Mitchel Resnick:
Playful inventions, tinkering; a lot of the ideas that of the people in this room or work in these ideas. It can be traced back to most of them got their inspiration from one person who was sort of the root of growing the whole community that’s grown out of this and that person is Seymour Papert. We’re just so happy to have Seymour here to talk about his ideas for moving forward into the future. Please, welcome Seymour. [Applause 00:00:39]
Dr. Papert: Thank you. Does this is work?
Audience: No.
Dr. Papert: I think since invention is such a theme here I’d like to say something about the process of invention, the serendipity and let’s start with the name of this event, the scope of this event “Mindfest,” which obviously came from “Mindstorms,” which is the name of a product put out by Lego. That came a book that I wrote in 1980 called “Mindstorms.”
I noticed with a mixture of delight and sometimes a little pang that most of the people using “Mindstorms” the brick thing have not even heard of “Mindstorms” the book. I’m really annoyed at the publisher once it ran out a few months ago. They had promised to have a new printing by today and it’s not here. I don’t know where it is, but we can take the step, one step further back.
Where did the name “Mindstorms”, the book, come from? I think that is something of contributions that I’ve made to the world, and I think that word is as important as any. So I was delighted to give Lego permission as they ask to use it. because I think it represents an concept, but recognizing it as a concept was a serendipitous event I must admit. was that although the concept had been growing for maybe 10 or 15 years before that.
The book was written with the intention of being called “Brainstorms.” It was actually at the printer when my dear came to Daniel Derringer brought out a book called “Mindstorms” and I’m sorry, “Brainstorms.” We had to quickly think of a new name and serendipitously or maybe by forces of, or maybe the force was with us and “Mindstorms” came out and hence here we are at Mindfest. I think “Mindstorms” is a great name.
It’s a great concept for a different way of thinking about learning and education and the job of the educator, which is it creates storms in the mind, which is the important part of life, of intellectual life anyway.
To affect the mind in a broad enough sense, including love and beauty, and appreciation of those things. It’s the most important thing of all to create. The storms and the weather, the climate, the ecology of what goes on inside their head there.
So, there is an example of serendipity of invention. “Mindstorms” the book and “Mindstorms” the brick I’d like to say something about the relation between them. First of all though, maybe everybody here being engaged with Lego knows that Lego itself was a serendipitous invention.
And hence it’s called a brick, and hence, this thing called the programmable brick because the grandfather, the great grandfather of the present owner of Lego made wooden trucks for kids and when plastics appeared they got the idea of making plastic bricks to sell with these trucks and the kids could load them in and out and from that emerged the idea. This is a case maybe of the tail wagging the dog or something.
All of the sudden, these sort of bricks became much more important than the wooden truck, and there you in a bright new invention that really changed the world, I think. It made a dramatic impact to an aspect of the world which I’d like to call the learning environment. I’m going to show off that term in a the moment. , but I think it means everything that has to do with how people learn, how learning happens.
I think the presence of Lego plastics made a big difference, and so let me say something about that invention. I wreak havoc here when I say that the opening of the launching of the Mindstorm’s brick, the Lego Mindstorm’s product which happened about a year and a half ago. I congratulated Lego there and I repeat that congratulation. I think Lego is the unique company that has made two generation-breaking, paradigm breaking contributions to the what children have to learn with.
I’d like to say something about the nature of them. Of course, everybody in the toy industry will say with every year we’ve got new things. Go to the toy fair, and this and that, but I think it’s about once every generation so let’s say before the century that something comes along that a real innovation. I think Lego has made two. One or two generations back, about 50 years ago was when the Lego plastic thing came in, and here is a way of looking at that.
Plastics was really something new. Of course, there were a few plastics before, but plastics as a huge industry and a huge part of that balance was just beginning. Every toy company in the world picked up on plastics because the toy makers could use plastics to make things for children. Toy makers used plastics as a construction material for someone else.
The Lego Brick turned that around because Lego means that children could use plastics for their own construction so it put into their hands the construction material; out of the hands of the toy industry makers into the hands of children or anyone, children at heart. About 25 years after that, there was another epoch-making change in toys and that was the arrival of the computer, and computer games, and video games. Well, Lego didn’t have much to do with that.
