Go to Outtakes Part One
Seymour Papert:
Who teaches French kids to talk French? Well, everybody and nobody, they talking French to one another and they pick up a word in a game from a another kid, from a parent, or they read it in a book or hear it in a, they’re learning it all the time. It’s part of the culture. This is very different from. I’m trying to imitate that a little bit in a classroom where people take this idea and say, let the kids mentor one another.
Well, sure that’s better than having a teacher in front of the class talk to them. But it’s still not the same as learning it in a natural way that French kids are not mentoring one another in learning French. They are learn, they are. It’s part of their lives. They’re living it. And I’m not saying that teaching math some form of math isn’t an important thing to do, but that’s the upper levels.
The foundation has to be learning, like you learn your language that is learning it by living it. This is what I think the computer can do. It’s not the computer is teaching, of course. I mean, the computer is the medium that allows them to communicate with it with one another, with ideas with themselves that they can formulate themselves what they’re doing.
So all these many complex things that we see perfectly clearly when we look at. The learning of language of the culture that we live in. That’s the model. We’ve gotta work towards that. And to do that though, we can’t do it in a classroom, it changes what we would do in whatever school is gonna turn into.
But we have to think on a much bigger scale. Gotta think about what’s happening. Right throughout life, from early childhood and after school and in the games and in the movies they look at and everything it’s this narrow isolation of mathematics that makes it such a hard thing to deal with.
Interviewer:
But you can’t learn it in the schools. You have to learn it by giving every child a computer in Maine, every child is gonna have a computer or iMac in this state. Are they gonna learn mathematics from the computer or by themselves or with friends or with a teacher?
Seymour Papert:
Yeah. I certain don’t think that giving every kid a computer is in itself the answer any more than giving every kid pencil and paper is an answer to creating literate people. They have to be in a culture where pencil and paper and writing and reading play an important role. So this cultural growth is something that will happen slowly, but I don’t think all that slowly as people fear.
I see for example, in the ways in which things that a lot of kids are already passionately interested in. That can where the connection can be made. For example, I’ve had a lot of success introducing kids to making their own computer games. So in order to make your own computer game, you need some elements of programming.
But once you’ve got them, you can very easily make a game. And because gaming is an important thing to you and you can share it with other people and talk to them about it, this is an example of a cultural connection. Between a mathematical pocket of mathematical knowledge and a passionate interest, at least for some kids.
And I think with many of those sorts in music and graphic arts and making movies, communication in this area we are in Maine. This is the lobster place of the world in our view. There are serious social controversies about the biology of lobsters. The lobster fishermen have certain views and the marine biologists have other views, and the Environmental Protection Agency has other views and the data to sort them out doesn’t exist.
And for most people, the basis on which to argue is very shallow. We’ve already got kids who are being to become involved in using their computers to make models of the. Of the lobster population and to use these models to either understand better what’s happening or make better arguments to engaged in deeper debate.
It’s an example of how an important interest for a community. Can be connected with important, powerful ideas, mathematical ones and biological ones and ecological ones, through using the computer as the medium for interaction with this area of interest. So the relation of the kid to mathematics becomes totally different if what the kid’s interested in is, how can I represent this idea about.
The change of the age distribution of the lobsters that are being hauled in and how that might relate to the evolution of the species, of lobsters in our waters. And that’s mathematics. It’s mathematical thinking, and that kid wants mathematical ideas for something. It’s not really important.
Personally, but also important to the community and to that kid’s relationship to the parents and other people around and to issues that matter.
Interviewer:
So they’re telling stories through mathematics. He’s building. This is, I mean, when you made games, are you telling stories? Is the kid telling the story? Is that what the
Seymour Papert:
Yes.
You would call this.
Interviewer:
Is he a better storyteller?
Seymour Papert:
You would call this trending stories in. It is often said, mathematics is the language of science for science, for big parts of science, mathematics is the way in which the story is told. That’s not what happens in school and school. Mathematics is not a language for telling the story, but if I’m going to use the land, the mathematics to, understand better explore and convey better the ideas that I’m developing about how the lobster population develops. Yes. Mathematics is a language for telling a story happens to be a scientific story. Mathematics here is in its real relationship to science as the language of science. Gotcha.
