A 1996 speech by Seymour Papert at the 92nd Street Y in New York City.
Seymour Papert: Good evening and thank you very much. What I’d like to talk to you about gives me certain pride problems. One is that a lot of what I wanted to say is that it’s an absurd way to determinate knowledge to have a person like a teacher stand up in front of a bunch of people who sit there and listen. What I’d much rather be doing is creating a learning experience for all of you, that would let you experience a different kind of learning, a different feel for a learning experience. Can’t do it, so I have to stand up here and talk.
At towards the end of the talk, I’m going to show you some demonstrations on the screen. Oh, I think we don’t want … Who’s do- … Can we turn? I don’t want this at this … It’s very distract- … Although, since we have it, let’s … Since it’s there, let me change just a little … Which would I prefer? Well, since we got there, turn it on again.
Seymour Papert: That raises an important point to remember when we talk about technology. I think, and it’s going to be the theme of what I’m going to say to you, that this technology is going to transform. I’m not recommending that it will or should. I am saying it is going to transform learning in extremely deep ways, and it’s going to transform our ideas about what children can learn, when they should learn it, how they should learn it, and since the family is the initial place where learning happens, it’s going to transform the nature of the family. In which direction? I think that cannot be predicted. That’s a matter for choice. To a large extent, it’s a political question.
Partly, what I’m doing here is making a political speech, and maybe one with more content than with some of the others that we’ve been hearing in this season. Well, now we connect, we clicked, and we came to a different site, which is a site connected with my new book, The Connected Family. One of the aspects of this site is to change the … one of its intentions, to change the way in which in our culture, we talk about issues like the computer, like learning, like education, and one way in which we can see that this technology helps us do it, is just by … This is our index, our directory for this website.
Seymour Papert: Let’s turn this off. Let’s turn this off and let’s pretend. I think we can imagine what we would see. The point is that the pace of discussion and the extent to which people can participate of discussion of such things is greatly opened and expanded by the presence of the technology. The thumb issue comes up. This book appears. It’s reviewed in the New York Times. Within hours, people all over who haven’t got the New York Times can read it and can put online for other people to read, their own views, reactions, to the book, to the review.
Reviewing the book stops being something that’s confined to special people whose special job is reviewing books. Everybody can, including small children, and everybody can comment on these reviews in the public way. I think it’s a system of a different mode of [inaudible 00:08:39]. As you notice, we have to remember that the technology, I believe … I believe that the technology, including these microphones is really going to make these vast transformations, but we must also remember that we are just on the threshold.
This technology really doesn’t work yet. You have to look at it in, say, the spirit of imagine that it’s 19 four, and the Wright Brothers have just made their ridiculous little short hop in their airplane, a useless act. But, in that useless act with some imagination, one could see a transformation of the whole globe, a transformation for good, and a transformation for evil. I think that if we’re going to discuss seriously the position of technologies in relation to learning, we have to think of the long historical process, from 19 four. It took until maybe the 1940s, 50s, before aviation really could be visibly seen to be a force transformative of the nature of transportation. Up until then, it was just a promise.
With that image in mind, I want to say something about the way in which technology and learning is being discussed in general, in our society. Now, in general, I mean in all the books that are published, in newspaper articles, in everywhere. There is very little appreciation of a sense of process from situating ourselves somewhere by analogy with the history of aviation, somewhere along that continuum from 19 four, to say, 1954. Where would we put ourselves? My guess is somewhere like in the 1930s, maybe when the DC3 was made, the first really great transportation airplane, but great in its promise, not yet able to transform the world.
If aviation had been judged at that time by what real effect, what real contribution that airplane was making to the world, it would’ve been a clear decision, “This thing is useless. It’s a waste of money. It’s a waste of time. It’s a lot of bally hoo. Forget about it. Let’s go back to improving the horse drawn carriage or the railroad or whatever it might be.” It continually surprises and shocks me that serious people talking about technology in schools do not preface their thinking by situating themselves in such a process. 99 or more percent of the discussion talks as if what you see out there now is what we are judging.
Naturally, those judgments are ultimately quite meaningless. In this book … I guess I’m allowed to advertise a little bit. In this book, I use three characters. It’s a story in which three characters play an important role. These three characters are the cybertopian, the cybercritic-
Beth Teitelman: Let me ask you to step back on the stage.
Seymour Papert: Oh.
Beth Teitelman: [inaudible 00:12:36].
Seymour Papert: The cybertopian, the cybercritic, and the cyberostritch. Now, you all know these people. For the cybertopian, it’s just all wonderful, raves, raves, raves, everything has changed. I was verging on talking like that in my first few sentences. Maybe, who’s a great model cybertopian? Alvin Toffler, you know you read these books about the third wave, the world is changing. We’re in the information age. School is going to be totally different. Then when you try and say, “Well, in what way? Will there be a lot of computers? What’ll that do? Everything’ll be different.”
There’s no substance, no real thinking about the substance, and no concession to the fact that there are serious problems and unless we face these problems, it isn’t going to happen. It’s as if the technology is going to bring marvels about and I’d like to use a word for that. Technocentricism, it’s a technocentric way of thinking that the technology can bring about changes. Well, it’s not surprising that the cybertopians, or the technotopians are technocentric. What is more surprising is that the cybercritics, tis the people who criticize, tend to be even more technocentric.
A typical kind of example is recently I looked … If you look at the recent deathabobooks that’ve been published, like Postman for example, who has made I think … I greatly admire amusing ourselves to death and teaching as a subversive activity. He’s a really sharp and witty critic of overblown ideas about education, and about media. In his recent book, The End of Education, which is a witty title because it uses a pun that I want to pick up and integrate into this talk. The End of Education has two meanings. One is the purpose to what end do we learn, and the other is finished. There’s nothing to it. His play on words is saying, “Unless we give more attention to the purpose to what end are we doing it, education is not going to work and it’s going to get worse and worse.” In our schools, we are paying less and less attention to the purpose, the end, and more and more attention to technicalities and details and making national curricula and all sorts of stuff of that sort.
