By Seymour Papert (2005)
Papert, S. (2009). Fuelling the Fire of Creativity. In M. S. Thompson (Ed.), The Fire I’ the Flint: Essays on the Creative Imagination (pp. 125-138). Four Courts Press.
Irish Times coverage of the event producing the following essay may be found at ‘Hard fun’ enables children to learn through enjoyment.
What a great pleasure and honour it is to contribute to a series of lectures and a book on creativity, named for such an immensely creative son of such an immensely creative nation!
The occasion of my lecture was given a special poignancy by learning that it would be in the same room where I spoke in 2001 shortly before the terrorist attack in New York. I expressed my view then that Ireland could play a special role in creating a world free of hatred and violence. I used the title of Thomas Cahill’s book How the Irish Saved Civilization1 to challenge her to do it again. Tonight I repeat the challenge. As an educator I take it as axiomatic that whatever else is needed to ensure the future of civilization, it certainly includes ending the disgrace of a billion children growing up in ignorance. Today we have powerful technologies that could, for the first time, support learning on a global scale. The technologies will inevitably spread across the planet. The challenge is to use them well, and I believe that the key lies in knowing how to nurture the spark of creativity with which all children are born, to fan it into a flame that will light the way to prosperity of life and richness of spirit. And what better fuel for the flame of creativity than the spirit of Ireland!
I wondered momentarily whether it would be fitting in a series of lectures on creativity to return to themes about which I had already spoken and in this very room. ‘Doesn’t creativity require inventing a new idea?’ Then on reflection, I thought: ‘No, that’s exactly wrong.’ Creativity is more than the flashiness of coming up every day with something different that will be obsolete tomorrow. Edison’s formula was 1 per cent inspiration, 99 per cent perspiration. Creativity is not just the quick conception, but also the sometimes long and arduous work of actually making (should one not say creating?) what was conceived. To readers of this book, that may go without saying. But I take my episode of repetition-guilt as a warning that it is easy to forget and ignore the obvious. I nearly fell into the trap of failing to see that showing what I have been able to make of my old idea might be a better display of creativity than telling you about the next twenty.
It would have been self-indulgent to confess my temptation instead of simply putting it behind me and getting on with the job if I were the only one to be tempted by it. Sadly, many are. A shallow, kaleidoscopic image of creativity is so poisonous to the real kind, and yet so endemic in the culture of schools, that the best one can do to enhance creativity is to stop inhibiting it. Let me explain what I mean by anticipating schematically the main line of my argument: children are born creative, free spirits endowed with instinctual drives to explore the given world and create their own. Education, in the broadest sense, has the duty to bring them to conform to society and to adopt intellectual tools whose purposes they cannot yet understand. I shall show by examples how the conflict inherent in this situation is reduced when the mastery of technology turns the knowledge required to be a contributing member of society into the servant of personally directed projects. But when school was designed the technologies that knowledge could master did not yet exist. Without the means to bring together the personal (which includes the creative) and the social (which includes the formal curriculum), school, as a social institution, gave a minor, limited place to the personal-creative side. This compromise was probably necessary but incurred a high cost. Many young people whose creative drive was too strong to be limited suffered pain and often, permanent damage. And all learning was limited for lack of the energizing drive of creativity.
I look to the right use of digital technology for the tools that will allow us to break out of the vicious circle. But before telling stories to show how this might be done, I must pause long enough to make it clear that the technology is a double-edged sword. Consider, for example, the remarkable capacity of the computer industry to offer us a kaleidoscopic succession of new, brighter, faster technological temptations. A good edge would be finding inspiration and models for learning in this volcanic burst of creativity, not only by the engineers and scientists but also by the business planners, the journalist-commentators and a host of others in this explosively growing sector of modern life. I know that when young people really understand what goes into it, it does open vistas of imagination as well as intellectual ambition. In fact, I shall tell a little later about children, some in Irish primary schools, who respond enthusiastically to the opportunity to do age-appropriate versions of the same kind of work themselves, for example designing, building and programming digital machines, making their own computer games, composing computer music and computer art. However, school, on the whole, does not allow this enthusiasm for learning to develop. It is not in the curriculum. And so, it is the bad edge of the digital industries’ prodigious output that comes to the fore generating excitement about products in themselves with no mind for how they came into being, for who made them or even for how they work. I count as a remarkable dereliction of duty by the education system — not by the individual teachers but by the system — the fact that the digital industry, instead of being used as an inspiring example of creativity for children to emulate, has been allowed to draw children into an addictive, consumerist culture of kaleidoscopic novelty and rapid obsolescence.
