Thanks to the Google and Internet Archive’s Wayback machine, I was able to preserve the recording of a provocative late career keynote address by Dr. Seymour Papert delivered at the (March) 2004 RIMA ICEM Conference in Quebec City, Canada.
- Cleaned-up version of the recording. Repeated words and “filler words” have been removed.
- Original (unedited) version in M4A and MP3 formats.
Papert spoke of “learning environmentalism” and shared the “Land of Suet” parable that many of us heard several times, but is barely documented. Therefore, finding and preserving this treasure is incredibly important. There is a Q&A after Papert’s remarks.
Rencontres Internationales du Multimédia d’Apprentissage translates into English as International Meeting on Multimedia Learning. Some historical context on ICEM, the sponsoring organization may be read in the following passage from this document.
On behalf of the Board of Trade of Metropolitan Quebec, allow me to extend a warm welcome to this first ICEM on the Road. As you are aware, the International Conference on Educational Multimedia (ICEM) is a biennial event held in Quebec City where international specialists in the field of educational multimedia content, tools and context can share ideas on the principle issues and innovations in this rapidly-expanding sector.
Stephen Downes blogged about the Papert speech here. Here is a PDF of the organization’s web page reflecting on the session.
Transcript
The following machine transcription is imperfect, but useful.
Seymour Papert: What I’m gonna talk about is education change. And what I’d like to leave you with is a set of visions of three aspects of education change, which I label who, what, and why. And I would like to start with, what, and start by telling a little parable. I love these making up parables. They make a point better than any abstract.
Now this parable is about a country where people, for reasons lost in history had a diet mainly of suet.
And naturally the health was very precarious and difficult for them to survive on this diet. But they had very expert doctors who did great research and managed to add a little bit here and a little bit there, and get them to survive on this diet of sette. Well, one day somebody said, Hey, why don’t we try something else?
We don’t have to eat this diet anymore. Let’s make a new diet. Instead of correcting what goes wrong when people try to live on suet. Well, they couldn’t really do that because the doctors didn’t know anything about making new kinds of diets. They just knew how to correct. What happened when you ate suet?
It? Well, we leave them of course, I don’t have to spell out the analogy. Our schools feed our children on a diet of suet. For reasons that made sense once upon a time, but don’t anymore. Our doctors are our researchers and professors and all the rest of education who do a wonderful job of making the most of this barely nutritious diet.
Who knows how to make a different intellectual diet. Who has that kind of knowledge, that kind of expertise, and that’s one of the points that I’d like to, we’ll run through all the remarks I want to make. It’s a question, and it’s not one that has an obvious answer. We do not anywhere in our universities breed the kind of person who have that kind of knowledge or that kind of experience, or even that kind of time to be able to do it.
I’ve tried over the last 40 years and more to put this into practice using a slogan instead of trying to make the children love the math they hate. Why don’t we make a math they will love and well, why not? ’cause it’s very hard. But that’s not the only reason. There are all sorts of, other obstacles and you would not expect the makers of suet, the suet establishment to have developed the alternative diet.
And that brings me to a point that makes me very happy to be here and to think of this meeting as a very significant one. And that is that it is called, it’s organized, I believe, by the chamber of Commerce. What are they meddling for in education? Well, it’s not the suet makers who should be meddling in education, and I believe, well, I’ve been struck very much recently by the fact that the important things in educational change come from outside the education system.
Let me give you two examples. One, which I promised to talk about and it’s very close to my heart, which is the laptop movement in which Maine has played a leading role, Maine, by the way, in case anyone does see where I live nowadays. But before mentioning Maine, I’d mentioned that I was a few months ago in Marsai, in France.
And meeting people there. And they have their even more extensive laptops in schools operation than in Maine. But what was really interesting there was that the decision to make this was made by the President Ncee,
The nearest approach to a governor as sort of somebody who is not in the education world. Moreover, what was really interesting about that is that it was known that the Ministry of Education was against this, and officially because they weren’t asked, and fortunately he didn’t have to ask, he could go out and spend 4%, four whole percent his total revenue of the region on buying really top of the line kinds of computers and making a first class installation of.
Of this, of the system in the schools. Now, he was not an educator and I want to make it very clear that for me, putting computers in schools, however many they are, however good they are, is not tantamount to educational change. But it’s the seed of educational change. And I think this is what they saw very clearly there, that what he’d become convinced of.
Was that putting these there would set in motion a different change, not only in the schools, but in the homes because the children were not only allowed but obliged to take the computers home. So it was part of a bigger vision of change than schools in Maine. I think we had the similar thing, and I think that I can claim to have planted that little seed in the mind of the governor.