Now, in this book, which obviously I think highly of, of this perspective, he’s absolutely right. When he comes to discuss technology and the computer, he has a little chapter which talks about the history of something that you would call electronic pedagogy, or electronic teaching. He tells us a story of how Edison himself predicted that quite a while ago, he predicted that, “In a few years the textbook and the teacher will be obsolete and replaced by the filmstrip and other similar technologies.” Now, says Postman after giving a series of other examples of that sort, he says, “Well, you see we’ve had heard the story before. Technology has always held up this promise of revolutionizing education and learning. It never has, so why do we take this one seriously? We’ve got one more false God. I know a false God when I see one,” he says, and in this way, the computer is dismissed.
If it were only Postman, this wouldn’t be serious. There’s been a whole series of publications, like a very scholarly book by Tyack and Cuban called Tinkering Towards Utopia, that was given a prestigious award by Harvard last year, when it appeared. Also tells the same story about Edison’s prediction and somehow, thinks that this is relevant to computers and what we would expect from them. I’d like to pick up on the logical peculiarity of that discussion. Why does anything about filmstrips and audio visual labs and television … Why has that got anything to do with computers?
Well, because they’re also made of metal, or what? Why should we throw these things together? There really isn’t any good reason, except for technocentric thinking that in some sense, they’re all technologies and it’s not even very good technocentric thinking because the piano is also a technology and so is the blackboard, and so is pencil and paper and printing press and those aren’t lumped together and don’t say, “Well, those technologies failed.” It somehow though, modern technologies, things that were invested since some of the readers of the book were born, or since the writer of the book was born, have a special category and are considered to be sufficiently the same so that if the sins of one are visited on the other, and the merits of one are reflected on the other …
Well, I’d like to say this is as wrong as possibly could be that the computer is as opposite as one could imagine to any of those other things that are lumped together as electronic pedagogy is, technologies for teaching. My main theme is going to be that the computer plays the opposite role to all those other technologies and I’m going to look at that from a number of different points of view. The first one is sees a certain opposition between teachers and learners. Was all those other things, the filmstrip used in the classroom, for example. This is a teacher’s instrument. Now, the computer can also be a teacher’s instrument. The computer can be something else. It can be a learner’s instrument and it can liberate the learner from the restrictions of the teacher.
Now, I’m not going to put down teachers. I think they’re important and I’ll talk about many ways in which they will be liberated to have a bigger role and fulfill their function more deeply because of this technology. I think the technology is inconsistent or can be used in ways that are inconsistent with the traditional concept of the teacher as the one who knows, as the one who hands out information and knowledge to the assembled students in a classroom. I’d like to emphasize that that’s that point from a number of different angles. Before doing that, I want to introduce my third character, the cyberostritch. Now the cybercritic says the cybertopians says it’s all wonderful and the cybercritics says it’s all bad. It lead us down the path, lead us down again. Measure what it’s doing. It’s doing nothing compared with its car, et cetera, et cetera, so bad. The cyberostritch is the more subtle person and there’re many more cyberostritchs.
The cyberostritch is the person who puts their heads in the sand and just refuse to see that this thing has tremendous implications. Typical cyberostritch is the school administrator who says, “We’ve got to computerize our school. We’ll get a classroom. We’ll fill it up with computers and the kids will spend two hours a week in the classroom.” Now, that might be good, it mightn’t be good, depending what they do. At its best, it’s a very minor reflection of what the computer really can do. The cyberostritch fails to see the depth of what can be done. A kind of remark that the cyberostritch often makes when I give talks like this, following: I, one of my themes and we circle around this theme, is that the entire concept of school as we know it is based on an obsolete kind of technology. By school as we know it, I mean almost everything you imagine.
When you think of school, that there’s a classroom, that we segregate children by age, that we segregate, that we fragment knowledge by subjects. We fragment the day into periods. All these are thoroughly inamicable to any common sensical view of good conditions for work or for learning. The proof is that if I were to say to you, “I’m not going to talk to you until we segregated all the people between 20 and 23 sit there, and then the 23 to 26,” you’d laugh at me and you’d refuse to do it. Why do we do this to children? Well people give all sorts of funny reasons like, “It’s for socializing.” Well, it’s funny while you’re socializing. It means that when you’re seven, you’ll spend a whole year learning how to deal with seven year-olds. Then the next year, we’ll put you among eight year-olds and you’ll never see a seven year-old again in your life, so everything you learned last year, throw it away. You’ll learn a new lot of stuff. Well clearly that can’t be the kind of justification. That isn’t the kind of justification.
The real reason is that for historical, all sort of historical circumstances, the only way in which we could deliver, knowl- … we could give young people the knowledge that society seems to need, is by fragmenting it into little pieces and handing it out, systemically. If you’re going to hand it out systematically, you’d better divide the kids up. You’ll get this in your sixth year, and you’ll get this in your seventh, and you’ll get this in your eighth year. Then to periods and into pedicular and all this, I am going to maintain is only done because the knowledge technologies that we had, dictated that we should do it. This is entirely a product of a technological epoch, the technology of print and blackboards and all the rest dictated that. That’s my primary thesis from another point of view.
Well, now so I tell this story and then the cyberostritch says, “What about now? Tell me concretely how will these computers, say in the year 2030, how will they teach the third grade math curriculum?” Then you want to tear your hair out because there won’t be such a thing as a third grade and there won’t be such a thing as math, and there won’t be such a thing as a curriculum. There’ll be very little of teaching, there. There’ll be learning. There’ll be children acquiring knowledge that isn’t cut up into fragments. There’ll be children working with people of many different ages and many different levels of expertise so they can learn from one another so that they can engage in projects together as the best learning happens, as the learning before children come to school, which is the extraordinarily successful period of learning when children, siblings of different ages, and parents, and in the good old days, grandparents and great grandparents, all were in the same kind of interaction and out of this, excellent learning took place.
