Jeff Richardson – Moderator:
What’s called moderator or forum leader or whatever of this. I wanna start off by asking Gary and Seymour some questions of mine about what we’re all here for, but I very quickly wanna move to all of you being able to ask them questions as well. Seymour, yesterday, you talked about getting back to what’s fundamental about what we’re doing, and I, I was thinking last night about this over and over again, and I thought I actually got quite emotional thinking about it during Gary’s talk just a few minutes ago. And the question I want to ask of both of you, it, it actually occurred to me when Gary said way out in the order of Montessori conference, and that is: Why are we doing this for? What, what are we– why are we doing this, Gary, Seymour?
audience:
audience laughing
Gary Stager:
As I said, I think that it provides a lens for amplifying the, the competence, the ability of kids. Um, you know, I, I don’t get to teach kids with Logo these days as much as I used to. I don’t even work with schools as much as I used to, which is another topic for perhaps for discussion. Um, but whenever I do, whether it’s poor kids, rich kids, kids in India, kids in Beverly Hills, kids in the South Bronx, I’m repeatedly reminded of the power of, of, of what kids are able to accomplish if they’re thinking of the way that they’re, they’re really articulate with their ideas, their enthusiasm for, you know, writing their initials with a turtle when they fly their private jet normally. I mean, it’s just, it, it– there’s something still amazingly powerful about those kinds of experiences. And I come back to how I felt when I, when I realized that I could get a computer to do something it hadn’t done before. And I think a lot of our colleagues had that same, that same feeling. They didn’t know what happened in their head when, when they were able to get the computer to achieve some goal that they had or, or a goal emerged that they didn’t think was possible. Um, and I, and I’m, I’m committed to helping kids have a similar experience.
Jeff Richardson – Moderator:
Seymour, you, you’ve been working at this, advocating this for decades. Why do you do it? What is it about that makes you do this, what we’re all here doing, above other things?
audience:
audience chattering
Seymour Papert:
Well, you know, you ask that question, there’s so many levels one can answer it. Why does a musician compose? You know, why does
Seymour Papert:
a mother look after her baby? I think some things one just does them. So, thinking certainly is one of those things. Thinking about… I’ve been quite into thinking about learning and thinking about
Seymour Papert:
how children could deliberate into their own power. By accident, it sort of grabbed me, and there’s a magical process of how some pattern like that invades one and sort of settles in. Maybe that’s one of the fundamental questions about education. What are the conditions under which
Seymour Papert:
somebody either acquires or maybe they’re born with them, and they… The question is, well, how do we keep them fueled? Does it stop them from being strangled? But what… I think that understanding the conditions for, uh, intellectual commitment, intellectual passion, wanting to do something, and especially wanting to follow some kind of inner line of interest, I think that is a, a fundamental question if there is one. And I don’t know much about how to answer it, but I do know it isn’t given enough attention.
Jeff Richardson – Moderator:
And none of us know enough about it. It’s the next question I want to ask of both of you, but also of all of us. And that is the thing about the conditions. Seymour, you talk about liberating learning. You talk about magic, and it s-it seems like you’re talking about using those sorts of phrases when you talk about why we do what we do, why we can– so committed to allowing children to have digital media, and yet the liberation and the magic isn’t always there. What, what are the conditions when so many conditions have a force of gravity in the other direction? Gary, you and Seymour, both of you, have s-have been there at, at ground zero that, that what’s led to where we are today, this one-to-one conference. It’s not a new thing. Fifteen years ago in Melbourne, Victoria, there was a school where all the children had a laptop. Gary mentioned it this morning. The point wasn’t that they all had a laptop, the point was so that they could all use Logo Writer as their medium of school. Now, I’ll, I’ll argue very strongly that the work that was done there in nineteen eighty-nine, nineteen ninety, ninety-one, is better than anything I see being done in laptop schools now. I will say that those situations, Coomera in the Gold Coast, MLC Cube, they’ve actually deteriorated over time. Somehow, the magic gets lost. And I’m sure both of you will have seen other sites where people have gone in, implemented the magic, the technology has at some point been a solved problem, but over time, the magic hasn’t been able to persist. What, what conditions are missing for us to be able to make the magic and the liberation persist over time against the forces of gravity that are in our school system?
