Seymour Papert Post-Katrina discussion

Seymour Papert speaks to a Louisiana audience following the devastation of 2005's Hurricane Katrina. This conversation is remarkable in lots of ways and its origins are unknown. Papert discusses how children might computationally model the effects of climate change in this talk.

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  I think, so, to do that I’d tell a few stories. One story is, let’s imagine some time travelers who came to see how things from some other century, like two or three hundred years ago, came to our days to see how we do things. Among them is a group of surgeons, and imagine the astonishment of these surgeons finding themselves in a modern time.

Operating room. They wouldn’t understand a thing about what’s going on. On the other hand, imagine some school teachers who found themselves in a modern classroom. They might be surprised at some of the details, but basically, what was going on would make sense to them. They would understand it much like what they were doing in their day.

I think that this is That’s something that bears a lot of thinking in general. Why is it that we see mega change in medicine, transportation, communications, but, you know, mega change meaning that what’s done today is unrecognizable to people from the past and yet in education, uh, it really has not changed very much.

Now, it could be that this is because Learning doesn’t lend itself to that sort of thing, you know, it’s like, like natural things, like eating. Whether your food is made in a microwave, or in an oven, or not cooked at all, it’s still food, you eat it and you enjoy it. Uh, that’s a question, I think it’s a question that deserves more discussion than it’s been given.

My feeling is that learning isn’t Or even if learning is, that is, the way babies learn, school, education, is a technical area like medicine or transportation or these other things and it is subject to that kind of mega change. And the two things that have held it up are, first, we have not had the appropriate technology until very recently.

Recently, all the Yeah. Little excitement. There’s been in the past that movies or video clips or you know, language labs would transform education, uh, that really wasn’t very serious. That for the first time the computer gives us, uh, technology that could be transformative, but in order for it to be transformative, we have to use it in a transformative way or else, ah.

What we do most of the time seems to me like what would happen if when they invented the, say, the train for transportation, they made the train run by the timetables that had been set by the horse drawn vehicles on previous epochs. We put these computers in our schools and we try to drive the old curriculum and the old order of doing things by the new technology.

And, uh, I think that this will seem totally absurd to educate historians of education of, uh, you know, maybe 20, 30, certainly 50 years into the future. Uh, why has this happened? And one reason is that something as big as the education system will only change when there’s a real kind of shock effect when.

There’s a really felt deep need. I think the last time in the United States that there was a widespread attempt to really deeply change any part of the elementary school curriculum was the time of the so called new math, just about half a century ago. Some of you probably remember that. Maybe many of you were subjected to it as, as students at school.

It came because there was panic, because it was the Cold War, because the Soviets put up a, uh, a satellite. They beat the, us, the Americans, into the space age, and just a little time before then they had tested an atomic bomb five years earlier than the experts predicted they’d be able to do it. So there was panic, and there was sufficient panic to drive A deeper change in what is taught and how it is taught.

Now, I think there’s a lot to be learned from that. Partly, that it went in the completely wrong direction. In fact, the opposite direction of the one that I’m going to be talking about. Uh, this doesn’t stop some people from deducing from the failure of that new math that we’d better not change anything because we’ve learned that change doesn’t do good in education.

But, the fact is that, uh It just went the wrong way. Exactly the wrong way. So much the wrong way that I think we could almost take as a recipe for the right way to do the opposite of what they did. And I’d like to talk about what that would mean to do the opposite. But obviously, uh, you’re reading my mind that, uh, uh, Soviet putting the Sputnik up there created a serious problem.

A need, a felt need for deep change. Maybe the events in Louisiana, maybe these could be sufficiently recognized as requiring something really new. That, isn’t it obvious that we have not only a challenge but an opportunity and that’s really what I want to talk about. Can we really think about, How we can meet this challenge and this opportunity by making something quite different for our schools.