I suspect that this lost opportunity is not the only way in which this culture is harmful. I mention just two other examples. It is instructive to look at magazines about technology in education. The articles are very much more about the latest gizmo and speculation about what will come next than about a long-term development of practices and deeper understanding. Apart from being worrying in itself, I see this as an example of how the kaleidoscopic attitude towards technology encourages similar habits of mind on the intellectual plane. Last year’s ideas follow the example of last year’s computers by being treated as ready to be thrown out before there has been time to explore more than their surface.
My other example, which may have done the most severe damage, is the impact of the novelty-obsolescence approach on the economics of computers. Ten years ago, and even earlier, computers had already evolved to the point where they were capable of serving as a transformational learning instrument, if only they could have been distributed as freely to students as books, paper and pencils. They appeared to be too expensive; but had a fraction of what has been spent on research devoted to make a stream of ever fancier machines been devoted to reducing the cost of machines, there would by now be a computer inexpensive enough for every child on the planet to have one.
The addiction to novelty is closely related to an addiction to ‘making it easy’. Here too we have a double-edged sword phenomenon. While computers certainly open the door to new kinds of learning, they also entice children into superficial, flashy activities. It is truly marvellous that children can get information with unprecedented ease by swooping around the world on the web, but it has been frequently and correctly noted that although the information they are getting may be world-wide, it is very often barely skin deep.
The computer industry has invested billions in making it easy to use computers. A striking example is how the Apple laptops, which are now given to every middle school child in my home state of Maine, are being used by children to make movies very different from what a home movie was like when I was growing up. In those days all one could do was turn a camera onto a scene and let it run. Whatever you came up with was usually your finished product: the possibility of anything more than the most rudimentary forms of editing required skills and expensive equipment available only to professional film makers. The positive edge of enabling children to do at least some of the mechanical part of what professionals do is evident. It is clearly a valuable experience. It leads to a better appreciation of professionally made movies and the skills learned can be used for presentation of projects or simple self-expression. In the light of these, and many other clear benefits, it is tempting to forget the negative consequences of making things easy. In a gym, nobody would welcome a machine that makes it easy to lift the weights. The hardness of the workout is essential to building the muscles of the body and the hardness of intellectual work is not less essential to building the muscles of the mind. Easy doesn’t do it. Spending billions of dollars on ‘making learning easy’ is a contradiction in terms and ultimately anti-educational.
I hope nobody will mistake me for a Luddite campaigning to throw out the computers. Even in the gym machines are useful when they are used not to avoid hard work but to focus the hard work, to connect better the work to the muscles it aims to strengthen. So too in the intellectual gym called school. The useful role of the technology would be to help children make contact with deep ideas and tough thinking. I believe that this is what children want. Nintendo does not sell its games by advertising them as ‘easy’. It sells them by advertising how hard they are. Similarly, in my experience children seldom complain that school is too hard but often complain that it is boring. By this I think they mean two things: it is insufficiently challenging to engage their minds and insufficiently connected to their interests to engage their passions. The alternative image of learning I want to present is captured by a phrase children spontaneously used to describe experiences of mastering — rather than using — the new technologies. They said it was ‘hard fun’. They did not mean that it was fun in spite of being hard. They meant that it was fun because of being hard. Or perhaps it would be better to say that they called it ‘hard fun’ because it provided an opportunity to stretch their mental muscles to achieve a result they really wanted to achieve.
The challenge for the education world is to find ways to mobilize opportunities for hard fun that will serve the larger purposes of education. To meet this challenge, we must avoid a trap: the path that is easiest for us is to use the new technologies to make it easier for children to learn what we have always set as the goals of education. I hope to offer some glimpses of a harder route. Instead of using technology to serve school-as-it-is, we should be rethinking what school could be in the context of the new technologies.
