Seymour: Thank you all for those kind remarks. It’s hard to know what to say after that. I will start by recording how important an event in my life was that visit to Sydney. At that world conference for computers and education, I made one of the statements that I’ve had quoted at me most often.
In fact, only 2 weeks ago, I was keynoting a reading of the [Inaudible 00:00:39] of education at the European union and somebody there reminded me that at that world conference, I had said, “Why don’t we stop having world conferences on computers and education? Why don’t we stop doing this?” I’d like to say that again.
I’d like to talk a little about the fact that that is reading and it’s consequences played a huge role in my subsequent thinking because I got to thinking about, “Did I really mean that and why didn’t they like that? Why didn’t they ask me again to a world conference?” let me just say something what I thought I was saying at the time and then the mistake that I made.
What I thought I was saying at the time was, those other people, they don’t have conferences on paper and education. They have conferences on education because they think they are talking about the real thing. By having a conference on computers and education, we are defining ourselves in a subordinate position.
That is they will decide what is to done with the goals of education. We will produce the tools to serve those goals. Didn’t like that. Rather, some didn’t like that. On a lot of reflection, I came to realize that I had missed an important historical event because I had my head buried in some of the events like writing Mindstorms and getting media labs started at MIT.
I had failed really to take account of what was happening sociologically to the movement about education and technology. I came into this world in the 60s’ and the ’70s and even early ’80s. At a time when, whenever I saw a computer in school, especially when the microcomputers came, it was always brought in, no exceptions by a visionary teacher who saw in this machine, the possibility of really transforming this thing called school.
That school would be different. They didn’t necessarily know how it would be different or how this machine would make that difference, but they were visionary people. Then, quite quickly in the 1980s, things changed. The early 1980s were quite, at incredibly any time, this was the time when the Apple II, when the Time Magazine had the computer of the year, which voted me as the man of the year, we were all very, very excited.
It was going to change the world. Then, quite suddenly school as an institution reacted like all complex systems do. They have defense mechanisms that quite quickly, this thing that had become a, that was coming as a revolutionary agent of change, was taken off assimilated by the school and turned into a, essentially a instrument of reaction.
That is it was tamed in any case. It was taken out of the hands of the visionary teacher, put in the hands of special teachers and special rules and with special curriculum. I don’t need to say this, some very wonderful things were done by those special people. A lot of those things were done, but it was taken out of the mainstream.
It became not a mainstream revolutionary influence on the education. At that meeting, they had changed. The people I was talking to were people like me, who were thinking about revolutionizing school, they were people thinking about how to make the system work, not how to change the system.
Naturally, there was a disconnect and understandably, got me to understand that this is a very complicated social movement to be a part of. It should be thought of as a complex system and I don’t want to make the same mistake here today. I’m sure that in this room there are people with very different visions, different attitudes, and different places in this complex system that is being growing up.
I don’t have to talk to all of them, but I’m going to think in terms of two separate sets of people. I think they might overlap and some of us have split personalities. I’m certainly one as the schizophrenic split personality and sometimes I act as one and sometimes I act as the other. I’d like to make a very clear distinction between how you think, if you think as revolutionary thinking.
I don’t just mean revolutionary as somebody who wants to force change, but somebody who looks far enough ahead to see that there’s going to be change. There’s going to be fundamental change. The big question that I’d like to raise on one side of this is, “What counts as fundamental?” We hear all the time, transformational change in school.
We have very little discussion about what really counts as fundamental. This is [Inaudible 00:06:53]. In the 1970s, maybe because there wasn’t very much you could do of a practical day-to-day nature. People interested in this sort of thing were much more concerned with that. What would be fundamental? What would be really did change? What changes could happen and why?
I have very, very variable discussion on a worldwide basis about this kind of question. That’s a different question from what is happening in the schools today, the things we saw in the screens here. What good things are happening in education? How can we enhance them? How can we do them better? There’s no value judgement to make in this distinction. Both are good things to do to think about, but don’t let’s confuse them.
