Source: Brand, S. (1987). Hennigan School. In The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT (pp. 119-140). Viking.
“The hackers were creating the front of computer science. Without specifications they would just start programming, quick and dirty. They did the first computer graphics, the first word processing, the first computer games, the first time-sharing. If you tried to tell them what to do, you got nowhere at all. You could engage their interest, though.”
“There are a million computers in American schools,” he told me, “and 50 million students. What do you do with one-fiftieth of a computer? Boston has the highest ratio of large American cities, a computer for every eighteen students. Each one gets about an hour a week. It’s like having one pencil for every eighteen students. At Hennigan there’s about 100 computers for 220 students—enough for the kids always to be able to get at one. They can get an hour or two of computer time a day.”
“It’s too soon to know what real difference that will make, but you can see some things. At Hennigan the girls play with computers just as much as the boys, unlike most schools, where computers are competed for, and the girls drop out of that game.”
“It’s a total love affair between kids and computers.”
“I think it corresponds to children wanting to be able to control an important part of the world. They’re always reaching out to grab what is perceived as important in the adult world. They grab a pencil and scribble with it. They can feel the flexibility of the computer and its power. They can find a rich intellectual activity with which to fall in love. It’s through these intellectual love affairs that people acquire a taste for rigor and creativity.” “And they see games right away that are fun to play.”
“Almost all the fourth- and fifth-grade children know music notation—that’s considered impossible in most music teaching—and they’re all writing music. Some are writing some extremely beautiful things that you’d admire. In our society music creativity is poorly represented. At school you don’t learn to compose, you learn to sing in tune and play the piano. Composition is only for specialists, and there’s no reason it should be. Everybody draws, everybody writes, everybody talks, everybody does theater. I think one reason is that you need too much performance skill with music to be able to listen to your piece. With a computer as a musical instrument it becomes possible to create a piece of music and hear it independently of your performance skill.”
“Music was the most hated subject. It was hated worse than math, even worse than punishment.”
“The other day one of the teachers was sitting on the floor with the children making bird sounds. Six months ago that would have been unthinkable. If we’d told them at the beginning that would be expected, they would have said, ‘Do your experiments somewhere else.'”
“LEGO is just grabbed by kids. Steve Ocko started one group with a sort of soapbox derby”—”running different cars down a track and then measuring how far they went. They recapitulated physics. They discovered friction—an axle through too many holes wouldn’t work very well. They found out about measuring—you could measure with anything, book lengths or string. They discovered averaging, because the same car would go different distances different times. There were philosophical arguments—a simple pair of big wheels won every time, but was it a car?”
“When they hooked up the computer and the motors and started working with gears, they discovered about trade-offs—such as speed versus power. To boys, giving up speed just seems perverse. Girls find it easier, and they learn about gears quicker.”
“That presupposes a massive penetration of powerful computers into people’s lives. That this will happen there can be no doubt.”
“Errors benefit us because they lead us to study what happened, to understand what went wrong, and, through understanding, to fix it. Experience with computer programming leads children more effectively than any other activity to ‘believe in’ debugging.”
“Some people sat in conference rooms and planned a new curriculum and how it was going to be imposed, and even a timetable. The research mathematics community at that time happened to be in a certain phase where a group of French mathematicians called ‘Bourbaki’ were extremely influential. There was a convergence of what mathematicians were seeing as the big issues at the time with what psychologists on certain readings of Piaget were seeing as big issues. New Math made its environment among these academics, but it had no basis in the school, and it had no basis in the general culture. So that’s one reason why it didn’t work, because it was imposed from on top. Another reason why it didn’t work—not only didn’t it have roots in the culture, it went against it. Already mathematics in our culture is a very alienated thing. Generally, people don’t like it, and don’t quite see the point of it, although they see certain pieces of it are sometimes useful. The New Math people took something alienated and moved it in a direction that made it even more alienated. It’s a very interesting case study because here was one of the largest-scale deliberate attempts to change the way people think on a planetary scale. There were tremendous resources, in terms of monies. They could mobilize the school systems of the world and did.”
“Pretty nearly. All the European countries. I ran into it in Africa, the ‘African Mathematics Project,’ at a conference about it in Ghana in 1959. I didn’t like it. But what I got from that conference… well, let me tell you the story. At a certain point the Nigerian delegation stood up and walked out. It was quite dramatic—they were dressed in beautiful African robes. Then the meeting broke up and I had this conversation with one of the people from the Nigerian delegation who went by. ‘Why did you walk out, what’s going on?’ ‘I can’t talk to these Americans.’ (Nobody thought of me as an American.) ‘Why not?’ ‘Because they say what they mean.’
“We’re so brought up with the idea that communication fails when people don’t say what they mean. The man explained, ‘When two Americans have a conversation, each one says what he thinks, and then there’s a confrontation—one’s going to be right and the other one’s going to be wrong. We don’t do it like that. We sit around under the tree, and somebody says something, and somebody else does, and we talk, and nobody has a position. It goes on for a long time, and maybe tomorrow, or eventually, everybody agrees on a position. Then everyone is right and there isn’t anybody’s point of view left out.'”
“That had a huge influence on me. There’s a negotiational approach to learning and to knowledge, to doing anything. How could we make a more negotiational approach to mathematics? The way we teach math is incredibly confrontational—’This is the theorem, this is the truth, and now I’m going to prove it, and you’re going to have to agree with me.’ In American supermarkets the price is the price and that’s that. In the rest of the world, bargaining the price is part of the fabric of life. It’s the difference between dislikers of ambiguity and dislikers of confrontation.”
“You see the same thing in students, especially working with computers. One striking category difference you will immediately recognize are those who like to plan versus those who like to tinker. Planners like to sit down, know what’s going to happen, think it through, plan it out, use diagrams, and they get tremendous pleasure from that. The others like a more negotiable approach. They just start, and once they get it going, they will elaborate it and add on and see how it improves and understand it and maybe scrap it and start again, and so it grows. It might grow into something extremely structured and complex.”
“Certainly I see more need to argue for the tinkerers. In the school system the planners are the ones who are treated clearly. Maybe not in the art class, but in the math class. Schools don’t yet tolerate intellectual negotiations. Though ever since Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolution we’ve known that science is negotiational and not so rational.”
“Six months into it there’s no wearing off. On the contrary. A measure: a month ago I invited the fifth-grade kids to come in on a Saturday morning to introduce a new version of Logo—it was seen by them as more of the same. All forty-six came, except for three whose parents had made other plans.”
“People know a lot, and the important kind of learning is bringing out what they know so you can make another step further from there. To do this we have to break down the barriers between school knowledge and ordinary life out there. Even a small child knows how to walk around and find his way through the complexities of three-dimensional space and argue with people.”
“Imagine if you tried to teach those abilities in a school with a curriculum.”