Dr. Papert: In all its aspects. When people say “How are you going to … How are they going to train teachers?” there’s another aspect of this model that I’d like to talk around at various points and so while [inaudible 00:00:15] question. The model is that “they” and who that is, the Department of Education, the Augustans, those people up there said, “They are doing this.”
Well, I think, I hope that this project can be something that goes beyond what they can do. In fact, if it’s going to be the kind of transformative process that it might be … Might, I said, not will … but it might but I think this will happen only if many more people than the Department of Education, many more people than those whose job it is to be part of this anticipate and that’s why I’m really, well, so eager to talk to you about this because in many capacities, many people here could be participating.
My model of the way it can work is decentralized, bottom up, lots of things happening and different people doing all sort of different kinds of things, some of them coordinated, more or less, some of them individuals and this is what I’d like to plant some seeds for and see if we can get from now or email us or recruit your friends but we need people and need people who do something that highly rewarding, highly important, fun, and I’m sure, beneficial in many ways.
What kinds of things do I have in mind? Well, I think they range from … I’m hoping to create just the beginnings of a network of support for teachers in these schools. Two hundred and forty-three schools in the state will receive a big load of laptop computers of some sort in September. Some two to 3,000 teachers are going to be faced with a situation that they … It’s going to be totally different from anything that they’ve known in the past, in its potential anyway.
It would be great if we could somehow do things so that every one of those teachers can be in one to one contact with somebody who you can email and say, “I’ve got this problem,” or just share your anxiety with or have somebody hold your hand or solve the problem or I think that’s one way in which we can make a huge difference and it doesn’t have to be organized and it’s probably better if it isn’t organized and it’s better if it isn’t part of a state apparatus.
I think that that could make a huge difference in lots of ways and among others because it would give the teachers, the parents, and the kids a sense that the state is doing this. It’s not Governor King, although, I have the greatest admiration for the courage with which he has sat by this idea … I’ll say something about that in a moment but it’s got to stop being Angus King’s project. It’s got to be our project, the state’s project, everybody’s project and I think this kind of buddy system is one way in which one can create that feeling that we are doing this and I think this feeling isn’t just helping the [inaudible 00:03:24].
I think it’s an integral part of what the whole project could be about, that the kids of the state feel that we are part, that this state is doing something really important, that the state is doing something that’s in the leadership of the world. I think just knowing that could make a transformative difference to a lot of individual children in what they do, in what kind of ambitions they set for themselves. That’s one example, this network of buddy systems.
Another sort of example, another extreme of and this does need some moralization, what will these teachers do, what will these kids do with these computers? I think that we need to develop … I see developing a different sort of teaching material or study units maybe or software or just ways of thinking. I’ll give some examples but I think that’s the general principle. Materials have to be developed. Who will do it?
The industry of making educational materials cannot do it. It’s too committed to an ancient way of thinking about schools on a model that they inherited from the 19th century and this is the first time, the first place where there really is a … The culture medium for developing the kind of materials that can take advantage of the fact that every kid would have a computer at school and most of them at home too.
I think Maine could become a leading center of the world in developing that kind of materials and I think leading center of the world and Maine becoming it in different ways. I believe this could, what will happen, it’s beginning to spawn inside our university system that researchers and faculty and students are beginning to, just beginning to get together in some projects of developing new ideas and new kinds of teaching materials.
I think there’s a scope for the development of business in Maine. I think that Maine could be the place where there could grow up a new kind of educational materials, production. I think there’s an opportunity for small business, maybe they grow into big business so I think on the dimension of private enterprise, there’s opportunity here and it is important that when we think about this kind of project, we think about that as in a way different from the way a lot of educators think about businesses, making money and it’s bad somehow to [inaudible 00:06:14].
Well, it sometimes is but on the other hand that’s what makes this country work and this country works better than all others in this respect and I think that is the only way in which materials can be maintained, produced in a steady stream. There’s a huge range, is individual support, there’s research in Universities, there’s the sporting of educational business and we could go on and on. Your imagination is as good as mine and I just want to spark it.
One action that we’re taking and I’d like to start waving a flag to see who will help us put this together. In the last few days, we managed to pull together some of the elements needed to launch the idea that in Maine, on the 13th of May 2002 we will hold the first international conference on the use of computers in a … Really personal computers and where children at last will have at least the same degree of access to computers that secretaries had for quite a long time and it really is pretty horrifying that to think that by now pretty much every secretary has a computer on her desk or his desk and that’s taken for granted.
Now remember 20 years ago when there used to be word processing tools and as the first reaction that companies had to the presence of computers and there’d be these places, room with all of our computers and people who were word processors who would use them to … For letters or documents to get … They didn’t last very long because obviously an absurd way to do it and we now see on every desk a computer, even on the desks of the executives or in their briefcases.
Why not children? Only because of the lethargic structure of the school system and our thinking about education and I believe that the deep significance of what’s happening in this project in Maine is that it’s a crack in, like a Berlin Wall, I think that in my model of the world, we are entering a phase of accelerated change in every respect.
The science we do is not only different in producing new results, it’s different in its methodologies. Mathematics has changed, business has changed. The way everything’s done, the pace of things has changed. Half the people in this country do jobs that didn’t exist when they were born. Well, the model of learning when you were young the skills you’re going to need through your lifetime, simply doesn’t apply anymore. It doesn’t apply to a rapidly changing society.
We see all over this country particularly the wave of test mania which is somehow designed to make sure that kids come out of school knowing how to do what they were taught, well, that’s exactly what we don’t want. We don’t want people who come out of school knowing how to do what they were taught. We want kids coming out of school knowing how to do what they were not taught.