The same thing happens when you look at a scientific research institute or an art institute, or a business. Wherever in the real world, where people are doing things they don’t do this fragmentation and this, and the segregation. It is only at school and we have to think about, “Why is that,” and if I’m right in saying that the reason has a lot to do with technologies, then we have to re-think some very fundamental things, much more fundamental than how to improve the teaching of third grade math in the near or distant future. Well, let me be a little more concrete about how I really imagine children learning mathematics. I’ll give you a concrete example, which I’m not going to try to … I don’t think we need burnt our figures with the technology.
About 30 years ago, I came to MIT from Europe and I had this mind boggling experience of being able to get at a personal computer. Now, it wasn’t a little thing on a desktop. It was a multi million dollar … It was a very expensive device and it was big. I could use it in my personal … I could take it, and I could use it all by myself for as long as I wanted to, and that was a revelation. I found that I could do all sorts of things that had been hanging me up in the past and it was a great sense of liberation and empowerment. I became obsessed with the idea that if children could have that similar empowerment and that similar intellectual liberation, wouldn’t that be a wonderful thing? I began thinking, “How can we give children the kind of access to computers that will enable them to have that experience?”
At the time, this is the 1960s. There was of course already a lot of talk about computers and education. The talk about computers in education was entirely confined to the idea that the computer would be a kind of automated teaching machine, a kind of automated flash card, if you really want to be, take the worst case, but that’s unfair. It’d be better than a flashcard, but it would essentially, the computer would be in charge and it would be automating and improving on maybe some aspects, the most wrote and mechanical aspects of what we do in school. My idea was very different. Let’s not let the … The computer’s not going to be something will teach the kid, anymore than, say, a piano teaches music. Piano doesn’t teach music. Piano creates, is a medium and an environment in which you can learn to make music, learn to express yourself, musically. The pencil doesn’t teach you anything. It’s a medium and an environment in which you can … makes possible intellectual expansion because you can draw diagrams and you can calculate and you can keep notes. I think of the computer like that.
This is very different from a teaching machine. It doesn’t fit this idea of electronic pedagogy in the slightest. Well, so what do we do about that? What I was trying to do in those days was make the kind of … Well, first thing was to make a programming language. The kids to take control of this machine and to use a slogan that I took a long time to formulate like that, I want the children to program the computer. I don’t want the computer to program the children. What I see being done all over the place, the computer’s being used to program the children. The computer will program you to recognize numbers, do arithmetics, spell, et cetera, et cetera. When you put the children in charge so that they can have a sense of power in what is carry out complex projects. We invented a programming language called Logo that would be accessible to children.
At that time, for all sorts of reasons, we could only do very little projects. Children could have access to this programming language for maybe a few hours. It was very difficult, practically, to have real conditions of learning. It’s not surprising that people have looked at that as somebody might’ve looked at the Wright Brothers airplane as if this was the actual final product that aviation was about, judged that learning to program was not a serious endeavor, and it didn’t do kids any good. Well, I think it did do them some good, even in these very limited doses. What they were seeing then was only the Wright Brothers plane. It wasn’t a Concord or a jumbo jet. I haven’t got to the Concord or the jumbo jet, but we’ve made significant progress.
Idit Harel, who was trying to make this, and who was my graduate student for a while, took a big step forward by creating a paradigm for children to work, using Logo that took a big step towards the jumbo jet, rather than the right flyer. What she did, in a inner-city public school was to create conditions where children could for maybe an hour a day, for a whole school year, work on a large programming project so that they were really software designers. They were making, in fact, educational software. They had the experience of undertaking a complex project, of learning to program the computer in the course of doing it, and thinking a lot about the process of learning and teaching, which might be the most important aspect of it.
This has been an evolving project. In a later phase, Yasmeen Pfaffii, another graduate student, working with the Idit Harel shifted the content of the software children were making to making computer games. This has turned out, I think, to be a real big breakthrough, because children think computer games are important. In fact, they are important. They’re a multi billion dollar industry. People who make the computer games are important people in the world let children make the computer games. It turns out the children will enthusiastically, if you can create good conditions for this. Learn what is necessary to make a real computer game.
This, as we’re moving closer to children actually using the computer as a creative material. We’re working now on questions like, “Well, in order to make computer game, what kind of knowledge do you need to draw on?” Let me tell you ane example that I really like is we’ve done quite a lot of work on is the following situation: Suppose you’re trying to make one of these Nintendo kind of Mario Brothers kind of games where there’s a character that runs across the screen, missiles come, chasms appear, the character’s got to jump. What’s a jump? What does it mean to jump? Is a jump moving like that, or is it moving like that? All of a sudden, when you think about making this character jump, you run into a kind of question that you’d never heard of before, namely the shape of a traject … There’s a word for it in mathematics, trajectory. The shape of the invisible path traced out by that jumping figure, wham. We’re in some real mathematics.
We’re getting to some real serious mathematics in thinking about how to make that. It turns out to be parabolic, but by the time you get there, you’ve gone through a lot of ideas which I don’t have time to dig into. What I do want to dig into and emphasize is that these kids, in order to make their game fond, we need to understand about the shapes of trajectories. When you understand this piece of mathematics now, today, and nothing could be in sharper contrast with the curriculum idea where you learn a particular piece of knowledge because it is now the 17th of May and you’re fifth grade, and it’s written down somewhere that on the 17th of May in the fifth grade, this is what you learn. There’s a world of difference between that and learning it when you need it. Just in time, learning to adapt a phrase from business management.