Learning and Being Taught
When I was visiting a pre-school, four-year-old Jennifer, who had heard that I grew up in Africa, came to me excitedly with a question she had obviously considered for some time. She asked: ‘How do giraffes sleep?’ and explained that when she sleeps, she cuddles her head in her arms and had noticed that her new puppy did the same. But giraffes have such long necks they cannot do this. Where do they put their necks? I said I did not know but suggested that we try to figure out how they might do it. Soon a group of children joined us in an animated discussion. Several theories were formulated, of which the one that gained most support was the idea that the giraffe would find a fork in the branches of a tree and rest its head there. My question about what would happen if there were no trees was given a curt reply: of course there are trees, giraffes have long necks to eat high branches.
The incident brings out two aspects of the intellectual condition of children of Jennifer’s age: they are capable of generating creative and coherent theories, but their only method of testing them against any kind of objective reality is the very poor one of asking an adult. I call this poor not only because the probability of finding a knowledgeable and willing adult is low, but especially because of what I call ‘the great school put-down’. We adults have an ambivalent reaction to children’s theories. We are delighted at their quaint originality. We love to tell others how clever our children are at coming up with cute ideas. But then we are seized with a sense of duty about putting the little darlings right. Since children do not know enough to produce the kind of theory that will qualify as ‘correct’ their theory-building almost inevitably leads to being told they are wrong. The wonder is that it takes so long for them to become discouraged and give up making theories and that some never do.
The put-down is one danger to the creative thinking of the growing child. Looking at what I did after I left Jennifer gives us a peep at another danger, and at how both could be avoided in a technology-rich learning environment.
After the conversation I went home with the question still turning in my head. There I continued the inquiry by two kinds of action that were not open to Jennifer. Since this was before the days when one could google ‘giraffe sleep’, one of these was looking in books. The other was following one of the leads that I found in a book by playing with plastic blocks to make a model of how a giraffe’s bone structure might facilitate sleeping while standing up. As I did so I reflected on how much better Jennifer’s sense of her own creativity would be served if she were able to do what I was doing. Even if it led her to give up her initial theory this would have been experienced as success in her own research and an encouragement to continue creative theory-making rather than as the put-down inherent in being told once more: ‘Nice try, but you are wrong.’ So, although doing what I did at home was impossible for a four-year-old, it is interesting to think about how she might come to be able to do this, or something functionally like it, under two hypotheses: in the world as it is and, in the world, as it might become. I will formulate this by putting Jennifer’s story in the context of my three-stage model of the development of learning.
The baby is born into stage one as a self-directed agent with an instinct for mastering the world, which at this stage is confined to what can be directly perceived and directly affected, for example by crawling or grasping or crying. The child’s exploration of this immediate world has many of the characteristics progressive educators recommend as good practice. It is self-directed, experiential, non-verbal, body-involved and often associated with powerful affect. We met Jennifer at a transition to stage two. She has become aware of a larger world than what is immediately accessible to her. For example, she is aware of Africa and of giraffes. But her access to knowledge about anything beyond the immediate is terribly limited and frustratingly dependent on adults. An increasing fraction of it is verbal rather than experiential. It is increasingly dominated by a true-false, rather than by an experiential-pragmatic epistemology. All these characteristics will increase to a peak when she goes to school and learning gives way largely to ‘being teached’. My continuation at home of the giraffe project shows me in stage three. Books and modeling materials and now computers and the internet have allowed me to regain characteristics of stage one. They have given me an extended immediacy that I can explore in a self-directed way that is closer to the infant’s than to Jennifer’s. But — and here is the crux of the whole drama of education — in order to get to stage three I had to traverse a precarious passage through stage two.