I think you’ve got a grand not that they are, again, a momentous change in what children do and what they can do. It affects how they learn. I will make this analogy that before the Lego brick, plastics was used as a construction material by the toy makers to make things for kids.
In the 1980s, digital bits, the digital technology was being used by the toy makers. That is all those people like Nintendo and Sega companies to make things for the children. Whereas, the Lego Mindstorms is a break through in putting digital technology into the hands of children as something that they can use to construct with. So it’s a repetition of the relationship that the turn around standing on its head of what represents the introduction of the plastics.
Now, Lego didn’t quite invent that idea. I don’t know who invented it or whether you can give that an attribution or a mention to the person or a company, but I’d just like to reminisce a little about my own experience about how a role that I played in that invention came out of that idea space crystallized in things I did down the road. The latest that I was struck by, actually, my grandson first drew my attention to the fact that in the latest Guinness Book of Records I have been cited as the inventor of Lego Mindstorm.
My reaction to that is a little bit abdicated because, in one sense, it’s totally untrue. I did not have much to do with making that brick, and I would have made it very differently if I had, much better. However, I don’t even know what’s inside it. A lot of people put their brainpower and their ideas, ingenuity, and money into designing and making that particular object.
On the other hand, where I would like to create some more important role is that I do think that I was the first person to say in public and was greatly reviled for this that children will be programming computers one day, and that this will change their lives, will change the way they learn, and the way they do many things. I recall a few incidents that in the 1960s where I think I, even into the ‘70s writing proposals to the National Science Foundation and other federal agencies for money to support research into that direction. A regular comment by the reviewers was, “This is elitist stuff and we should not spend public money on something that will not benefit any but the children of the very rich.” And this was their words, it was outside the framework or vision of people in those 1960s that computers were going to be some little thing that could be hanging around your neck there. So, that seed grew inside here in MIT and the artificial intelligence lab when I was working there.
I think out of that seed grew this idea that not only that children would be programming the computer, but that for children to program computers we have to invent different things that they would use it for. First, the school started introducing computers and programming. Children were asked to write a program to work out the average grade for our class or the average baseball score or all sorts of totally uninteresting things.
I think that the break through that we started having then was, “No. We must invent different things.” Children would use the computer to do things that are important to them. Programming graphics on the screen, making games, making multimedia shows, and, of course, programming robots. We made the first robot in 1969, and it was called a turtle, and it was really a mechanical thing that crawled around the floor and was programmable.
At the time, we hoped one day that we’d find this to be something not that we make for the children, but the children could make their own, things like that, but the technology was just hopelessly inadequate. It took a long time and it didn’t have to take as long as it did take. Because Lego and other companies in those days, Lego’s a cautious company and the others were even worse, but here it is.
One has complicated feelings about your relation to something that, it’s like a parent, you have an idea that has gone out into to the world. When children get out in the world and they don’t have to pay any attention to you anymore. They are nice to you at Christmas, but.,you know. It’s interesting walking around, even here, hearing people say many things, including the word “Mindstorms” as their own, and that’s the way it should be, and that’s what you’d like an invention to be, an idea where teachers would aim at. That the people who take those ideas and feel never .
[15:30]
Nevertheless, the pang of parents, of parenthood, is always there. So I’d like to talk about that, and how we bring issues about invention into the lives of children. Here I think I want to talk about the subtitle of the book “Mindstorms.” Children, computers, and powerful ideas. and in the world I think children have thrived and computers have boomed powerful ideas much lesser. I’d like to make the point to talk about invention as an idea, not just something that you do.
It’s a complex idea with emotional aspects as I just said, and social aspect, epistemological aspect. Here is an example of that, I was just thinking when I was thinking about saying what I just said about that invention, my own feelings. I remember the incident in one of the very first Logo classes I taught. There wasn’t a turtle there they were doing things on computer screen, and I’m not even sure about that. They had computer screens, and one day a little girl was in tears. Why was she in tears? Because somebody had stolen her idea, and she had a really good idea for writing a program.