Seymour Papert:
First of all, to start and to talk about the magic of one-to-one, um, that’s bad. That’s not a good way of thinking of it. I think I should say the same as what I said to that world conference in nineteen ninety. That’s not what it’s about. We shouldn’t be talking about… What we need is a kind of, as a political question, we’re concerned with how to get more computers in the hands of kids. For me, the importance of one-to-one is really that not having one-to-one is something so absurd that that needs to be broken down. But the having one-to-one is not really much. Um, I– When I had that lunch with Angus King that he mentioned yesterday in his, his opening talk, clears throat: I told this favorite parable of mine about how… Imagine this country where writing had not been invented. No pencils, no paper, but they had quite advanced, uh, philosophy. Poetry, even science and mathematics, and they did it all without writing. How would they do it? One day, somebody invents writing, and they getQuickly, this gets picked up by the scientists and business. Everybody’s using it. School, of course, is slow. Eventually, they start bringing it to school, and then have a debate. Should they put a few pencils in the classroom, or should they have a special room that is a mountain of pencils, so everybody can have a pencil experience? audience laughing: And, and I really think that, I mean, that story is what made Chris worth w-with Angus. Uh, and I think the point there is that pencil writing
Seymour Papert:
might, under those circumstances, do some good. I’m sure ingenious kids and enthusiastic teachers would find good things to do with those pencils. But, but that would have nothing in common with the role of writing in our culture. And the writing has the role in our culture because kids have got pencils before they can even write, and they scribble on the walls, and they fight with them, and they draw with them and color with them. It’s an integral part of every part of their life. And digital media will have its role in forming, uh, forming the culture of– we’re going into, only if it has that same kind of, of presence. And one-to-one computing in schools is a, is a minor little, highly symbolic,
Seymour Papert:
but still minor step in that direction. Uh, so what we’re talking about is, is really a transformation of culture comparable to the transformation that was produced when, when writing came about. And I think a bigger transformation for this reason, that, uh, the writing transformation did not affect up to… I said maybe negatively, but I mean, the, the printed written word does not make a radical difference to two years old, three years old, even five or seven years old in our, in our society. And the digital can. And so it can go much deeper in forming the individual. And that’s the vision that I suppose that drives, that drives us. But, uh, for your real question, what, why doesn’t the magic stick? Partly because people… This idea, people got excited about one-to-one, and that’s poison. As soon as you get excited about one-to-one rather than what you’re doing with it, you’re killing it. So I think that’s one factor. So in a certain sense, what I said about that world conference, I might say about this, that there’s a negative side to having a conscious goal of one-to-one. Of course, there’s also a positive side of it we get, and the positive side does outweigh it, but I think we should recognize that there is this negative side. And I think the second point, uh, I think that, uh, the second point is maybe, uh, uh, more challenging, and that is that, uh,
Seymour Papert:
s-a lot of work is needed to develop this new culture. It’s not with, with… Let me make another analogy with, uh, say, another technology. Another favorite of mine is movies. One day, somebody, when they invented the movies, audience member coughing: people quite quickly saw you could use this in some sort of theatrical entertainment. But basically, they put a camera in front of a play and acted.
Seymour Papert:
And that’s the natural thing to do with a new technology. You use it to do what you always did.
Seymour Papert:
Maybe a little better, but differently. I don’t think that was particularly better, but it was intriguing and novel in itself. And then there was a long evolution before
Seymour Papert:
this developed into what we might call today cinema, cinematographic art, Hollywood, all with the bad aspects. It was a long process of half a century of failure. And this development took the place of many people, many dedicated and brilliant people making, uh, contributions, some of which paid off, some of which didn’t. A series of things that were resisted. Just take an example there. The idea of a close-up was bitterly resisted by actors
Seymour Papert:
who said, “I want to be a face, not a person.” The idea of putting a mere… There’s a face on a screen. There’s an eye. This sort of thing was, was resisted, overcome, became part of the culture. Of course, the introduction of sound and the introduction of a thousand techniques is what produced the final thing that we’ve got. And this is what we need to do, and this is what’s gonna happen with, with, with learning. So with education, what are the schools going to turn into? It’s gonna have a lot of hard work, contribution by a lot of people over a long period, and we should see it as a intellectual, cultural evolution. It hasn’t… I don’t think we always do that. We always make it too attractive,
Seymour Papert:
make it sound easy, and say, “Well, we either inject this thing, this laptop, or this one-to-one, or this new curriculum, or whatever it might be. We inject something into an otherwise untrained system.” And that’s an incorrect model of what this process is about.