I’d like to … I’ve prevailed on the, organized the conference and especially Gary Stager to turn the session that Gary and I are in-charge of tomorrow into a discussion about that question. What constitutes fundamental? In case, because there might be some people who want to participate, who will be in other sessions, we will be running this right through to lunchtime as a working session.
I’m going to share that question for discussion then, although I will refer to it a little now and I’ll refer to it in terms of a couple of metaphors that I have. One of them really is about my own schizophrenia about this. I’ve often been torn between two me’s. One me thinks visionary. I like to think what it might be like in 20 years’ time. What might children be learning?
I don’t mean just idle thinking. I work really hard. I think some of the hardest, most painful work, sitting up late at night, sweating over trying to think through what could mathematics be? How could you really integrate mathematical thinking and it’s rigor with history, for example, or geography.
Angus, at breakfast yesterday reminded me of something I’d heard before and I’d forgotten until he recalled it, namely that in his experience, the students in law, he comes from a legal background, who did best were very often the ones who had majored in mathematics. Mathematics is not just a ritualistic thing that we do, moving black box with pencil and paper. It is a way of thinking.
The situation will be that I’ll give some hints out later, think what might that be like. Sometimes I talk to teachers and other people about this and they often are quite entranced and that’s wonderful and then they pause and they say, “But what shall I do Monday?” What shall I do Monday is teacher talk for, ‘Be Real’.
You were talking about what might happen in this other world where the kids were grown up with all these wonderful things in their lives. I’m going to be facing the class on Monday and what will I do? Then, I feel all guilty, wasting my time, thinking about these abstract [Inaudible 00:10:27] things and what about the practical [Inaudible 00:10:30]. Going through a phase of really thinking about what will you do Monday? Real practical stuff.
Then, after a while, I’d be, “No, no, no, no.” This is like being a ship without a rudder. I’m just doing good things, but the good things don’t necessarily add up to where they are going. So I tend to shift back into the other one. This is the fundamental schizophrenia that we have to [Inaudible 00:10:58]. My solution is just that I don’t know why it took me such a long time to find this out.
It’s not just today, I think it’s the last four or five years I have been saying this. It took me a long time to realize that we could really bring these things together by adopting a different criterion for what to do Monday. In the education world, how do you decide between policy A and policy B? We had on the screens here standard answer.
If kids learn better, if they’re more excited, if they’re learning more, that’s the best solution. No. You’ve any business at thought like this, would say, “Okay, if we’ve got policy A, policy B, the one that brings the biggest profits now is the best, you’d be bankrupt.” We should have a different criterion for deciding between different policies in education.
The different criterion should be based at least as much on where’s the system going? What is the system learning, as what are these kids learning? What is this adding up to in terms of producing movement towards a goal, and suppose we have got a goal there and we’ve spent time thinking about a fundamental vision that’s not achievable today, or tomorrow, or next year and that’s the big gap.
This is my j’accuse to the education world that we are not spending our time or putting the resources into creating models and thinking through what we can do that is impossible today, but will become possible. Where are we going? Speaking a few months ago at the American Education Research Association, I used a analogy that some people loved, some people thought it was a bit rude, but let me say the saying.
Imagine a country, I love using these paragons. Imagine a country in which, for reasons lost in the history of time, people adopted a diet consisting mainly of sewage. Needless to say, the health of this country was pretty bad. It’s a wonder they survived at all, but they had a really brilliant body of medical scientists and doctors who knew how to cure the diseases that arise out of sewage, who knew how to add little additives to make it less dangerous and so the country survived.
Then, one day, people woke up to the fact that there are now airplanes, we can import everything from anywhere. We can get these wonderful things from Australia and all sorts of places where there are good things to eat. Why don’t we change our diet? They didn’t succeed. There were a couple of obstacles. The most obvious obstacle was people said sewage was good enough for my grandfather, it’s good enough for my kids.
That was an obstacle. It wasn’t the real obstacle. The real obstacle was, let’s say ignorance, but a special kind of ignorance because those many people in this sewage land, it’s not that they were ignorant, they were very smart, they knew a lot, but they knew a lot about sewage. What they did not know was anything about how to make a different diet.