This has to change. There’s an increasing gap between the rapidly changing society and our lethargically changing school system. I believe that this gap is responsible for many of the problems that beset schools today. I’m sure it’s responsible for the epidemic of learning disabilities, so called, that we see in the schools. Surely, some children do have organic reasons that make it hard for them to or maybe impossible for them to do what other children do but it is impossible to believe that this has suddenly begun to afflict 30% of our children.
I believe that the reason why we’re seeing this epidemic is exactly because of this gap. That it’s visible to school, to the kids that school is out of sync with the society around, so they don’t buy into it. They don’t think of school. They don’t see school as the door to the bridge to the future. They see it as a chain to the past. They see it as boring and so we see waves of disaffection that show up in many forms. In extreme forms they … We meet them in the, what used to be called the Maine Youth Center.
In less extreme forms, you see them in the so called special ed class that are strangling our school district. It’s strangling them financially. It’s strangling them I terms of the quality of life in the classrooms. They’re strangling them in terms of the attitudes of parents toward school. We are in the presence of a very, very serious crisis situation and the way it will … The way that it has to resolve itself eventually is a breakdown of this disharmony, these contradictions between the way the kids learn and the way that itself society works.
I think public schools don’t have a future unless they can resolve this conflict. I think you see lots of signs happening. The home schooling movement across the country, they are now somewhere between two and three million children who are completely or largely home schooled and that’s a movement that is on a scale that’s I don’t precedent it. There never has been in all the fads and school of forms and ideas for different kinds of schools, there wouldn’t be anything of that scale. I think that it reflects a deep profound dissatisfaction with the state of school, of education.
I don’t think it’s the solution, although, two of my grandchildren are being home schooled and I was part of a decision to do that but I see it as a symptom of a deep social disease that when you’re faced with a problem of what to do in the children, you have to adopt what’s really an anti-social kind of reaction, of solution to a problem on a personal level. On a social level, it’s not a solution, it’s a worse problem.
Well, I think that … I don’t know that our school system is deliberately doing everything that it’s doing in order to solve this problem but I think that objectively the forces that make this thing possible reflect a deep understanding in the public that things have to change.
It was interesting to be close to the Center of Development of this project. If you remember, when Angus King first announced the idea, which was February of last year, the immediate reaction across the country was violently negative. Even after three months of hard campaigning there wasn’t a single legislator who had prepared to sign up for it. Newspapers were still writing quite negative to very negative editorials. There was a lot of discussion but very little of it in a positive direction.
I noticed that people that I just ran into talking or addressing groups of people or getting into email discussions about it that you could sense a complicated ambivalence in people’s reactions that it was as if people wanted to believe that this would be a good thing that a good [inaudible 00:14:20] couldn’t bring themselves to do so. That produced all sorts of knee jerk kind of reflex, knee jerk reflexes of why it couldn’t work. For example, you can’t give expensive equipment to kids, they’ll lose them, unless lose them, break them. This was pretty common as a [inaudible 00:14:44].
Talking to people about that, I found that if you just gave them a way out, they would take it that … and this was a defense mechanism. They you could say to them, we tried to say to them to turn this away from being about schools and computers, it’s about trust and it’s about your kids and why don’t you trust your kids, and in fact, you do trust your kids. They have expensive bicycles and expensive Gameboys and they don’t lose these things.
There was a beautiful incident where Angus King went to one school and said to a girl in the seventh grade, what do you think about this and the whole seventh grade said, “Come on, bring them in,” and he said to this girl, “But I was speaking to your mother and she said you lose your gloves, your ribbons, your boots, won’t you lose the computer?” and she said, “Governor, you don’t understand. You can’t send email with a boot.”
The fact is kids are responsible people when they care. They look after the things that they care about and I was thinking at that stage, I don’t believe those things really going to get through but it’s worth carrying on these discussions first because it’s a good kind of conversation to engage people in, maybe leads them to think differently about their kid and about themselves and about their home situations.
Well, bit by bit these, one at a time, these resistances they fell until eventually, as you know, eventually this thing is past and right now an RFP is out. You can look at it on the state’s education website. It’s a bit too late and everyone can take a [inaudible 00:16:33] because they do it the next week and we will see then what the computer industry offers. There are all indications that something within the cross [inaudible 00:16:43] of that, that’s possible will be forthcoming something reasonably good.
The thing went through and my interpretation of it going through is not only about Maine but about the whole world. It’s about the fact that deep down people know that our education system has to change, that everybody knows that it’s not keeping up with the world we live in. Everybody who’s got kids know that those kids are bored silly by school. Something’s about to change and one of the things that has to change is [inaudible 00:17:19] the way we do things in school in line with the way that we do things anywhere else.
If school is part of society, it’s got to be in harmony with it so it doesn’t solve the problem of making a new educational approach, something to hand out a lot of computers but it does take away the major obstacle to doing so. Good technology will not guarantee good education. Bad technology will guarantee bad education, certainly in a state of society that’s as highly technological as ours is.
Okay, so these are the very general kind of remarks. I’d like to focus in on some of the things that I think might happen. As a background I’d like to tell an image that guides a lot of my thinking. I’ve been in this business of how computers might change the way kids learn. I came to MIT in 1963 and walked into the what is called the Project MAC at that time where there was the place where their idea of time shape computers and computers as an aid to doing other things was being spawned and I walked in and I had an appointment with Marvin Minsky with whom I’ve worked very closely later and he, as typical of him, he got the day wrong.
There I was at his office, sitting around and there was in his office number two of digital equipment’s PDP 1 computer just sitting there. I just started to play with it and this was an amazing thing and in 1963 to have a personal computer you could just play with. I had done things with computers before in England and Switzerland, but you signed up for an hour of time on those very expensive computer … Just sitting there played, well, I’d had sat and played with it for a long time and it’s to solve two or three problems that had been bothering me for a long time and I just couldn’t, for it was too much trouble. There was too many detailed things in solving this problem.