And the governor had asked me to come and have lunch with him and discuss some problems about his vision of making Maine a more high tech state. So one of the things that came up there was, well, what’s the proper ratio of computers in schools in, should we five to one or children to computers or six to one, or what would be a good thing?
And I. Bit my tongue. I was a little nervous because if I said something that sounded too crazy, I’d lose the chance of having any influence on him. I’d be written off as a romantic. So nevertheless, I bit my tongue and I said one to one is the only one that makes any meaning. And told my other parable that I’ve told over and over again about the country where they had a high degree of civilization but hadn’t invented writing yet.
One day writing was invented and the pencil and paper, and this precipitated a huge debate about if you’re gonna put this in our school, should we start by putting two pencils in each classroom or four pencils in each classroom, or should we have a special class? Well, now what’s really interesting is that Angus King bought that.
Now that’s no education argument. It was just a little parable. But the point was that it resonated that Angus King was a man who was in touch with the way that society was going. And he could, because he was in touch with the way the society is going. He could resonate to this and just clicked. That could come and yes, and it doesn’t make sense to think of the future except everybody having very powerful compete.
It’s going to come. This isn’t a question of is it the right policy or the wrong policy? And all the discussion about this is so foolish because it’s going to come and since it’s going to come any resources or money or effort that’s devoted to doing something to make the sewer work without, with more fewer numbers of computers, it’s just a waste.
So this clicked. And so, I think this is Sig, another significant example. Now, the education people were there. They didn’t oppose it. The then commission of education. Became an ardent and really ardent supporter of the idea of bringing these laptops into the schools, which required a long, long, and sometimes bitter fine.
But it’s quite clear to me that if he had started off by asking his education establishment, they would not have said one to one. They would’ve maybe said five or six or debated or. It would not have come from them. It’s got to come from somewhere else. So let’s talk about this somewhere else. Looking for metaphors.
So images of that. So analogs isn’t even just a metaphor. This one is not just a power. This one I think is real. It’s about the nearest approach. Well, I said I’m gonna give two examples of near approaches to what the situation is as I see it in the educations. First I want to talk about the growth of the environmental movement.
When I was a child, there wasn’t such a con, this concept of in the environment, meaning all this big thing of the. The sky and the earth and the waters on a big sky didn’t exist. The word environment existed, but it was like the environment of this room is a little stuffy or something of that sort.
It, this global sense didn’t exist. Environmentalism, it wasn’t a concept. Environmental protection agency, no. Nobody had imagined such a thing until amazingly recently, maybe 40 years, not even 40 years ago. In the 1960s, a book by one Rachel Carson called Silent Spring, precipitated this movement and in an amazingly short time, it coalesced.
And I think of this as a case of tipping point, right? You push the thing and it doesn’t go and it swings back and, but when it gets to some over that point, it’ll collapse. And the world was tipping point and. We want to tip something. Well, this one’s too easy. There we go. So now let’s, I think it’s worth pursuing just a little bit, that analogy because, it’s not as if the problems that we call environmental life, pollution of the air or erosion of the soil.
Or Silting of the, all these things were there and they’ve been there for millennia, but until a certain time they were sufficiently small scale and they changed at a sufficiently slow pace so that they could each be dealt with locally. Somebody could worry about the fog in London. And somebody else could worry about the soil being washed down by the Mississippi, and all these things that somebody else could worry about.
Forests being destroyed in Brazil, it wasn’t a big thing that everybody, that demanded big attention. Then it came to a point where you couldn’t deal with it in this fragmented way anymore, and it became obvious. And then boom, something very different came into being very quickly. And I think that’s an answer to a lot of the doubts that a lot of us have sometimes, and sometimes one’s beset by this feeling, God, won’t it ever change.
Well, I think that we are getting to a tipping point, and I try to spell out that analogy a little more because I think that in the case of learning. Well, I think learning, let’s call it, I dunno, I’m looking for a word for this. The learning environment, which is used now like the little environment we used to talk about, the environment of the room.
Little learning environments, what happens in one classroom, but not only the whole big learning environment of the whole world, of all the things that affect how and what. People learn. This whole concept just doesn’t exist in our mental space and even less not exist in our mental space. It doesn’t exist in our professionalization quite quickly.
We got so that there could be people who could be professional environmentalist. You can get degrees in environmental science. You can’t really get a degree in learning science in that same sense. In learning environmental science. There are specialists in little preschool education and infant and parenting and elementary school and this and that, and adult education and e-learning and et cetera there.