They couldn’t and this is our problem. Maybe it’s an exaggeration to say we’re feeding our kids on sewage, on intellectual sewage. Of course, it’s an exaggeration. The fundamental moral of the story is not exaggeration. We don’t know how to make an alternative intellectual diet for children. We do not have this experience. It is not what our researchers in education are trying to do, nor even our teachers.
This is something that we need to put more resources into. This we need to see as a goal and that is something that I’m going to try to talk around. What will it be like? How one should go about deciding a different diet, a different intellectual diet. I’m going to concentrate on mathematics for the reasons I’ve already mentioned because I’m a mathematician and so I can talk with more authority, although that’s probably just certain stuff.
Let me concentrate on it, both as a metaphor because what I said about mathematics applies to everything else. Also, because I really do think that mathematics is one of the, has a very key role, and not only for the reason that Angus reminded me of at breakfast, namely that it’s a way of thing called acquiring an important kind of thinking, but also because of another kind of factor that it’s dragging behind many education reforms.
In the 1950s and ’60s, especially ’60s in the United States, and Britain too, I suppose in Australia there was a lot more than today of people wanting to change schools. There was our movement called free schools, for example. We had wanted to break away from having classes and age segregation and strict, and have much more creative kind of learning.
The joke at the time was free schools work for tie diving and artistic things like this, they don’t work for mathematics because nobody knew how to take mathematics and learn it in a free, unencumbered, creative sort of way. The need to come back to a coercive curriculum and mathematics dragged the whole thing back because keeping one piece coercive made it really hard to make the rest as free as people had wanted to.
These are among the many reasons why I think mathematics is most important. I’d mention one other since we have marketing people from Apple here and I say to them, I think Apple and all our computer companies with one exception whose name I won’t mention because it would be not [Inaudible 00:17:59] in a Apple sponsored meeting.
They are not paying attention to this. They ought to be putting resources into developing a new way of doing mathematics because that’s what’s going to kill them because people are going to count test scores of mathematics in the end as a vital issue on which to judge the success and failure of this. I’m even afraid that in [Inaudible 00:18:29] without any question is the best and for reasons I’ll touch on little bit later, by far the best laptop initiative.
I think this is it’s Achilles heel that when we look around the schools the results are coming in very loud and clear that teachers are doing extremely innovative things in writing, in history, in social studies, not in mathematics. Why not? Because mathematics is not really well represented in our culture.
Every teacher knows something about history outside of the school curriculum. Every teacher reads books outside of school textbooks. Very few do anything that could be called mathematics outside the school confines and very few even know anything about any mathematics that’s not in the little sliver of mathematical knowledge.
I calculate it by the millionth of the total mathematical knowledge is what we count as math in schools. In my mind, I make a big distinction between math and mathematics. Mathematics is this noble jewel of the human mind and math is what we teach in schools. When people say children must learn math, they are often making this confusion.
I’d like to go back to my WCCE experience to come back to this point because when I said that, “You know, those other people don’t have meetings about paper and education,” I didn’t quite take it seriously, I was just teasing. Actually, I didn’t realize until quite recently that it ought to be taken seriously. We ought to be having conferences about paper and education because paper did play a dominant role in shaping our education.
If I was talking at a conference on the impact of paper on learning, what would I do? The first thing I thought of doing was recounting an experience just last week. I spent time with a father in Maine whose son was being drugged, given Ritalin, because he’s counted as hyperactive. What’s hyperactive mean? It means he’s like me. I hate sitting down and working. I like to move around, but if you’ve got to work with paper, it demands that you sit there at a desk.
That’s one of the influences of paper. It’s created this concept of, you’ve got to sit still to learn. Now of course, you might say a lot of the laptops are being used that way. That’s because those laptops are just one tiny little step in this direction. We are breaking away from it slowly. I think that that kid, who is being drugged into sitting still because he’s classified as hyperactive, isn’t.
I know he isn’t because, unlike the school psychologist who diagnosed him, I sat him down to computer program. Although he’s six year old, I taught him to program the computer, and he stayed there for an hour and a half with attention held on learning to program a computer. That’s no short attention span. That’s no hyperactive child.