People in my audience may not have experienced stage two as precarious. Those who become the kind of adult who engages in such intellectual pursuits as attending lectures or reading books about creativity traversed it successfully. But this is the time when the vast majority of people worldwide give up the intellectual curiosity and creative drive they all had as infants. It is precarious! Moreover, many of those who survive it do so at a cost of marking time in their intellectual development for a period during which the major interest of most school systems is in perfecting the mechanics of their reading, writing and calculating. In the meantime, school has little choice but to scale down the intellectual level of the work to match the reading-writing level of the average student.
Contrast this with another scenario. One can quite reasonably imagine that a Jennifer of some future time would be able to get better information about giraffes by using an interface that connects her without using text to better sources of knowledge than I could find. Such sources do not exist today because nobody has taken the trouble to make them. They are technologically feasible and will surely come. In the meantime, the thought experiment is enough to allow us to formulate this hypothesis: a major — perhaps the essential — contribution of digital technology to learning will be seen as eliminating stage two as a transition by permitting a seamless, smooth transition from the immediacy of the infant’s world to the adult’s extended immediacy. Of course this does not mean that the skills learned in stage two will necessarily be abandoned or given less importance. But their acquisition need not hold up other learning; they need not give rise to the hysterical tension occasioned today when a child does not learn to read at the appropriate time. And most relevantly here, the learning process will be less brutally dominated by the stage two epistemology with its emphasis on propositional true-false knowledge at the expense of experiential-pragmatic knowledge. As a result, there will be more room for the aesthetic, the affective and the creative dimensions of learning.
Literacy and Letteracy
For reasons that I am not able to determine, Jake refused to read at the time the school he attended thought he should. The more the teacher insisted, the more he dug in his heels and just would not. By the next year the school began to suspect that there was an organic reason. The suspicion grew into certainty. Jake was classified as dyslexic. The mother who found this hard to believe arranged for a consultation with a private practitioner who confirmed the school’s diagnosis. In the meantime, Jake was increasingly unhappy at school and increasingly in tense relations with the teachers. Jake’s mother decided to take him out of school and let him learn at home. What he wanted to do was look at movies and listen to books on tape. The mother allowed this. Over the following year Jake went through all the books on tape in neighbouring libraries. He developed a remarkably large vocabulary for a child of his age and a sophisticated sense of plot and character.
This level of learning poses an acute question for the advocates of standards. Judged by President Bush’s criterion, Jake was ‘a child left behind’ because he couldn’t read. By some other criteria he may be counted as further ahead than President Bush in his mastery of English. We have to ask ourselves which kind of knowledge is more important: what Jake learned or what he did not learn.
The sequel to the story relieves us of having to answer in Jake’s case. After a year of ‘home schooling’ his mother couldn’t take it any longer and sent him back to school, though to a different one. There he encountered a teacher with whom he fell in love sufficiently to be willing to give reading a try. He soon disproved the diagnosis of dyslexia. The love of stories and of language he had developed during his year out of school now stood him in good stead. Once he began to read he streaked ahead. Within weeks he had caught up with his classmates; within months he became the best reader in the class, and the next year received an award as the best reader in the school in competition with students several years older!
Jake’s story raises several issues. The most important is the questioning of the assumption that all people must follow the same route to becoming successful adults. Even on the most superficial level Jake shows us that timing is not destiny. If he had not had a mother with the education herself and the willingness to take action he might well have been left behind — not because teachers who didn’t care neglected him, but because they were over-diligent in forcing him to do so. This is not a problem that would have been solved by imposing sterner testing and accountability. There was already too much of it. But let us look at the situation on a deeper level. Jake did eventually read. But what if he had not done so? Would this have ruined his life?
Knowing and Doing
In a small school near Kilkenny, I saw primary-age children constructing something one could describe as a robot theatre. The actors did not look like humanoid robots; for one thing, they moved on wheels not legs. But they did move in what appeared to be a purposeful way, responding to what was around them and acting out a story. This was part of a larger education project called Empowering Minds conceived by Dr Deirdre Butler of St Patrick’s College, Drumcondra, and now implemented in a growing number of Irish schools.2 I shall have more to say about the goals of this project but focus first on an aspect related to the story of Jennifer and the ‘great school put down’.