That sparked in me a … What became an obsession that this computer can augment your intellectual power. That you can do things that you were blocked on and the people maybe who need augmentation of their intellectual power more than anybody else are kids and so my obsession was the computer would become for children, the instrument to be able to do projects and have access to ideas and ways of thinking that were beyond what they could do, with the kinds of tools that were available before we had computer. It would open up new horizons of power.
I began to [inaudible 00:20:26] all the other people who all think about computers and children and there weren’t many but there were some. All of them were thinking about computer as a teaching machine. You can program the computer to say “What’s seven plus eight? No, Johnny, it’s not. Now try and …” This was the entire concept of what computers could, would [inaudible 00:20:45] for education.
We started in MIT in the Artificial Intelligence Lab, a little [inaudible 00:20:53] that began way back in the ‘60s to do projects and try to think of ways in which the computer could be an intellectual tool for a kid to do things intellectual things that were not accessible otherwise. Although we did a lot of firsts, I’m pretty sure we had the first kid’s writing computer programs, we made the first computer programming language called LOGO that was accessible to kids. I think we, I think that was the first time a kid used email. It was the first that a kid do something like word processing, so a lot of nice things happened there and all this was in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s.
I still have my collection of rejection slips of trying to get funding for these projects. Reviewers say “It’ll be a public disgrace to spend public money on something that would benefit only the children of millionaires,” and of course it was true that at that time, you’d have to be a child of a millionaire to have serious access to a computer but it was also obvious from right then, it was already obvious that the day would come when these things would become less expensive and that one day, every kid would have a computer.
Let’s start trying to think through the ideas that would be used by those kids [inaudible 00:22:15] education system, [inaudible 00:22:17]. Nobody knew how long it would take but I think the general impression of people in the … or in that world of thinking about the way those new technologies was growing, I think it was pretty accurate. If anything, it’s grown faster than people anticipated but we were about on target in terms of [inaudible 00:22:39] anybody would have made in say 1970, about when computers would really be an integral part of every child’s life.
It wasn’t then and in the 1980’s something new happened. Microcomputers started getting out into the world and nearly into schools. Now the first one I saw, the first microcomputer in the school had been made by a teacher over the summer from a kit that you could buy then and this teacher brought the computer along and there it was sitting in his class and it was in the next few years, this was like ’77, ’78, I began to see a lot of computers, in the thousands of hundreds.
Every one of them was brought into a classroom by a visionary teacher who felt deep down that this thing will break out of the rigidities of school and provide a new way of learning. They maybe didn’t know how that would happen when they had utterly romantic ideas of how it would happen but they were driven by that with almost without exception. That was a very exciting time for looking at computers in schools. Then came the ‘80s and then came the success of Apple and then came IBM with it’s personal computer and by the mid ’80s there was beginning to be a big change in the way you saw computers in schools.
The school administrations were getting into the act. I overheard Jim Martin over there at that table using an analogy which I’ve also used and that’s, it was like this living creature, school, the education system has its own defense. It’s own immune system and this thing came in, this foreign body came in that was threatening to change it, so the response of the system, like a living organism was to isolate it, to neutralize it, to assimilate it.
We began to see a change that instead of it being there in the mainstream, in the classroom where a teacher is trying to use it to cut across the existence of different subjects and do project based interdisciplinary work, that broke out of the restraints in the curriculum, we begin to see a situation where the computer’s isolated in a separate room where there’s now a specialist computer teacher. In many schools there’s now a curriculum for … In other words, it’s been “schoolified” and it stopped being the revolutionary instrument. It’s become an instrument that supports the old structure and it’s what you’d expect.
Now I’m not saying that those people in those rooms didn’t do some wonderful things. Some of them do but it was despite the … It was countercultural. It was despite the trend. It was despite what school was trying to make them do.
The consequences of that are quite serious of course now, because in the long period of the ‘80s and the ‘90s in which the image of computer in school has grown as that model that developed, under no circumstances when the computer was isolated to the mainstream of learning and from [inaudible 00:26:06] socializing the culture formation, that is what in the culture of school computer often means.
Today we’re faced with the possibility of breaking out of that but we have to recognize that a major obstacle is that this mindset, this construct of what a computer is has permeated the culture of school. That doesn’t mean that they are not wonderful people. There are a couple of them sitting in this room who use computers in the most imaginative and countercultural ways but on the whole there is that concept of what the computer is based on the use of the computers that developed during that period.
This is one place where I think people like, I suppose many of you are, can play an important role in exposing the systems, [inaudible 00:27:04] the teachers and the parents and the public to a different concept of the computer, to a concept the computer that isn’t serving a curriculum but breaking out of that curriculum, going beyond it, doing things that are more like putting intellectual power in the hands of the children, more like what those visionary teachers in the very early days were trying to do, like what became systematized in the development of the computers in school movement later on.
Another little dinner table conversation that I overheard, Gary Stager here has worked with us in the Maine Youth Center, come and go from California, mentioned that he had been a speaker at the World Conference of Computers in Education in Copenhagen I think recently and I remembered the start of an incident in 1990, I think it was. I was invited to be the keynote speaker at a conference, one of those. I had nearly four years, the World Conference of Computers in Education. The theme of my speech is why … Let’s make this the last conference that’s ever going to be held on computers and education and they didn’t like that.
My reason, though, was that, those other people don’t have world conferences on paper in education. No, they have conferences on education and defining ourselves as a conference on computers in education, we are saying, those other people are the ones who own education and we are their servants and we’re defining ourselves in terms of [inaudible 00:28:53] role. We have to break out of that.
Well, they didn’t like that and they didn’t invite me again but I think that’s where we are and I’d like to … Yeah, before sitting down, we have some, make something a little more concrete by spreading out some of my favorite examples of why I think the … The difference between, that this is we’re talking about education in the context of the availability of technology which is a very different thing from talking about how to use technology in education and that’s the shift that we have to make.