Somebody had stolen it. Now, I believe it was Cynthia Solomon who is here somewhere, who might confirm that this happened. I think it was Cynthia Solomon who was teaching that class, observing them, and who took the child up her arms and pointed out. “You should be proud to see your thing there on both these screens.” I can’t remember how successful she was in conveying this idea to the child, but behind what she was telling this child is a deep idea, the idea of and idea as a thing. It’s a thing that you can take from somebody else, an idea that you can have and other people to appropriate.
The idea of intellectual property. One of the weaknesses of school is how seldom there is the opportunity for somebody to steal your ideas or to feel that you are stealing. When it does happen it’s called copying, but, even then, the very doubt, particularly in subjects like math, etcetera there is nothing to steal except the right answer, and that’s not an idea. Something very different was being introduced in different. The idea as a thing that you can take that you can name, that you can hold it, you can pass on, have an evolution.
[19:18]
I think that we need to put a greater emphasis that people have thought about what Logo or Lego Mindstorms or what these things can mean for children on that their of they’re taking the ideas like the idea of an idea, and putting a big focus on identifying the non-obvious ideas behind what’s going on there . First, you could invent a way to have an enormous amount of fun, and no doubt, you get a lot from it, but I think something else happens that you can identify the ideas, including the idea of idea.
Let me give you an example from another more recent experience with children to illustrate what I mean by the idea of idea. I have been having an incredibly moving experience in the last month or month and a half with David Cabello and Gary Stager, and a few others who are here who had been taking on creating an alternative school in a juvenile prison. In this there are young people, teenagers who had, well, what overwhelms me, having really lived closely for the first month I there, four days a week, five hours a day with these people, it overwhelms me, the extent as you get to know them, they are just like any other kids I know, like your own kids, the kids you know. And how thin that line is between somebody who landed up there in a prison at the age of 14, and somebody who ends up really making a video construction , but it’s a very thin line, I think, and they are people just like you. This was obvious, I suppose, but to experience directly is deeply moving. Well, inside this environment we are doing a lot of Lego.
Then we’ve got they have been making the same sort of constructs as some of you are showing off here. I’d like to focus on one of their group whom I’ll call “Bill,” not his real name. Bill is in a group with mostly a cross section of kids at all current academic levels as their school saw them. Bill was one the one at the bottom. He had spent his whole life in special Ed classes classified as learning disabled, really, pretty much, and in terms of schoolish things he had the gaps.
He barely can write, but Bill, from the first day, became involved in building with Lego. He started building extremely complex things. Then he started also building very simple things, the reverse. He did something funny, and just spun around, and he’d take a piece and make another one. It became obvious that Bill, instead of some people their goal is the performance.
Bill was showing an idea. For example, at one point, his idea was that you can use a string around a pulley, and that produced a certain transformation of motion from rotation of a motor to something moving up. He made a number of constructs and that was the key goal . This was really interesting to see this kid who was classified as intellectually at the bottom of the scale by school was, in some sense, being more intellectual, intellectually deeper than most of the others.
Now, I don’t mean I want to put the others down at all, they were all doing wonderful things, . For complex reasons that I don’t have to get into in this context, but I brought a rat trap. You know a mouse trap, a big one, into the classroom and we were playing with the idea of using this to store up energy. We could use the motor to pull up the spring, and Bill, and another one, actually, made a thing that did that, and then the idea was to release it. It would make something zoom off.
What they were interested in doing was make something go as steep as possible incline. By the way they had got 72 degrees. That’s the steepest incline that a Lego, and they put this out as a world challenge. That’s pretty surprising. Well, I showed this rat trap and the kids gathered around and made, well, first of all, the girls in the class made . A group of boys gathered around and made like macho remarks like, “You can break somebody’s finger with that,” or “That’s nothing. I’ve made a bear trap.”
Bill had listened quietly and after everybody had said their sayings and went around, Bill said, about the mouse trap, “That’s a wonderful invention.” You know, it is a wonderful invention. When you start thinking about it, to invent the mouse trap we made jokes about inventing a better mouse trap, but it’s really a lot of very, very clever ideas in the way that thing triggers. It’s a really powerful idea that you can find in many places in the world.