I take seriously the dilemma of a sensitive teacher faced with a child’s theory. Explaining why the theory is wrong risks the put-down. On the other hand, the child has to learn to face reality. In my opinion as much harm is done by the idea that one should protect the child’s sense of self-esteem by an ‘anything goes’ attitude: children have to learn that tough thinking is sometimes necessary and acquire the habits of mind and skills necessary to do it. Building robotic creatures allows a third way between authoritative instructionism and laissez faire. If the robot fails to work (as it inevitably will on the first try) the child inevitably makes a theory of what is wrong. The theory leads to action to correct the problem. If the theory does not work this is directly apparent to the child. No put-down is necessary. On the contrary, the failure of the theory leads to more thinking and to generating a new theory. This is very different from the misguided version of constructivism that condemns ever providing knowledge explicitly to a child on the grounds that good learning only happens by discovery. There is no ‘put-down’ when the child asks for and is given help to solve a problem that has arisen in the course of that child’s own project. The important difference between this and the ‘instructionist’ school practices condemned by progressive educators is that here the problem comes from the resistance of reality, not from the authority of a superior.
This discussion of the process of learning gives a false, or rather, partial, impression of what the Empowering Minds project brings into the classroom. Discussions like constructionism versus instructionism or of the costs and benefits of discovery learning are about how to learn and how to teach. The Empowering Minds project also introduces a new content: it is about what to learn before it is about how to learn. These children are learning a new subject matter that does not fit into the traditional list of school subjects like mathematics, English, history or geography. If we have to give it a name, we would recognize it as a branch of engineering that will lead us to ask why we should teach engineering in elementary schools.
I can make a long list of justifications of the kinds that are commonly given for including topics in the curriculum. A superficial one would simply be that engineering is important in the world and so children should learn about it. Perhaps true, but insufficient, since we cannot possibly include in the school curriculum everything that is important in the world. My discussion of the kind of learning that takes place in building robotic constructions goes deeper as a justification. But I still want something even more fundamental and find it by going back to the overall theme of this series: the concept of creativity.
I want to stand back and compare in the most general way science and engineering as school subjects. To avoid a likely confusion, I must pause to say explicitly that I am talking about science as it is taught in schools not science as research scientists working at the frontier of knowledge practise it. With this clarification I think it is fair to say that science is primarily about understanding things, while engineering is primarily about making things. The essence of engineering is doing and creating. The essence of science is thinking and understanding.
Now let me ask: which comes first, doing or thinking? I know this is a trick question, like the famous chicken and egg. Neither comes first. They go hand in hand. Or so we should hope. But when we look at school, we see a different picture. Whole subject matters, especially science and mathematics, but also history and geography, are practiced in school as if they are entirely about thinking, knowing and understanding, with no component related to getting anything done, to creating anything. This goes so much against the most elementary common sense that we need to ask why it happened and why it is tolerated.
Think back a few millennia to the kinds of problems that came up in activities closer to engineering than to anything we teach in our schools as mathematics. Building pyramids or surveying lands are plainly in the field of engineering; so is predicting the behaviour of the Nile or of the stars; and carrying on commerce or navigating the oceans are all close to it in their styles of thinking. Certainly, mathematics began as a way of thinking about real things that was integral to action, to getting real jobs done in the real world. Only very gradually did this concrete mathematical thinking develop into the stand-alone subject we call mathematics.
In schools the order is reversed. After a few gestures towards concreteness in the very earliest grades (and even then ‘concreteness’ does not mean that it is used to create anything meaningful to the creator), students go through a long sequence of years spent on arithmetic as a nearly closed system. This is followed by more years spent on algebra and formal geometry, and, for the few who have not yet dropped out, by calculus. Only then do the even fewer survivors actually use it in university courses on engineering or economics or other applied areas.