Of course, that’s going to have political obstacles. I’m not going to talk about those. I’m sure that there are people there who know more than I do about how strong they are and how they can be overcome. Um, now what’s the opposite of what they did with the new math? Uh, If you remember rightly, the essence of the new math was to say, let’s make mathematics more rigorous, more formal, and we’ll prove things, we’ll have kids knowing what rules, it, what it did was to take pure mathematics and make it even purer, and what I’m going to suggest is that the right direction to go is to make it more applied, is to connect it with real world problems.

And not only Mathematics, but all other subjects.

I’m gonna concentrate on Mathematics just because we’ve got limited time and that’s a good case. Because in some ways, our teaching of Mathematics is so totally absurd. So I’ll tell another story. This one’s only partly a parable. I’d like to imagine a country in which they use Roman numerals. You know that stuff, right?

5 is V and 6 is VI and 500 is, well you never can remember what 500 is, something like M and 600 is something like MC and then LI, you know, that sort of stuff. If you’ve ever tried to do this, uh, you’ll be interesting to do it. Try to multiply two numbers in Roman numerals. It’s extremely difficult. And so difficult that in those days, in reality, when they did really use Roman numerals, being able to do operations like multiplication were regarded as a highly specialized, difficult thing that only a few people could do.

Now, in my story, let’s imagine a country where they use these Roman numerals, but, People have begun to be worried, for whatever reason, that so few people seem to be able to learn to do operations with numbers. So, there are two schools of thought about what to do about it. One school of thought says, well, we’ve got to fix our school system.

We’ll have better tests. We’ll make movies. We’ll incorporate, um, We’ll make video games about how to put XI. We’ll make, uh, movies about it. The kids make movies. All sorts of stuff like that. I’m sure all those things that we do all the time, the people who try to improve our schools do all the time, would produce some improvement.

But a much bigger improvement came from a different direction. The invention of what we now call Arabic, which we used to really call Hindu Arabic. Numerals made a radical change, because all of a sudden, by inventing, doing it in a different way, in fact, doing a different arithmetic, they could, all of a sudden, what required long years of specialized training for only a small number of experts, now most people in the society, could multiply at hand.

At any rate, that could be put out as a goal, and that’s the perspective that I want to have. Could we have that kind of change in our education system? Not comparable to getting a little bit of extra, a few extra points on the test, but, but really changing on the model of something like going from Roman to, to our Hindu Arabic kind of numerals.

We might notice some of the difficulties that those people trying to introduce the new kind of numbers might have had. For example, the kids would fail the tests because the tests are all about, uh, is, uh, uh, M I X bigger or smaller than M X I? And, uh, well, the students who were learning about 1 1 and for our, uh, Sensible kind of number system would be totally incompetent in dealing with M’s and C’s and L’s and X’s.

But that’s what their tests were about, and we’ve got a problem about our testing system. I’m not one who’s against testing. I think it’s important to have testing, important to have standards. But if the tests prevent us from making change, we’d better do something about it. Now, what kind of change? So, I’ve got to think of one more little parable, tell you about one more little parable, and that is, where did mathematics come from?

If we go back, Egypt, they were building pyramids. They were having to worry about how to predict the, when the waters of the Nile would rise. Um, And gradually, as they did these things, a new kind of thing started coming about, something called a mathematical approach. I mean, there weren’t any mathematicians, there wasn’t mathematics as such, but mathematical thinking was creeping into the way they thought about making pyramids, and then the Phoenicians sailing the oceans and navigating, there too, mathematical thinking began to come into the way they did things, things like, how did they navigate?

Or, for that matter, the astrologers trying to predict the stars. Mathematical thinking started as a way to deal with real problems. And then gradually it got deeper and deeper, and in the Greek times it got richer and richer, and eventually, after a long time, this thing called pure mathematics, this sort of jewel of the human spirit, appeared.

But notice, historically, it grew out of What we might today think of as Applied Mathematics, and yet, crazily, in our schools, we turn it the other way around. We start trying to teach them this very abstract thing, like numbers. What are numbers, and how are you going to add them and subtract them? Why would you do that?