Audience member:
And a lot of technical like me are just plain impatient.
Seymour Papert:
Yeah.
Gary Stager:
I,
Gary Stager:
I, I have a few thoughts that don’t answer the question. Um,
Gary Stager:
uh, the first is a story that I wanted to share during the, the main talk and forgot to, but it’s, it’s somewhat related. Um, I remember coming back from Australia early in the nineties, all excited about the work the kids were doing, and I remember showing them to Paul Burchett. You see my notes. Who was a fabulous veteran computer using educator in the US, done a lot of stuff for years with kids, involved with one of the people that I aspire to be like as a teacher. And I showed the work of what the kids were doing with Steve Kosso’s class, for example, at NLC. And Paul turned to me and said, “Oh, that’s what the work looks like when the kids have time.” That, that one of the differences the laptop made was the kids were able to work on stuff until it was done. There’s, there’s sort of resistance of reality. And in fact, another experience was, um, later on, I worked at Wesley College in Melbourne, and they cruelly put me in a room with two hundred and fifty year fives and their laptops for six hours, audience chuckling: followed the next day by two hundred and fifty year sixes and their laptops. And after we ran out of ideas, patience, and sanity, we, we wheeled, uh, we wheeled monitors, projectors in, and asked the kids to show examples of what they… Of work they were proud of. And every single example they showed was, was magnificent, and none of them were created within the confines of the school curriculum.They’re all done using the software the school had introduced to them, but the work that they cared about was the stuff that, that exceeded the curricular requirements and, and may or may not have had anything to do with the curriculum whatsoever. One of the answers on point about the sort of– about ma-the magic is that I grapple with this issue, too, of how could a school that saw the magic turn their back on it? It’s one thing for you to come to a conference you sort of stumbled upon, and it’s like, “Ooh, I love computers, and maybe that might be a good idea in the future, maybe not.” But when you had kids in your classroom who were learning in transformative ways, where f– were funded– where the staff room was filled with daily discussions of, of, of pedagogy, of learning theory that– where they had never existed before, how a school could turn its back on that I think is one of the great lessons and, and areas of inquiry for people who are concerned with leadership. And when we talk about magic, I’m reminded of a teacher from Perth came up to me after a presentation once, and we talked for a while about some of the work that I shared with you. And, and, and I said, “Well, you know, but it’s hard. Maybe that’s not magic.” And she said, “Oh, you need to tell people that.” I thought teachers knew that. It seemed obvious to me. But, you know, working at Youth Center was exhausting. You know, not only is teaching hard, but we were in a hostile environment. And– but you went home on a– you went home and bo-by mail orders, and you read books, and you bought books, and you emailed people, and you put stuff up online, and you called Cboard and you played with the software to anticipate what the kids went through the following day. Yeah, it’s hard. It was worth it. I can’t imagine teaching any other way. That’s what made it so much fun. I think that one, you know, one of the, one of the questions we need to ask in, in, in order to answer Jeff’s question is, I, I think we– this comes down to a… It has a spiritual quality to it. You know, if we care about kids, and we seem to put everything ahead of kids when it comes to school. You know, the state schools are propped up by test scores. The private schools embrace them because they can use them to beat up on the state schools. Um, you know, this sort of curriculum uber alles is creating winners and losers. There’s, you know, no matter what school, I mean, there’s always a group of dumb kids. One, one school, I had a class where they gave me a class requirement with these kids that none of the other teachers wanted to teach. It turned out the qualification for being in the bad kid group was they weren’t taking two foreign languages.
Seymour Papert:
laughing:
Gary Stager:
So one of the kids was a semi-pro tennis player, another was a violinist. You know, they had other commitments, so they weren’t taking two languages other than English. But the school had managed to sort of demonize that group of kids as, you know, somehow being unlearnable. I, so I think, you know, I think of my friend and, you know, inspiration, Jonathan Kozol, and I think this is a spiritual question. If we love children, if we know what’s possible,
Gary Stager:
we ought to start embracing that and helping it become a richer, more accessible part of kids’ lives.