The Empowering Minds project is a small step that shows a big direction: it points to a vision of schooling in which the pedagogical sequence could be reversed to match the order of historical development and (although I do not have time to develop this point here) the natural epistemological development. Certainly, it matches the common sense idea that understanding and doing should develop together. The students building the robotic theatre begin like the Egyptian builders of pyramids with a real engineering goal. As they pursue it, they pick up some mathematical ways of thinking. In principle these would eventually support a study of pure mathematics in a very new and more meaningful way. We can see a little of this actually happening in Deirdre Butler’s doctoral thesis about the project and in reports of a few similar projects in other countries. But I turn again, as I did in 2001, to Cahill for images of a deeper kind to support a movement that goes very much further in the direction of shifting the creative uses of science and mathematics from a narrow place, towards the end of schooling-as-it-is, to diffuse and enrich the whole of schooling-as-it-will-be.
Rome and Ireland
I encountered the book How the Irish Saved Civilization as background reading for my first public appearance in Ireland and must admit that my initial thought was to use the title superficially as a flattering hook to catch the attention of an Irish audience. But as I read the book I found surprisingly many resonances with issues that face us today.3 For example:
Patrick’s gift to the Irish was his Christianity, the first de-Romanized Christianity in human history. A Christianity without the socio-political baggage of the Greek or Roman world. A Christianity that completely encultured itself into the Irish scene. Through the Edict of Milan which had legalized the religion in 313 and made it the new emperor’s pet, Christianity had been received into Rome, not Rome into Christianity. Roman culture was little altered by the exchange and it is arguable that Christianity lost much of its distinctiveness. But in the Patrician exchange Ireland, lacking the power and the impeccable traditions of Rome, had been received into Christianity that transformed Ireland into something new, something never seen before.4
It is easy to see a superficial sense in which school has treated the computer culture much as Rome is said here to have treated Christianity. Every education department in the world declares its intention to use computers to support new forms of learning. But these new forms, even when they are different in detail, and I am quite willing to admit sometimes better, remain within the overall structural framework of established school. In particular all the key features of stage two are retained: the propositional form of knowledge (now in fact reinforced by their good match with multiple choice testing), the three Rs, and the exclusion of engineering and of understanding computers. The culminating irony is that computers are used to improve these practices that were installed only because there were no computers at the time school-as-we-know-it came into being!
Extending Piaget’s language from the development of children’s intelligence to the development of other systems, one can say that Rome assimilated Christianity and school assimilated the computer; by contrast, what happened in Ireland and what I anticipate happening in education are more akin to the notion of accommodation. But while I do find that this level of parallelism provides some food for thought I do not think I would find it worth mentioning if there were not also another level with a more specific relationship to the particular issues we have been discussing.
The point of difference between Rome and Ireland is not simply that one accepted Christianity only superficially while the other did so in a deeper and more real way. This difference was there, but a difference even more relevant to our present theme lay in the fact that the Christianity Ireland took in deeply was not the same Christianity that Rome took in superficially. Or rather, perhaps one should say that their epistemological representations were different — they used different ways of knowing even if it could be argued (on this I am agnostic) that what they knew was the same at its core. These differences in ways of knowing are not unrelated to the differences we have touched on in looking at how children learn.
Their origin goes back to the earliest days of the Jesus movement. For Simon/Peter and the other early disciples, the new knowledge was experiential, carried by narratives and direct relationships. Paul, with his thorough Greco-Roman education began the process of intellectualizing that was to achieve the status of a full-blown theological-philosophical system in the writings of men like St Augustine and St Aquinas who came, of course, too late to play a role in our story. In these versions principles and theses replaced narratives and experiences as the central carriers of knowledge. Saying that Patrick brought Christianity to Ireland tells only half the story; the deeper half would emphasize that his was a particular kind of Christianity, one that went against the dominant intellectual paradigms of the time, one that went against the Augustinian theology to become more akin to Peter than to Paul. More precisely, Patrick and the Irish together evolved a new form of Christianity, carried by narrative and relationship and imbued with fantasy, magic, love and mysticism to make it specifically Irish.
It is not a very daring step to postulate some degree of parallel between how school’s epistemology relates to my stage one and how Paul and Augustine relate to the first followers of Jesus. It is riskier enterprise, and in any case too complex to be given more than a hint here, to develop the idea that Patrick’s reaction against an Augustine-like theology provides a model for the transformation of school that will be made possible by providing a continuous passage from stage one to stage three. So, in the rhetorical tradition of the early disciples I throw it out as a parable that might be suggestive to others as it is to me.