Bill appreciating the idea inherent in the mouse trap. So in his value system, in his head, ideas have a different kind of very sacred role, and maybe that’s why he hated school, and that’s why he hated the routine of rote learning and all of this stuff. Maybe his low school performance is not a reflection of anything wrong with him as a learning disability, and a victim of this amazing epidemic of learning disabilities that’s been sweeping the world, but I think like many people apparently victims of their the problem wasn’t what it’s supposed to be.
[27:19]
In fact, his poor performance maybe reflected on something that we should be proud of, that he should be proud of something really great. But we need a different kind of context to bring that out, and this is, of course, where all this kind of work is all this work of trying to change the way people learn. That’s going to bring me to the general concept of the learning environment, but before I do that I’d just like to say this present project is extremely challenging, not easy, inspiring [inaudible] .
If anybody here lives in Maine or near Portland, I want you to come and volunteer your time physically. If you live somewhere else maybe by electronically and by email you can volunteer ideas, inventions, suggestions. Maybe you could tell us where to find more parents to support the learning. I should say that it’s actually supported context by the governor and the State of Maine because it’s in Maine by Stephen King, Angus King no relation to Stephen King the novelist who contributed a substantial amount of money to make this possible.
We need more help. My email is papert@mit.edu. The learning environment. I’d like to reminisce on something else. An invention on a bigger level of an idea that has transformed the world. Not about this idea of a bigger . It’s the idea of the environment and of environmentalism. When I was a kid, even as a big kid and a young adult there wasn’t a concept of the environment. The environment was not a phrase used.
The environment of this room maybe, but the environment meaning all that has to do with the water, earth, and the sky, and the air of our planet. That concept did not exist. Of course, we knew about particular problems. We had soil erosion here, pollution of a river there or sulfurous coal producing fogs here, and little pieces, but nobody put those together, and, certainly, there was nobody in the world whose function, whose job, whose preoccupation was to be concerned with the environment.
Then one event triggered by crystallizing out of a super-saturated solution Rachael Carlson “Silent Scream,” one book, “Bang!” and very quickly this caught on. Part of this was a time an idea of this time was there. We were already in a super saturated kind of condition. Now, we see it’s become bureaucratized. The Environment Protection Agency, International Treaties, it’s become a big thing, an area of research and a profession, and it has changed the world.
Right here, when I first came to Cambridge nobody would swim in that river. It was poisonous, and there were no fish and it’s now really clean. Environmentalism has done something. Now, I think that in relation to learning we are now in a position that we were in relation to an environment in say the ‘60s. It’s the same thing. There were people interested in pollution and erosion, and fog, and nobody seems to know. Now there are people who study early childhood, teaching in schools.
There are middle schools, high schools, a lot of learning, training in the military, training in the industry. There were all sorts of people, all sorts of aspects of learning. There is nobody in the world who was interested in learning as such the whole thing. It’s not recognized either as a field of study or a focus of attention or concern. This is what is now needed. I’m seeing my main goal for this year may be apart from running that and making sure that project in the prison really works, is to launch this idea and promote it as hard as I can that we need a change.
We need to start thinking of, in a different sense, the different kids of people, different kinds of professions, different kinds of organizations who will be concerned with learning as such. Now, why now? Certain folks that are around today are . This thing comes into the lives and even into homes, and creates a kind of learning or something called programming, which schools sort of playing with it have found to handle in their context, but it’s now happening in homes.
It’s one example of the breakdown of the kind of division of labor, of the interest between home and school in relation to learning. Some of them are more sinister. Until not long ago, very few parents concerned themselves with how mathematics should be taught or learned. That’s something that teachers worry about. It’s for professional educators.
Today, everybody is bombarded with advertising, which directly or indirectly says to you, “Buy this software so you kid will learn math.” Math or reading or whatever it might be that’s become that. Parents are now making decisions about how to learn math, well, that’s the first barrier.
It’s just one little example of where there is a breakdown of what used to be a division of labor.