Interviewer:
I guess you believe that chil, you’ve been working with children all your life?
Seymour Papert:
Most of it, yeah.
Interviewer:
You’re a child. I mean, deep experiences with mathematics.
You think, well, with it’s mathematics, you would, mathematics, you’re te you’re at, you’re teaching children not to be learning, not to be fooled. Is that an important ’cause. Yeah, isn’t it? I can’t, I can, I we’re fooled all the time by,
I don’t know what I’m, I dunno what I’m saying. Mathematical. Are you teaching children the how not to be fooled. How not how to be better citizens. How to be better.
Seymour Papert:
Well, there’s one way I was just picking up on that. You know, I’ve become very convinced that. Public education is as important as school education or teacher education and putting my, did you say My money over my mouth?
I’ve been convinced that public education is really important and practicing what I preach. I’ve taken to writing a column every week in the Bango Daily News, which is the most influential paper around here about learning. Right, and it so happens. The last one was about a saying lies big lies and statistics.
In fact, most people are, have no basis on which to judge the value of any statistical argument. A couple of weeks ago, there was a big. A debate, a big fur in the state because some poll polling organization published some statistics to say that one of the candidates for the coming November elections for governor had a 60% lead, and lots of people got very upset about it.
Now, I was struck by this day. A lot of people get upset about it, but hardly anybody has any way of judging whether the arguments follow and against the way that poll was done, how good they’re, how bad they are. And in fact, most people are very suspicious about polls altogether. And I hear people say, well, they never asked me.
Or anyone I know or how can asking 400 people tell you anything about what you know, a hundred million people are gonna do? Well, most people don’t know anything about, they can’t do anything to explore that question, that believe experts or not believe they’re experts. Kid with a computer could make a model.
In which we set up statistical situations and take samples and see how many, how big a sample we need. When, if I say this box, there’s got a lot of, it’s got 60% black balls and 60% and 40% white balls. No. If I give you this box and say it’s got black balls and white balls. 60% or one color and 40% or the other.
Which color is the dominant color? Well, how’d you decide if you take out one ball? It really doesn’t tell you. Even if you take out two balls, doesn’t really tell you how many balls would you have to take if there. Say a million in the box or 10,000, how many would you have to take in before you could make a confident statement?
And I bet you don’t have any idea about how to go about thinking about that kid capable program. The computer, we did it in logo, but couldn’t be done in squeak in 10 minutes, could set up a role model and in 10 more minutes, run some trial experiments. And find out that if you took out 20 or 30 and judged on the majority there, you could still be off wrong, maybe one time in 20.
But if you took out several hundred, you’d only be wrong one time in, in many thousands. So the, you can do something about it. You can do something about that issue. And, you know, I think that’s just a tiny little example of that.
Interviewer:
And that kid couldn’t be lied to by the media. That kind of shot. Well, of
Seymour Papert:
course he, it’d be harder for the media to, they couldn’t lie to them so, so naively, so easily.
By the way, I, that thing was last week in the column and I got. An email from a math teacher saying, I don’t see why he needs a computer. We just teach him a formula. And I dunno whether he had the tongue, his tongue in his cheek. But I mean,
Interviewer:
did you write that? I mean, was it a, you got that letter?
Seymour Papert:
I got an email.
I accumulate them and every now and then I write in the column about things that I’ve, but I think this is important. I think that it’s important for us to get out of our narrow academic. So making this kind of video a movie is part of that.
Interviewer:
I hope so.
Seymour Papert:
I’m thinking and I’d like to talk to you, I mean, that’s not part, I suppose, of the movie, but I’d like to talk to you about how this, your ideas about how this could be done on a bigger scale, that as part of public education about the nature of learning.
And it’s gotta be something beyond what you can do in, yeah, in one piece, but maybe, obviously one step on the That’s right, is the beginning of the long journey, but I’m, I think that ought to be seen much more as a goal to educate about learning in general about the nature of learning and the variety of the ways of learning.