I think the first impact of paper on education is we’ve created a form of school and of learning that means that people with certain kinds of personality, certain structures, neurological structures, take to it well and succeed. Some of them take to it less well and don’t succeed. Some of them are really far from succeeding or jettisoned from society. That’s one influence of paper that we should revise.
I could carry on about other similar ones. I could mention one of the wonderful things that Angus King enabled me to do apart from dissipating in the laptop project. For several years in the juvenile prison in Maine, we ran an active learning center, in which a number of students, who are or were in that category and had been completely rejected by the school system, flourished.
In one case, I think, at absolute genius level. When we gave him the possibility of doing active learning by building things … I think Gary, mightn’t you say something about that student tomorrow, so I won’t mention more, except to say, this is something that has to do with paper.
What I really want to talk about is paper and mathematics. I’d like to emphasize something that I think very few people realize that, how much of what we call math is really about paper math, about how to write mathematics. For example, you spend a lot of time, we draw these kids into, how do you add these big numbers. You write this one like this and write that underneath it. Then, you add this and you put it on mark up there.
It’s all about paper. It’s all about how you write it. It’s not about the ideas. It’s not that some ideas don’t seep through, but they’re greatly diluted by being weighed down by all this paper stuff. Thinking more deeply about the influence of paper on mathematics, I realize we need a terminology. I’d like to throw at you the word that I’m trying to use. I introduced this terminology at that same meeting of the AERA last month.
I started off that meeting by recalling the fact that when I was a kid, they made us learn Latin. They made us learn Latin for reasons rather like what Angus said. Mathematics contributed to learning law. They said learning Latin teaches you logical thinking, rigorous thinking. I don’t want to go into whether it does or doesn’t. I think to some extent, yes, but I don’t want to go into that.
What I want to go into is this fact that … People laugh at this. It’s become the standard joke. If you talk about learning this because it has certain … They say, “Ha, ha, ha, ha.” It’s like they used to say about Latin. I think we laugh too soon. Because I think that in 50 years’ time … I don’t care about numbers.
Sometime, in the not very distant future, maybe much closer than that, people will find our reasons for what we have in our curriculum just as point, as the explanation for why they’ve learned Latin. For that reason, I’m using the term ‘Latinesque’ to mean the justification for something being learned because it serves some other purpose, as opposed to …
I don’t, quite as happy about the alternative, but I’m using the word ‘Driveresque’. For this reason that, if you’re designing a driver education for driving cars, there’s information that you absolutely need to know, that red, red hexagon means stop if you don’t know that, you’re in serious trouble.
It’s not that you’re going to learn that because it leads to becoming a better law student or something else. You’re going to learn it because otherwise you’re going kill yourself or somebody else. There’s two kinds of justifications you might give. Driveresque justification is when it’s for something that you actually need to know for itself, and Latinesque is you need to know it for something indirect.
Now, I’m not saying that Latinesque is bad. Some people misunderstood me when I first gave … Latinesque is excellent. I think all the good justifications are Latinesque because most of our learning, most of what we do in learning is there to learn something else and, in particular, learning how to learn. As Gregory Bateson said very convincingly, more convincingly than anyone else I know, “Whenever you learn something, you learn two things.”
If I give you a math lesson, hopefully you learn some math as intended, but it’s also a lesson in learning. Because either you, it reinforces this mode of learning that I used for teaching you, or it undermines it if you think you’re bad, but it always influences your learning about learning. That’s Latinesque and it’s great.
If we recognize as Latinesque what we want these kids to learn, our attitude changes and the onus on us is different for justifying it. Because if it’s Driveresque, there it is, you need it. If it’s Latinesque, there’s always the question. Whatever purpose it’s serving, could that same purpose be served by something else? That’s the point I’d like to focus on now because, while I think that the mathematics curriculum, it goes under the name math, does some good in the Latinesque way, I don’t think it does nearly as much good as it could.
We put a very different content of math, a very different kind of math. The reason why we chose that particular one is because of paper. Because it lends itself to being taught with paper. It’s utterly perverse for people to say, we’re going to now use the computer in order to teach this thing, which is only there because we didn’t have any other way of teaching it, except by moving black marks on pieces of paper.