But the who is there, who job it is, and whose knowledge and whose expertise it is to understand learning as a whole, to take that holistic view of all the factors that. That affect how and what people learn. We don’t mean they are individuals and people do it in an amateurish way and maybe very profoundly, but there aren’t professions.
We don’t recognize that profession. I think this is what we’re gonna have to do, is we’re gonna have to move into thinking in this different way about.
Let me give a few examples and I’d like to give one example
that connects with what I believe James G was talking about yesterday, how the influence of these video games on children learning. And I’d like to emphasize two aspects. One, which I believe is probably close to what he said and one which I don’t think he mentioned, but doesn’t matter. I think he’d probably agree.
I’d like to hear the one that’s close is this, that. I’ve done a lot of work with working with kids on video games, and I’ve been told by myself, and a lot of the work is sitting down with a kid and saying, help me learn this game. I’m, and I’ve had so many say, you’ll never learn, and Well, how come?
The, what strikes me working with these kids that they’re developing a kind of sophistication about learning. That they are understanding, learning in a way that. Kids or maybe nobody understood before. And the reason why they’re doing it is because there’s something so special about these games.
Special in the sense that the new game comes out and you are a kid and you are gonna get your kicks from being the first kid on the block to be really mastering this game. So here’s a new thing, a learning experience. You’re gonna start here. You just make a beginning, a middle, and an end. And you are under control.
Nobody’s controlling it for you. Nobody’s giving you a timetable or a curriculum or making you do it. You’re doing it yourself. How painful it is. And it is painful. It’s amazing to think how seldom in our world people have this kind of learning, discrete learning experience. Kids might at school, you go there and.
There’s multiplication, there’s this table and there’s another table and something else. And it goes on and on. Didn’t have a beginning and you were lost in this, in, in this desert. Or even the things that you care about, like you want to be good at baseball. But even that, and as long as you can remember, you’ve been batting balls.
And you go and do it and you get a bit better and you learn something. It doesn’t have this quality of the learning experience starts middle and end. I think that’s an important thing in the children’s lives that leads ’em to think more about learning, but they don’t have the words to articulate that thinking.
And this is somewhere where we are missing out in our responsibility of as adults, as more sophisticated people about, about learning and thinking. That an important thing to do, irrespective of what the content of that game is to use this as an opportunity to develop for those kids or with those kids, a framework for thinking about and articulating and be able to talk about and sharing, talking with them and think how this could change the learning culture of the family.
And there’s another concept we need. The learning culture of a family is. In different families, it’s very different. And learning culture includes the jokes you make. And if, how do you talk about the fact that the, it’s always the kid who fixes the VCR. Do you snigger or do you ask the kid how he did it?
It makes a big difference how you talk about it and how many people pay attention and who is there in the world to help them pay attention to fostering and developing the. Learning culture in that, in, in that family, and this might be the most important single task we can do in relation to learning, in making the analogy with environmentalism, I focused on the fact that there were so many little pieces before that specialists could deal with, and then we had to break out into the whole, and I think this is the case with learning.
An example that, that I like to think reflect on is that. I, my father was a scientist and in the house were books on science and mathematics, but I don’t think he ever gave two thoughts to my learning math was, didn’t think it was his business. At a certain time I’d be sent to school, and then the people in the school, it’s their business.
They’ll take over. No, I don’t think he was trying to, it wasn’t that he answered that way. He never posed the question. But today, thousands of parents are posing that question, or they ought to be, ’cause they’re answering it because they’re being bombarded by advertising for, by the software. And the kids will learn math easily without even noticing that parents are making decisions about.
What kind of mathematics children should learn at what age? And well, parents are wonderful people, but they’re not qualified to make those decisions. And I don’t know who is qualified to make those decisions, but what I do think is is extremely problematic is that so little attention is paid to thinking about.
How these different things could influence, one, how these barriers are breaking down the games you play and what happens and your attitude to school and how you think about learning the software you use and your mathematics, and you, this holistic phenomenon of learning as a holistic environment is there and is spreading whether we like it or not, but it’s happening in a mindless way.
The other example of what I think kids are learning from the games, which I wasn’t sure whether James g was would’ve mentioned or not, was they are learning to despise school because they’re learning that the way school does things is not the best way to do it, not the only way to do it, not the way it happens in the outside world.
World, and this is ultimately the deep reason for all the problems we are having in schools that society is changing at a huge rapid rate. School is hardly changing at all, and the gap is becoming bigger and bigger and more and more obvious and bigger and obvious to kids who are increasingly disaffected.