Seymour Papert:
Can I ask you to take a different angle? If this is thinking of, you know, school is a complex system, and just stand back and think abstractly. If you’re a complex system, you change a little piece of it, it probably has its own equilibrium. If you let go, that piece jumps back. And unless you make a big enough change, it’s obviously… Now, in the particular case, one can examine
Seymour Papert:
exactly why that… But in general, I think that one can say that in general, the good pieces that happened, it’s here or there with good pieces of Logo or good pieces of other ways of using computers very creatively and deeply, uh, were too isolated to hold on. Now, that’s an– this is not strictly true. There are some places where they did hold on. But it’s more exceptional that they did manage to hold on. So I think there’s a critical mass effect. It’s got to get up to a certain point of, of, of, of critical presence in order to, to be able to hang together. I think
Seymour Papert:
we made a mistake. Now, thinking about Logo, which caught on pretty widely, I think we shouldn’t allow Logo to go out into the world when it was used in small quantities here or there. Uh, because it always went out and became an interesting add-on to what people saw as the main goal of school. And I think that was, uh, that’s an unstable sort of condition there. That for the thing to be– really to become stable, it’s got to become integrated and seen as integrated into the main fabric of, the mainstream of what, what that school is doing.
Gary Stager:
Where the absence of it would be ridiculous, like you were saying about Latin.
Seymour Papert:
You know, the absence would be ridiculous. So, so I think what we, what… We now have a condition because, because there are enough… Well, I think the fact then that we had so few, so few computers out in the world, and there were a few laptop schools, but mostly it wasn’t. Mostly there was not enough access to computers for anything deep to be done. You know, magical things could be done, wonderful things, but they didn’t go deep in the sense of you changing the, the, the culture, the culture of the school. And so they were unstable for the most day then. So now that the conditions are no longer so restrictive, and I think even in schools where it’s not one to one, even in schools where there’s, there’s, there’s three or four computers to– three or four kids to a computer, it is now possible to do so much deeper things. But in the meantime, a culture has grown up, a culture of this c-c-computers in school culture. What you should do with computers has developed, and it’s dominated by internet. And I’m not going to die, fight against internet again. And it’s wonderful, but it’s the most poisonous thing that’s happened to the development of, of education, with all its wonderfulness. And, uh, this is easy because you don’t have to think hard. Because you don’t have to do the kind of things that Gary was showing us ear-ear-ear-earlier this morning. And clears throat: so the– we now have to fight against this, this culture. And the culture includes the idea that programming was not worth it, that it was a lot of work and it gave very little, little results. And it was true that in most circumstances, in sort of ninety-nine point nine and more nines percent of, of schools, the conditions under which children learned to program was too insufficient, too isolated to really have any deep effect. And so that got established in the sort of unconscious of the educational world. So programming got pushed away, and it’s gotta come back. And I’m quite convinced that, that, that, that programming is the powerful catalytic idea that can really cause the computer to change the way we think aboutThe important subjects, the difficult things that they’re learning. And, and programming– Logo is an example. It’s not necessarily the right thing. And I’m putting a lot of time these days into thinking about and working with Alan Kay and a few others on this, on designing a new modern kind of language. But the important thing isn’t which language you use, the important thing is the, the idea of, of you programming the computer. In some sense, programming. And I think that where I think there could be a big change is
Seymour Papert:
in, let’s take mathematics. I, as I was saying yesterday, I think mathematics plays a, a key role in
Seymour Papert:
maintaining an old system as well as even if– point to its own terms and importance. But, um, I think the natural formalism for mathematics is programming. The natural formalism for mathematics for, for kids is the algorithm, and the algorithm is best to programming. And so if we– This, the, it is now possible, we’ve got enough computer base, but we haven’t yet done enough intellectual work to recast the idea of mathematics in a computational form. And if we could do that, I think it would stay because it would be better and wouldn’t be competitive, and it would… One of the things that people see as a major, a major goal of school, like learning mathematical thinking, uh, would be cast in a epistemological form that, uh, is clearly superior once you’ve accepted it, and then it would be stable.
