1996 Seymour Papert speech from NYU as broadcast on C-Span
From the C-Span website… Mr. Papert, whose latest book is titled, The Connected Family: Bridging the Digital Generation Gap, spoke about how technology will impact education. He examined the debate over how technology will help or hinder human progress and stressed that it is too early to predict the changes wrought by technologies such as the Internet. After his remarks, he took questions from the audience.
[00:00:00] C-Span voiceover: American Perspectives continues with Seymour Papert, taught and Learning in Artificial Intelligence laboratory, and author of the book, Mindstorms Children Computers and Powerful Ideas. He gave these remarks last fall at the 92nd Street Y in New York City. His comments run about an hour and a half.
[00:00:26] Moderator: Good evening. Welcome to the 92nd Street Y. I’m Beth Talman, director of the 92nd Street Y Parenting Center. We’re pleased to have you with us for the first evening in our, the series continues on February 27th with good children challenging behavior with Dr. Stanley Turecki. We hope you will join us then.
Tonight we are fortunate to have with us Dr. Children Computers and Powerful Ideas and the Children’s Machine Rethinking School in the age of the computer. Tonight he joins us to share his most recent publication, the Connected Family, bridging the Digital Generation Gap, and to answer our questions about his work.
I am also pleased to announce that in honor of Dr. Papert and his commitment to children and their learning, the Zeiss family and Mama Media will be donating a comm a computer to the 92nd Street Y nursery school. There are few people like Dr. Papert, knowledgeable about computer technology, how people learn, how children grow and family life.
He has also retained his capacity to play. To explore, to discover, and to enjoy. Let us all welcome Dr. Seymour Papper.
[00:01:55] Seymour Papert: Good evening and thank you very much. Um, what I’d like, what I’d like to talk to you about gives me certain problems. One is that a lot of what I want to say is that it’s an absurd way to disseminate knowledge, to have a person, like a teacher stand up in front of a bunch of people who sit there and listen.
Uh, 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, of learning a different feel for a learning experience can to do it. So I have to stand up here and, and talk. At towards the end of the talk, I’m going to show you some of the, uh, some demonstrations on the screen.
Oh, I think we don’t want, who’s, can we turn? I don’t, I don’t want this at this. Uh, slightly distract, although since we have it, let’s, since it’s there. Let me, let me change just a little. Um,
which would I prefer? Well, since we got there, turn it on again. Okay. Now who, who have you has used the, the worldwide web? Almost everybody. Okay. So, so almost everybody then knows that this is a, this is a website. And it’s real life website. It belongs to an organization called Mama Media, and it has a link to a connected family website, which is a website that’s being created.
Well, typical. Let’s turn it off again.
[00:03:58] Idit Harel: Magic.
[00:03:58] Seymour Papert: Uh, maybe, well, now that, you know, that raises a, that raises an important point to remember when we talk about technology. I think, and it’s gonna be the theme of what I’m gonna 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 gonna 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 gonna transform the nature of the family, but in which direction, I think that cannot be predicted.
That’s a matter for, for choice. And to a large extent, it’s a political question. And so partly what I am doing here is making a political speech and maybe one with more content than some of the others that we’ve been hearing in this, this season. Uh, well now we connect, we clicked on it and we came to a different site, which is a site connected with my new book, the Connected Family.
Uh, one of the aspects of this, this site is. To change the, one of the 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, do it is just by, uh, this is our, uh, our index, our directory for this website.
And I’m gonna press on a leaf of this flower called reviews. And when that comes up, we will see that there’s already a review of this book in this morning’s New York Times. And if we want to read that review, we click there. And, uh, here is what Mr. Shannon said about, oh, I’m sorry. Can I get it?
Indeed, I think we’re gonna have to abandon these live demonstrations. But
[00:06:24] Idit Harel: yes, actually this is, this is what Mr. Shannon said, said, and I think you already received somebody who’s commenting on this, A teacher,
[00:06:31] Seymour Papert: and let’s hear that.
[00:06:33] Idit Harel: Okay. You were supposed to be able to link it, but it’s not blue. So we’re talking to, let’s turn
[00:06:41] Seymour Papert: this off.
Let’s turn this off and let’s pretend, I think we can imagine what, what, what, uh, what we would see. The point is that, and that the pace of discussion and the extent to which people can participate in discussion of, of such things is greatly opened and expanded by the, uh, by, by the presence of the technology so that some issue comes up.
This book appears it’s reviewed in, in the New York Times, within hours. Uh, 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 compliant to special people whose special job is, is reviewing books.