Well, this is, I would say, a radical shift. It’s a radical shift in several ways. It’s a radical shift first of all, as mathematical knowledge becomes something that you do need, which wasn’t the case before so. It’s meaningful knowledge. Secondly, you need it at a particular time and you’ve got to know it then. This doesn’t fit with the curriculum project, but how can we have an alternative? How is it possible for, since every kid will be needing knowledge at every different time? How can they possibly get this knowledge? This is where another side of the computer presence comes into play. The computer has solved a problem by creating another, but it also gives us the means of solving this problem.
They hint at a solution, is a next phase in the same project that we’ve been running in our MIT research group, which has been run by another graduate student, called Michelle Evard, who has set up a sort of little, tiny baby internet. It works like this: That if you’re trying to work on your game and you’ve got a problem, you might ask your neighbor, the next kid, the other kid, how do you … If you get an answer, you get an answer. If you don’t get an answer, you can send this problem into cyberspace, into this network she’s created.
Then there’s other kids, maybe somebody in your class, maybe somebody who did this project last year, so we’re breaking out of the age segregation. In principle, maybe somebody at the other end of the world, although she’s only doing it on a local scale, but somebody, somewhere, knows the answer to that question and is interested in sharing that knowledge. We can get knowledge in a different way. We have a different relationship to that knowledge. This does not mean that we don’t need teachers. With teachers, there’s a consultant. There’s an advisor setting standards, setting values, saying to you, “You know, you could be doing better than that. Why don’t you look at this idea, there,” or all sorts of advice of all sorts, but not handing out bits of knowledge in neatly packaged little pieces.
I think any teacher would rather be doing that, if it could be so arranged. This is a transformation of a very deep, radical sort. It puts in question the entire fundamental set of concepts of our schools. The very idea of school is grades, and curriculum, and teachers, and classrooms, and all the rest. Just think, the first thing you ask when you meet a kid, “What grade of you in,” seems come tripping off the lips as a natural … as if this was an important part of the nature of a being that you’re in a particular grade. It needn’t be, and shouldn’t be, and this is a reflection of a particular period that we are going to move out of. Maybe it’ll take a long time.
The cyberostritch, who thinks we’re going to improve the teaching … well, I didn’t say it again. That’s the concept of the cyberostritch, who thinks we’re just making improvement in school, whereas what we’re really doing is … what you’re really seeing here is an instrument that will subvert the very idea. Excuse me. Another piece of technology got lost. Well, I’d like to look at this from yet another angle. I should think of a child in a family growing up. Baby is born, and from day one, this baby begins to explore the world, begins to learn in a self-driven, self-motivated, exploratory mode. The child explores everything within reach, picks up objects, bites them, sucks them, throws them, does everything possible and really thoroughly explores this immediate world of objects and people and words and language and noises and jokes and relationships. It’s a narrow world.
Soon, questions start coming up that go beyond the small world. In my previous book, The Children’s Machine, I use as the kind of central metaphor, a child who at a preschool heard that I grew up in Africa and couldn’t wait to ask me, “Do you know how giraffes sleep?” Well, children will ask themselves questions like this all the time. She’d seen a picture of a giraffe. She’d had a puppy and the puppy slept cuddling its head. So did she. She saw this giraffe with a long neck and wondered, “Oh, poor giraffe. How can it cuddle it’s head and how does it sleep?” Like a million other questions that come into the heads of children, there isn’t anything she can do about it, because it’s outside the scope of her immediate reach. Bit by bit, children’s questions, their need for knowledge, drifts and opens into areas where their natural mode of learning that’s served them so well up to then is insufficient.
They move over into a different mode of dependence on adults, dependence on more verbal learning, ask questions. People might tell you the answer. You might believe them or they might have time, but that’s all you can do. The ultimate end of that is school, where you’re going to stop learning and start being taught. We’re learning if learning means what these children do so naturally, you’re going to give up your control of it, hand yourself over to somebody else. Well, let’s call that stage two in the development of an individual’s relationship to knowledge. Stage one is self-driven, nonverbal, exploratory learning. Stage two is this dependent, highly verbal schoolish kind of learning.
Now, in this course of schoolish kind of learning, you actually learn some skills that might enable you to break out of that restriction if you have managed to retain your curiosity and your learning drive, which many children do not, because you learn to read. You learn to read and you have research skills. You can now go to a library. You can read books. You can create this wider reality because you’ve gone through this rather dangerous crossing of where you had to be dependent on other people, but then if you survive it, you open out in to this new wider world. Well, I think the primary role of the computer can be seen as making unnecessary to go through that second stage. There’s children can begin to get access to knowledge without their dependence and reading will always, no doubt, be important in the foreseeable future, and it’s not the only way.
Again, in this book, I sort of opened it with something I call learning story, like love stories. They are learning stories and through learning stories, we develop our sensitivity to learning, like adventure stories and love stories develop that side of us. This learning story is about my grandson, three at the time. Not even at a computer, he went and he took a video tape and put it in the VCR and spent 30 minutes looking at road construction machinery. Now, there’s something really remarkable about that was when I think when I was three, I couldn’t do anything remotely like that. If I sort of got a hankering, “I want to know about road construction machinery,” nothing to do about it and I could ask an adult. Good luck. I could maybe wait one day. We’d go for a drive with the family and I’d see some by the roadside, maybe. This kid can do something different. He can, by his own decision, decide to spend that half hour looking at road. That’s just little beginning with this VCR.
Being able to click into an internet, into a website, extends it further and I think we see through the incident, a little peep at a future in which children will take, be able independently, to make connections with knowledge. Well, all these are different visions from the same side. I’d like to emphasize that we don’t have the technology for … and, it’s more than technology. It’s not true that a child that four year-old today could use the world wide web to find out how giraffes sleep because how would you do it? You’d get Yahoo and enter giraffe. Well, no. That’s not the way. We need to develop interfaces. I was going to show you one, but I’m scared to try machines again. You can. Since you all seem to be familiar with the web, you can see it yourself by visiting the Mama Media website.