And
Interviewer:
you gonna say anything you want to say more? This program that your interview could be used in a many different ways.
Seymour Papert:
Well, that is something that I really would like to, and I’ve been working on ideas of how to get people to think of learning as something that they should be discussing rather than taking from the experts. I find that people are really, are worried about learning in ways that they weren’t before.
In that, I think when I was a kid, my parents and my father was a scientist. It wasn’t, they didn’t know about mathematics and science, but I don’t think he gave two minutes thought to how I should be taught or how I should learn mathematics. This was something for a professional that sent me to school and professional teachers knew how to do it and it wasn’t his business.
As a matter of fact, he did teach me a lot of mathematics, but he didn’t think about it as teaching mathematics because this was a bit of math land in some of our lives. And he liked playing with little puzzles and jokes and paradoxes. So that’s feeding into mathematical thinking, but he didn’t think of it in his head as I’m going to think about how mathematics should be learned today.
It’s parents are very worried, and the computers had this effect too, that they have computers, they read magazines, they look on television, they see adv a advertising saying, buy this software, and your kid will learn mathematics without even knowing it. And well, so they do, but they’re making decisions that have broken down that barrier between that sharing of responsibility.
They are not leaving it to the school to decide. They take into their own hands, but they’ve got precious little resource to turn to for how to think about good ways to do that. So the best they can do is maybe they imitate school or ask the teachers, but teachers aren’t trained either to know what would be good for a three or 4-year-old even if the narrow goal is to prepare that three or 4-year-old for coming into in, into school eventually, well, teachers don’t know. Nobody knows. And it’s something that we should be giving a lot more attention to. And anyway I can give attention to it, is to allow diversity, which is happening ’cause people are taken to their own hands. But put out ideas that people can think about, create forer for them to think about those experiences.
I think television could be a wonderful medium for this. Are they making pieces, sort of set pieces like you’re talking about here? Which I am thinking about, or something else. I’ve been talking with Maine PBS, and I think we’re going to do this. They’re quite interested and it’s just finding enough time.
Interviewer:
I was talking to Suzanne about that. Yeah. Talk to.
Seymour Papert:
I hope on One of the things we do with main PBS, I hope is to create a sort of talk show about learning. Erica,
Interviewer:
is there If our windows open in the back. Okay,
Seymour Papert:
so sort of maybe take each each time as a me say it’s once a week and each time take some situation where learning happens in the broader sense.
Might be in a school, it might be out of a school mightn’t involve poop. He might be animals learning, ah, or machines learn, but something where people can have different views. So we’d look at some piece of actual real world happening and then have something like crossfire, get people with opposing views and let them fight it out.
And the most important thing I’d like to see come from that is giving people the idea this, there isn’t such a thing as just knowing what the best way of learning or teaching is. One of the negative, one of the big problems about this computers in Maine, and this is a continuing problem we got, I’ll say we are, became sort of assimilated into this local state group that, but I mean it was the Governor’s initiative.
Okay, so the computer’s contract is now signed with Apple to provide. Computers starting seventh grade and eighth grade, at least going for the next two years. And that’s funded up to that point. But once the principle had been accepted by the legislature that passed this law the, I thought the next important question was, well, how would these computers be used?
I think even now the governor doesn’t quite see that as a big issue. Because after all because I think the vision people have of education is very technical. You know, you might, if you wanna build a bridge. You might have to persuade the legislature to, to produce the $10 million whatever needs to produce the bridge.
And you’d think about the need for the bridge. But once you’ve decided here’s the money, you go out and get a highly competent engineer who will find the best way to, to build a bridge, it becomes a kind of technical thing. I think that’s how they thought about the computers, that it’s a technic, once the computers are there, it becomes a more or less routine technical issue to decide how to use them.
It’s
Interviewer:
like the piano in the classroom, put a piano in every classroom, and they,
Seymour Papert:
well, not quite, because they at least did see that we’d have to teach teachers how to use it. But I think we pushed the piano thing is, well what music would you play on that? And by the way this is a little story that reminded me of.
