Education in the Digital Age (1998)

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500 years ago nobody's education included the bassoon because it hadn't

been invented yet as new technologies developed education changes how will

today's new technologies affect tomorrows education

we've been fooled for a hundred thousand years in to believing that our

perceptions are correctly revealing what

it was going on in the world it's only been a few hundred years ago that people

started waking up and realizing that by being more careful more probing giving

up the idea of absolute truth that all of a sudden there's a whole nother world

revealed and it's a world that's a lot more reliable and gives us much more

power than the world within two hundred thousand years back when a computer was

a room full of equipment attended only by the e left Alan Kay envisioned a

portable personal computer and directed a group of researchers that developed

the features we now see on laptops all around us he invented the overlapping

windows interface and modern object-oriented programming since

October 1996 Alan has been affiliated with walt disney company as a disney

fellow and vice president of research and development

I had the great good luck of learning how to read fairly fluently before I

went to school and so when I showed up at age five in first grade I'd already

I'd already read

you know probably a couple hundred books and most of them were children's books

but I also started delving around into my grandfather's library and so my rec

one of my recollections from first grade is the teacher saying something and I

would raise my hand and say what I read something different in book X Y or Z and

was you know basically shut up kid because they at some point now of course

I didn't have the concept of a party line so by the by second grade and of

course I mean while I was still reading I was reading I'm probably at least a book a day and so it's some at some but

I was very unhappy of course because I wasn't enough of a loner

pretty much of a longer but not enough of a loner to actually just say the hell

with it and so there's this uneasy balance going off all the way through

but I basically even though I wasn't

happy I realized it was entirely possible if a guy didn't even use the

word education but in fact there were the my grandfather had five or six

thousand books he was an author and there they were and my father was a

scientist my mother was a was an artist in a musician

and so the setup at home was perfectly

reasonable for a kid of six or seven years old and so again I had this

possibility of getting fairly deeply

sensitized to this stuff and I started singing and also the although the school

I was in was not a very good one they had a very interesting way of dealing

with music which is that they only had 200 kids in the high school and by

tradition they had a full band in an orchestra in this little town in

Massachusetts in order for that to be true almost every child had to grow up

being able to play a musical instrument reasonably and so they simply taught

music there as though it was anything else like it anything else there was an

hour a day devoted to it forever from first grade on and it was done kind of

in an old style where they taught the kids solfege the syllables Doremi Faso

latido and I can remember I have a vivid image from the first grade classroom of

the teacher having all the syllables on board not just the seven in the scale

that the ones for the chromatic notes and she would point with her ruler to

one of them and last would have to sing that note and she pointed to her with a

ruler to another random one and you'd have to sing that interval you know so basically in the first year they taught

us to sing all of the intervals and the

keys of C F and G to map the notes in

this in the score into the intervals and meanwhile all the way through I had bad

experiences in school until I got into graduate school which was the first mill

year since kindergarten that seemed reasonable I feel like you do what you wanted to do and there are plenty of

really smart people around that you could talk to and see how smart people

ten years older than you did things and all the things you really need and so

when I met Seymour Papert in 68 almost

30 years ago now and saw that he was

trying to not teach kids to program per se but to

try to teach kids to think more powerfully and particularly to be able

to think powerfully about powerful ideas the ideas that are really hard to learn

and that there are some things about the computer that could make that more

possible for things like mathematics in the large and science and the large that

just completely blew my mind

you

the experience this said oh yeah this is what we want to do this thing is going

to be like the printing press and literacy is fluency it isn't just being

able to read the words off a pill bottle and fluency is best gained by children

and you know the heck with the adults let's really try and infant media as

opposed to technology Thomas Hobbes political essays were in the mid-1600s

so that's 200 years after the invention of the printing press and that the

printing press in one sense was wasting itself for decades and decades and

decades because they didn't know what the new thing should be there are still just using it to automate the old and of

course we could see that was happening in the 60s of the computer people were

trying to do accounting on the darn thing people were trying starting to trying to imitate paper and in fact most

of the use of a computer today is simply imitating paper rather than doing what

it's really good for and see more heads started honing it homing in on gee what

is the computer really good for in Douglas Engelbart guy invented the mouse was homing in on what is the computer

really good for and one of the answers are this is a new way of augmenting

human intellect and what's new about it

are the things that only the computer can do so that absolutely sees my imagination

to this very day that our basic job is to try and speed up the normal normal

Darwinian evolution of people fumbling around with something new trying to

figure out what it was why do I keep on

fooling around with technology is I think it it has to do with not what it

is but how you can use it to evoke and I

think of it very much as the technology of musical instruments which the music

is not in the piano for where we'd have to let it boat so it's in the person the

person has to make it and piano can amplify it and often the piano kills it

piano has a whole thing about itself that relieves some of the necessity for

listening to the pitch of notes and it has a very mechanical aspect about in

fact you can play it with a rake you can learn to play it like like you are a

rake so the trick about the computer is the

same way they it's its music is not incited it's a it's an amplify it's a

special kind of container and like the

the bow and arrow in the art the zen and the art of archery it has enough things

interesting about it enough of things interesting that it does that you can

use it as a vehicle for for waking up or enlightenment and the special thing the

computer has is its kind of a language machine so it's intimately connected i

would do like way more like us than any

language machine I mean a book is language machine too but the computer is

a dynamic language machine I would like

to live in clearing and bone because it's phone so it's more like us than any

artifact that we've ever made and we can learn more about what we can do with

language and what we can't do with language we can get to true math real

math at an earlier age than we ever could before because of the computer and

we can understand the difference between mathematics and science in a more

profound way at an earlier age than we ever can before so math.max is kind of

an extended form of story telling the stories it tells are perfectly

consistent stories when you're doing it right but they need they're not about anything that's out there they're only

