| Kid Speaker: | I also had the opportunity to speak at MIT in Boston. While there, I interviewed Sun Microsystems executive and NetDay founder, John Gage, as well as professor Seymour Papert, a leader in the education technology field. |
| John Gage: | When you give people tools to be able to do something new they’ll think of something new. Generation WhY is taking the tools of the internet, the tools of web design, the tools of everyone a publisher and making them available to a range of people that have never touched them before. A hard part for schools is taking new technology and using it. It takes years. We’ve found that the trainers of the trainers are generally about four feet five, eleven years old. The students teaching the teachers how to teach is one of the most powerful ideas. It’s hard because the teachers have had a role forever of knowing everything and imparting it, of being a source filling a container. The role’s changed now. Teachers are learning they can use the student’s talents to develop something new, so the teachers become guides, which is useful and the students are the explorers. When you explore you’re interested, and when you’re interested you learn. I think that’s the incredible value of the projects that Generation WhY has put in place. |
| Seymour Papert: | As for the Generation WhY project itself, all I can say is the obvious, it’s great. It’s one of the rare times when the U.S. department of education is really funding a great project. I think it’s by far the best project funded by them, but I’d like to put it in a bigger perspective and taking this personally, I see it in the perspective of the last forty-five years I’ve been on a crusade, believing that school will change, that school as we’ve known it, and the separation of teachers are supposed to know everything, teaching a lot of kids who are supposed to know nothing, this isn’t going to last. People often ask why do I think this can change? A hundred years ago John Dewey said about the same sort of criticisms as I’m making, and that didn’t have much effect, and there’s been one education reformer after another, trying to cause it to change, predicting it will change. |
| | What’s different now? Two things are different now. One is we’ve got a technological infrastructure. Without these computers, it really couldn’t change very much, because school is designed to fit the previous kinds of knowledge taken out of technology like chalk and blackboard and print and paper, and that sort of stuff. With a new kind of knowledge technology we can have a new kind of learning, but there’s another factor. In my last book, the connected family, I call this factor, kid power. This is in line with the philosophy of the Generation WhY project. |