Mama Media’s a group run by Idit Harel, the same one I mentioned before, who they’re trying to develop something like a search engine that would be better matched to the needs of a child, of children of different ages. That’s just roping, but that’s the area we’re going in. If we want to think seriously about what this technology’s about, we’ve got to think ahead and think, “Where can that lead us? What would the consequences be?” The one on which I want to emphasize and want to end, these … I promise to be provocative and let’s see some questions and discuss around questions.
This book has this name connected family and it’s meant to have a pun, connected makes you think of computer, connected to that computer and the computer connected to the web. But, connected in the family is the relationship between people in the family. I think that everything I’ve been saying implies that there’s a shift in the relationship between children and knowledge and adults in the family, in the school, in the society. We are moving into a different ballpark. I think it would be absurd and wrong for anybody to understand a profounder view and say, “This is the way to solve those problems. This is the way to create the family of the future.”
Families, social structures, cultures, don’t develop in that way. I mean, they’re not created. They’re not invented by someone. They grow. What I see as the role of this book, from where I’m standing up talking to you and talking to lots of other people is, to that I think we’ve got to take it seriously and not enough people are really taking seriously the idea that we do have to re-think. What is our relationship to children when they can be exploring how giraffes sleep by themselves? What happens when parts, aspects of learning, like learning math …
Most parents in the past let that be the job of the teacher, of the school. The professionals can deal with that. All of a sudden, we now have a big industry selling billions of dollars worth of software to parents who eagerly buy software that’s going to teach their kids math. Something that used to be in the school is moving into the home and these parents are making decisions. Of course, I think it’s great for parents to make decisions, but are they making them thoughtfully? I don’t think so. Is there public discussion? Very little.
This is what I’d like to precipitate. I’d like to be sure that we don’t use the computer revolution by saying that, “Instead of displacing schoolish kind of learning, instead of doing that by pushing it backwards, so that at younger and younger ages, children do the kind of learning that we’ve seen in school. Or, if we’re going to do that, that we do it on the basis of some better reasoning than that a software manufacturer managed to persuade you that if you give the child the software, the kid will learn math, and so will do better at school and so will go to Harvard one day. We need some better basis than that.
Two other examples of just to illustrate, the incredibly low-level of discussion, economics. I’ve had numerous education administrators, especially in politicians they’re just ordinary folks, make this kind of objection. They say that, “What you’re talking about requires a lot of computers. Everybody might have to have a computer. Children would … and we can’t afford that.” Well, I just want to do a bit of arithmetic with you. There’s a pure paradox in that. I like this piece of arithmetic because it shows how little these schoolish people who are running our schools have in fact, themselves, assimilated the real lessons of arithmetic. Because, their argument is arithmetically, like at grade zero level. Would it be expensive? Well, would it?
Last October, I was asked to testify at a congressional hearing on future of computer, and I made this argument and I was really soundly berated by a gentleman who turned out to be the Chairman of the President’s Committee on technology and education. I’ll tell you my argument, I’ll tell you his. [inaudible 00:52:15] this is on public record. You can read this congressional hearings. My argument is like this: In the United States of America we’re spending $7,000 a year of tax money per child on education, $7,000 on the average. In New York City, it’s probably closer to $10,000. This is not counting all the indirect costs.
A computer, you can get a pretty good computer in the store for $1,000. If we bought these in mass, surely they wouldn’t cost more than $500, and such a computer’s good for five years, at least, $100 a year. $100 a year gives every child a computer, full-time, at school, or at home. Now, $100 a year to $7,000 is between 1% and 2%. Giving every child a computer would add only a fraction less than inflation does every year to the cost of education. There might be all sorts of reasons for doing it, or for not doing it, but to say that it’s too expensive is just total nonsense and only reflects that these people who are insisting that our kids be drilled in the silly arithmetic that they teach at school have not understood themselves how to think numerically because they think that computers are expensive because compared with a pencil they cost a lot of money and by some trick of accounting, computers and pencils are put in the same budget category so computers seem incredibly expensive. It is absurd.
By the way, the gentleman at the congressional hearing said to me, first of all, that I was irresponsible in suggesting to Congress that we would give children computers at low-cost. Because industry experience shows that the life of a computer is only one and a half years and not five years, and because the average cost in industry of running a computer is through $5,000. In any case, to let five years time, the computers would be obsolete. Now, how a borage of arguments of this sort and it makes you want to tear your hair out that people in responsible positions are using this kind of reasoning. Now, let’s suppose that those computers are in some sense obsolete. Are we going to say? Would we say that because we can’t buy a Cadillac, we have to walk barefoot?
Is there any logic in saying that because we can’t afford, if that were true, even if that were true, we can’t afford to upgrade the computer every year and a half, we shouldn’t have any computers at all, or should put one computer in the classroom, or whatever other silly compromise solutions are proposed? I’m telling that story because I want you to take action and I wanted you to not let the people in the school districts you’re associated with get away with that kind of argument. But, also because I want to make a more general point. The general point is that the level of discussion of these vital issues is at a shockingly low level and I want you to not allow that to happen. With that, I’m going to ask for questions. Yes?
Male: At what age would you ideally see all of the students in possession of their own computer? Would you see that? Would the student be sharing at the age of three or would each one have a computer that she carries home, or that her mother brought in? How would you see that?
Seymour Papert: Marvin Minsky once was asked about 20 years ago if he’d made some of his usual, outrageously provocative remarks and people said, “Do you mean to suggest that in every house there’ll be a computer?” He said, “No, I mean to suggest that in every doorknob there’ll be a computer.” Interestingly, if you go into hotels these days, every doorknob does have a computer. I think every little rattle that the child has and every little doll, every child will have many computers. Now, if we mean take charge of the computer and be able to do something like communicate with it and program it, I think that from the age … As the child begins to talk, it can also talk to a computer and that there could be interesting things the child would do to it.