Audience member:
Got no argument from me, Seymour. laughs: But that’s a pretty revolutionary statement that programming is back. I mean, I, I’d like to endorse it. I think Jenny, we got the title for the next conference, which is, Even One to One is Not Enough: The Hard Work Starts Now. But it’s really time to take some questions from the floor. I know there’s lots of people who are keen to, to ask one. Yeah, Eddie?
Audience member 2:
I’d like to ask both Gary-
Audience member:
Hang on, Eddie. This way with the microphone.
Audience member 2:
I’d like to ask both Gary and, uh, Seymour their thoughts on, in the digital age, whether we still need the actual institution of a school, and if not, what can we replace it with? Where do we constructively spend those billions and billions of dollars that now seem to be so wasted?
Gary Stager:
Well, I…
Audience member 3:
laughing:
Gary Stager:
Well, I’ve thought about this a lot because I’ve been teaching online for a long time. In fact, I’m running two classes while I’m here. Um, it’s not a panacea, but I think that there’s, there’s, there’s some intermediary steps. I think that Australia in some regards leads the world, um, certainly leads the USA in this regard. Let me give you an example. Every community’s got a netball center, a football oval that’s maintained by parents, a, a gymnastics studio. That, that sport, for example, here is community-based. In U-US, it’s all dependent on school. In fact, we didn’t build parks in our suburbs because the school was the park. And, and now we’ve decided we don’t want kids on the school grounds, so there’s nowhere for them to go but the mall. Um, so I think that sort of barn raising that the, that Australia’s had for a long time of creating places for kids to engage in constructive things with other members of the community is, is part of the answer. I think that another intermediary step is deciding what stuff can– needs to happen in a, in a place where we’re gathered together and what stuff can be distributed. That one of the, the pressures that teachers are under is the tyranny of the clock and, and the problem of coverage. And I no more want to have my kids walk into a classroom and have a teacher say, “Find the traditional garb of Togo on the web,” than I do to have them– the teacher say, “Open your book and read chapter four.” That’s a waste of resources, of technology, of time. You didn’t come to school to sit at a desk and read a chapter. You ought to be using that space to engage in the kind of stuff that, that benefits from being together, and then some of the other stuff ideally will be distributed. So I think it’s gonna be a lot more flexible. Both Seymour and I have worked with homeschooling communities. I met with a family in Los Angeles about a year ago that they, they were so rich, you couldn’t find out why they were rich. Um, they owned the rich people.
Audience member 3:
laughing:
Gary Stager:
And, and they said, “We could afford any school in the universe, and we’ve had it with all of them.” And the, and the, and the father turned to me and said, “My daughter can no longer dance because of school.” I feel that’s a really nice metaphor. A twelve-year-old girl that between the pressure, how she felt about herself, the surveil- of homework, the, you know, the, the other stuff that was just sort of piled on, the lack of respect for their priorities, they had had it completely, and people were checking out. So I think part of what you’re gonna need to do to recast yourselves in the future is figure out what’s the stuff you’re good at, what’s the stuff that benefits from people spending time in the same physical space as you, um, and that’s the stuff the schools should– needs to do. That should be your plan.