Uh, everybody can, including small children and everybody can comment on these reviews in a public way. So I think this is a vision of a different mode of discussion. 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 rarely doesn’t work yet. So 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 for good and a transformation for evil. And I think that if we are 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, fifties before aviation rarely could be. Visibly seen to be a force transformative of the nature of transportation. Up till then, it was just a promise. And 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, uh, 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 DC three was made, you know, the first really great transportation airplane, but great in its promise, not yet able to transform the world. And 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 of B who forget about it. Let’s go back to improving the horse drawn carriage or, 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, in, 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. So naturally those judgments are ultimately quite meaningless.
In, in this book. I guess I’m allowed to advertise it a little bit. Uh, 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 cyber critic. Can ask, can you step back to
[00:11:41] music: the stage?
[00:11:43] Seymour Papert: Alright, the cyber, the cybertopian, the cyber critic, and the cyber ostrich.
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. Uh, maybe. Who’s a great model? Cybertopian, Alvin Toler. You know, you read these books about the third wave. The world is changing.
We are in the information age, but then when you school is gonna be totally different. But then when you try and say, well, in what way, uh, will there be a lot of computers? Well, what will that do? Everything will be different. There’s no substance, no real thinking about the substance and no concession to the fact that there are serious problems.
Unless we face these problems, it isn’t gonna happen. It’s as if the technology is gonna bring Marvels about. And I like to use a word for that techno. It’s a technocentric way of thinking that the technology can bring about. Changes. Well, it’s not surprising that the cybertopians or the techno topian, uh, are technocentric.
What is more surprising is that the cyber critics is the people who criticize, tend to be even more technocentric. And you sort of a typical kind of example is, uh, uh, I’d recently, I looked, if you look at the recent books that have been published, like, uh, uh, like Postman for example, who has made a, I think I greatly admire, amusing ourselves to death and teaching as a subversive activity.
It’s, he’s a really sharp and witty critic of, uh, you know, overblown ideas about education, about media and his recent book. Uh. The end of education, which is a witty title because it uses a pun that I want to pick up and, and, and integrate into the, into, 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. And his main, his play on words is saying, unless we give more attention to the purpose, to what end are we doing it? Education is not gonna work and it’s gonna get worse. Worse. And in our schools, we are paying less and less attention to the, the purpose, the end, and more and more attention to, to technicalities and details and making national curriculum and all sorts of stuff of that sort.
Now in this book, which. You know, obviously you, I think highly of, of this, this, this perspective. He is absolutely right. Uh, but he, when he comes to discuss technology and the computer, he has a, uh, little chapter which talks about the history of something that you could call electronic pedagogy or electronic teaching.
And 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 film strip and other similar technologies now says, uh, uh, postman, after giving a series of other examples of that sort, he says, well, you see.
Uh, we’ve had heard the story before. Technology has, uh, always held out 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.
But there’s been a whole series of publications and like, uh, a very scholarly book by, by t and Cuban called Tinkering Toward Utopia that was given a, a prestigious award by Harvard last year when it appeared. Also tells the same story about, about Edison’s prediction, and somehow thinks that this is relevant to computers and what we would expect from them.
And I’d like to pick up on the. The logical peculiarity of that discussion. Why does anything about film strips and, 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? I mean, uh, the why, why should we throw these things together?
Uh, there really isn’t a 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, and those aren’t lumped together.
They don’t say, well, those technologies failed. It’s somehow. Somehow though modern technologies, things that were invented since some of the readers of the book were born, or since the writer of the book was born, uh, have a special category and are considered to be sufficiently the same so that, uh, 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, as electronic, uh, pedagogy as technologies for, for, for teaching.
And my main theme is gonna be that the computer plays the opposite role to all those. Tho those, those other, 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, uh, opposition between teachers and learners. Was all those other things the film strip used in the classroom?
This is a teacher’s instrument. Now, the computer can also be a teacher’s instrument, but 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 wanting to put down teachers. I think they’re important, and I’ll talk about many ways in which they, they, they will be liberated to have a bigger role and fulfill their function more deeply.
Because of this technology. But 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 a, an, you know, to the assembled, uh, uh, students in a classroom. So, uh, I’d like to emphasize, uh, that, that, that’s that point from a number of different, different angles.
But before doing that, I want to introduce my third character, the cyber ostrich. Now, the cyber critic says, the cybertopian says it’s all wonderful, and the cyber critic says it’s all bad. It let us down the past, let us down again, measure what it’s doing. It’s doing nothing. Um, compared with its car, et cetera, et cetera, uh, so bad.
The cyber ostrich is the more subtle person and there are many more cyber ostriches. The cyber ostrich is the person who puts their heads in the sand and just refuse to see that this thing has tremendous implications. So typical cyber ostrich is the school administrator who says, we’ve gotta 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, but at its best, it’s a very minor reflection of what the computer rarely can do, or the cyber ostrich fails to see the depth.