Let me emphasize, could be. There could also be terrible things. One of my worst nightmares is that somebody comes along with this thing called the Child Stimulator which is this little computer that you hang over the baby’s crib and this thing detects a baby’s movements and makes lights and sounds and hypnotizes the baby and holds its attention. You could make such a thing and I can imagine parents saying, “Wow, gives us peace and quiet. We can get on with our lives.” I can imagine psychologists saying, “But, it’s stimulating the children.” I can imagine all sorts of bad things. I’m not Pollyanna-ish. I’m sure bad things are going to be suggested and done, and some already are. I do think that very good things could happen with children at the very lowest ages. Yes?
Female: When we talk about equity of access to computers …
Seymour Papert: About what?
Female: When we talk about equity of access to computers, it’s always in terms of children. Rarely do we talk about the teachers and it’s ironic that teachers, if any kind of revolution is going to happen in schools or in classes. This particular issue is teachers trained is rarely addressed when it comes to buying computers, when it comes to educating. Do you have any comments on teacher equity of access and teacher and training with regards to teachers?
Seymour Papert: Well, let me first say that this sounds like quibble, but it’s I think goes a little bit deeper than a quibble. The word teacher training needs careful examination because do we train teachers to train children, or do we want teachers to do something that it’s not appropriate to call training? We want teachers to facilitate the growth and development of children. We’d hate the idea that the teachers are training children. We think of training teachers and why? Because we think of the teacher a kind of technician who is carrying out the curriculum and the educational plans of the school and so on.
I think in relation to computers, for the kind of revolution in learning that I think is bound to happen, teachers need more than anything else, you can call training in computers. They need the change to develop a whole different approach to their role, to the educational process, and I think that should be done. I think that what we should do socially is, and politically is, everything we can to create opportunities for teachers to develop their philosophies of education. I think that the trained in some New York school districts towards alternative schools provides a kind of framework in which that can happen, but it’s too limited and they can’t get access to more technical knowledge.
I’m going round and round a very complicated issue. I agree with you completely that it’s the development of teachers is absolutely essential in our schools. It’s been neglected. When I first saw personal, microcomputers in school, say, in the late 70s, invariably, you saw the computer in the classroom of a visionary teacher who want to saw that computer as a way of breaking out of the restrictions of the school. He or she maybe didn’t know how that was going to work out, but there were ideas that would … the children work on projects would cut across the disciplines and subjects and they’d do collaborative learning and all sorts of things of this sort were being done. It was a visionary teacher who was carrying out a vision.
By the mid 80s, there were … I’m not saying there were fewer visionary teachers. There were probably more visionary teachers using computers, but the dominant use of the computer, dominant presence of the computer in the school wasn’t like that at all. It had fallen into the hands of the school bureaucracy and when the school bureaucracy took control, it doesn’t use it to subvert the way of learning of school. It uses it to reinforce it. Now, we have a computer classroom with a special computer teacher, with a computer curriculum. In other words, you made the computer just another one of those school subjects. I think teaching teachers to do that better, sure, obviously. Doing it better is better than doing it worse, but that’s not a fundamental answer to a solution to a question.
I don’t think that we’re being held back because teachers aren’t given enough training in the use of computers, although I think they should be. I think we’re being held back because those teachers who would like to do something better than what school allows them to do are not given the opportunity to do so. Is that not a straightforward answer, but it’s not a straight … It’s not a really straightforward question. I’ve got another little catch phrase that I think also expresses part of my attitude to that, that I think one of the reasons why schools are bad places for children to learn is because they’re bad places for teachers to learn. If we really imagine a good education system, a good kind of learning place, it should be possible for teachers to do as much learning as anybody else is.
We don’t give them the time and we don’t give them the incentive, and we don’t give them the opportunity, and when they make the time and they make the opportunity and they give up their own energy to learn a hard things, which I’ve seen many, many thousands of teachers do, the school then doesn’t let them put into practice what they have learned and they get disillusioned and burned out. Well, some of them don’t. Some of them are heroically survive and continue, and with the greatest admiration from [inaudible 01:04:15]. Yeah?
Male: Can you tell me are there any software products on the market that are recognized at preschools openly?
Seymour Papert: Well, for preschool children there’s a … I think I could give a more complicated answer to that. When the parent asks me that, I’ve got to say, “Well, are you asking me what I can buy that I’ll give the children and that they children sink and swim with it?” I don’t want to do that. Because that’s no way to parent or to be doing. If you’re asking me as a parent, “What software can I suggest that will enable you and the child to learn together?” Then I’ve got lots of answers. Logo’s one. Hyper Studio and all the kinds of software that enable you to construct or to explore are others. If I wasn’t so suspicious, nervous now, about this technology, I would’ve shown you some examples of the newer forms of Logo, in which it’s possible for six and seven year-old children to create a really playable computer game.
Well, just very recently, working with some colleagues in Moscow, in the in student new technology there, particularly, supernov, we’ve developed … well, Sergei is the main drive for that, has developed a version of Micro Worlds, which is the latest version of Logo, that can be programmed without writing anything, entirely by using icons. You can really actually create a computer game, a playable one, using that. Or, some interesting graphics or some interesting dynamic item screen, and I think that’s an example. I mean, that’s something that kids and parents could work together with. Although, it’s not quite on the market yet. You can download … Sorry, within the next couple of weeks, I’m sure that all these technical problems will be solved and you’ll be able to download from the Connected Family site or the Mama Media site, a demo version of that software.
A little, nother little story … Another of my grandchildren, when he was less than two, he was fascinated by geometric shapes, squares and circles and triangles and … how do you say it? Parallelogram …
Male: Parallelogram.