This is a distinction that’s not commonly made. Let me emphasize it by taking another example of what it might mean to have a different kind of math. Since we’re talking about Rome and Latin, I’ll take this example of … Suppose we lived in a place where we used those Roman numerals, I’s, and X’s, and V’s, and M’s, and all that stuff.
It’s possible to do arithmetic with that to calculate. People used to do it. Doing arithmetic used to be a very hard, esoteric sort thing. Now, Arabic numerals, the way we do it, was not invented by educators for an educational intention, but it could have been, couldn’t it?
One could have imagined that somebody for an educational intent said, “Look, if they, if we did this, had this different way of writing numbers and manipulating, we could our purpose of being able to do all the good things in the world that we need mathematics for much more effectively, so let’s do it.” Maybe it would have succeeded, maybe it wouldn’t.
It all depends on the trouble because people would say that they won’t pass the test because the tests are all about the difference between IV and VI and MMMIXX and all that. How could anybody pass those tests if all they knew about was these numerals?
Nevertheless, one might get over it. What I mean this is an example that, this is an example of, it’s not a different curriculum for teaching the same thing. It’s something we don’t have a name for it. It’s a different intellectual diet, it’s a different kind of mathematics, a different piece of mathematics.
Now, in the ‘80s, we did lot of work on developing some pieces of geometry, we’ve that sort around around Logo, and the Turtle, and Turtle geometry, which I don’t have time to go into in any or enough detail for it to be anything but superficial. Except to mention that it is possible with the computer to develop an alternative kind of mathematics that’s not a curriculum for the existing one, but is as different as Arabic numerals are from Roman numerals. That serves all the Driveresque purposes of mathematics vastly better than the present.
Now, you can take my word for it or not. I don’t want you to take my word for it. My complaint is not that they don’t adopt this new mathematics, my complaint is they don’t talk about it. My complaint is that it’s not on the agenda of the education world to discuss what should be taught, but only how it should be learned and taught.
This is the idea I want to plant here as firmly as I can, and I’ve tried to plant everywhere. For a minister, I’d like to say I think that the right government policy, and I say this to every representatives too that it would not be bad to put 10% of your total resources into developing these alternative contents for what the future might be like.
Just before I leave mathematics, I’d like to ask you, to ask a few questions like … We spend quite a lot of time teaching children to do, solve quadratic equations using this formula, minus b plus or minus the surd of this whatever the other. How many of you ever do that? We teach them to do a lot of complicated fractions.
Admittedly, everybody needs to know that a third is bigger than a quarter and less than a half, but is there anybody who works in a kitchen who doesn’t get to know that pretty quickly? Why do we need to know about adding fractions by taking the common denominator and turning this upside down and all that sort of stuff?
There’s hardly anything in the mathematics curriculum that can be justified in a Driveresque way. Since it’s all Latinesque, we should at least be considering, isn’t there some other way of getting those ways of thinking, those hard ways of thinking in mathematics? Let me warn you because I care about this movement of, towards bringing these computers in. I think you may even get a backlash.
I’ll just tell one story of the backlash that actually happened. In California, some of the most eminent mathematicians got together and wrote a manifesto against the reforms in mathematics that were taking place. In not just, as I said, computers directly, but all in the direction of the kind of educational thinking that’s reflected, I think, in this room and those pieces of video that we saw.
There’s been a movement towards trying to make mathematics more engaging, more student-centered. Because it was being done by educators who knew very little mathematics, the only way they could do this was by taking out the guts and making it, what these mathematicians call fuzzy math.
What happened in California was that this protest led to banning of the mathematics reforms, which were very good in themselves and going in the direction that I think most of you would like to see. They were banned in California because of good reason. Because they really did eviscerate the mathematics.
I really am worried about the fact that we are undermining that medical rigor. In fact, we are undermining all rigor by emphasizing the engagement side of what this computer can contribute to education. We have to do something about this or it’s going to kick back on us.