For a long time I worked in a public, in a inner city public school in Boston, the Henigan school. We did a lot of firsts there with kids and a lot of computers and programming and. When we asked the kids what subjects they liked least or most, to my surprise, I thought that something like math would be the, what we, like worst music was, and I took me by aback, but was these kids, they live in a musical, a lot of black kids there, and they’re very much into the music.
But the point is that in music class, what is being thrust down their throats was a different kind of music from what they were passionate about them. It wasn’t their music, it was somebody else’s music. So they hated it even more because it had this connection to something in their lives.
Interviewer:
Well, again, someone else should have been teaching it.
Or someone who should have been but the people
Seymour Papert:
who decided that there should be music there, I don’t know whether, it sounds odd that they weren’t aware, but it’s as if they were not aware that they could be different ideas about music and different kinds of music. And certainly these people were very unaware of the fact that there could be very different ways of using these computers and in fact.
They, when they put out a request for proposals, the way the thing was written allowed the bids to come in, which were about as diametrically opposed. You can imagine that there was one, the two extremes. One was the one of by the skin of its teeth, meaning one that was to give them the eye books, the.
Other contender the other finalists that they were, wanted to use the computer to control, basically, that they eloquently talked about how they had the system where each kid’s computer would be in constant wireless communication with a central computer in the school, and that with a central computer in the industry, ultimately with a big computer in their headquarters.
And they boasted, teacher will be able to follow keystroke by keystroke what any kid is doing. Ah.
Interviewer:
Oh, that’s scary.
Seymour Papert:
It’s scary. This company that made that proposal, it’s a new company, about two years old. It raised $80 million without any trouble. To, because people see this as they can see, it’s their specialty is what to do about one-to-one use of computers in schools.
And I saw those two that embodied the big issue in, you can use the computer for many ways, but on the two poles around which the fight’s gonna be is use it for control. We use it for empowerment. Oh, and this was distilled out in that, but it wasn’t that they, I think they all liked the, certainly the governor liked the empowerment better and the control, but it’s not in his mental space.
That educational philosophy is something of that you can take sides on and think about, and you should have a stand on it. This is one of the things we need to educate people to see that there are multiple ways. There isn’t any expert who knows the right way to do it. You can have your own views and should and get into arguments, and out of this will be the ferment that will, that real change can develop.
Interviewer:
Well, those. That’s what computers will do is, I mean, with math there’s 28 ways to do one thing. Kids have to see all these different ways. I mean, not, there’s not just one way of doing.
Seymour Papert:
Yeah. And it’s not just this one source of knowledge and this one authority in front of the classroom there.
And by the way, something that we’ve seen that’s incredibly encouraging is that. I was always, I mean, there’s a lot of fear that computers can mean. Teachers are afraid to give up control in their classroom. It’s really interesting. The schools that have already had these computers here, there’s none of that.
They’re not a single teacher seems to be upset about. On the contrary, most of them are excited about the fact that they don’t have to micromanage the activities of the classroom. In the way that they traditionally did.
Interviewer:
That’s very important.
Seymour Papert:
And kids are taking more initiative. Kids know more than they do about some things.
This is making the classroom a much more lively place and a much more interesting place for them as well as for the kids. So I always knew that kids, that teachers would learn this eventually and from earlier experiences, saw it happen somewhat slowly. I think there’s something about the present atmosphere in the world that this digital culture has spread so much that it’s entered people’s consciousness, that there’s never any single one way to do things.
And so, and we can’t control the world. And that decentralized ways of working the decentralized process is what’s really important. And I think, you know, teachers, it’s part of that background that is infiltrated into teachers’ consciousness as members of current society, which they bring into their school context if you give them the chance to make choices there.
Interviewer:
Anything else? So,
Seymour Papert:
well, as I said, there’s, what else? But
Interviewer:
Suzanne’s coming over and you know, a couple. Hope she’s gonna be here by three 30.
Seymour Papert:
She said three 30 by
Interviewer:
three o’clock.
Seymour Papert:
What’s the time now? Because
Interviewer:
I want to talk to her about that six part series she has in mind about. Yes. That would be very interesting to talk about.