People say and in, no, in fact, most people in the professionals in using computers in education go along with this kind of statement, the computer is just a tool, it should serve the curriculum. It should not dictate it. Well, yeah, I guess so, except that misses a point. Yes, technology, you’d hope, wouldn’t dictate the curriculum but I think the boot’s on the other foot that our present tech curriculum is dictated by technology. Only it’s not the modern technology, it’s the ancient technology and I think that almost everything in our curriculum is highly colored, if not determined by the characteristics of the technology of the 19th century, and basically its curriculum to form.
What we are talking about is using a much more flexible technology to break out of the stranglehold that a limited kind of knowledge technology had over the shaping of what we’re able to teach children. It’s interesting that educators as a whole, reform, educational reform is assumed that the body of knowledge that has been decided on is what should be there. We might add something to it but we very seldom propose throwing any of it away and we go about how do we teach it there, how we encourage children to learn a bit …
I spent two days in the library of that place up the river and I spent two days there. I spent more than two … I spent two days on this one particular project. I wanted to find where there was set out the reasons why we teach children fractions. I didn’t, I couldn’t … There are reams, rows and rows and rows of books and papers and research studies on how to teach them for that, on how to test whether they’ve learned the fractions, on why they don’t learn fractions but why do we want to teach certain [inaudible 00:31:51], why not …
Let me be clear about that, there’s a certain kind of knowledge about fractions that everybody learns without any trouble, like, yes, a third is less than a half and two quarters makes a half. That’s not the stuff that leads us to spend a lot of money on math education and do a lot of psychological damage to children, somehow convinced I’m not good at math. There’s some sort of deficiency in me. Why should you know how to divide fractions by inverting one and why should you know how to find the common denominator? Why?
It’s certainly not because this is knowledge you’re going to actually use. I don’t think even in the 19th century people used it very much, but certainly in the 20th century. You don’t need it, so the other justification is you need that in order to do the next stage of math but that’s a very scary argument that we’ve got to teach this because we’re so committed to teach that, we can’t change … and why are we committed to teach that because if you don’t teach … Well, you can imagine that … and it’s just absurdly circular and I think the fact is if you go to the mathematics curriculum that there’s hardly anything in there that has any justification either in terms of actual use value or as an introduction into this wonderful thing called mathematical way of thinking.
I was introduced as from the Media Lab at MIT and I don’t whether it is relevant here, before the Media Lab existed, I was a professor of mathematics in Course 18 and for many years throughout the sophomore introduction to applied mathematics, so I’m a mathematician. I love it but I don’t consider this thing that … It’s not mathematics, this thing called math that they teach in elementary school, which has very little relationship to mathematics, this great jewel of the human mind.
Well, let me give an example of what I think is the … How the technology of past years has determined the choice of stuff that you’re [inaudible 00:33:58] … Two ways, one is certain things are there because before we had calculators, we needed to be able to add and subtract. Now, [inaudible 00:34:07] into fractions but you don’t need to do multi digit manipulations around this. Nobody nowadays ever knows those things. Certainly, nobody has to do those things because we have calculators.
I’ve surveyed a lot of teachers about “Well, what do you say to your kids when they ask you ‘Why are we learning that?’” and a lot of teachers become very embarrassed and say they ought to because what do you say to the kid? The official line is that “You need that.” In supermarkets you’ve got to do arithmetic and so on and you’ve got …” but the kid knows that that never happens in the supermarket. Nobody does any arithmetic in the supermarket. No, you read the numbers on the, on printed on the pieces of paper and there are the unit prices and then you go to the checkout counter, a machine does it all.
The kid knows, you don’t do that anywhere, so in addition to wasting the kid’s time and doing psychological damage by punishing the kid who doesn’t want to do this, you are introducing a big lie into … Because you’re forcing teachers to lie to the children and that’s probably worse than any other aspect of the current education system that we are lying to the children when we imply that somehow this is useful because it really isn’t useful.
What, why is it there? Some of it because it was once useful and some of it because it’s the kind of stuff that’s easy to teach with pencil and pen and I’m afraid that we would look through the curriculum carefully, you’ll find there’s an awful lot of that. I’ll give an example. Every kid is supposed to know that y = x2 is the equation of a parabola. Now this is an interesting, yeah, it’s still a piece of math.
Why did we choose that through one billionth, this little sliver of mathematical knowledge, of all the things we could teach? Well, because you can do it very nicely with squared paper and you can say x = 1, 2, 3 and y = and you put all this thing on the paper and the teacher can come by and see, “Yes, you did it. That’s right or that’s not right.” It’s dictated by the convenience of pencil and paper methods.
Consider a different approach to thinking about parabolas. I’ve worked a lot with having kids construct their own video games so [inaudible 00:36:30] in programming. We looked into that. They get very enthusiastic about this because they care about video games and something they might like to do. Here’s the situation. You write it, you do one of these video games where this little creature runs across the screen and then something happens, a chasm appears or kids have to jump across. How do you make it jump?
Well, the easy way to make [inaudible 00:36:56] writing your program for it is to make it go like that but some kid might not think that’s a good of … It doesn’t look like a jump. It’s too easy. What you’ve got to do is make it go … Well, how do we do it? Well, one way to do it is to introduce some different kind of mathematical ideas and one usually introduces at elementary school, the idea that you can put together two motions to make a compound motion and we can do this dynamically.
When you do it in pencil and paper in algebra it’s a complicated thing but on a computer screen you can have an icon for a … You can make motions and add them together for some kind of operation. It’s easy to combine them together and kids at seven or eight years old can get it. Now if this guy’s running across like that, you have this motion and the motion, and their motion this way, that’s kept zero, so it doesn’t have … When he jumps through add in this motion and then now he’s going to go like that so then you’d fly off into the sky so we have to introduce something else and everybody know what you have to introduce.