Now, what we can do about it. I’ll just add here, now add a real perspective on the history of mathematics. Where did it come from? Go back. There were those Egyptians building pyramids and were doing wonderful mathematics. They had no paper and they didn’t know how to solve quadratic equations, but they did mathematical thinking.
There were people sailing the oceans. There were people traveling to Australia. All these used mathematical thinking. Long before there was such a thing as formal as pure mathematics. Mathematics started as a way of thinking about other things. Then, a good part of it became distilled out until we got this wonderful jewel, as I called it before, of the human mind, pure mathematics.
In our schools, we have reversed this order. Why? Good reason. Not because people were malicious about children are stupid. It was because you can’t afford to have children build pyramids or it’s too dangerous to send them out in boats to sail the oceans. They couldn’t use the mathematics.
This is what the computers are about there. This is what this technology is about in relation to mathematics. It’s about being able to get engaged in activities and projects where you use mathematical thinking in a hard, rigorous way. What we’re trying to find, backing against the whole world, the education department in Washington and, I’m afraid, even in Maine that … Anyway, I know, and the computer companies …
I think this is where, this thing that I feel today is where I stand in relation to the world like, when I first said in 1968, “Every child will have a computer,” and was ridiculed. In fact, my first application for a grant to do work on that, one of the reviewers said … I’ve just had this pinned up on my wall for a long time, got lost in moving … “It would be a disgrace to spend public money on this project that could only be of value to the children of millionaires.” So it seemed in 1968.
Mathematics. Can we make the mathematics sense as engaging, and as rigorous, as engaging as the performance [Inaudible 00:38:45], and as rigorous as the mathematicians want? Yes, we can. It’s got to be a different mathematics. It’s got to be a mathematics in which we have a different perception of what the computer is about, and certainly, we should shift to that.
What is a computer? When I first met them, everybody thought a computer was a mathematics machine in a sense. They wrongly thought you’ve got to be a mathematician to even know how to do anything with it. It was almost true in the 1960s. Gradually, there’s been a shift. Is become an information machine because that’s what it’s used for by most people.
Now, neither of those is accurate. It’s both an information machine and a mathematics machine, but by becoming an information machine, I think we’ve destroyed at least half, and I would say 90%, of its value for education. I’d like to spell that out by making, standing back and looking at two aspects of what we might do with a computer.
One aspect, you get information. It’s wonderful. Of course, you use it all the time for that. We can get at information magically, wonderfully, and don’t think I’m putting that down in the side of the matter. The other thing you can do with it is, Gary will give some examples tomorrow, you can program the computer.
Most of the computers in the world are not used for information. What makes possible a space shuttle up there is that it’s got probably a thousand computers in it. Your automobile has six computers in it at least. This little thing, this wonderful little thing I have here, telephone, camera, it’s got a screen, which has the same resolution and pixels as the first Macintosh, and it sits in my pocket. It’s wonderful, but it’s a computer in there.
I suppose you could say it’s information because I use it to talk, but that computer is part of the construction of this thing. Computers are a construction material, a constructional material as much as they’re informational material. Yet out of all that I saw here are this morning, I’m not criticizing everybody, I love it, but I would point out we saw no hint of the computer being as a constructional material to build things.
In fact, I think we would use the computer far better if it were ever connected to the net. I’m not proposing that, this is just rhetorical, that can be wrong. Let me make this point that, what’s wrong with our education? I think everybody, every deep thinker who has looked at our education system …
I think of everyone, from Voltaire, Rousseau, Piaget, Vygotsky, John Dewey. They’ve all focused on one point that our school is much more, too much focused on information, on getting facts. Far too little on doing things, on learning by doing, by action.
Unfortunately, there’s been this match. There’s a, if we say these two sides of a computer, the information side and, let’s say, the constructional side, and in our schools, the informational and the constructional side. Because in our popular culture, the informational side of the computer is the side that is most familiar and most useful. It has had the tendency to strengthen that side of our education system.
Now, that’s good to strengthen, but it’s also had the effect of pushing the balance over, away from the constructional side. I think that one of the most, almost incomprehensible things about the education world is that … In the United States National Science Foundation guidelines for science education, the standards, what kind of science do you need to know?