Seymour Papert:
Six. I don’t know what, I don’t how any part,
Seymour Papert:
a lot of
Systems and their taxes.
Seymour Papert:
I don’t know. You know, I don’t believe you that there’s a, I don’t think people are apathetic about their kids. I mean, some are, but I mean, then I believe most people care a lot about their kids and want the kids to have the best, they might be apathetic about trying to influence school because they know it’s not getting anywhere.
But that’s not quite apathy. It’s not caring. It’s lack of direction and lack of knowledge. Lack of knowledge, like, I mean, lack of seeing where what we, what could be could happen and, no, I think something else I’ve been driving about is this curious fact that the Bush’s Let No Child be left Behind.
Act could get bipartisan support and get through with so little opposition. And oh, if you’d looked at it from a Washington perspective, there’s consensus. Everybody agrees, but there absolutely is not consensus in the country on that. And I know educators who have some of the finest educators who are quitting the profession because they see in this.
Conditions made impossible for them to do what they think is their responsibility. As educators, lots of people are upset about it. How come? It looks like there’s unanimity now. I think one reason there are lots of reasons. I mean, one reason which is relevant to public education. Something like this that I think there are really two polls and it’s like this control versus empowerment.
It doesn’t quite capture it in general, but there’s,
do
we want to see our junior schools change into something else, or do we want to keep them basically the way they’ve already been, which is really the issue. Now on the conservative side. It’s a simple statement. No change. Make them more so. The people speaking that voice have found ways of stating it very simply and compellingly, they’ve made connections with political positions.
So it’s like this big giant moving forward. The other people who criticize it are like. I like a pack of puppy dogs biting at the Giants heels, where some people are objecting. We don’t know. High stakes testing. Some people are saying we don’t like the federal government dictating to states.
Some people are fighting about vouchers, some people are fighting about religion. There are people snapping at it from all sorts of many directions, so there’s no unified. A unified voice saying puppies of the world, unit United was, they’re more of us puppies than they are of the giant. And history is on our side.
And this is something that I think is just vitally important, and again it’s a political thinking as much as a educational thinking we have to do. Work on both those registers, and I think that’s been a reason why Educ been education innovators, particularly the computer people have been very unsavvy politically or not interested.
They, we feel we are so right and we know so well, and we can prove it, come into the classroom, come and look. You’ll, but it’s, that’s treating it as if decisions of this sort are made purely on the basis of compelling sort of scientific evidence. They aren’t scientific evidence. This is one piece of a larger process.
And so I’ve been looking at the other models, like what’s been happening in medicine, where there’s been much more transformation, often, not necessarily in a good direction, but it’s, there’s been transformation or environmentalism is a wonderful example than that in the last say in 30 years, there’s been a radical change in the way people think about.
The environment. And this came about through fusion of, you know, operating in, in multiple ways. And it’s not even that there were scientists here and there were politicians there and citizens there. And it was people crossing all these boundaries and. You know, in biologists getting engaged in the political process and some politicians actually learning about the scientific basis and this has transformed the way we think.
And I believe that’s what’s gotta happen in relation to learning. It did happen in the environment. It did happen in 30 years. The forces of resistance were, and conservatism were no less powerful. Maybe they were more powerful in that situation. Yet there could be deep change. And so that, that gives one encouragement too, that if it could happen there, it can happen.
Interviewer:
I feel encouraged by talking to you by this whole thing. Yeah,
Seymour Papert:
that’s what do,
yeah,
Interviewer:
I do. I mean, you were so full of exuberance and so full of you one big positive force in, in, in this state. That’s for sure. I wish you could wish you that. A PBS show on this whole thing would be, or PBS or Discovery Channel
Seymour Papert:
or whatever.
Yeah.
Interviewer:
Or whatever. Get people to watch.
Seymour Papert:
What do you think is the channel that
could go,
Interviewer:
Discovery? A and E-P-B-S-P-B-S is, unfortunately, PBS only has 1.5% of the viewership of total television viewership. It’s been going down. Let’s stop tape here. Oh yeah. Stop there.
Seymour Papert:
Okay.