Gravity. What’s gravity? Well, gravity in this world of computation objects, gravity’s also the old computation object that eats vertical velocity, so as soon as you give this thing the vertical velocity and it’s going up, the gravity starts gnawing it away so it reduces until the thing flattens out and then it gives negative and the thing starts coming down. You get a parabola. If you think of a parabola like that, this is a natural definition of a parabola by differential equation.
The parabola’s not defined as y = x2, it’s defined as what you get if you have a constant velocity this way and a constant acceleration that way. Then teachers say and some mathematicians but how do you prove that it’s a parabola? I say, “Well, that’s why a parabola is complete.”
This other thing y = x2, you prove that it’s flat if you think that’s what … but what this example is supposed to illustrate is that one can have a different way of thinking about mathematical objects that needs some mathematical insight to generate though and it’s not just a matter of taking the curriculum y = x2 and finding a computerized way of teaching that, but of rethinking mathematical ideas in a way that results in a double connectivity. That you would like your doing your mathematics to connect to real interest that the kid might have and also to powerful mathematical ideas and we are trying, is beginning to accumulate a collection of ways of thinking of mathematics in that sort of way.
[Inaudible 00:39:42] it a little bit differently that if we think about the way mathematics developed historically, think back where it started, I mean, where it started. We know that the Egyptians and Sumerians and Babylonians already had … They did things mathematically. Now they didn’t have people who were mathematicians. They didn’t have pure mathematics.
They had mathematical ways of thinking that were creeping into doing other things like building pyramids, like how to predict the flooding of the Nile, the movement of the stars or sailing across the Mediterranean and bit by bit more sophisticated mathematical ways of thinking appeared until eventually this beautiful thing called pure mathematics broke off and became a wonderful piece of human creation in its own right and some of us spend a lot of our lives or play with that in doing things and then we find things that can be applied back again but, historically, the order was first, using it in doing other things and then eventually making it a purer thing.
Our schools reverse that process, is we teach mathematics as an incredibly pure, abstract, isolated subject, then we try to make up for a little bit by showing how to apply the mathematics but it’s the pure mathematics that’s supposed to be the driving force. Now it’s a very interesting fact that some kids can get excited about that thing, that pure mathematics but most kids don’t and I think it’s perfectly understandable that most kids wouldn’t because it doesn’t connect with anything in their lives.
In the case of people who do, sometimes you can find the connection. I know what very early childhood experiences resulted in my being, liking math, getting involved with mathematics, quite independent of school. I mean, at school, there might have been specific techniques but I already loved it. I love that kind of reasoning. I’ve seen kids whose families like logical jokes and logical puzzles where mathematical thinking has been rooted in relationship, dialogue that, the sporting side of the family.
They also do well at it. It’s not they wear a different kind of brain, it’s that they had a real occasion to develop love for this or for this subject, for this kind of thinking. Why can’t we reverse this in schools? This is the model that I’m trying to think through. It’s become my leisure obsession in mathematics anyway that can we create for children something like the building of the pyramids and the waters of the Nile and the sailing of the ocean?
Well, they can’t actually do those things for obvious reasons and the real reason is not simply because those projects are too big a scale because now we can make very small projects. We can miniaturize fascinating projects for kids. At the Maine Youth Center, Sue Fitzgar and John Stetson over there have been working with kids on using computer controlled LEGO to create very ingenious [inaudible 00:42:49] where they are doing engineering and coming into contact with ideas that you call physics and mathematics through engaged in in an [inaudible 00:43:01] project.
We still need a lot more work to get a lot more connection between what we know how to do there and the more abstract general ideas. That’s why I hope some of you might volunteer to help but what we see is that kids who are totally turned off by school, sometimes are totally turned on by work of an intensely intellectual nature. Kids who were considered to have no attention span and couldn’t do anything for more than two minutes will spend hours and hours and day after day working on a project of this sort and I don’t exaggerate.
We don’t know how to approach all kids in this way. We need to invest many more kinds of such activities and people who understand the technology and what it could do and the ideas behind it, a big contribution to make to the lives children by inventing kinds of things that kids can do and bring them into contact with powerful ideas. That’s the perspective that we’re trying to work on that we need in this context that’s opening up here where the kids of Maine will have these computers.
We need to be able to feed into that system, ideas, kinds of projects, ways of getting into, just different way to think about parabolas might … How do you access that? Well, we have a concept of Conceptopedia where if you’ve got a … Where we’d like to imagine using electronic access to go from a search engine that will go from a problem I have or project to the sort of ideas that might be valuable for me in solving that.
This is a project on the scale that no single person can do but it’s a project on a scale which a state will mobilize the intellectual resources of this state, we could make a dent in that and we could put Maine in the forefront of an international movement of great import and so this is what I’d like to attract your energy and let me just, as I sit down, [inaudible 00:45:18] there are different ways, different people, and different things you can do. There’s this intellectual side, I’ve seen engineers, let’s say, “What can you do with that, with these LEGO things that are really interesting projects that raise the important principles?”
There’s the support side and I think we like to be in contact with some wonderful kind of person who will teach us, who [inaudible 00:45:38] and you’ve got a kind of knowledge that can be useful to them, maybe we can create the conditions for pen pal, buddy system, relationships to do that. Maybe somebody’s in touch with some source of funding that could contribute to some of this.
Because I think as far as the when the state, is to say the state can do it or this ought to … Somebody else has to do it and for the moment I’m concentrating on what can be done inside the university system but I’d also like to see the founding of small businesses, of non-profits, of all sorts of ways in which this can … We can mobilize resources and we need funding for that. If somebody knows a millionaire has, wants to make a smaller contribution, please help.
This conference in May, we want to make it a smashing success and every kid and teacher in Maine knows that something important is happening here. Help with that is solicited. Well, that’s just an example so I’m sure your imaginations will produce a lot more if you try. I will stop and at this, questions of discussion I’m very happy to stay all night.