Of what can be of, of what, of what can be done. Uh, a kind of remark that the cyber ostrich often makes when I give talks like this following, I, one of my themes, and I’m gonna circle around this theme, is that the entire concept of school as we know it, is based on an obsolete kind of of technology and 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 segregates, that we fragment knowledge by subjects we fragment the day into periods.
All these are thoroughly in amicable to any common sensical view of good conditions for work or for learning. Yeah, and the proof is that, you know, if I were to say to you, I’m not gonna talk to you until we’ve segregated, you know, 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.
But why do we do this to children? Well, people give all sorts of funny reasons, like it’s for socializing. Well, it’s funny way of 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 will put you among 80 year olds and you’ll never see a 7-year-old again in your life.
So everything you learned last year, throw it away. You’ll learn a new lot of stuff and, and so well, clearly that can’t be the kind of justification that isn’t the kind of justification, the real reason is that for historical, also historical circumstances. The only way in which we could deliver, not we could give young people the knowledge that society seems to need is by fragmenting it into little pieces and handing it out systematically.
And if you’re gonna 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 year. You’ll get this in your eighth year, and then into periods and into curricular. And all this I am going to maintain is only done because the knowledge technologies that we had dictated that we should do it.
So this is entirely a product of a technological epoch. The technology of print and blackboards and all the rest dictated that. And that’s gonna be my, my primary thesis from another point of view. Now, uh. Well now, so I tell this story and then the cyber ostrich says, well, but 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. And 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, and 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 ga engage in projects together as the best learning happens, as the learning before children come to school, which is extraordinarily successful period of learning when, uh, children, siblings of different ages and parents and in the good old days, grandparents and great, great-grandparents, all were in the same kind of interaction and out of this excellent learning took place.
And the same thing happens when you look at a, a scientific research institute or an art institute or a business mean wherever in the real world where, where people are doing things, they don’t do this fragmentation and this and, and the segregation. It is only at school. And we have to think about why is that?
And. So if my, if, if I’m right in saying that the reason has to do with, with with has a lot to do with technologies, then uh, we have to rethink some very fundamental things, much more fundamental than, than how to improve the teaching of the, of third grade math, uh, in the near or distant future. Well, uh, there may be a little more concrete about how I rarely imagine children learning mathematics.
And I’ll give you a concrete example, which I might have been able, I’m not gonna try to, I think we need, uh, burnt our figures with the technology and, um, about 30 years ago. I came to MIT from Europe and had this in a mind boggling experience of being able to get at a personal computer. Now, it wasn’t a little thing on a, on a desktop, it was a multimillion do.
It was a very expensive device and it was big, but I could use it in my purse. I could take it and I could use it all by myself for as long as I wanted to. And, and that was a revelation. And 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.
And 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? And 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, but the talk about computers and education was entirely confined to the idea that the computer would be a kind of automated teaching machine, a kind of automated flashcard if you really want to be, uh, 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 rote and mechanical aspects of, of what we do in school. And my idea was very different. That’s not that the computer’s not gonna be something that will teach the kid any more than say a piano teaches music.
Piano doesn’t teach music. A 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, and this is very different from a teaching machine, and it said, doesn’t fit this idea of the electronic pedagogy in the slightest. Well, so what do we do about that? The, what I was trying to do in those days was make the kind of, well, first thing was to make a programming language, aren’t the kids to take control of this machine and to use a slogan that I took a long time to, to formulate like that.
I, I want the children to program the computer. I don’t want the computer to program the children. And 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. So when to put the computer, the children in charge so that they can have a sense of power in order to carry out complex projects.
So 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. Uh, it was very difficult practically to, to have real conditions of learning.
And uh, so it’s not surprising the people who looked at that as somebody might have looked at the Wright Brothers airplane as if this was the. 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. Uh, well, I think it did do them some good, even in these very limited doses.
But what they were seeing then was only the Wright brothers played. It wasn’t a concord or a jumbo jet. Uh, we still, I haven’t got to the Concorde of the jumbo jet, but we’ve made significant progress. Indeed. Harrell, who was trying to make this and who is 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, the right flyer. Uh, 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.
So they had the experience of, uh, they, they had the experience of, uh, undertaking a complex pro 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. Uh, this has been an evolving project.
Uh, in later the, in a later phase, Yasmine Kafa, another graduate student working with with the DITA Rail de shifted the. The content of the software children was making, were making to making computer games. And this has turned out, I think, to be a real big breakthrough because children think computer games are important.
In fact, they are important. There are multi-billion dollar industry people who make the computer games are important people in the world let children make the computer games. And 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.