Maybe they were happy eating the SE until they heard there was something else. So what do we do about the something else? What can we give them? What can we do? And I’d like to, first we go back to the example that I’d chosen to mention before, and that’s that what happened in Maine, what happened in, in Leland in a few other places in the world where laptops are coming into the schools I’ve mentioned already, I don’t think we, I think very strongly, one should not mistake that for really deep change.
In the learning conditions. We need much deeper change, and it’s a little dangerous. We’ve seen over and over again this pattern that when the computers come in, the kids are very excited and they think things are changing and it breaks out and you see a subs surge of excitement and engagement and they feel good about it.
The people in Leland, where there’s probably been the closest study of this for the longest time, are now reporting that. It’s going down that the kids aren’t looking after the machines anymore, that the machines are being broken. It’s too soon to say, and it’s hard to generalize, but one possible interpretation is that the kids had high expectations, and after a while they begin to see, huh?
It’s the same stuff in a different bottle. And although they like the computer better than not having it. The oldest disillusion with school is coming back again. We need to think about deeper change. And how do we do that? Well, I can see a number of different possibilities and one of them I’d illustrate by taking a the other analogy that I mentioned before is an analogy with the Soviet Union.
Now I like to think what made the difference. There’s the contrast between that centralized, highly planned economy. It should have been very rational and people could plan what would happen and be rational about it. And not just haphazard. It got nowhere. For a lot of reasons, but amongst others, that kind of economy just can’t work and it can’t give rise to innovation compared with what happened in, in our country where or in the western world, in the capitalist world, where I’m not for a moment saying that there weren’t other very serious problems.
And don’t get me wrong about that. I’m as critical as anybody, but in one respect. It was radically different in a good way. There was room for innovation, for entrepreneurship, for people being able to try things. There was something like a Darwinian evolutionary approach. Darwin got that idea, which my friend Dan called in the title of his book Darwin’s Dangerous Idea ’cause it dissolves away so many prejudices.
The dangerous idea is that’s how change, that’s how things can grow and can change by allowing many variations, not what we do in our schools. And I think that our school system is the closest thing we have to the Soviet structure. And I think it’ll collapse ultimately for the same reasons. And I think our choice.
It is not whether we can save what we’ve got, but whether we can transform what we’ve got fast enough so that it won’t have to collapse into disorder and chaos, which is what will eventually happen. I recall how unchangeable that Soviet system seemed as recently as the eighties. Most of the experts in the world.
My wife, Suzanne Massey, sitting there as one of the few who didn’t believe that it had to go on for it was assumed it would go on forever and quickly. When the tipping point came, it went down. This gives one hope. We’ve gotta be looking for that tipping point, and we’ve gotta all be part of it. And this is a social phenomenon, and it’s not a matter that can happen in schools or only in schools.
It is gotta happen on a social scale with a lot of people participating. But the one thing we’ve got to do to our schools if we’re gonna save them, is to break their resistance to accepting change.
We have to go against the current that’s so dominant in. The United States now, not only in the United States, but in the most extreme form there of trying to impose a standardization and ification on the education system. One last parable. I like to imagine a professor of education of a hundred years ahead who will give his graduate students this writing task, to write an essay to explain how it could have happened that at the time when the world was on this verge of the biggest revolution in learning, how could it happen that at that time, the most powerful countries in the world seemed to close their ranks in order to prevent change?
Well, there are lots of explanations you give. I’ll mention one, and that is, I see it as the dying drag, the last twitch of the dying dragon’s tail. The system knows that it is coming to the end of its days, and it’s one way of protecting itself to close ranks and bureaucratically impose. This kind of standardization, which by some slate of hand, it’s been able to persuade us to accept standardization as a synonym of the direct opposite, which is high standards.
So that’s my picture, I think. I try to say what much deeper than people are recognizing, and that’s a very serious problem that people are not recognizing how deep it goes, who, not just the professionals in the schools, but a much wider set of people like the Chamber of Commerce of Quebec, and why?
Well, for many reasons. One is that we are losing the chance to have. Vastly better learning, but we are not only losing the chance to have better learning, it’s not as if we had the choice between going into better learning or sticking with what we already did before. ’cause business as usual is not an option.
Trying to remain static can only lead to decline and an aggravation of the tensions and problems as this abyss becomes larger and larger. So that’s what I want to say about. Why, who and why, what and whom? And I’d love to have questions and reactions.