Monday and Some Day
Let me recapitulate my main theme. Children are born with powerful instincts for creative, experiential learning. Their quest for understanding soon reaches the limits of the immediate world they can reach directly. The most modern digital technologies would make possible a seamless transition across the boundaries from their immediate world into an extended immediacy. But social habits formed long before it existed prevent it from doing so. Earlier forms of technology, such as print, supported a huge advance in learning by making the crossing possible on a mass scale. But doing this required going through a painful and precarious period of schooling based on a less natural form of learning; for many children the transition could only be made at the cost of extinguishing or seriously damping their natural tendencies. The drama of education today is that the institutions built to implement this great opportunity have been cast in social and legal as well as in literal forms of concrete. The possibility of the seamless crossing remains a vision of what might happen someday.
Teachers to whom I have described this vision are often intrigued, filled with hope and eager to make it come about. Then they come down to earth with the question: ‘But what shall I do Monday?’ which is teacher-talk for ‘Be real, I’d love to do that, but it is impossible.’ Indeed, for the individual teacher the vision cannot be achieved before meeting a class of present-day children when she gets back to school. Yet there is a pragmatic, constructive answer to the question: ‘I can’t tell you specifically what to do Monday, but I can tell you a general principle: whenever you have a choice ask yourself which way best takes us a step closer to someday.’ This might mean changing the criteria for what you do in your class. Choices are supposed to be made by thinking about which will produce the best immediate improvement in how the children learn. But in the long run, the best choice might be what improves how the system learns. Consider for example the Empowering Minds project. As it happens, the children do learn a lot. But perhaps far more important is that parents, other teachers, school administrators — in short, the system — come to see that there is a kind of learning they never imagined. If so, a step has been taken from Monday to Someday.
Empowering Minds is a powerfully chosen name. Someone else might have called it Robotics in the Schoolroom. I like to think that Deirdre Butler’s Irishness is responsible. Who could be better at finding the images and the metaphors that will catch people’s minds and empower them to see the absurdity of teaching what we teach simply because it was taught before, and when there are so many more exciting and even practically valuable things to learn? Nobody would be better at teasing them when they say things like: ‘But technology shouldn’t dictate the curriculum, it should support it.’ As if the boot were not on the other foot — the curriculum as taught is entirely dictated by the technology that was around in the old days. The new technology doesn’t dictate the curriculum; it liberates it.
But why Ireland? Why should we ask Ireland to save us? Ireland has given the world so much to fuel creativity, so much poetry, so much imagination, so many myths and stories that it might seem churlish to ask her to give more, even though these are just the things we need to bring into the world of technology. She tempts us further to ask for more by showing that she can get things done. When Ireland turned herself to making a new economy, she startled the world by making this Celtic Tiger. I agree that it is too churlish to ask for more. So, I won’t ask. But she has taught us to do something better than asking. She’s taught us to dream.
Footnotes:
[1]: Thomas Cahill, How the Irish Saved Civilization: The Untold Story of Ireland’s Heroic Role from the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe (London, 1995).
[2]: The Empowering Minds project (EM) is a model of constructionist learning and teacher professional development. It is a joint collaboration between St Patrick’s College (Dublin City University), Media Lab Europe, the National Centre for Technology in Education (www.ncte.ie) and the MIT Media Lab Laboratory and was initiated in Ireland by Deirdre Butler in 1998 (https://web.archive.org/web/20130627224806/http://empoweringminds.spd.dcu.ie/). To date the EM project has deeply integrated technologically expressive materials — including robotics and presentation/programming software — into the educational practices of teachers at more than 50 primary schools across Ireland and continues to expand. As the project grows, organizers are challenged to aim beyond sustainability to scalability, encouraging participants to develop ways of maintaining their local identities and their control and ownership of the work and ideas.
[3]: I do not pretend to be a sufficiently well-informed scholar of Irish or Christian history to vouch for the veracity of Cahill’s account. But as a student of how thought systems operate I can say that his story is remarkably illuminating even if he made it up.
[4]: Cahill, How the Irish, p. 148.