Okay, so, um, this is removing closer to children, actually using the computer as a creative material. We are working now on. Questions like, well if you, in order to make a computer game, what kind of knowledge do you need to draw on? And let me tell you my, an example that I really like is, we’ve done quite a lot of work on is the following situ, I 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 gotta jump. Okay, but what’s a jump? Yeah. What does it mean to jump and what is a jump moving like that? Or is it moving like that? All of a sudden when you think about making as this character jump, you run into a kind of question that you’d never heard of before.
Namely the shape of a trajectory. There’s a word for it in mathematics trajectory. The shape of the invisible path traced out by that, that jumping figure. Wham, we are in some real. Mathematics. We get into some real serious mathematics and 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, to, to, to dig into.
But what I do want to dig into and emphasize is that these kids, in order to make their game found, we need to understand about the shapes of trajectories and we need to 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 in your fifth grade, and it’s written down somewhere that in the 17th of May and 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, a phrase from, from business management. Well, this is, I would say, a radical shift. Uh, it’s a radical shift in several ways. Radical shift first was mathematical knowledge becomes something that you do need, which wasn’t the case before.
So it’s meaningful knowledge. And secondly, you need it at a particular time, and you’ve gotta know it then. So 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?
And 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 and, and a hint at a solution. Is a next phase in the same project that we’ve been running, uh, in our MIT research group, which is being run by another graduate student and called Michelle Everard, who has set up a sort of little tiny baby internet.
And it works like this, that, uh, if you are 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, this, this network you’ve created.
And then there are other kids, maybe somebody in your class, maybe somebody who did this project last year. So we breaking out of the age, segregating. And in principle, maybe somebody at the other end of the world, although she’s only doing it on a, on a local scale, but somebody somewhere knows the answer to that question and is interested in, in sharing that knowledge so we can get knowledge in a different way.
And we have a different relationship to that knowledge. And this does not mean that we don’t need teachers. ’cause teachers, there’s a consultant as advisor setting standards, setting values, saying to you, you know, you could be doing better than that. Or 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, in neatly packaged little pieces.
I think any teacher would rather be doing that if it could be if, if it, if it could be so arranged. So this is a transformation of a very deep, radical sort and it puts in question the entire. A fundamental set of concepts of our schools. The very idea of school is grades and curriculum and teachers and classrooms and, and all the rest.
And just the first thing you ask when you meet a kid, you, what grade are you in? Seems sort of comes tripping off the lips as the, as a natural, as if this was an important part of the nature of a being, that you’re in a particular grade and it needn’t be and shouldn’t be. And this is a reflection of a, of a particular period that we are going to move out of.
Maybe it’ll take a long time. Um, the cyber ostrich, who thinks we’re gonna improve the teaching? Uh, I didn’t say it again. That’s the concept of the cyber, of the cyber ostrich, who thinks we are just making improvements in school? Whereas what we are really doing is, what we’re really seeing here is an instrument that will subvert the very idea, um, excuse me.
Uh,
another piece of technology got lost. Um, well, I’d like to look at this from get another angle and to 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, and 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 and, but 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 gaffes sleep? Well, children 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. And so she saw this giraffe with a long neck and wondered, oh, poor giraffe. How can it cuddle its head? And how does it sleep? But like a million other questions come into the heads of children, there isn’t anything she could do about it because it’s outside the scope of her immediate reach.
So bit by bit children’s questions. Their need for knowledge drifts in opens into areas where their natural mode of learning that serve them so well up to them is insufficient. And so 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 you mightn’t. They might have time, but, but that’s all you can do. And the ultimate end of that is school where you’re going to stop learning and start being taught. We are learning. If learning means what these children do, so, so naturally gonna give up the, your control of it and hand yourself over to somebody else.
Well, um, let’s call that stage two in the development of a, an individual’s relationship to knowledge. Stage one is self-driven, non-verbal, exploratory learning. And stage two is this dependent, highly verbal, schoolish kind of learning. And now in the 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 ’cause you learn to read. And you learn to read and you have research skills. You can now go to a library, you could read books. And so 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 into this new, wider world. Well, I think the primary role of the computer can be seen as making it unnecessary to go through that second stage. There’s children can begin to get access to knowledge without that dependence. And reading will always no doubt be important in the foreseeable future, but it’s not the only way.
And again, in this, in in this book, I sort of open it with something I call a learning story. Like love stories, there are learning stories and through learning stories, we develop our sensitivity to, to learning like adventure stories and love stories develop that side of us. Uh, this learning story is about my grandson three at the time and not even with a computer.
He went and he took a videotape and put it in the VCR and spent 30 minutes looking at road construction machinery. Now there’s something really remarkable about that, Bruce, 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.
