[SUSANNAH SHEFFER:] Seymour Papert’s Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas is, in the author’s words, “about an end to the culture that makes science and technology alien to the vast majority of people.” It looks at how we might use computers if we think of learning as active rather than passive, integrated rather than fragmented, and at what this might mean for our society.
Pat Farenga and I met with Seymour Papert at his home in Boston to explore some of these issues and to bring them before GWS readers. Aaron Falbel, a student of Papert and frequent contributor to GWS, was also present.
One note: LOGO, the program that Papert and his colleagues developed, is mentioned only briefly here. LOGO is a concrete example of the ideas put forth in the discussion that follows, and readers who are interested in the details of how this program works can find them in the book Mindstorms.
Susannah Sheffer: I’m curious about the distinction you make between using computers to maintain the status quo and using them to change it – particularly with regard to math.
Seymour Papert: Why ask the question with regard to math? Why not with regard to school? The essence of what’s wrong with school is this thing called instruction, and everything that goes with that: having people follow a curriculum, having them learn fragmented knowledge that’s been meted out in small pieces. Clearly, this is something that doesn’t work very well, and there’s no reason to believe that it’s a good way.
SUSANNAH SHEFFER: Why not?
SEYMOUR PAPERT: Because it’s an unnatural way of learning. It carries with it the idea that knowledge is fragmentary, and that you learn by being taught. This is true irrespective of the social structure of school – even in a school without classes or age-distinctions, for example, if your concept is that knowledge has to be dispensed, you have a fundamentally wrong concept, and of course it’s a concept that is essential to contemporary school.
SUSANNAH SHEFFER: Have we carried that same assumption over to our use of computers?
SEYMOUR PAPERT: Computers clearly can be used, and I suppose most of the computers in school are being used, to further that assumption. All the uses of computers as aids to instruction do this.
SUSANNAH SHEFFER: What would be an example of that – programs that involve filling in the blank?
SEYMOUR PAPERT: Filling in the blank, dispensing information, any situation in which the computer decides what you need to do next, and when you’ve made a mistake.
SUSANNAH SHEFFER: Why have we used computers this way? Lack of imagination?
SEYMOUR PAPERT: Yes, I think the concept of school demands that we use them that way.
SUSANNAH SHEFFER: Which do we have to change first, then, our use of computers or our concept of school? If I understand your work correctly, you say that changing the way we use computers might be one way to change our concept of school. But can we change the way we use computers if we still think about teaching and learning in the old ways?
SEYMOUR PAPERT: Insofar as computers are used in school to support the same concept of instruction as dispensing information, they support the status quo, yes. And I think if your readers install computers in their homes and run these same programs, they may be saving their children from some of the disadvantages of school but they’re still instituting in their homes the essential epistemological content of schools, the same way of thinking about learning.
SUSANNAH SHEFFER: Yes, just as Aaron said in GWS #63 that there are ways of thinking about math that are just as limiting whether you’re at home or at school.
SEYMOUR PAPERT: I don’t think the issue is whether you do it in your living room or in the classroom, if the assumptions are the same.
SUSANNAH SHEFFER: I’m wondering though, if because those assumptions about teaching and learning are so firmly ingrained in school, it’s harder to make change there. What are the challenges you face-if you walk into a school and say, “Guess what, there’s a whole different way of using computers, it’s founded on different assumptions”. How do people hear that?
SEYMOUR PAPERT: Slowly! I don’t know by what route school is going to change or disappear, but it’s going to take a long time because these assumptions aren’t only in school, they’re in the whole society. I think the concept of deschooling society is much deeper than getting rid of school buildings; it’s really about deschooling the mind.
SUSANNAH SHEFFER: Which is why I wonder whether it works to say, “Here’s a different way of using computers, a way that will empower children, let them be active”, etc. Wouldn’t the response be, “Why do we want that?”
SEYMOUR PAPERT: So ultimately it becomes a question of social philosophy. In the end it’s going to be a political decision. I think movements such as yours are important as models, and I expect we need many different kinds of models, for moving towards pluralism. I think computers do have a lot to do with this. I think they plant seeds of different approaches to learning things, to doing things you didn’t think you could do before, and I don’t think this is limited to school. Writers using a word processor may find they can handle things they thought they couldn’t, and businesses, offices, may be taking on more complex jobs. So these are seeds of change.
