Seymour Papert – Bulgaria 1999
A third event is also relevant to what I want to say today, and that’s that it was here at that same meeting that I first paid attention to the word Troika. And partly because it was obviously a place to play the word pay attention to that word. It was, in fact, the first time I’d been in any country inside the orb of the erstwhile Soviet Union. And although my much, my books, both Mindstorms and Perceptrons and a lot of other stuff had been published, I had not wanted to go to the Soviet Union for all reasons to do with the political situations. And I might have been right or wrong, I don’t want to go there.
But I was here in Bulgaria and in discussions and meeting. Russians who are here who have also gotten to know very well since I became interested in what’s turned out to be very abiding way in the problem problems of how organizations or social structures change and fail to change and create chaos in changing.
And this is another theme that I want to talk about today, and that was a theme that grew from discussions that I had here in Bulgaria to a paper that I presented at the 1990 World Conference of Computers in Education, which was in Australia two years later. And I called that paper. Perestroika and Epistemological Politics.
Perestroika and epistemological politics. And the point of that paper, which I’d like to develop in a slightly different way today was being struck by the analogy, powerful analogy between the Soviet command economy and political system. And the structure of education in the Democratic countries and in the United States, particularly where it appears to be so decentralized and yet is so highly structured from a a powerful center.
What the theme of my paper was that Ryker, meaning restructuring. Was then the same word as what was being used at the time by the educational reformers in the United States. And the point of the paper was that they’re bound to fail in the same way that Gorbachev was bound to fail, namely for this reason that they were trying to tinker the system.
They could see that there was a lot wrong with it. They tried to fix it by jiggling the system. Failing to realize that the system that we call education, let’s call it school, is a coherent, highly well equilibrated system that has developed historically over a long period and all its parts fit together and match one another.
And to think you can change it by change it. Little piece here, a little piece there. Well, the inevitable result that makes people pessimistic about any change in education is what will happen. It’s like a complex system tied together by springs, and if you pull one aside, as long as you’re holding onto it, it stays let go and it snaps back into its state of equilibrium.
And this is the case. And I’ve come to believe more and more that this is the case, that all these aspects of our school. The curriculum, the aid segregation, the very idea of putting people of one age in one classroom, and of another age in another room. The fragmentation of knowledge into a curriculum, the attempt to order things by a natural sequence of in which you should acquire knowledge.
All these things hang together. In a highly integrated equated system, and it really is a nonsensical enterprise to think you can fix any pieces of it.
Just quickly on you those points. First of all, I think, I dunno if you were here when Richard Nelson and Celia Hoyle presented their video that I missed yesterday, but I heard that fun. It’s hard and the kid liked the challenge. I think we’ve gotta take that challenge. Of course, it’s not easy. You don’t have very model many models in the world.
We trying to make some but I think that we can find models outside of schools. Most learning does not take place in schools and looking at how children learn before they go to school or looking at such phenomena as in United States, there was a wonderful lady called Julia Child, who appeared on television with a cooking program.
And in 10 years transformed the approach of the average American to food and cooking and what they would eat and would have not average a very large number of people. I think it’s an example of a learning process on a social level that we should look at as just as important and valuable as what happens in schools.
Wisdom and knowledge?
I hope, I think I probably didn’t emphasize enough that I think that one of the most anti wisdom aspects of our education is the structure of school where the kid is expected to be told the truth by the teacher and so wisdom is something that comes from somebody else. Putting children in a situation where they’ve gotta solve their own problems and.
Achieve a project that’s very hard. In order to get there, they have to make judgements and they have to collaborate with other people, and they have to decide, is this a good or a bad project? I think this is not an answer to how to develop wisdom, but it’s a huge step ahead of what we do in our present day schools.
And I think that in fact even on a smaller scale. A lot of the project work done with logo is, I would say is fostering rather than teaching, but is fostering something that isn’t knowledge. It’s fostering a love of doing some beautiful and hard thing, and that’s the basis of a kind of wisdom that’s just as important as as knowing fact.