Speaker 2: Right for a couple of … Few questions?
Speaker 3: Yeah, question. Just hearing what you said, seems to be it’s going to be a tremendous job on … From the teacher to be able to make this transition. I was actually, Brad had to disappear too and then really what is your project going to [inaudible 00:47:33] …
Dr. Papert: Well, now let’s … My project, not my … What the state is doing and I’m part of that, there as an advisor to the governor. What the state will do is set out so these computers are there and as far as possible they’re maintained in the physical sense and that every teacher gets a support for making the transition. The immediate step that’s at … Right now is identifying in each of the 243 middle schools somebody who would be a lead teacher and get [inaudible 00:48:05] to be able to engage in getting together and planning for [inaudible 00:48:11] … A problem solver, more than computer expert of agent of change in the school.
Starting February, there’ll be 10 … [Inaudible 00:48:23] same way, ages … Pilot project, leads demonstration schools which will start this in February of 2002 rather than September and because there’ll be just a small number, we’ll be able to concentrate resources on and hiring the people, peopling them and getting things going and this can serve as a … To demonstrate to the other teacher but for all that, it’s not enough.
That’s why I am trying to raise the idea across the state that we need to recognize that this is a tremendously difficult job and a tremendously important job and I’d like to see popping up all over actions that will help those teachers, the buddy system online, pen pal with the teacher organizing for teachers who would like to learn about particular things, particular aspects, organizing workshops around that. These things don’t have to be organized by the system. Each one of you could do something, you could become part of a network to help do it.
I think that you’re right, it’s a tremendous job. It’s so big that it can only be done by the state and can’t be done by the state government. It’s got to be done by the people of the state by mobilizing those with resources of every kind.
Yes.
Speaker 4: It strikes me that the real innovator will be the children. Part of the question is how do we get the schools out of the way of limiting what they might, how they might [inaudible 00:49:56] to you that I’m the father of a 11 and 13 year old and they’ve had computers all along and they don’t like the pre-programmed, excuse me, crap that tries to teach them that … is the, I think back to your model of the ‘60s where basically the computer would deliver context. They like to play with it. They didn’t have [inaudible 00:50:14] and they can get whatever they want by [inaudible 00:50:16] … They’re wonderful users of as a tool, to solve the kind of problems that they want.
My concern with what you’ve laid out is we’d have a set of teachers figuring out how to use a computer to teach, not how to use it as a tool to help children work and they’re probably not even equipped to know how to use the computer themselves to solve the problems, so how would they ever use it in leading a learner.
Dr. Papert: Okay, I’m sorry to … Thank you for the question. I’m sorry I slipped my point that I would have made. You’re absolutely right. Let me put this in and it’s a big general question summed up by, because really what … The reason why schools are bad places for children to learn is they’re bad places for teachers to learn and I think that … I have quite a favorite story about that, that if I wanted to become a good carpenter, I’d go and find a carpenter and work with this guy on carpenting and I’d become a better carpenter.
If I want to become a better learner, what should I do? I go and find a good learner and do some learning with this person and I’m going to become a better learner. School doesn’t allow that. The [inaudible 00:51:19] we have that’s going to be lay down curriculum, the teacher is hired to teach what … They’re hired to teach what they learned long ago. They’re not hired to be learning there in the classroom.
I think Sue would tell you here that in our classroom at the Maine Youth Center she did as much learning or more learning than the kids, that they really learned together and something about you’ve got this material and you’re going to make a vehicle to climb up a very steep slope, which one of the challenges, aspect we do. Now nobody’s done that before. Even if they’re done that in general, each kid making a vehicle is going to make a vehicle different, that’s unique. It’s going to run into problems which nobody has ever solved before, the teacher doesn’t know the answer.
They have to learn together and I think that’s the essence of the kind of change that can come about that the classroom can become essentially a learning community in which teachers and kids are learning together.
Now my personal view is that it won’t take very long before we will give up the idea of age segregation of kids because they’re … This idea that you’re a sixth grader and a seventh grader and an eighth grader, comes from a model of dissemination of knowledge that was [inaudible 00:52:35] to the Henry Ford style assembly line, car moves along, someone puts a bolt there, the nut there and a wheel there. The kid goes along from first period to second period, from first grade to second grade and you put the …
Now the essence of projects based learning, if you’re really going to do it is the very opposite. This kid I mentioned who’s making those video game, he needs that knowledge about how to combine the velocities, not because this is the seventh of May in the 10th grade where it’s written down you’ve got to learn that but now because he’s running into that problem. The whole concept of the structure on which school is based is I’m sure going to disappear, that it’s meaningless in terms of the modern technology.
It will take time for it to erode away but it will erode away. In the meantime, I think you’re absolutely right that the steps that can be taken in that direction are doing things inside those age segregated classrooms that are, where everybody can participate. It’s the only way in which you can get more efficiency in learning. It’s crazy that when you’ve got 21 people or 31, whatever it is in that room, one of them should do all the teaching, when you could have 31 of them doing teaching and learning.
I think it’s inherent in the strange … In this access to the technology we can do really project based work where kids can get at knowledge when they need them and I think that’s another way that I might have mentioned where volunteers would help in. We’d like to have this Conceptopedia. In the meantime, I think it’s got to be people based, just need to create a network of people who could respond to a kid who throws into the system, “I’ve got this problem,” and then other people, whether they’re old or young can look at that and say, “Oh, I’ve got something that might be helpful and feed it back.
Yes, sir.
Speaker 5: My wife and I are [inaudible 00:54:40] from Sunday Schools and I found that most kids [inaudible 00:54:47] is giving the homes or day care centers for pre-school kids and I just gave one to a woman who had a three year old and six months later telling the woman, the child has gone crazy and maybe it is before [inaudible 00:55:01] going to school I see your point but I don’t have [inaudible 00:55:04] … I think the [inaudible 00:55:10] I care more about the [inaudible 00:55:12] …
Dr. Papert: Of course, the only reason, the reason why laptops is the kids can take them home.