Uh, wait. One day we’d go for a drive with the family and I’d see some by the roadside maybe. But this kid can do something different. He can, by his own decision, decide to spend that half hour looking at road. And that’s just the little beginning with this VCR and being able to click into an internet, into a website extends it further.
And I think UEC through the incident, a little peep at a future in which children will take, be able independently to, to make connections with knowledge, age, uh, well, all these are different visions from the same side. And I’d like to emphasize that, uh, we don’t have the technology for, it’s more than technology.
I don’t, it’s not true that a child, that 4-year-old today could use the worldwide web to find out how giraffe sleep. Because how would you do it? You would, you’d, you’d get Yahoo and enter giraffe. Well, no, that’s not the way we need to develop interfaces. And I was gonna show you one, but I’m scared to try machines again.
But you can, if you, since you all seem to be familiar with the web, you can see it yourself by, uh, visiting the Mama Media website. Mama Media is a group run by IDI Harrell, who, 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.
And that’s just still groping, but that’s the area we are going in. And if we want to think seriously about what this technology is about, we’ve got to think ahead and think. Where can that lead us? Uh, what would the consequences be? And the one on which I want to emphasize how to end in these, uh, I promise to be provocative and let’s see some questions and discuss around questions.
But, uh, 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. And 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 underst stand up in front of you 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 not created, they’re not invented by someone.
They grow. What I see as the role of this book and why I’m standing up talking to you and talking to lots of other people is to that I think we’ve gotta take this seriously and not enough people are really taking seriously the idea that we do have to rethink, think what is our relationship to children when they can be exploring how giraffe sleep by themselves, what happens when parts as 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, but 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 gonna teach their kids math. So something that used to be in the school is moving into the home and these parents are making decisions.
Now, 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.
Uh, we’ve seen in school or if we are going to do that, that we do it on the basis of some better, 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. Well, it’s better at school and so we’ll go to Harvard one day.
We need some better basis than that. Uh,
two other examples of, just to illustrate the incredibly low level of discussion, um, economics. I’ve had numerous education administrators, especially in politicians and just ordinary folk, make this kind of objection. They say, well, what you’re talking about is requires a lot of computers. Everybody might have to have a computer.
Children would have, and we can’t afford that. Well, I just wanna do a bit of arithmetic with you, and there’s a little paradox in that this, and 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.
You know, like at grade zero level, would it be expensive? Well, um, would it, uh, last October I was asked to, uh, testify at a congressional hearing on the future of computers. 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.
Uh, I’ll tell you my argument, I’ll tell you his, and this is on public record. You can read these congressional hearings. Uh, my argument is like this, look in the United States of America, we 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.
And this is not counting all the indirect costs. A computer, you can get a pretty good computer in the store for a thousand dollars. If we bought these in mass, surely they wouldn’t cost more than $500. And such. A computer is good for five years, at least a hundred dollars a year, a hundred dollars a year.
Gives every child a computer full-time at school or at home. Now a hundred dollars a year to 7,000 is between one and 2%. So 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 some by some trick of accounting, computers and pencils are put in the same budget category.
So computers seem incredibly exp. 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 could give children computers at at, at low cost. Uh, 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, is, uh, three or five, $5,000 in any case, to let the five years time, the computers would be obsolete. Now, whole barrage 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 gonna 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, you know, silly Compromise Solutions are proposed. I’m telling that story because I want you to take action and I want 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. And with that, I’m going to ask for questions.
Yes. Uh, at, at what age would, would you
[00:55:19] Audience member: ideally see, uh, all of the students, uh, in possession of their own computer? Would you see that beginning? Uh, would the students be sharing at the age of three or would the, would each one have a computer, uh, that you carried home or mother? How you
[00:55:37] Seymour Papert: that? Um, Marvin Minsky once was asked about 20 years ago, he’d made some of his usual outrageously, uh, provocative remarks, and people said, do you mean to suggest that in every house there’ll be a computer?
And he said. No, I mean to suggest that in every doorknob there’ll be a computer. And interestingly, uh, if you go into hotels these days, every doorknob does have a computer. Uh, I think every little rattle that the child has and every little doll, every child will have many computers. Now, uh, if we mean take charge of the computer and be able to do something like communicate with it and program it, uh, 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 that the child would do to it.
And, but 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, and this thing detects the baby’s movements and makes lights and sounds and hypnotizes the baby and holds its attention.
And 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, well, it’s stimulating the children. I can imagine all sorts of bad things. So I’m not Pollyanna-ish. I’m sure bad things are gonna be suggested and done and some already are, but I do think that very good things could happen with children at the very, at the very lowest stages.
Yes. When we talk about,
[00:57:34] Audience member: uh, equity of access to computers, about what, when we talk about equity of access to computers, always in terms of. Uh, rarely do we talk about teachers, and it’s ironic that the teachers, if any kind of revolution is gonna happen in schools or in classrooms, uh, this particular issue of teacher training is rarely addressed when it comes to buying computers.