Aaron Falbel: So it’s almost as if these tools have to resonate with certain social philosophies and movements before they can really make any change. I remember in 1986 you wrote a short paper called, ‘The Computer as Trojan Horse.” You hoped that the computer would sort of infiltrate the existing social system and make people start asking questions. Do you think this happens? I mean, there are two routes we can go with computers. We can become even more deeply entrenched in the status quo, do the same things we’ve been doing all along, only more powerfully, or there can be some sort of friction and we can say, maybe what we’ve been doing all along isn’t that great, maybe there are new possibilities.
SEYMOUR PAPERT: My sense is that in this decade, or this quarter-century, there’s been a lot of movement toward a more pluralistic approach to knowledge – its use, its acquisition, whether with children or grownups. There’s more talk about this stuff, more people who are actively engaged in thinking about it. I think computers are an element in that. They’ve given people a sense of a possible bridge into forbidden areas of knowledge, areas outside someone’s normal expertise. But I think it’s meaningless to ask what the computer can do, by itself. It’s part of a whole process, part of what we decide to do with it.
SUSANNAH SHEFFER: You talk about computers in terms of empowerment, in terms of how they can help people feel that they can do things they never thought they could do. It’s funny, because I think there are a lot of people in 1988 who still feel rendered so powerless by the computer, or maybe it’s powerless in the face of the computer. I think a lot of people still see the computer as part of a whole trend in society that makes them feel more alienated, not less. Again, which comes first – maybe the reason some people are so afraid to touch a computer is that their schooling made them feel so incompetent, so afraid of anything new. How can the computer be used to empower people who are afraid even of getting near it?
SEYMOUR PAPERT: I think that breaking that barrier can be an empowering event, and ifs very seldom reversible. People who find they can use computers for their own purposes feel empowered and stay that way. People who feel disempowered by the computer I think generally are people who in any case feel alienated from knowledge, who feel locked into a small, restricted area.
SUSANNAH SHEFFER: I don’t know. I think some people see computers as part of the technological era, a whole way of looking at things that renders people less important. They feel something like, “I used to be in control, and now the machine is in control”.
Aaron Falbel: But that attributes causality to the machine, says that it is in itself dehumanizing. What does that mean? What does that mean to say that a technology is in itself dehumanizing?
SEYMOUR PAPERT: Certainly in some areas of work, computers can be used for a sort of professional degredation, in some kinds of work that previously required individual initiative. In selling insurance, for example, there was a time when the insurance salesman trying to sell you a policy had to think quickly about what sort of needs you might have, and now that it’s highly computerized you can enter a series of characteristics into the machine and it spews something out, which is essentially degrading. There is that side, and certainly computers can allow that degredation to happen. But they can also allow the opposite to happen. What’s changed with computers is that more things can happen, there’s more chance for improvement in all sorts of directions.
SUSANNAH SHEFFER: Is it necessarily better to be able to do more things? What if we’re doing things, and they’re bad?
SEYMOUR PAPERT: I see the computer as breaking down assumptions about the way things have to be. It doesn’t break them down in any particularly good or bad direction. It’s up to us to decide what to do. With respect to school, the idea that there’s a fixed set of knowledge that people should have is becoming increasingly absurd, for example.
SUSANNAH SHEFFER: How do you account for books like Cultural Literacy, which argue that there is a fixed set of knowledge that people should have?
SEYMOUR PAPERT: It shows that people are very upset and concerned about these issues.
SUSANNAH SHEFFER: How can we tip the balance – you keep saying that computers can be good or bad. What are the ways to use it that can make it an active and empowering thing?
SEYMOUR PAPERT: The computer is neutral, but I don’t think we ought to be neutral. People ought to be acting to bring about the change they’d like to see happen. You can see specific programming, for example, as opening doors or as locking you out of doors you couldn’t get into anyway.
SUSANNAH SHEFFER: For some of us, thinking of educational software, all we can think of is the very basic kind of fill-in-the-blank stuff that we know is bad. What alternatives are there?
SEYMOUR PAPERT: Well, I think LOGO in its various manifestations is meant to provide kids with a constructive use of the computer. Of course if people make their kids use LOGO and then ask themselves. “What is this doing for their understanding of multiplication tables?” or anything else that narrow, they would undo whatever good LOGO did.