Seymour Papert: He couldn’t say parallelogram, but he knew what it was and he struggled to say it. His little tongue couldn’t get around … Anyway, I made, because I know a little bit of pro- … I know what program is necessary for that, but it wouldn’t have needed a lot of programming skill to have done what I did for him. That is, I used Logo to make a little piece of software of our own that put shapes on the screen, exactly the shapes that he likes playing with and pushing on the keys, he could make them do things. I think there, that’s a kind of activity I’d like to see and I think that created a kind of connection with me and the child, and the child and the computer, and the child and geometry, that is richer than any program that might’ve been there to teach him what’s a square and what’s a circle, which is what most of the program, well most of the software available.
I’m not … don’t mean that they won’t … I’d give a kid Kid Pics. I’d give a kid … a slightly older kid, I’d give The Incredible Machine. I’d give some of the music programs to make music, because children like to make music, but with traditional instruments it’s very … you need a lot of dexterity skills before you can really make music, so that’s an ideal case where computers can [inaudible 01:08:41] a child into a creativity area where much sooner than you would if you had to use traditional instruments. There are plenty, so plenty. There’s a dozen, maybe two dozen. There’s some nice pieces of limited, but good software. The question isn’t which is the best software. The question is, “What are you trying to do with it?”
Male: I’m a professional programmer and I’m going to try to create some software [inaudible 01:09:16]. I’d be glad to share with anyone who [inaudible 01:09:24].
Seymour Papert: Well, I’d love to, yeah. My connectedfamily.com, this website came up today. You can send me e-mail through it, and I will respond. Yes?
Male: Sort of generally, you said that you want to see more discussion about what you’ve been talking about here. Seems to me that it’s probably too many different places on the internet where people could continue this discussion. Starting it, it might be good if everybody here has particular places to focus their energy if they wanted to react to to anything you said, see if the dialogue with you [inaudible 01:10:04] particularly use that route or website where there’s ability to post messages if you want to point people at?
Seymour Papert: Yes, connectedfamily.com. We brought it. It came up today, like all of them when they come up, it’s largely under construction but it’s alive and it’s there, and you put in your name, you can join and you can send messages. It’s www.connectedfamily.com. Connected family’s one word. Yes, there?
Female: When you were talking about sleeping giraffes, and how kids … of the frustration around when kids [inaudible 01:10:47] internet right now and search for that, can you talk more about your ideas that I guess how kids search, of how I can [inaudible 01:10:58] to think about how kids search?
Seymour Papert: How kids search? How kids could search for this kind of knowledge?
Female: [inaudible 01:11:05] find something like that.
Seymour Papert: I’m not sure. The question is …
Male: [inaudible 01:11:09].
Seymour Papert: No, the question is can I say anything about how kids search for knowledge, like how giraffes sleep. Do you mean how they do it in the present day’s world, or how they might do it in a cyber world, in a …
Female: I would think they’d be somewhat similar, wouldn’t they?
Seymour Papert: Yes, I’m sure it would be somewhat similar, and I think I have to say I don’t know the answer, and nobody really does. I can share some thoughts. One kind of thought is they don’t think hierarchically. They think more like by associations and by grouping things together. This Mama Media search engine that’s …
Speaker 6: [inaudible 01:11:59].
Seymour Papert: Oh, it came up. Now, this is an example of the kind of thing that we need to do, which is not ask a guru for the answer to the question, but the kind of experiments that we need to do to collect information. This is one attempt to make a search engine that will allow kids to search for knowledge and we’ll see how they do it and modify, make lots of other search engines that will explore other directions.
Speaker 6: You were looking for dinosaurs before you [inaudible 01:12:37] looked [inaudible 01:12:39] and there’s some websites here.
Female: We can’t hear you back here.
Male: Louder please.
Speaker 6: You can talk about that website.
Seymour Papert: This is a particular search engine. It goes from at the top, there’s this concept of the Nature Burger that is a metaphor for a sort of sandwich that has many ingredients in it. Notice these are not. These are topics, rather than categories. Save the Earth, or rainforests, or endangered species, or pets. These aren’t meant to be exclusive categories, that something belongs to one or the other, but there are associations. You might be interested in pets or in dinosaurs. If you’re interested in pets you click on pets and now the sandwich happens. The next layer is you get different kinds of pets where they might be information and you pick on one of those and try one and you get on the next layer of the sandwich, you get more stuff. Then …
Speaker 6: There’s a pet corner website, yeah?
Seymour Papert: Then you get to a somebody, somewhere out there, has made a website and this is a way into that website that here, was created by adults, but what the intention is, is that kids searing for websites with watch how they do it? Well, they’ll say how they did it and it’ll get translated into search machines of this sort. Pet Vet, please get … Well, we don’t have time to really … That’s fine. Kids don’t get upset. You know, they’re very used to things never quite work the way that they thought they would and …
Speaker 6: [inaudible 01:14:37] make their own Yahoo, yeah.
Male: [inaudible 01:14:42].
Speaker 6: Yeah, go ahead.
Seymour Papert: Okay, well that sort of … that makes a point. This is not an answer to the question. It’s an answer to the kind of thing that one should be doing in order to find more answers. Okay, I think we should have more questions just …
Speaker 6: Just for background, I look for shell and in the meantime, you can take a look.
Seymour Papert: Look for shells in the meantime, okay. Next questions, yes?
Male: Just a question, just something, I think is an example. We’re seeing information, that we have access to information [inaudible 01:15:28] technology. I think there’s a huge difference and kid is looking at this need a place called school, need a place where people are there … [inaudible 01:15:40] trust, knowledge out of this information. I disagree that kids will have access to this and will be able to construct knowledge by themselves. I do see school in that place as a very important setting to help make sense.