Audience member: Now I spoiled your glass of water. Unfortunately, thinking it was water, it was pouring it with tea. Can could we get them? I’m sure you must be getting thirsty a bit. Questions, comments? We’re getting your glass. Seymour, it’s just, as I said, I just spoiled it down with suet it in laptops.
Could I ask you to here. Yesterday I had the privilege to hear you in the other context, and you, I want to develop the idea that Nero is playing violent during the Rome is, you said that in Rome, in antique Rome. There was fire and Nero, pa violent. Yeah. I like this image. But you develop on it.
Seymour Papert: Well, what he’s referring to is the tentative title of my next book is. Fiddling while Rome burns and fiddling is meant to have A double meaning because we all know how Nero was playing his violin while Rome was burning. And we, with our world falling apart around us, are fiddling or not recognize the depth of the problem.
And what we do though is fiddling with little details.
Is, it’s like empowerment. It’s like empowerment is not putting the laptops out only, but that the effort of working with the teachers led by, especially by Betty Manchester, who’s the person in charge of that. The effort is to empower teachers to take initiatives and try many different things and this is why I think Maine really might turn out to be the most important place because they didn’t have enough money to tell the teachers what to do with the computers.
Audience member: There was a suggestion by your wife that Maine joins Quebec. If we eventually separate.
Audience Member (2): First of all, I’d just like to say what a pleasure it is to hear you and to see you here. I feel very honored that you are here. The question has to do with diversity because the model of learning that you’re talking about embraces diversity as one of its central paradigms. Different ways of learning, different approaches to learning.
And one of the problems with diversity though, and we see this with the homeschooling movement, is that sometimes some of the things that people choose are things that other people don’t like. The type of schooling is deemed to be inappropriate. The type of learning is deemed to be not proper, to prepare somebody for society.
So I think we have the question here of the balance of the needs of society as a whole, the certain fundamental values, fundamental learning versus the diverse approach to learning. I’m just wondering how you would address this. How do you preserve the whole preserve the center? In a system based on diversity.
Seymour Papert: Well, let me first of all reject the last way you formulated the question. How do you preserve the whole, ’cause the whole doesn’t exist. We don’t have something worth preserving. So, that’s not really the question that, and that’s important was if we had a functional good system. Then if somebody proposes something else, you’d have to say, is it better?
But in fact, we have a dysfunctional system and I think it could hardly be worse. And especially in areas like mathematics, it really couldn’t be worse. ’cause I think that almost everything in the mathematics curriculum is open to question whether it’s there or not. And it’s never been questioned. It’s just thereby by historical accident and by opinion.
When they make these standards, they ask people’s opinions about what ought to be there. But the people they ask for the opinions don’t know very much except what they learned at school. So, let’s not talk about preserving the good now, what I think about the diversity, yes, I believe it is true that there could be a problem that, there are certain basic deep ideas that should be available to everybody, but I have an epistemological thesis about that, and it’s related to this idea that. The degree of distance of people that, I dunno what the number is. People cite different numbers, but how many handshakes separate any two people in the world?
That is true. Somebody in the other end of the continent, I know somebody who knows somebody. It’s not very many. I think the same thing is true with ideas. That is, if you start with almost any area, I’m gonna study music, I’m gonna study physics, or I’m going to study. Biology or poetry, there are certain deep ideas that very soon make contact wherever, whatever point you started at.
So I do think that we need work on identifying a small number of deep ideas that are not in our present curriculum. And which would be that common core. But because they’re useful ideas, people will, I think people will pick them up and I don’t think we should try to legislate it. So I don’t think that the kind, I think that’s a serious problem.
How does uniformity some sort of common culture develop is a serious problem I think can be solved. It needs work. And the key to it is recognizing that if you, if you, that, if you think of any area of knowledge, like say mathematics, as we teach at school, what we teach is the surface level and it doesn’t connect with anything else.
But if you go underneath and you have say, the concept of rigor and of proof. That should be, if it’s formulated in a deep way, it’s common to mathematics or to a political discussion or to a discussion about the history of art. So if we deep down we find the right concepts, these can be and should be picked up by everybody.
Is that part of an answer? Of course. In any case, I don’t think that the argument that everybody needs to know the same is has much support for it. It’s just a prejudice at best.
Audience member: If no one asks for the yes. Mike, you’ve been at the center of whatever consequence decision to provide computers in Maine was, what would you say to Dr. Perler? What would you ask him now?
Maine Professor: That’s hard because we’ve had the good fortune to work together. And I’ve benefited from the opportunity to ask him lots of questions. I guess if I had a a chance to say something, it would be thanks for planting the seed. I’ve personally, I’ve gotten to work on some very interesting things because of it.