Computer science is not mentioned. The computer is mentioned as a tool, and I think this idea it’s a tool, it’s only a tool, it’s for serving other things is extremely mischievous. Because isn’t it amazing that here’s this box … Take this one. In it is a magical technology, magical principles.
Not only technological, our whole science, what’s special about the scientific thinking of this century, is that it’s based on ideas like information and information flow. Not in the sense of getting the news, but in the technical sense of information theory.
Computer science has become a key part of knowledge. Yet, although, our kids have these machines and use them all the time, our authorities lay down standards, almost make it illegal for students to be taught what’s inside that machine. We have people ridiculing and technology for the sake of technology. It’s not for understanding, it’s for using.
Of course, it’s for using. How can we tolerate that the thing that’s most precious, most exciting for children, we don’t teach them anything about how it works inside, except in the most superficial, ridiculous way, of how to use an irrational, badly-constructed, anti-intellectual operating system … Apple’s been gradually catching up with Windows in my opinion, in it’s irrationality, not intelligibility.
If the kid can’t make an operating system themselves, we are failing them. They are being consumers of the operating system, the computer, if they don’t know how to make one. I’ve had elementary school children make a simple operating system. It’s no rocket science. We can do it, but it’s not part of our perspective on what we’re doing in school. It’s not part of the standards that we’re imposing on kids.
I get a little speechless about this, but I think I’ve said enough. We do have to think also about content. We do have to think about making another kind of intellectual diet for children. We have to think about them understanding this technology in a deeper way, that’s something being able to use it, however magical and wonderful that might be, to access for knowledge and for communication.
The phrase ICT, Information and Communication Technologies drives me up the wall. It shouldn’t be called that. That’s emphasizing one side of it that’s the, not the most important side from the point of view of developing the mind, the ability to think, to think hard.
Let me just give way a little, shift gear, and talk a little bit about the future, about some of these obstacles. At breakfast this morning, I was having a conversation with Bruce Dixon about how hard it is to change education because of the exam system. You can’t get into a university in Australia unless you pass this high-stakes exam. If you don’t get to university, you can’t get a job.
How can it change? It seems like an invincible system that’s anchored well. I’d like to recall one other thing that was also said at that conference [Inaudible 00:47:38] Sydney. A team that, since then, I have also deepened and spent a lot of time on, and that was, I think for the first time, I made an analogy in public with the Soviet Union.
Because I think that our education system is the closest thing in our country to the Soviet system of economy. Now, it’s true we don’t necessarily have gulags and we don’t necessarily have somebody who makes those decisions, but what was responsible for the Soviet system failing in the end was that it didn’t allow initiative.
It didn’t allow people to try thing. It didn’t allow an entrepreneurial spirit, and so, this whole wonderful technology that gave rise to the computer and these things just couldn’t happen. It collapsed, and I’d like to remind you that two or three years before it collapsed, everybody was saying it’s impregnable, it’ll never … It’ll be there forever.
I take great heart from that. I think things aren’t impregnable. I’d just like to end on, this is one image of how our school system, this thing might really change. I hope it doesn’t change this way because I think that, unless we can allow bigger change to happen, it’s going to … How much had happened?
You can make thousands of scenarios, but the one that I was using this morning is, it’s beginning to be possible to take a degree online, maybe that’s as good as you can take at the University of Sydney. It’s conceivable that in a few years’ time, somebody who’s studied online will be recognized by employers as a better employee then somebody who’s got a degree from Sydney University. That will be the beginning of the crack.
I think that we’re going to see that sort of thing. This is not, we’re not talking about a decision to go left or, we’re not going to … We’re talking about social movement. We’re talking about things that are happening independently of what anybody might decide. Laptops and computers, laptop computers in schools, in one sense, the debate about laptops and not laptops.
If you think of these two sides from a long-term point of view, it’s a silly debate. Because you can be quite sure that if we’re talking about children having access to powerful computation, in a few years’ time, they all will. It’s in the nature of our society that it’s moving in that direction. I think it was a remarkable, it’s an example of both remarkable impersonal insight and great charisma that Angus King managed to carry this through in Maine.