Seymour Papert: Wait a minute. Let’s look at that. Let’s grant you … Just knowing a fact is different from real knowledge, because real knowledge has to do with values associated with that fact, knowing what you would do with it. It’s part of a context and a structure, that sort of thing. Yes, kids need to have guidance in the development of knowledge of that sort. You said they need school. Do you think that that guidance has to take place in a building where kids are segregated by age?
Male: Not necessarily segregated by their age, but the reality I would decide is that parents can’t be at home … age time, or you know, birth group, [inaudible 01:16:40].
Seymour Papert: Yes, but the point I want to make is that I’m not saying that they will not be places where kids will go to, to have learning experiences and do things that would be rich in learning, perhaps even our future society will have kids spend, particularly kids, spend a lot of time every day for several years in the same place. Maybe we’ll even call it “school.” I’m not saying anything about that. What I’m saying is that organizing it by grades and by curriculum and by workbooks and by a teacher in front of a class, that is meaningless in the present context for making knowledge. In fact, I would say that school is the worst we see it, most schools out there. I mean, obviously some terrific schools and terrific teachers, do wonderful things. [crosstalk 01:17:41] the nature of school tends toward … What’s that?
Female: Teachers have to get used [inaudible 01:17:50].
Seymour Papert: Yeah, I’ll say so [inaudible 01:17:53] in a minute. School, I think, is the worst offender in confusing knowledge with information. Children have to learn facts. They have to learn how to add fractions. That’s not knowledge. It’s not knowledge unless you have a perspective on what mathematics is about, what fractions is about, and how you would use it, whether you would use it. In fact, knowing that hardly anyone ever uses that, I bet you never did. I bet you never divided a fraction by another fraction.
Male: Me, personally?
Seymour Papert: Personally.
Male: I don’t know, yeah I have.
Seymour Papert: When? Only in a test, only in school.
Male: No, I mean, I …
Seymour Papert: You divided a half by a third?
Male: I build things. I construct things.
Seymour Papert: So do I, but I never have to divide a half by a third.
Male: I’m not saying …
Seymour Papert: No, I know what you say. You’re saying that children need a context in which to develop knowledge and I agree one million percent. School as we know it is not the right context. Nobody in his sane mind in the 20th century who is designing a context in which children, we’re going to develop knowledge rather than information. We’d make it anything like school, except that the school thing happens to be there and happens to have an institution or roots and it’s hard to displace it and it has conceptual roots, too. When we think learning place for children, we think grade, curriculum, school. My dire tribe is not against children having guidance in learning, places where they’d learn, pressure on them to learn certain things, maybe. My diatribe is against the idea of all these assumptions that we make about how it should be done, which are built into the structure of the schools that you can see out there, and that people hardly ever question, except in the most timid sort of ways where it’s considered revolutionary to put two grades together and it’s called multi-grading.
What about abolishing grades all together? I don’t know whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing. There’s no discussion of it. Especially, there’s no discussion about the fact that the origin of that lies in particular ways of disseminating knowledge which no longer are as unique as the only ones we have, as they used to be. By the way, I think if there was that …
Speaker 6: [inaudible 01:20:44] I work six. Actually, we’ll have a URL.
Seymour Papert: Well, see there’s an example. A kid building a webpage, if you use one, you should make one. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t make one. This kind of graphic, software which isn’t on the market, but so isn’t an answer to the question, but ought to be, and many varieties have been able to do that ought to be, and will soon be, I think, so kids cannot just visit these places by surfing and jumping here and there, but can make their own and get a sense of what’s involved. By the way, on the question of children danger, that children will believe every thing that the computer tells them, I think that the answer to that is, “No, not if you’ve programmed the computer yourself.” You know what went into it. You’ll develop a healthy skepticism about what other people put into it, as well.
You know, finally about in that same category, I would say about the question that nobody asked me about, I’m glad. Nobody asked me about, “What about pornography and protecting the kids?” I think something should be said about that, too. Because although it is important maybe to protect kids, the answer to how to protect them cannot be to impose rules and have software that will restrict them. The answer has to be building trust and confidence between you and the kid, so you can trust them to tell you about what they’re looking at and listen to your opinions about what you think is good and not good. That would work if there is a real relationship of trust and confidence in that family. That’s the question we have to tackle, not how to deal with the situation where you can’t trust your kids, and so we have to police them. What else is there? This is this website growing.
Speaker 6: I learned how to do GF89 to record technology on the internet.
Seymour Papert: Well, now what is this R?
Speaker 6: This is my space on the Mama Media [inaudible 01:23:20].
Seymour Papert: [inaudible 01:23:20]. What can we do with it?
Speaker 6: We can [inaudible 01:23:26], post a message on [inaudible 01:23:33].
Seymour Papert: Well, I think you see the point, that it’s not out of the question to have kids begin to make their websites, leave messages, get messages, and start developing a network of other kids who share their interests and they get to know by working together. If this thing is working, can we have a minute of Make Believe Castle?
Speaker 6: Sure, one more minute. [inaudible 01:24:18].
Seymour Papert: Okay, here’s an example of what I think is quite a good piece of software because it allows children to do all sorts of things without any imposition. I can put a horse there and I make it run. I’d take this guy … I’d take these things and just like many elementary children the programming might look like for third grade, for the three year-old and we’d take that thing and put it … These things are characters and these are behaviors. We’ll put this behavior there and what that means is if you [inaudible 01:25:31] your … How are you going to get him out of there? Well, one way might be to get this thing. There’s a spring, and it’s with the spring there.
Speaker 9: Do you want to exit? Bye-bye.
Speaker 6: I think we need to …
Seymour Papert: It’s going to stop, okay.
Beth Teitelman: Join me in thanking Dr. Papert for a wonderful [inaudible 01:26:30].
Seymour Papert: Well, thank you for listening.
Beth Teitelman: Are you good? Are you? Well, wow. That’s great. Hold on, we have to close the …