SUSANNAH SHEFFER: Is LOGO something anyone can get access to?
SEYMOUR PAPERT: Well, computers are still relatively expensive – although not as expensive as television sets or cars.
SUSANNAH SHEFFER: I mean the software – I think some people have the feeling that you can’t get all the really fancy stuff if you’re not part of the schools.
SEYMOUR PAPERT: No, you can get it.
SUSANNAH SHEFFER: One interesting difference between schools and homeschoolers with respect to all this is that many homeschoolers already hold the views about children and learning that you’re saying computers can help us see.
Pat Farenga: And in Mindstorms you emphasize that the children have extended access to LOGO, it isn’t just forty-five minutes of “computer” and then on to “math”. Homeschoolers have that kind of time to play around for long periods.
SUSANNAH SHEFFER: Can you picture kids in 1988 never touching a computer and still growing up without being mathophobic – the word you use in Mindstorms? Or is a computer essential to avoiding mathophobia?
SEYMOUR PAPERT: I do think that kids who grow up with access to computer technology, and who are able to use it in constructive ways, will pretty obviously be less mathophobic. We see many examples of people who were mathophobic and who got out of it through interacting with computers – it’s a new, personal access to mathematics for them.
SUSANNAH SHEFFER: I guess my question is, are there other routes out of mathophobia besides the computer? I’m thinking again of Aaron’s writing in GWS #63, in which he talks about so many entryways into math.
SEYMOUR PAPERT: Well, don’t ask the question, how to get out of mathophobia, ask how we avoid getting into it. I think we get into it because of the alienated nature of mathematics in our culture, and the permeation of computers into the culture does create a set of conditions in which that alienation might not exist. I think we’re moving in that direction – there are millions of kids who are now doing mathematical kinds of things with computers, who would not have done anything mathematical otherwise. That’s clearly happening.
There’s also a kind of ripple effect, whereby the presence of computers, even if you don’t touch them, makes mathematical, scientific, technological kinds of things seem more friendly, more personal to children. You can get a better idea of what it’s like to do mathematics.
SUSANNAH SHEFFER: It also helps to learn that all sorts of things besides multiplication tables count as mathematics.
Pat Ferenga: You wrote that computers can help fade the line between teachers and learners, but meanwhile there seems to be a big movement to increase that barrier, and to make teachers more professional.
SEYMOUR PAPERT: Yes, in some sense the existing structure is threatened by what I’m saying about computers. But for the people who do believe in a more empowered life for children, the more they see what forces are at work the more they may intervene and try to make change. I think it’s unlikely that schools will uniformly change into something better, but I think some schools might – some schools are.
SUSANNAH SHEFFER: Where does your hope lie – in the belief that we are increasing the number of people who are making schools better, or that we’re moving toward deschooling?
SEYMOUR PAPERT: I think we mustn’t think in terms of schools but in terms of schooling, of that attitude toward knowledge.
SUSANNAH SHEFFER: What would society look like once the majority of people’s attitude toward knowledge had changed?
SEYMOUR PAPERT: I don’t know. For a long time we’ve put children in places called schools, and they’ve spent a lot of time with people their own age. I don’t see any reason to suppose that that’s a good thing to do. But perhaps it is a good idea for children to spend many years in a community that meets together, does things together – or maybe not. I don’t know whether we’ll keep the distinction between children and adults. Why should there be a phase in which you’re defined as preparing for life, and then at 18 you start living?
We’ve got very strong prejudices against what we call child labor, which have historical roots in the nineteenth-century exploitation in the sweatshops. But this needn’t be the case. I think we’re still living in the shadow of that nineteenth-century exploitation, so it’s hard to see whether the idea of protecting children by keeping them out of the workplace has any meaning anymore. Maybe if we broke that down we’d go back to the exploitation, or maybe if we broke it down we could find a much more harmonious way of making less of a distinction between work and play, childhood and adulthood, learning and teaching.
Source:
Papert, S., & Sheffer, S. (1988). Computers and the learning society. Growing with Children, no. 65. Retrieved from the John Holt GWS archive: https://www.johnholtgws.com/pats-blog/w9a5mgu6bgtzpu166nkht8uzt3jp78