Uh, when it comes to, uh, educate. Uh, do you have any comments on teacher equity of access and teacher training with regard to the teacher?
[00:58:11] Seymour Papert: Um, well, let me first say that, uh, I’m, I’m, I’m, this sounds quibble, but it’s, it’s, I think it goes a little bit deeper than a quibble. Uh, the word teacher training needs careful examination.
’cause, uh, 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, the growth and development of children. We’d hate the idea that the teachers are training children, but we think of training teachers and why, because we think of the teachers, a kind of technician who is, uh, 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 that you could call training in, in computers. They need a chance to develop a whole different approach to their role, to the educational process. And I think that should be done.
And 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, uh, the trend in some New York school district towards, uh, alternative schools provides a kind of framework in which that can happen, but it’s too limited and they can’t get access to, to more technical knowledge.
And, uh, but I, you know, 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 school that’s being neglected. When I first saw personal microcomputers in school, say in the late seventies, invariably you saw the computer in the classroom of a visionary teacher who want to saw that computer as, as a way of breaking out of the restrictions of, of, of, of, of the school.
He or she maybe didn’t know how that was gonna work out, but, but there were ideas that it would, the children work on projects that would cut across the disciplines and the subjects, and they do collaborative learning and all sorts of things of this sort were being done. It was a visionary teacher who, uh, was carrying out a vision.
By the mid eighties, there were no, 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, 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, the way of learning of school. It uses it to reinforce it. And so 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.
And 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. So I don’t think that we are 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 ’em to do are not given the opportunity to do so,
is that, that’s not a straightforward answer, but it’s not a straight, it’s really not a straightforward question. Uh, I’ve, I, I, I’ve got another little catchphrase that I think also expressed part of my attitude to that, that I think one of the reasons why. Uh, schools are bad places for children to learn is because they’re bad places for teachers to learn.
And if we could, 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. And we don’t, we don’t give them the time, and we don’t give them the incentive and we don’t give ’em the opportunity. And when they make the time and they make the opportunity and they give up their own energy to, to learn 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 burnt out.
Although some of them don’t, some of them heroically, survive and continue now with the greatest admiration for that. Yeah. Tell me, are there any, uh, software product on the market that would recommend for preschool?
Um, well, uh, 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 gotta say, well, are you asking me what I can buy that I’ll give the children and let the children sink and swim with it? And I don’t want to do that ’cause that’s not what a parent ought to be doing.
If you are 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 and logos, one and, uh, hyper Studio and all the, all the kinds of software that enable you to construct. Or to explore our others. Um, if I, 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 7-year-old children to create a really playable computer game.
Well, just very recently working with some colleagues in Moscow in the Institute of New Technology there, and particularly Sergei ov, uh, we’ve developed, well, Sergei is the main drive for that, has developed a, a version of micro worlds, which is the latest version of logo that can be programmed without writing anything entirely by using icons and you can really actually create computer game.
A playable one using that or some interesting graphics or some interesting dynamic art on the screen. And I think that’s an example. I mean, that’s something that kids and parents could, 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 MoMA media site, a, a demo version of, uh, of, of, of, of that software.
A little, another little story. Another of my grandchildren, when he was less than two, he was fascinated by geometric shapes, squares and silvers and triangles and, and p and how did he say it parallel? Uh, he couldn’t. He couldn’t say parallelogram, but he knew what it was and he struggled to say it and his little tone couldn’t get it wrong.
Anyway, I made, because I know a little bit of pro, I know a lot more program was 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 use logo to make a little piece of software of our own that puts shapes on the screen. Exactly the shapes that he likes playing with and pushing on the keys.
He could make them do things. So I think there, that’s a kind of of activity I’d like to see and I think that created a, a kind of connection with me and the child, and the child and the computer and the child in geometry that is richer than any program that might have been there to teach him what’s a square and what’s a circle.
Uh, which is what most of the program, most of the software available, but I’m not, don’t mean that they aren’t. I would give a kid, kid picks, I’d give a kid, uh, a slightly older kid. I’d give the incredible machine. I’d give, uh, uh, some of the music programs to make music because children like to make music.
But with traditional instruments, it’s very, you’ve got, need a lot of, of dexterity skills before you can, can really make music. So that’s an ideal case where computers can let a child into a creativity area where, uh, much sooner than you would if you had, uh, in, in the, if you, if you had to use, uh, traditional instruments.
There are, there are plenty there. So plenty. There’s, there’s a dozen, maybe two dozen. There’s some nice pieces of. Limited but good software. But I think the question isn’t, which is the best software. The question is what are you trying to do with it? I’m a
[01:08:18] Audience member: professional program. I’m in the,
uh, share.