It’s hard though to be put on the spot to ask a question. We’ve had the good fortune to win.
Audience member: Hello. How do we take that as a future teacher? How do I nurture that seed and make it grow into a plant?
Seymour Papert: Well, I think the first important thing for future teachers to decide to be subversive. Yeah, to decide once and fall, you’re not serving that system. You’re undermining it. And that’s a big decision to make. So having made that decision, what can you do? You then notice that although there’s a lot of talk about standards and standardization and you’ve gotta do this, and in fact when you close the door of your classroom, nobody can see what you are doing and.
And what teachers rarely do is not necessarily what they are told to do, and that’s part of being. So then I think you should go and look for deep ideas, look for ways of thinking and what in particular, and I haven’t mentioned it here, but I hope it would come up, and what can we do about, what should we do about these laptops?
Well, I think it’s an amazing fact that if you look at the curriculum of the standards of the National Science Foundation, it says this is what kids should know, physics, biology, this a lot, US topics nothing about computers. Maybe you should know how to use them, although hardly there’s hardly any of that.
It also says they should encourage curiosity. Yet amazingly, we give kids this box and do everything we can to discourage them from knowing what’s inside the box or caring about it or knowing what ideas go into making it work. So I would open that box even if you’re not allowed to. And I would teach the kids how to program that computer and how to understand issues like how the color is represented there and all sorts of interesting things that go on inside it.
And I believe that you’ll find that by teaching those skill, by taking the time off to teach those things, especially programming. You’ll find that will enable you to save so much time on the other things you want to teach. That in the end you’ll have taught more. And there’s an important principle there that very often teaching more is much easier than teaching less.
Because if two things make sense of one another, learning them together is much less than breaking it into little fragments, which don’t make sense. And the whole structure of our curriculum is based on breaking things into fractions and little pieces. So, that’s the kind of advice, national Research Council of Canada. You said that we should not look at the educational system for change. Where should we look
at ourselves? Huh? At ourselves.
We can plant seeds of change in the educational system. I think that getting those laptops in is a powerful seed of change. Not much of a change in itself. And we do it a disservice by exaggerating how big a change it’s, but it makes possible a really deep change and we have to focus on making sure that those things can happen.
So in what examples then? There’s a place in another state where I heard of where a teacher was in trouble because she had done something. Outside of what the future, I think citizens, every citizen there could have helped her and some did come to her rescue and protest and talk to the local authorities.
And I think we can all act in ways that in encourage, empower, change in the system. And I think that’s the way we would do it. And let me correct, it’s not that I think that the system can’t change and it has powerful internal forces for change. I just think those changes can only come about there in the context of a much wider holistic approach.
So I think what’s happening in Maine is fascinating and important and beautiful that. The system itself would not have gotten these computers in, but once they’re there, it’s running with them. And the new Commissioner of education, Sue Gendron, is doing a heroic and wonderful job of making sure that this thing gets extended despite the terrible economic situation she’s fighting to get this extended into the high schools because although the original law said every kid from seventh grade up should have a.
A personal computer. It was only funded for seventh and eighth grade. So the system, once you get the seed there, the seed can grow. It’s fertile ground, but so we’ve gotta put in the seeds and we’ve gotta fertilize them and make sure that they’re protected from these ravenous insects that come and on them.
Audience member: From the University of Montreal let’s think that you would be given the chance to reinvent logo now. What would you change in the way it’s disseminated and implemented?
Seymour Papert: I’m sorry I didn’t,
Audience member: oh, I’ll try to say it again. Yes.
Seymour Papert: Yeah.
Audience member: So if you were given the chance to reinvent logo now to reinvent the way that you did
Seymour Papert: reinvent, logo.
Logo,
Audience member: how would you change the way you implement and disseminated it so you would be able to disseminate the seeds of what you and to make sure that it’s planted in the soil? That is, yeah. Good for growing.
Seymour Papert: Okay. I mean there are two parts of that. The how would I dis, let me focus on how I disseminate it now.
I think about it because I think, of course I would redesign it if we started from scratch now, but that’s more complicated and it really depends on the other. I think that what happened was in the history of logo and the history, in fact of computers in general, was that. Way back in the eighties, even further in the seventies when computers appeared on the scene, there was great excitement and wherever you saw a computer in a school, there was some revolutionary visionary teacher who had brought it there and wanted to use it to make big change, and, but there weren’t enough computers to make really big change.