Speaker 5: Pardon me?
Dr. Papert: The reason why this is laptops is so that the kids can take them home.
Speaker 5: Right, right.
Dr. Papert: If we’re thinking of computers only in school, it would have been less expensive and easier to do desktop computers but from the beginning we fought for the principle that these must be portable machines and every kid will have access to net, they have net access at home as well at school. Now there’s a little twist on this that the legislature would not decree that teeth that schools had to let the children pay for the computers.
Now it’s going to be up to each school district to decide what the policy is but what is decreed from the center is that the computer should be, the facilities should exist for the kid to be able to take them home and my feeling is that probably in the first year, a lot of school districts will be nervous about having the kids take computers home but that will break down and after a while, the pressure to let them take them home will grow and so they will go home.
I think that what happens, I think that’s absolutely essential that what happens at home is going to be an essential part of this process and that’s how school is going to change. It’s going to be driven by the development of a better learning environment inside some homes and through the school, that will be … infect the others because I think we’re getting to the point where in every class there’s at least some kids who have had a better learning experience at home than they’re being offered by school and they’re beginning to say “Hey, we can do better than that.”
Moreover, I can show you how and I’ve got the technical knowledge that teachers might not have had the time or the inclination. It’s nothing … It’s not a put down. Some people maybe don’t want to learn to use the computer but the teacher doesn’t have to use the computer, the teacher who doesn’t want to learn the computer, that’s okay but then let the kids do it. What’s not okay is [inaudible 00:57:10] I don’t want to learn to use the computer so nobody in my classes get it.
Speaker 6: [Inaudible 00:57:15] we kind of started equally in school.
Dr. Papert: Yeah, you know I think completely, I mean I think that the … What we need in thinking about education is a much more holistic view of … I think the [inaudible 00:57:35] is analogous to what happened in the 1960s to thinking about the environment, because before mid ‘60s, people knew about water pollution and they knew about forests and they knew about soil erosion but all these were separate problems. It’s hard for us to remember but the concept of environmentalism, of the environment didn’t exist.
It was created by a set of events in the late ‘60s, Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring played a bit role but essentially it was created because technology and the development of the world had accelerated and exacerbated the problems about these pieces of the environment that forced a rethinking. I think that learning at the moment is exactly like that. It’s fragmented.
There are people who are experts of, and are doing or planning to be in an elementary school and at school and even within school, there’s special ed specialists and science specialists and there isn’t anybody around in our … Whose profession is to think about all the conditions about learning. We need something, a new movement that … I don’t know what the name is … I call it in my head Learning Environmentalist.
We need a concept of the holistic conditions that affect how people learn. Just one little example of where you see how the traditional division of responsibility breaks down. When I was a kid, my parents and our father’s a scientist, so we’re not informed about such things. I don’t believe that he spent two minutes thinking about how I would learn math or science. This was a job for professionals in the school. I’d go to school and they would teach me.
Today, every parent is bombarded with advertisements saying “Buy this software, buy this computer. Your kids will learn math. They’ll learn math without even knowing it. They’ll …” something , the parents’ being bombarded with exhortations to become engaged in how to … what used to be the responsibility of professionals at that school, so that line is breaking down between what’s happens at home and learning and what happens in school and learning and that’s just one little example.
I think that right across the board, the traditional way in which we subdivide this learning business is coming unraveled and what we’ll see around us is a movement towards a new way of thinking about it, this whole process, all this. What you are doing I would say is a manifestation of that movement, it hasn’t yet become articulated and conscious as environmentalism has done but I think that we are seeing all over in many different ways that people are acting in directions that cut across the compartments of in which we think about learning and creating pieces that will grow into a new learning environmentalism.
I talked about school because, well, although it isn’t the whole story, it is an important part of the story and we happen right at this time to have [inaudible 01:00:36] an opportunity to get some leverage on that part of this complex holistic picture.
Speaker 7: Question.
Dr. Papert: Yes.
Speaker 8: One of the reasons we may have gotten to the system we have now is that in some economic sense in states, this assembly line model works with 21 student [inaudible 01:00:54] and the more the [inaudible 01:00:57] to project based learning so it’s hard to stay at, so what is it that you think about technology in the classroom that helps with that problem?
Dr. Papert: Well, you see, technology itself doesn’t help. The reason why it doesn’t [inaudible 01:01:09] is that we [inaudible 01:01:10] that is, I love the … Sorry to impose my little fanciful stories but this story is about the 19th century engineer who invented the [inaudible 01:01:20] and thought this could be useful for transportation so he went to some transportation experts and actually those were the people who made safe coaches.
To find out where the jet engine would be good for transportation, they put one, tested onto the stage coach to see if it helped the horses get across the continent and it shook the stage coach to pieces until they turned down the power until it didn’t shake it to pieces but now it didn’t do much good either. I think what we generally do with technology in schools is attaching a stage coach to or a jet engine to a stage coach. We need the educational jet plane and to be … Maybe, for example, that’s referring back to examples on that from that.
If you’re combining the idea of project based learning with the idea that there’s a safe curriculum that says what you’re supposed to do, where you’re supposed to … It’s like a contradiction in terms that both of them [inaudible 01:02:12] and in fact it is the case unfortunate when project based learning is badly introduced, not only doesn’t it produce a big effect, it actually shakes us. It produces deterioration.
I think generally the use of computers in schools produces a lowering of educational standards for that reason, so it only becomes valuable if you can change the basis, the structure of the way the learning happens and that means that we’ve got to break out of this idea of age appropriate, this will do, learn at this age and that age and … Let kids learn what they need to learn, when they need to learn to do things that they really care about passionately and where the computer really makes a difference is at least two ways.