I did a mischievous experiment a while ago of provoking some children to ask their teachers, Why don’t we learn all this stuff? About fractions and, uh, It’s interesting what answers the teachers gave, and I don’t blame the teachers, I think that I sympathize with them, but the fact is, teachers found that kids were told things like, well you’ve got to learn it because you need it in the supermarket, in the workplace, you need to work with fractions, and now the kids know that in the supermarket nobody does anything with those numbers.

Machines do it. So, for those kids, the teachers were lying. And lying is about the worst thing you could possibly do in education. I can’t think of anything much worse than lying to children. Besides, you undermine the prestige and respect they have for the teachers because they see this as another piece of teacher double talk.

We’ve got to, it’s not the teacher’s fault though, Because the fact is that we’re teaching children stuff that does not have any real place in the modern world. You know, I’m not saying that simple arithmetic like, like 7 and 8 and a half is a quarter and a quarter. These little things don’t give anybody trouble in school.

It’s, it’s knowing that if you want to multiply fractions by one another, you take LCDs and to multiply. Multidigit numbers, you write them down and you carry in all this sort of complicated stuff that nobody does in the real world. Why do we do it? Just pure inertia. Because it needs too big a shock to make us change.

And my question is whether what’s happened in the world, I mean, things happening in the world today, including what happened in the past, In your part of the world, is this a big enough shock to cause people to think about really making that change? And what would it be like now to make the change? And now let’s come down to concrete things like the idea of a place based curriculum that has been fostered by some people being brought together by the Virtue Foundation, Ha!

Myself and some colleagues at MIT and some people around, around the world who’ve put our heads together and tried to think through, uh, some way in which we could do a different thing there. And I think back on the Egyptians building pyramids and the Phoenicians sailing boats. Why don’t we give children that sort of stuff?

Well, obviously you can’t afford to give them pyramids to build, and you can’t afford Risk sending them out in the ocean to see how they would navigate. The fact is that, until recently, there was no real way to give them kind of problems, kind of projects and thinking where they could really use mathematics in those ways.

But the computer has changed this. The computer and other digital technologies. Because with the computer, there are projects that are really deep, meaningful, engaging, In which mathematical thinking can be nurtured in the first place, not as an abstract thing where you do ritualistic manipulations of numbers on squared paper, but where you use the mathematics to make, do something.

And so what are examples of doing something? Let’s suppose you want to understand how a hurricane comes about. There are two ways you can do it. You can have some general principles, um,

But, scientific understanding requires some, in the traditional way, requires some deep insight into, you need to use equations and isobars and all sorts of concepts that are really much too difficult to give to, say, an eight year old. to do an investigation of what would happen, for example, if the waters of the Mediterranean, of the, of the Gulf of Mexico heated up by five degrees, what would this do to the strength of the hurricanes?

A really urgent, important question. Could an eight year old sensibly tackle that question? Well, before there were computers, for sure not. With computers,

Northwestern University and the so called Net a Logo project have, are developing ways of approaching the creation of a model by programming that sort of thing which are accessible to elementary school children. I can’t come to details here. I believe that tomorrow you’ll have a chance to see some little snippets of how we can just get a beginning of teaching children to program computers when you get some demonstrations of microworlds.

But that you’ll see what can be done in an hour. But if the children can spend many hours and the sort of time that we spend now on, on, on multiplication tables and all that kind of stuff, if you could spend that amount of time on getting a foundation in building models and programming the computer, not just using other people’s programs, but making the program that will answer a question that you asked yourself.

They can do it. There’s no doubt that they can do it. So, that’s a kind of little model. A couple of others. Some colleagues in Latin America and Brazil have, uh, a project in which children are, and this is an after school project, but that’s maybe the direction you have to go, but it’s an after school project where they seriously spend their time doing harder work than they do at school and loving it.