And in a sense, logo or program was too successful too soon was the idea of programming. Computers got out pretty widely, but with only a small number of computers and a small amount of time to get at them. Most people who were able to, who had them could never program at a sufficiently deep level for it to make a difference to the way they learned something else, and so it.
It correctly got a bad name as not worth the trouble. In the meantime, other much easier uses of the computer came along and some very superficial ones like making beautiful presentations and slideshows and so on so that the harder and deeper uses of the computer tended to get swept away out of the limelight and dropped.
This is one of those sad quirks of history because in the situation today, there is in many places, for example, in Maine, enough access to computers for everybody to learn very deeply about the computer. But this idea school culture has grown up where that, that puts the emphasis on things that you could do with very few computers.
Exactly. The school computer culture, the idea in the school of what you do with a computer grew up at a time where access to computers was very restricted, and that school culture has stuck there and it’s stuck in habits. It’s stuck in consultants, it’s stuck in books and people’s minds.
And so I think the important thing that I would do now and I’m doing now is to try to break out of that. So for example, just to give one little example of the sort of thing I’m working with a small group of people in Maine on a project which takes a standard mid mathematics curriculum, the CMP career.
But we could do this with any one of them. And we look over this whole curriculum that has many different parts. We try to find parts of it which have these two properties. First of all, they could be deeply. And easily enhanced if you combine them with some programming. And through doing that you would learn a little more programming to do other things.
So with a multi-year approach to teachers, I imagine saying, well, there are three or four places in this curriculum, and what I’m trying to do is to create. Alternative substitute units so that I can say the teacher. Okay, you can pull this piece out and put this other piece in. This other piece will teach you something about programming.
I’m gonna use logo, and you’ll learn more about logo and about programming and about mathematics. So next year you’ll be able to take bigger pieces and in other words the logo is not presented as a thing apart from the mainstream of learning it. It’s part of the learning process. Let me give you an example.
In the little concrete example, in this particular curriculum, like in many middle school curriculums, when they, there’s a section on areas of irregular shapes, and the way you do that isn’t a bad way. You cut it up into little squares and count how many are in, how many are hard. It’s a bit tedious, but it’s a perfect example of where instead of drawing lines.
You could make the computer and program the computer very easily. You make down very little programming, very little bit of logo to write a program that will cut it up and count the number of pieces. But the advantage of that now is that we can do a lot more, like once you’ve written the program, you can make it do smaller and smaller pieces, and you can see is as the pieces get smaller and smaller, does something that mathematicians would call going to the limit.
Which is something very hard to do in the normal context. Moreover, if you’ve written this program that does it, you can use the program for an instrument for other things. That is, because it’s in a computer program, you can scan a map into the computer and it can measure the size of a country or how much of the country is above a certain altitude.
So you’ve taken an idea. That was there in a very disempowered form, namely cutting the thing up. It was not an empowered idea because you couldn’t do much with it. You’ve reem empowered that idea by turning it into something which can be mathematically deeper because you can do this limiting and it could actually be useful because you can use it in other projects.
’cause it turns into. An instrument you can use so that mathematics becomes something that you can use to do other things that you want to do, and that is a huge transformation of what mathematics is about. So logo then appears as the medium. The formalism, the language in which we can restructure our way of thinking about what the poet mathematics is.
And so it’s an organic thing that’s got a better chance of surviving and growing in the atmosphere. And of course I use the example of mathematics because I’m working on it, but the same sort of idea applies to all sorts of other fields and. And I just mentioned, although it’s harder to describe it in detail, that the area I’m working on a lot now is on music and dance.
And we’ve been doing a lot of work on on creating an environment in which children can do dance and have senses and. Control a computer as they move and make all sorts of wonderful things happen to the environment. So, that’s not special about mathematics, but the answer to your question is, the way I would present logo differently is taking advantage of the fact that it’s now possible to learn it more deeply and more organically in order to make it part of a multi-year learning process for the teacher integrated into the real learning of other.
Of other subjects. And of course if you think about it like that, you would redesign the language itself. As it stands, it’s pretty good for that. But we are thinking a lot about rebuilding, redesigning to have a new kind of programming language for the future.
Audience member: Good. Mike Muir has had a chance to think of a question and that’ll be, unless someone is really.
Stressed about asking one or making a comment after. I’ll consider this the last enclosing question. Thank you, Seymour. I serve two masters at the University of Maine at Farmington. We’re a licensing agency and we have to prepare teachers to teach. There the state has regulations. Now the US government has regulations for what constitutes a quality teacher.