The questions people are facing the issue they have to be concerned with, decisions they’re making are changing. The traditional ones are being washed away. The existence of home schooling is a manifestation of the same sort of development. I think that we are in a position where you can see all over the place. Things are happening. Technologies are heavily into the learning environment. Changes that are momentous for the way that children will grow and learn and think in society.
On the whole, educators are looking at this in a trivial way. Parents are looking at it in a trivial way. An example of trivial maze, the preoccupation with pornography on the Internet, for example. Now, I’m not saying this is a problem, but it’s a tiny tip of an iceberg of a much bigger problem, namely that children are judgmental. They make their own decisions. They are deciding themselves much more. The traditional ways of influence or guidance that constitute parenting are breaking down.
Pornography is just one little fraction of that. People don’t want to face the fact that there is a much deeper breakdown of our assumptions about childhood and how children should be , and what parenting is, what the relationship between a parent and child should be, and what happened. I’ll give one last example of a concept of pollution of the learning environment. I’ve got two examples. The first one, a teacher heard this person teaching their lessons. I’ve told the story a few times. I’ve listened to many others.
An English teacher saw a movie called “ Shakespeare in Love.” Now, I’ll explain briefly about it. It’s not a great, great movie, but it’s a very good movie. It gives you a different kind of perspective on Shakespeare . It’s a good thing to see. This teacher wanted to take her class to see it. She was not allowed to take the class to see it because the thing is rated R. Why is it rated R? Because in the movie there is a 20-second sequence of nakedness in bed. A 20-second sequence that contributes zero, nothing, to the artistically otherwise good movie.
Maybe, it contributes to attracting people to the box office with their trailers. I don’t know why it’s there, but I would say that is an example of pollution of the learning environment.
There should be an “environmental agency” for learning environment protection, healthful learning environment, environmental protection agency that doesn’t allow you to do that or, if not an agency, better a public opinion that would not tolerate, that would recognize that by putting that little sequence in there you are depriving a lot of children and young people, including our kids in this Maine youth center as they’re not allowed to see it either because it’s rated R. I think that’s the term for pollution of the learning environment. An act that undermines learning by pulling out fibers fascination with nakedness in bed, that is much less sexy than the suggestion between people. Now, one final example that I’ll also call the pollution of the learning environment that is not so gratuitous, but that piece of pollution shouldn’t happen.
There are other examples of pollution that are necessary, perhaps, but could be counteracted in the sense that none of us want to say, “Don’t generate electricity or don’t generate electricity that’s going to put pollutants out, but we try to keep it in check to try to counterbalance it by its makings. This example is movement from transparent to opaque technologies. Everybody asks how could everybody use more than my book Mindstorms. My publisher would kill me if I tell you to read it, but the book that you really should all read is, Surely, You Are Joking, Mr. Feynman” by the great physicist Richard Feynman.
Many other points, and I’ve thought about playfulness in creativity and invention, and one point in that is how much either technology is old thinking to benefit because if you look inside those old-fashioned radio sets that many of you are too old or too young, sorry, even to know what they look like, but instantly, if we could look inside a radio set, there are many things that glow and are connected, and you could think and fantasize how this works.
Open a radio set today and there is like nothing visible. Automobiles is the same thing. I brimmed with excitement when my father would occasionally open up the engine of the car and tinker with it, and replace, and there were all these things I had to drop down and go and fix it. Today you open up the engine it’s hopeless. There are specialized machinery and gears . You can’t do very much. This is the change in the learning environment because I’ve learned, Feynman learned, from radios.
I learned from these automobile experiences all about, a lot about, how to think. How to think about things, how to fix them if they are broken, how to think about how things work. The very idea of opening up and looking inside and seeing. Well, that I don’t think you even say, “It’s a bad thing. There should be a learning protection agency for burning microchips. We could recognize this as a matter of public concern and saying, “Well, if that aspect, if that access to how things work and what’s inside them is being taken away from young people growing, let’s give them others.”
“Let’s make sure that they get the others .” Let’s make sure that these are the situation we valued, and this stuff, Lego Mindstorm, you can program a computer, make things have software, which you can learn to open up and look inside, and learn how it is written. This is a compensation, and we should see it as such.