Uh, the harder work is Learning to use computer models and computer techniques for answering the question, what kind of city would we love to live in? Let’s design a city. And they use software where they can do city planning and they do, they raise all sorts of questions like the distribution of energy, the flow of traffic, and any questions of this sort, through computer simulations, they can really make a professional kind of analysis of these.

I heard about something similar, in fact, in Louisiana just the other day, that a workshop for a week worked on kids taking the blue area in which they live, their street, and what might it look like ideally. What would I like it, can I imagine it looking like in 10 years time? In Geneva, Switzerland, at the École Active, children, elementary school children again, Learned how to use computer controlled Lego.

Some of you might know about this under the name Mindstorms. This is Lego with motors and a little computer that can control movements, so you can make it do things. And with this they made models of the water distribution in the city of Geneva, which has a river, in fact it has two rivers, and they generally walk together.

There’s a water plant and an energy generation plant and they really could make a physical model of this and come to grips with the mechanisms that worked underneath it. You could do the same with dams, with how to control floods, with how to control the flow of water. There’s an endless variety of deep problems and deep issues that kids can really become engaged with, provided you give them, in a serious way, the underlying skills.

To be able to approach them using computer based tools. So, that’s the general image we have. Can we create a collection of activities? And a collection of the right sort of tools and the right way of introducing kids to them. I think that to do it you need to presuppose that it’s a collection of the right sort of tools and the right way of introducing kids to them.

You’ve got computers in sufficient numbers, and that you’re making a serious effort to use these computers, not in the superficial way that’s being propagated by the computer makers today who try to sell their computers by saying it’s easy, you just have to do easy things. These are difficult things.

But we can do them, we could do them, and this is the challenge in that. This is where I’d love to be able to work with you, even at a distance, and see what wonderful things you do. I think that it must be true that if you try to get, come to grips with how to bring the understanding of hurricanes or floodwaters or town planning to a form that could be grasped by children, there must be many, many people in your university structure, in the research labs, who would Gladly spend part of their time taking the things they know about and rethinking them, re conceptualizing them in ways that could be made accessible to the children.

So, that’s the image that I’d like to throw out. It’s idealistic, it’s an image of, an ideal image, maybe there are many other partial forms of it and I’m sure there are many other Greater and even more idealistic forms of it that you generate from discussion, but I just wanted to throw out into your discussion something that was thinking out of the box, thinking big, thinking on a scale that’s commensurate with the kind of problems that I was going to say that you have.

That’s not exact. It’s a problem that we all have. What happened in your part of the world might just be sufficiently, made sufficiently visible by that so that there’s a provocation to real action. So, I talk longer than I meant to and I will stop and, uh, we could spend some time, uh, answering questions.

Unfortunately, I’m far enough away so that any rotten tomatoes can’t quite get at me, but, uh, uh disgusted,

has a play with, uh, microworld.

CI and Susan have donated that software already to this program and is loaded on all of the laptops that, uh, ES foundations have donated.

Well, that’s part of it, that what you’ll see is a sample of one of the entry points that is, that have been developed in multiple forms, in multiple places about how to get kids into being able to program.

Now, that’s general purpose programming. To use the programming in relation to the specific kind of problems that, that came up there, you need to adapt them quite specifically. And I don’t, I don’t, uh, think that you can just draw on content that already exists, but there is some content that exists. I mentioned that.

Some of the, the work at, uh, Northwestern, where they have developed, uh, quite well, well documented and well polished, uh, school content for simulating ecological situations and environmental situations. Uh, these could be brought over very quickly and adapted pretty easily. Um, I think that, uh, Another form of content that exists that can be picked up as a stepping stone is using the computer to document research into, um, what actually happened.

Collect stories, put them together, um, in a systematic way, in a kind of database of, of episodes. Uh, collect. Statistics, make a model, make, make a model of exactly how the, the, the level of the water will, uh, I don’t want to get into details, but I think that, uh, what exists is enough to get the kids going, and after that we need to make some specific things that are matched to the, to, to the specific problems, problems there.