[01:08:31] Seymour Papert: Well, I’d love to. Yeah. My, my, uh, connected family.com. This website came up today. You can send me email through it and I will respond.
More generally, you said that you want to see more discussion about what you’ve been
[01:08:50] Audience member: talking about here. It seems to me there’s probably too many different places on the internet where people could, uh, continue to continue to discussion started here tonight, but it might be good if everybody here particular place to sort of focus their energy if they wanted to react instead see the dialogue that, is there a particular use group or or website for this ability to post messages that you wanna point people at?
[01:09:18] Seymour Papert: Yes, connected family.com. Sorry, we brought, it came up today in a, like all of them when they come up, it’s largely under construction, but it’s alive and it’s there and you can put in your name and you can join, you can send messages and it’s connect, www connected family.com. Connected family is one word.
Yes. Yeah. When you were talking about, um. Sleeping. Yes. And um, how
[01:09:50] Audience member: kids of the frustration around kids on the internet right now search for that. Can you talk more about your idea, I guess, how kids search about how kids search,
[01:10:07] Seymour Papert: how kids search, how kids could search for this kind of knowledge? Find something like that?
I’m not sure the question is, uh, yeah, the question is, can I say anything about, uh, how kids search for knowledge? Like how giraffe sleep? But do you mean how they do it in the present days world? Or how they might do it in a, in a cyber world, you know? Well, I would think it’d be somewhat similar, wouldn’t it?
Yes. I’m sure it would be some, it would be somewhat, somewhat similar and I think I have to say. I don’t think, I don’t know the answer. Nobody really does. I can share some thoughts. Uh, one kind of thought is they don’t think hierarchically, they think by more like by associations and by grouping things together.
And, uh, this, uh, this MoMA media search engine, that’s,
oh, it came up. Okay. Look at an example. Now this is an example of, 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. And, and this is one attempt to make a search engine that will allow kids to search for, search for knowledge.
And, uh, we’ll see how they do it and modify it and make lots of other search engines that will explore other directions. And we were looking for.
[01:11:42] Idit Harel: Before you.
[01:11:43] Seymour Papert: Okay.
[01:11:44] Idit Harel: We looked at bones and fossils, and there’s some websites here. Louder, please. You can, you can, you can talk about that website.
[01:11:56] Seymour Papert: Well, let’s, this is a particular search engine.
It goes from at the top. Uh, there’s this concept of a nature burger that is a metaphor for, uh, a sort of sandwich that has many ingredients in it. And notice these are not, these are topics rather than categories. Save the earth or rainforests, or endangered species or pets. Uh, these aren’t meant to be, uh, exclusive categories that something belongs to one or the other.
But they are associations. So you might be interested in pets or in dinosaurs. If you’re interested in pets, you click on pets. And now the sandwich happens that the next layer. Is you get different kinds of pets where there might be information and you pick on one of those and, and try one. And you get on the next layer of the sandwich, you get, uh, more stuff.
And then there’s a pet corner website. Yeah. And then you get to a, somebody somewhere out there has made a website. And this is a, a way into that website that here was created by adults. But what the intention is, is that kids searching for websites will watch how they do it. Well, they’ll say how they did it and it’ll get translated into, uh, search machines of the sort.
And, uh, pet vet, please get well, uh, we don’t have time to really, but that’s fine. Kids don’t get upset. You know, they, they’re very used to things. Never quite work the way that. That they thought they would and can make the own Yahoo and, uh,
uh.
Okay. Well that’s sort of, that makes a point in the, 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 and,
okay. I think we should have more questions. Sure. Back
[01:14:18] Idit Harel: on. I look for she in the meantime, you can take a look
[01:14:21] Seymour Papert: for Shell in the meantime. Okay. Uh, next questions? Yeah. Yes. A question. And this example we’re seeing, um, information that we have access information,
and.
[01:14:38] Audience member: And that kids looking at this need a place post school need a place where people are there to construct knowledge outta this information. I, I disagree that kids will have access to this and able construct knowledge by themselves and do school and that place as a very important, um, setting to help make
[01:15:02] Seymour Papert: sense.
Wait a minute. Let’s, let’s look at that. Uh, let’s grant You mean just knowing a fact is different from real knowledge. ’cause 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.
But you said they need school. Do you think that that guidance needs to take place in a, in a building where kids are segregated by age?
[01:15:38] Audience member: That’s the reality of society is that parents can’t be at home
[01:15:42] Seymour Papert: no
[01:15:43] Audience member: age five or you know, birth through 15.
[01:15:46] Seymour Papert: Yes. But the point, the point I wanna make is that I’m not saying that there will not be places where kids will go to, to have learning experiences and do things that will be rich in learning.