We should see this as a really important contribution to the way to let them have so my final point about Lego, the book “Lego Brick” was that one of my favorite ideas from that book is how objects can be a carrier of knowledge and ideas. Let’s say, for example, one that is developed in great length in the book, but it has says over and over again, “this is only an example.” To stop people from critizing me by saying this is all I care about. The example was the turtle, a concept, as a programmable object.
The main theme that’s an example of the fact that an object, a thing, can be a carrier of knowledge very different. The Lego brick is, a programmable brick is, a computer is, the turtle is and it was very different from the kind of contribution that in the official education establishment making a contribution to learning means writing out curriculum, or worst still today, creating a new test to inhibit teachers who really want to teach children instead of making them pass the test.
That ought to be maybe the major concern of the learning environmental protection agency to put down this test mania that’s sweeping across the globe. That’s a few thoughts to throw out. I’m trying to give a bigger perspective to the exciting things that we’re doing. Of course, we should spend most of our time doing exciting things, but I think it’s a concept of tithing that might be here that many churches have this practice you give 10 percent of your work .
Maybe give 10 percent of your time thinking about these bigger issues , about literature, and about resources, making a foundation and give 10 percent of your resources to the future, and reflect on this fact that almost zero attention is being given in the world today to how learning might look in twenty years time to a vision of what it’s going to be. Plus, the main idea is it will be very different. You will not find books written, you will not find essays speculating about descriptions of concretely specifically what it might be you’re looking for.
I think that’s maybe a concrete manifestation of the challenge, of the new Rachael Carson’s challenge facing us today. Go to it. Thank you. [Applause 00:47:15]
Speaker 1: We’ll take a few questions for Seymour
Dr. Papert:
Speaker 2: Technology and environmentalism, when I look at all the things being talked about there they seem to be wonderful devices to substitute for nature for overcoming nature, and I wonder if there’s a mismatch here. Are we just showing people how to make more distractions, and people move away, further, from of their innate humanism.
Dr. Papert: Well, a profound question. Let me give one simple, a simple example, a story, and I’ll take a the story from my recent experience I’m so deeply impressed with it. We’ve been trying to find the kind of project that if I match the interests of each individual kid that are in school, and in one case, this project has been a emerging of walking, understanding.
Oh is it not operating? Oh, I’m sorry.
Dr. Papert: [Inaudible 00:49:25] [Cross talk 00:49:28] What’s happening?
Speaker 1: I’m sorry. That’s fine. It’s actually fine.
Dr. Papert: Now, a project that I have since suggested here last week, I think, is understanding walking. Now, that has some origin of my personal life that has to do with about when I wrote my last book The Connected Family because of the stress and the amount of time sitting there trying to get it out of my weight about how to control it. I’d put on 20 pounds or 10 to 5 pounds. I’d like to put on, and every since then, I’ve been trying to get it down and I never could. I had started walking. Everybody has the experience.
At about last Christmas I was in a school and I saw a girl making a screen, making a little animation scene using MicroWorlds doing this [pumping arms in the air]. This is a rather plump girl and you could see why she had this preoccupation and as she did it her figure got thinner. I’ve seen that quite often. What I have never seen before was that other kids who had gathered around said, “She’s getting thin too quickly.” What’s that mean, too quickly? Some discussion started. How many times would you have to do this in order other get a noticeable amount of thinness?
I realized kind of the faintest idea, that’s not quite true, I had the faintest. I knew 100 is too little. I know a billion is too much, but somewhere in-between I haven’t the faintest idea. This became a preoccupation with people. Now, then I suddenly found as I walked trying to do more exercise I was thinking about her strategy, tools, what sorts of things do I pieces together, little bits of knowledge of that I had in thinking about how walking works.
Well, eventually, I got a lot of stuff in my head about this, but I think what was interesting was that my relationship to this whole business of dieting and keeping, thinking about food and diet, and exercise. I had a different relationship to it because I was thinking it in this way. It wasn’t just a chore or something that personal for me, and this time I start losing, wow, 20 pounds down.
