to add the area to professional development and training. Higher education teacher training could do likewise, and higher education research could probe the complexities of the field.
- As said at the top, the purpose of this piece is less to give answers than to suggest that important questions can be raised. Otherwise things will go on as they are, inevitably covered in positive rhetoric, and things will seem to have been already satisfactorily done so therefore nothing will need questioning.
Notes
(1) This opinion piece is about statutory education in Scottish schools. There is also 16+ education in colleges and universities, and also education in informal settings such as youth clubs.
Public health education about gambling harms is a specialist area best discussed by specialists
(2) Language here covers all written and other signs and images. Traditionally, teachers have always enabled students to ‘decode’ advertisements, and ‘read between the lines’ of news stories, public relations texts etc. Literacy itself involves far more than simply being able to read written texts: it involves understanding and the ability to spot rhetorical techniques used to influence us. Digital literacy begins with the ability to use devices and interact online; it develops to understanding why technologies seem to have the power to ‘hook’ our attention and influence our choices in life. Since the greatest harms associated with gambling occur through online ‘slots’ and other games, digital literacy is a core of gambling education.
The Machine Zone 