Perhaps even our future society will have kids, you know, spend a particular kid spend, uh, a lot of time every day for, for several years in the same place. And maybe we’ll even call it quote 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. It is the worst, uh, in the school as we see it. Most schools out there, I mean there obviously some terrific schools and terrific teachers do wonderful things, but Ka babe, the nature of school tends towards kaba. What’s that?
[01:16:54] music: Teachers have get used to this and
[01:16:57] Seymour Papert: here, uh, I’ll say something about that in a minute.
You know that school, 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 and what fractions about and how you would use it and whether you would use it.
And in fact, knowing that, hardly anyone ever uses that. I bet you never did. I bet you never divided a fraction by another f. Mean personally? Personally, I don’t know yet. I have When only in power? Only in a test. Only in school. No, I mean, I You divided a half by a third. I build things. I construct. So do I.
But I never have to divide a half by a third.
[01:17:52] Audience member: But I I’m not saying
[01:18:02] Seymour Papert: No, I know what you’re saying. I mean, are you saying that children need a context in which to develop knowledge And I agree 1000000%, but school as we know it is not the right context. And nobody in his sane mind in the 20th century who is designing a context in which children were going to develop knowledge rather than information would make it anything like school.
Except that the school thing happens to be there and happens to have an institutional roots and it’s hard to displace it and it’s, it has conceptual roots too. When we think learning place for children, we think grade curriculum school. So my diatribe is not against children having guidance in learning places where they 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. But what about abolishing grades altogether? I dunno whether that’s a good thing or bad thing, but there’s no discussion of it. And especially there’s no discussion of the fact that the origin of that is in lies in particular ways of disseminating knowledge, which no longer are as, you know, as unique as the only ones we have as they used to be.
By the way, I think, uh, oh, yes, there was that thing of a, I’m building
[01:19:50] Idit Harel: a webpage here and if I were six, I actually will have a UR L.
[01:19:57] Seymour Papert: Well see there’s an exam, see kid building a webpage. If you use one, you should make one. And there’s no reason why you shouldn’t make one. And this kind of graphic, uh, you know, software, which isn’t on the market, but.
So isn’t an answer to the quest, but ought to be. And more, many varieties of being able to do that ought to be and will soon be, I think, so that kids cannot just visit these, uh, these places by surfing and jumping here and there, but can make their own get a sense of what’s involved. And by the way, on this question of children, the danger that children will believe everything that the computer tells them, I think that the, the answer to that is no, not if you’ve programmed the computer yourself.
You know what went into it. And you develop a healthy skepticism about what other people put into it as well. And, and you know, finally about in that same category, I would say about the question that nobody asked me about. Yes, I’m glad. But, uh, nobody asked me about what, about pornography and protecting the kids.
Uh, 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 kids so you can trust them to tell you about what they’re looking at and listen to your opinions about what they, uh, what you think is good, not good.
And that would work if there is a real relationship of trust and confidence in that family. And that’s the question we have to tackle, not how to deal with a situation where you can’t trust your kids. And so we have to police them.
What else is there? This, is this website growing? Yeah. I learned how to do
[01:22:12] music: 2 89, which
[01:22:14] Idit Harel: is called Technology on the internet.
[01:22:21] Seymour Papert: Well, now what is this? Ah,
[01:22:23] Idit Harel: this is my space on
[01:22:25] Seymour Papert: city. It’s, and what can we do with it?
[01:22:31] Idit Harel: We can, uh, visit
post message on visitors.
[01:22:46] Seymour Papert: Well, I think you see the point that it’s, 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, uh, they get to know by working together.
If we are going to, if this thing is working, can we have a minute of, uh, of the, of make believe castle?
[01:23:20] Idit Harel: One more minute?
[01:23:21] Seymour Papert: Yeah.
Okay. Here’s a, uh, yeah. Here’s an example of what I think is quite a good piece of, 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.
[01:24:00] music: I’d take this guy
now,
[01:24:15] Seymour Papert: I’d take these things and. Programming might look like for the, for the third grade, for the 3-year-old. I’m gonna take that thing and put it. These things are characters and these are behaviors. I’m gonna put this behavior there and what that means is if you meet it, you,
so how are you gonna get him out of that? Well, one way might be to get this thing has a spring and let’s put the spring there.
Well,
[01:25:16] Moderator: do you want to exit? Bye bye.
I think we need to,
[01:25:30] Seymour Papert: it’s to stop. Okay. Here we go.
[01:25:32] Moderator: Join me in thanking Dr. Pat for a Wonderful,
[01:25:45] Seymour Papert: well, thank you for listening.
[01:25:49] music: You need this Well, well, that’s great.