One, kinds of projects, that if I’m passionately interested in music or graphic arts or film making, by … The computer is an instrument through which mathematical formal knowledge could be connected with those passionate interests. That’s one way, and the other way is you get access to knowledge. There are those two. The point is that it’s got to be used up … but this is where we need ideas and we need [inaudible 01:03:24] and I know a list of good things we can do with computer and project based learning, it really does connect with powerful ideas and will empower children’s thinking but I know also there’s not nearly enough [inaudible 01:03:37] to change that more.
That’s not only [inaudible 01:03:40], get you to participate.
Speaker 7: There’s a question here.
Dr. Papert: Yes.
Speaker 9: Somewhat related to what you said but not necessarily computers, it’s a … but affects the State of Maine is, I don’t know whether you’re familiar with the state learning results at all … [Inaudible 01:03:56] and some of what we’re seeing in our classrooms is that transformation to more of that project based, do you see those learning results supporting the kind of thinking you’re talking about or do you see it as a butting up against and not really facilitating that kind of learning?
Dr. Papert: That’s where I see in the learning results there. The general principles that the learning results are really very good, they say we want children to be skilled communicators and problems solvers and independent thinkers and that takes …
Speaker 9: The guiding principle.
Dr. Papert: Yeah, the guiding principle. When people, schools have tried to put these into [inaudible 01:04:31], look at the … What are they called …
Speaker 10: Performance indicators.
Dr. Papert: The performance indicators, unfortunately, this, you see the contradiction because you’re asking people whose experience of education is what they have learned in the past and who don’t have any access to a different kind of technology so they’re subject to the same limitation as that [inaudible 01:04:51] traditional education and so what they come up with as how to implement this is the same old stuff and so I think that while those guiding principles are wonderful, the performance indicators are a mess and are doing a lot of harm by rigidifying the teaching.
I think that one of the ways in we can use this new project as leverage to be [inaudible 01:05:15] to is by getting people to accept the idea that that was great stuff for the 1990’s before we had this technology and the age of digital technology, we can do better and create new performance indicators that are much more rooted in the possibility of genuine project based learning.
That’s another area where I thought that I think deserves a lot of other [inaudible 01:05:40] attention and in fact it’s getting it because I’ve had several meetings with [inaudible 01:05:46] from head of research [inaudible 01:05:48] about their interest in using Maine as a test place for a new concept of testing to be applied nationally, using the fact that this different presence of technology and possibility of more project based learning and the possibility of a kind of assessment that is sometimes these days called authentic.
That is, you don’t separate the test from learning. That is you try to design projects that are [inaudible 01:06:19] the kids are exercising ideas and which maybe lead to see from a record of project [inaudible 01:06:27], how well that student is doing so you don’t have to give a separate test by asking a question, giving a right, wrong answer that you judge quality by from a portfolio of what they’ve done, maybe looking in a more detailed way at the way which they handled complex projects and possibly the kind of assessment you might have, instead of a test of the same questions.
Maybe you have kids come together into a room as a mode of style and maybe they go into different rooms where there’s different kinds of stuff depending what their interests are and say, well, you’ve got two of those, two of … Make the musical instrument or a robot or a piece of animated art and that’s your [inaudible 01:07:08] and we need to have assessment on how kids are doing, which they need also as much as anyone else. We can get it by this more learning kind of experience, working by count of right, wrong answers.
Whether they, I must say, I’m pretty down on this test mania that’s sweeping the world and as you hear, I’m a bit critical what’s happening then but I must say, the rest of the United States comes out pretty well.
Speaker 10: Aw, man.
Dr. Papert: Compared with the rest of the country in this respect so we want so badly, hopefully we’ve got a start and it’s an openness here to rethinking the basis of the indicators and the testing, so I’m actually pretty optimistic that this is another way in which Maine could perhaps lead the country by developing here an approach to assessment that will solve a dilemma that seems to have gripped the country, a dilemma between we want accountability somehow but these tests are such a crazy way of doing it and I think it’s becoming obvious to people everywhere that they’re doing more harm than good.
I don’t know if you read an editorial by our Commission that will govern these things that they would maybe lose, that’s [inaudible 01:08:27] … If you haven’t [inaudible 01:08:32] it’s a very firm, well written argument against the policies now being discussed, proposed from Washington, of imposing a standardized testing onto our country, testing every year and it makes the point. I mean, Maine is doing pretty well. There’s no reason to suppose that imposing a test every year is going to do good.
There’s every reason to suppose that it will do harm and certainly since we’re doing pretty well in those respects, imposing the same test on Maine as you want to impose on places that are the bottom of the scale in performance, even if you accepted the principle of testing, that would be absurd. He cites this pretty close and we hear rumors that the people in Washington are open to a small number of states, including Maine, being exempt from the requirement of a [inaudible 01:09:24] case but they tried to impose.
Speaker 2: Well, I think it’s been an awfully interesting evening, Dr. Papert and I’m amazed that MIT is interested in education as it is. I believe that young people …
Dr. Papert: Well, let me tell you why.
Speaker 2: Okay.
Dr. Papert: MIT has a very proud record of effectiveness in innovations in education. It’s done much more than the place at the river. You see, even things that I don’t quite like are the new man. It’s a very beautiful science curriculum in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. Those who came from MIT played a primary role in this. The reason is it doesn’t have a school of education.
Speaker 2: Thank you very much for coming tonight and sharing ideas with us. It’s been an enlightening evening.
Dr. Papert: I hope so and I hope to hear from some of you.
Speaker 2: I’m sure you will some place, somewhere. Just a couple of [inaudible 01:10:33] before we break up. In January, there will be another Enterprise Forum. There was one cancelled on September the 11th but will be rescheduled into March, April, they don’t know when just yet, so we will give an announcement …