I’d like to say though, I do believe that this could be a decentralized effort in the sense that there are a lot of people who could contribute pieces of it, but I think it’s absolutely essential that there’s got to be some centralizing, uh, agency or person or at least some little group of people who are full time devoted to doing this.

But given that amount of, of effort, say one, uh, leading researcher and, uh, a couple of, uh, maybe even students working part time, you could, there’s enough to be able to try to generate real content that’s adapted to the purposes there faster than the kids can absorb it.

I hope I can, uh, I hope I can paraphrase.

The question was, uh, How would you go about bringing this programming paradigm down to the K 12 community?

Speak directly into the mic here, too, if

you want. I’m going to

talk

directly into the camera. I appreciate your being with us today. My question, a little premise. We’ve got a very robust optical network being deployed in Louisiana. We are, uh, Uh, today, uh, fixing to deploy about 100 teraflops of computing power distributed around the state and, and five of our research universities.

And we’ve had some discussions, um, uh, amongst ourselves about pushing this, uh, the, the parallel programming paradigm down to the K 12 community. So the question is, how can we really, uh, go about doing that given that we’ve got the investment in the fundamental infrastructure here? Uh, uh, as a place to start from?

Well, there is, I don’t believe there’s any formulaic answer. I think it’s Will that makes it, but I’d like to say certain, try to enunciate a couple of principles. I think one is that it’s networking people that’s as important as the network of, uh, of, of, of technology. So we have to put people together.

Second, uh. It may be more painful for some educators that, uh, I think it’s impossible to produce this kind of change uniformly across, across a state or a city even. I think that it’s clear that all new innovations come in because there’s a small number of, uh, Early adopters, people who are ready to put their neck out, who see the point quickly and will put in the required energy.

So I think the important thing is to create a kind of network that would allow the say five or ten percent of schools or teachers who are ready to really go ahead of the pack. To know that there’s an opportunity and to get help and so to identify this group of front runners. Uh, I think that’s an absolutely essential part of it because, uh, you know, it’s going to require effort.

Some teachers and, uh, are going to have to learn some things they didn’t know before, some parents are going to have to be prepared to go along with the idea that what their kids are doing is not what they remember doing, and these are not, uh, you know, you can’t expect everybody to do this at once, so we’ve got to create a small, cutting edge community.

Uh, I think thirdly, there’s got to be time for, that, the problem of teachers learning is A difficult question, but it’s not as difficult in the way that, uh, is usually, is usually formulated. I think that there, there are a few specific things. First of all, the most important preparation for teachers is to accept the idea that those kids in your class.

Computers are going to be much faster than you at learning some of the things about computers. Not only about handling the computer, but some of the things you can do with it. Why are they faster than you? Well, for one thing, because they’ve got more time than you have to spend on it. Another thing that, that they, many of them have a style of learning that’s more matched to, to the way computers work.

Um, but mainly because, you know, thirty heads are better than two. And if you’ve got 30 people, what they know between them can add up to quite an expert knowledge. So, we’ve got to solve a problem of getting over the resistance of teachers to giving up the idea that they are the ones who know and get into an atmosphere of co learning with their students.

And the final point I would make is Um, giving, it’s often said teachers don’t have time to learn anything new, even if they want to. And it always seems to me that that’s a cover over for something, because if you use a little bit of ingenuity, you can think of a lot of ways in which teachers could have time.

Let me tell you just a, a, a simple minded one, and I don’t, but so simple minded that, uh, you’ll think it. You couldn’t even imagine that that’s a solution, but why not? Suppose that for an hour a day, or two hours a day, you put the kids in front of really instructive movies, there are some really instructive movies, or, or, or self instructed computer games, or activities, whatever they might be, that are in some way instructive whether they meet a curriculum or not, and for that, but the point is They just need some kind of supervision that doesn’t require highly qualified teachers who are qualified at teaching.