Seymour Papert:
Well, I don’t think– Well, I– Let me s-take it from another angle. I don’t think school reform. I do think school reform is impossible, and that doesn’t mean school change isn’t possible. But school reform is s-somebody formulates a picture of what school ought to be, and then you somehow figure out how to try to impose this. That, it’s– can’t work. Evolution doesn’t work like that. Darwin taught us. Evolution starts from what is, and it modifies. Um, it’s incremental, but it’s incremental in a context where the increments can add up as opposed to random incremental, which is, is really just, it doesn’t add up. So I look at it and I say, “Well, given this thing, here’s school. Where are the places where it makes sense to anticipate change of a sort that could be fundamental?” So I can see the ones that seem very clear to me then. Uh, first of all, moving towards more project-based work. That, that happens very easily. We can see– people adopt this very easily. Now, they’re often disappointed because the project-based work often loses the, the, the, the sharp content areas like science and math or even in language editing. It gets fuzzy out here, as the, as the, the mathematical rebels say. So what we need, and this is what I’m working on as my sort of major thrust in, in research and, and other people too, I mean, we need to have more ways of doing projects that make contact with important, powerful ideas, so that you can do the project and you can also be rigorous and, and have-Point two, he has a really powerful idea which is exemplified and exercised and acquired in, in, in the course of doing this project. Some of the kinds of projects that we saw this morning, uh, that Gary showed us, some of those are projects that, that, that qualify for that. We need a lot more because the essence of the project idea is that many people should be able to easily want to do it because you want to do it, not because somebody has, has said, “Here, do this project.” So we need to have, uh, a, a much richer variety. But I see that’s the way it’s going, the generating new project areas. So the, the repertoire of projects that– in which children can engage, and in engaging encounter not only new ideas but the, the ideas that are counted as, as essential. So I think the movement of projects… I think related to it is breaking down of the fragmentation of the day into… Because it’s really inconsistent with doing projects to, to spend so-called periods or what do they in Australia called them? Is it hours? How are whatever-
Audience member 4:
Half past.
Seymour Papert:
And then, and then the bell goes and do something else. So that’s a, it’s a, that’s a breakage point where the system could break without it being really life-threatening. So I think there is a place where it can break, and you can see it breaking in some places. That’s, that’s evident. So I think the, the breaking down of the period structure, the breaking down of the discipline structure because the projects, we get clever and clever making projects across, across between the, the school discipline. Uh, and all that’s just the beginning. The big thing is when we scrap the curriculum.
Audience member 5:
laughing:
Seymour Papert:
Now, how we scrap the curriculum, uh, I think there’s the issue there we have to find a way to, uh… It, it, it’s quite clear it’s politically impossible to go to the world and say, “Dump the curriculum. We don’t need curriculum anymore.” For one thing because I think we haven’t yet got this, a good substitute. I think we need a substitute. But for another thing, it’s just too big a, just too big a task. Even if you said, “I’ve got an alternative curriculum,” it’s a huge thing to get something like that, uh, adopted. So the strategy has to be, uh, my analogy is living in the– remodeling your house while you live in it. How can we, how can we take existing thing that I think of as curriculum and start changing it in a way that will, in a certain amount of time, maybe three to five years, uh, turn into something very different? I think that should be the perspective, and I think that that’s something that, that individual teachers can deliberately do if they have that perspective. That what takes you… If you look, if you’re looking at your curriculum, you constantly have this question: How can I take this little piece of curriculum and, uh, do it differently? And a differently that’s cumulative and moving towards a, a bigger concept. Uh, so for example, a bigger con– An example of a bigger concept is, is building a program of that.
Seymour Papert:
Now, let me give a very simple example, uh, almost trivial example, but it makes a point that in, in Maine and, and in fact almost all other places in the United States, uh, the kind of curriculum in mathematics that’s used in middle school has a unit somewhere on, on measurement and for example on measuring irregular areas. And basically, the measurement of irregular areas, you know, funny shapes like that, they do it by, by drawing. You draw the area, and you draw squares, and you count how many other side and also do something, something like that. That’s a frequently done thing. Uh, it’s done explicitly like that in the math curriculum that’s most widely used in Maine, a curriculum called CMP.
Seymour Papert:
Uh, so given that, this has an interesting property that, uh, one of the very easiest things to do with Logo is to make, try to program that will draw the, that will draw grids. So why do it by hand? It’s much easier and takes actually less time. And you’ll see this. It actually takes less time to learn that amount of Logo and, and actually draw them than they usually spend on getting out the cardboard and drawing these things and putting them up. So, so we can do what looks like the very same thing, but we’re doing it by programming the computer. But once you program the computer to do that, you can now do a lot of other stuff as well for no extra cost. Uh, one of them is, well, you don’t just draw one set of lines. You can draw… You make your program so that the lines get finer and finer, and you can see how your estimates of area change as you start with, with, with a small number of distant lines and make it tighter and tighter until you’ve got almost individual pixels. So you can get the idea of coming to the limit. You can draw that little graph, which is easy to draw. So we’ve brought a new feature into it by doing the same thing but in using the computer. You know, not just using the computer, using it deliberately-