Maine Professor: And, there are I really like your idea of standards instead, or high standards instead of standardization. Yet we work with content standards and we within that same master, our teachers’ comfort levels and an educational system that. That has very caring teachers, but locked into a system that they’re comfortable with and afraid to try something different.
The other master are the young people that we serve in our schools. We know so much more about how they learn and what creates creativity. And I always get discouraged when I see kids at school who lose their curiosity and shut down their learning because what they’re interested in doesn’t match schoolwork.
And you have such a clear vision of how to serve that master. But what I need help with is knowing how to make the bridge what can I do to better serve one while living in the world of the other?
Seymour Papert: Well, I suppose that’s a good one to stop on to. In five minutes. In five minutes. I make the same point that I made about the person who asked me advice about being a teacher. You can close your door and what you do there is your, I think that what I’m talking about to you, to what the people in the education edu in the education school business.
Should be doing. First of all, we should recognize that this business is profoundly reactionary in its nature. So, and we don’t recognize that we forced into playing their game all the time and pretending we, so we, once we recognize that we can set ourselves up as different and create some pockets of real difference inside the system.
And so for example, this this mathematics approach I’m talking about, we can, I can imagine that being taught, turned into a real course for teaching not only kids, but future teachers of mathematics in a much deeper way. And that’s exciting. It’s a more exciting way. It’s, and it’s not scary if we’ve gotta learn to hold their hands and comfort them and lead them into it.
But it’s not scary and it’s. It’s more exciting and more pleasing in the end. What about these standards? I know, but let me say it to louder again. We should say this louder and louder, that the best way to get high results, even on these stupid, on the most stupid test, is not to teach to the test, but to teach people to be good thinkers and good learners.
And we’ve seen over and over again. Evidence that this idea that there’s this test and these standards and you’ve gotta hold the kids’ nose to the grindstone, is not the effective way of getting even those results. You don’t need it in the homeschooling movement, there’s a very good rule of thumb I gather, which is if you spend an hour at that, if you spend an hour a day on the crap, then you can do what you like for the rest of the time.
That an hour a day is enough and not necessarily crap. The stuff that you have to do, some of it might be crap and some of the stuff in the tests is actually useful but it only ne an hour a day is known to be sufficient to cover all the stuff that’s gonna ever come up in, in any of these tests.
So if only we would adopt this. Explicitly and say, this is what we have to do in order to handle the test. This is testing time. It’s an hour a day we can spend on this, and then we’ve got the rest of the day to do real learning. I think that it’s true and people, we can establish that it’s true and it could grow and catch on, and that’s gotta be the way to, to get around the present wave of this.
There’s dragon’s tail twitching at us because I think it probably is hopeless to simply say in the present atmosphere that we’re down with that and let’s ignore it. But we don’t have to ignore it. I think we can appropriate it and we can handle it inside the framework of of doing good learning, all the same.
Audience member: I’d like to co comment in question. There’s two, well, there’s a few things that I find important and what you’re saying. One of the things is about the holistic view of what learning is. And the other thing is some, I don’t know if anybody has talked to you about it, but the fact that the city of Quebec has decided to become part of the network of City iv, a worldwide network, and that, that took the birth of that idea, the idea of progressed somewhat.
Last year when we were coming back from from MIT, from the media lab, from visiting with Mike in, in Maine and Mario and Clem sat down and they started writing an article for the newspaper to start pushing for the idea of a city zi. And a lot of people in the Quebec area got involved in this process.
And this year, recently the mayor of Quebec decided that they were gonna go forward with this. And when you talk of the chamber of. And was deeply involved in it as well. But the whole idea of the, I think is if you take the holistic view of learning and you, it’s, we have to forget about getting people in ministries of education and getting politicians and even getting parents to start thinking differently about how the schools operate.
It has to come from the learners. And the learners are not only the children, the learners are the everybody in the city and everybody in the population who have to become to be allowed to become aware of the fact that they can still learn. And I think that’s what the whole movement is gonna bring to this area.
We’re gonna permit people to begin to say, it’s all right to learn. Therefore, how can we help our kids learn more? And I think that’s what it boils down to everybody when you talk about getting involved. Everybody has to get involved in learning and not changing the system, but in learning because when we learn, the system will change by itself.
So because it was not a question, you may react to it, but it was a great comment.
Seymour Papert: Well, you saw my reaction maybe that little aphorism that a little while ago, I just came home from Russia and somebody looked at me in amazement. You learning Russian at your age? And the thought that came to my head is people think that you stop learning because you get old.
They’re wrong. You get old because you stop learning. I.