Meantime, the teachers can use that time to be learning something else. Um, well, there are a lot of other ways, and we don’t have time to, to, to go into it now. Except I’d like to mention one other, which is a metaphor that I’ve been using a lot, and that is, uh, the metaphor is You want to change your curriculum, but you can’t just change it overnight, because you’ve got to keep on teaching, and something’s got to happen on Monday.

So I think of it like remodelling your house while you’re living in it. Somehow you’ve got to find this little corner that can be changed a little bit, then you can move over there and change something else, and the change in curriculum has to be like that. There. Find the place that you can change it, uh, most easily.

Find the place where you can introduce, say, the working on a model of hurricanes. Um, or whatever it is that that teacher might happen to know about or have access to some expert who can give, who can give help. And bring that in and use that as a foundation for the step towards acquiring knowledge.

Skills and concepts that can go into other areas. So, um, I think this is a hard problem, but

a solvable problem.

I’m just wondering, what is your view about the academic world where you’re working in? How the partnerships can work more quickly together. Um, do you consider yourself a, uh, a, a, an academic or do you feel that there is a lot more work to be done in terms of advancing partnerships based on the type of person you are?

How, how do you feel that these two partnerships can impact in this? Yeah, that’s a deep question.

Um, I think

that. We really need a kind of partnership that we don’t see enough of. Let me go back to my story about the Roman numerals and the Arabic numerals. I contrasted two ways of dealing with the fact that people were having trouble with multiplication. One was, sort of, purely on the education side. We have better methods of teaching.

Now, the other one was inventing a new kind of number, a new way of representing numbers. And you might say, well, you know, that isn’t education research. I mean, it’s not educators who could do that. That’s mathematics. But of course, to do that kind of thing, you would need a mathematician who understands mathematics.

He won’t learn to be creative in mathematics, but is ready to do this, working on problems. whose main motivation is educational. And making mathematics in a form that’s good for children is, raises, needs the same kind of mathematical creativity as making any other new mathematics, but it needs a different kind of motivation that might not be so well recognized by the mathematics department.

Right. wants its faculty to be working on research problems that are on the cutting edge of what the mathematics community considers most important rather than on what would be most important for, for the advancement of, of learning among children. So, uh, what I’m saying is we need to bring together, uh, mathematical talent and knowledge and creativity with educational insight and knowledge and creativity and education.

That’s an academic and activist kind of co operation. You asked about how I see myself. Well, I see myself as two personalities. One who’s an activist in education and one who’s very academic and a mathematician by origin. And, I’ve done all sorts of things of that sort, and I struggle with myself to keep these two together.

And we need to create a, you know, find mathematicians who would like to exercise their mathematical creativity in a way that’s good for kids. Bring them together with educators who can talk to them about what’s possible for kids and needed by kids.

To understand how hurricane falls. You really understand how it happens, like Coriolis effects and how the force is operating. You can’t take a book on, uh, dynamics of fluid dynamics and advanced meteorology and put it in the hands of kids, or even of teachers of kids, because it’s cast in a language that’s much too abstruse and assumes all sorts of mathematical formulae and methods that, uh, Calculus and all sorts of stuff that isn’t so easily accessible.

But, we know, and what’s the work at, uh, Northwestern. Some of you might like to look at their website. Netlogo, N E T L O G O, netlogo. org, I think. There’s a lot of stuff there where they make computer models which enable a kid to To be able to work with a problem like, how does a hurricane get formed? But in order to make that model, two things were needed, uh, or three things really.

They needed the programming system, the modeling system which they could make it. They needed some sense of what kids could do or couldn’t do. and how it would connect with other things in the lives of, of, of kids. But they also needed somebody who had a deep understanding, a professional understanding of that particular area, in this case hurricanes or related things.

And, uh, I think that’s that, that’s a model for what I think could be done and the presence of the computers combined with a sense of need, and, um, That’s what I’m sure is going to be happening more and more in the next decades.

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