This girl doesn’t happen to be overweight, but she was interested in some aspects of walking that I had become aware of. How wonderfully efficient our walking process is, and one of the discoveries I made is that if you watch somebody walk, nature has evolved this wonderful system that amazingly and physically makes you move along.
If it were inefficient you could walk like that [walking] you notice me bobbing up and down with each step. I’m accelerating my mass and putting some potential energy into it so I’m being inefficient about walking, about energy consumption; although, it’s a bit backwards because if my goal is to lose weight, inefficient means efficient. We got into a whole lot of stuff like this about thinking about walking and how it works, the gaits of animals, body chemistry, how things balance.
I think that by making technological, commitments to technologies, it was started with a little micro-world. It went through ideas about attaching sensors like these Lego sensors, in fact, those very sensors, those very bricks with sensors to oneself to measure trying to think about what it looks like on the screen if you use them. I think this kid, through this technology was, and certainly I detect a personal relationship to my biology, and to nature, and to evolution.
It doesn’t have to go that way. Of course, it can be able to take you away from nature. It can also be used to bring you back to nature. I think this is one of the jobs of my learning environmental protection agents to make sure that this thing to recognize it can have negative effects like the ones [inaudible] points out, but counterbalance them to see how we can get it this positive effects . OK?
Speaker 1: Another question?
Speaker 3: Research to collaborate on their connection with the individual with the family, with teaching of children on a personal basis. Expand a little bit on how you see the really big problems of institutions, public education in schools, and how are they going to … I don’t see the application so much in those areas being very easy.
Dr. Papert: Well, it’s not only not easy. It’s impossible. What you are saying …
Speaker 3: Then it’s irrelevant?
Dr. Papert: School as we’ve known it in 20 more years it will be dead. I step back and just throw away our resources and our energy trying to fix this dead institution. Now, I’m not saying, the institution is incompatible with everything we now know about good opportunities for learning. Now, you might say, “What’s that mean that the kids should run wild in the street?”
Surely you wouldn’t have said that, but people do. Good or bad, I think there will always be places for coming together for intellectual questions and for learning, and maybe they’ll be called schools, but they won’t look like schools as we have known them. They will not have segregation by age, for example. If I started off here by saying, “You please segregate yourself.” You wouldn’t have done it. You’d have thought I was crazy. They would have not have had a curriculum like we have now.
They certainly would not have a curriculum that’s based on 19th Century knowledge that’s been patterned for the 21st Century. You would say what about this testing right here?” I think it’s the last twitch of the dying dragon’s tail.
I think the system that feels itself under threat and about to die is closing in on itself, and trying to consolidate itself by its own means. It’ll die. It’s just its agony. How will it happen? I don’t know. I’ve written about analogies between the way that social systems have broken down. I think of when the Soviet system broke down as a strong analogy to what is happening here.
You can read about that on my website. I think that we are seeing parts of manifestations of the increasing tension as school gets more and more out of touch with society. Three million children, I think it’s three million rather than the official million and a half in home schooling, all sorts of charter schooling, all sorts of demand for vouchers. None of these are a solution. They’re all symptoms and manifestations of an increasing disconnect with school.
Kids are not buying into the idea of a school. All this violence and killing, and learning disabilities, and all these manifestations are manifestations of the fact that kids are aware of this increasing gap between school and society. They buy into school less and less. It is breaking down. Now, whether it will come to its senses enough to make orderly changes into something different before there is chaos in the learning world, I don’t know.
That depends partly on us and what we can do so let’s go to it. But let’s not talk about how can we adapt the dead engine to this learner [Inaudible] which can be found on my website, about the 19th Century engineer who suddenly, a hypothetical story, Somebody brought him a jet engine and said, “Can this be of transportation?” so he put one onto a horse-drawn carriage to see if it would help the horses.
It broke down the carriage of course, and he decided jet engines are useless for transportation. Yes. They are, but for stop putting powerful jet engines in the horse-drawn carriage that we call the classrooms.
Speaker 1: [Cross talk 01:00:16] [Applause 01:00:16] will be around during the day the exhibits, the instructions. You can follow up there. Maybe about 10 minutes or so let’s start with the next panels.