Also, I think that it’s not quite as personal as that because what happened was that I see that King was a person who was in touch with the way the world is going. I know he read books about the way the economy was developing. He was thinking about where Maine might develop into. It’s people thinking in terms like that, that have made the major decisions about, that have brought the laptop into the world.
Our schools are just lagging behind everywhere else in the world. Where there’s knowledge work, people are using computers. It’s only a matter of time before this gap closes. That’s going to happen. It’s a silly debate about whether it’s worthwhile or not.
On the other hand, what’s also a silly prediction is that everybody will have laptops. Not long ago, telephone meant something that’s … You did this. It now means this thing. Laptop, that heavy horrible thing there, I don’t want it. I’d take it, but I’d pine for the day, which isn’t far away …
I’ve got friends who are working on making the computer screen like this, which you can fold up and put it in your pocket and open out again, which has a wireless connection in it to the computer that might be a thousand miles away. You will have this thing in your pocket, and you’ll take it out, and you’ll use it for whatever you do. Is that a laptop? No, it’s not.
I think the point is that we’ve got to recognize that laptop is just a little step in the progress towards the shift from the medium of paper, primacy of paper-based static media, to the primacy of an electronic digital media. That’s going to come, it’s going to sweep the world, it’s going to change what we think we can know, how we can learn it and when we can learn it.
We ought to be spending as much time as we can, as many resources as we can afford, thinking beyond these little questions of, can the school afford this laptop or that laptop or this clumsy machine, should it be an Apple or an IBM. Of course, you should get an Apple, but that’s not the real big question.
I hope my friend Steve Jobs is not so taken with becoming a music magnate that he won’t catch up with people I know in other countries, who are pretty close to making $100 laptop so-called using a technology … Can I take one moment and show you this techno- … Here’s a little instance of an idea that it’s not secret and it’s not … The major cost of that laptop is the screen. A major obstacle in reducing the cost has been making smaller screens with that resolution.
Now, if we’d been settled with a lesser resolution, we might have been able to make them cheaper. To make an education miracle, we could’ve done with a much smaller screen. In a sense, the computer industry has not done a favor to the development of learning in the world by putting its resources into making the machines more fancy and powerful.
That’s not the thing I wanted to say. I don’t know why nobody had thought of this before. I know somebody who’s actually made this prototype. Instead of having that screen there, it’s got a tiny little projector. A little projector about, less than a centimeter cube, much less. This projector will project onto the opening laptop, so it’s using a tiny little LCD, which cost about 10% of the price of this big one.
I know there’s a serious discussion going on about that product, can’t say with whom, but about manufacturing such a thing. It would dramatically drop the price, so the economics of it also is something that’s a bit of a silly argument. However, I do want to make one point, [Inaudible 00:55:38]. The fact that that price is going to drop, that this is going to cost almost nothing quite soon, is no reason for not buying them now.
I hope [Crosstalk 00:55:49], but I’m not just trying to please my hosts because there’s a delay in education. It takes time for change. It’ll take time to develop these new ways of using it. We can’t afford to wait. We need to get into the act now. I thought that the great thing that Angus said, and I’m sure he will tell this joke, so I won’t steal his joke, but the joke is about being where things are going to be and not where things are now. We better be jumping into that future as fast as we can. Thank you very much.
Speaker 2: This conference has been a number of years in the making. Behind the making, certainly, was our intent to be able to bring Seymour, Angus together to Australia to share their experiences in North America. As I said at the start, Seymour referred to, your trip here 14 years ago had a profound effect on not only everyone who attended that conference, but anyone who was fortunate enough to read the proceedings.
You’ve impacted on, I think, a massive community across the globe. You have, yet again, exceeded that at this event. I don’t think that there’d be anyone in this room who wasn’t touched by the powerful ideas that you were seeding in their minds and the profound thinking, hopefully, that will carry on over the next two days. You have stimulated their minds in ways that I think, at times, we haven’t been able to do. I’d just like to sincerely, on behalf of everyone here, thank you Seymour for your time. I also want to mention …