about itself and this is something most people don't realize because they tend

to confuse the things that they say in language with the things that might be

out there and the computer actually makes this clear in a very strong way I

think in a stronger way then is readily apparent in English or in classical

mathematics and it also allows us to

take things that we're wondering about and put them into a dynamic language and

be able to probe our wonderings from a number of points of view in a way that's

never been possible before so I think all of those things about the computer are incredibly profound and important

when looked at in the the travails of

humanity at large

so one of the questions that we asked back in the 60s is can't the internet be

as subversive to humanity as the printing press was and back then we were

we had a simple-minded model of what the printing press had done for instance I

didn't know that only ten percent of Americans in the eighteenth and

nineteenth centuries were really educated back then I didn't know the

printing press had basically gone from having one educated person in 100 in the

year 1400 to having maybe 20 educated

people in 100 now after four or five hundred years and the power of being

able to read was in the power of science for instance there less than one percent

of our entire population in the US or scientists and engineers and it's from

them we get all of the technology and all the new ideas and stuff and it's so

powerful and the technology to make it

and spread it it's so powerful that one less than one percent of the population could sustain the illusion that we are a

scientific society right our artifacts are everywhere but most people as Neil

postman said once they have to take more things on faith now in the 20th century

than they did in the Middle Ages right because there's more knowledge that most

people have to believe in dogmatically or be confused about but in fact the

number of people actually understand this new knowledge is is maybe five or

ten percent of the population so when

that way of looking at it says the printing press was incredibly successful changing society but it wasn't

incredibly successful at changing humanity right I think the Internet has

the same problem actually good good

anecdote here is Al Gore I had a number

of dinners at his house in Washington where he invited people in who are

concerned about education and the particular dinner I was at and my wife

and i were there and Arno Penzias there's a Nobel Prize winner who ran

bell labs for a while Neil postman was at this particular one and the

discussion was broken up into dinner tables and of about eight or nine people

apiece and one of the things that they did at the end was they have everybody

vote on what the most interesting I thing that was said during this thing I

wasn't at the table were but my wife was at the table with Al Gore and apparently

she got into an argument with him because he was talking he's a great eye but he was talking about kind of a

politician's concern for universal access to the Internet Toby haves and

have-nots and she said look most of the stuff that's worthwhile knowing is still

in books and those books are in free public libraries that was the legacy of

Andrew Carnegie and the real haves and have-nots are the people who have or

have not the discernment to go in and use those libraries the biggest problem

is that there already is a universal access to the most important knowledge

of our civilization and most people aren't using it and I believe that's the

basic problem of the Internet is that it

has those it has those properties that

the library has and it has them a hundred fold and that can be in people's

houses and everything else but there's there's a discernment problem which is a

value problem the values at some point

the kids have to value stuff that's hard it's like tough love right Seymour

Papert calls power learning powerful

ideas tough fun it's like we're going to

hit a baseball or shooting a basket or playing a musical instrument it just isn't easy and part of the joy of it is

what you have to become in order to learn something that's not easy and it's

the value system for that just so easy to find out what Michael Jackson does

buy a television it's so easy to find out what Michael Jordan does buy a

television but buy a television you cannot find out what Michael Faraday did

because a scientist just doesn't do anything interesting when they're doing

their thing there's nothing visually interesting about it or when they're

talking about their thing that's why I'm sitting in all of having all of these different places to have some sort of

visual interest which is what television is interested in but in fact the the

biggest shortfall is that there's nothing strongly in the environment of

most kids that gives them any sense of what the range of adult activities

really is this is why McLuhan really thought that there there would be a

global village because of television electronical media and I for one do not

want a global village I want a global civilization I know not want to

recapitulate a global village culture

traditional village culture back on in

the world here I think it just has almost everything that I think is wrong

with the way humans think about things what's it but that's basically what is

happening and the Internet allows an incredible balkanization as well to

people who are there and the the whole the whole difficulty of in premise and

promise of school was that school was supposed to bridge the gap between a

village culture and a civilized culture I think being a benevolent despot is a

hard way to reorganize the environment so that learning is a main thing because

you there's already a lot of state and beliefs and institutions in plus but you

could imagine an omnipotent God could actually by Fiat arrange something there

and without changing the human nervous system at all and I think what what that

guy would do is simply create take all

the adults that now exist and get them to be enlightened

and they learned it it knowledgeable and then let kids grow up in a village

culture as they have for a hundred thousand years watching what the adults

do that's weds are set up to learn

schools were partly invented after the

printing press because there are hard things that now needed to be learned

that weren't in this natural way of learning and in some some of the better

schools like Montessori schools were set up to recapitulate a village culture but

with special artifacts and ideas in it and so if you didn't want to change the

human genetic structure what you need to do is to find some way of getting enough

adults in a community structure to know

enough so that the kids could learn most of their really important ideas and

particularly what their common sense is going to be like from those from those

adults I think school for most kids is way too artificial I think that it just

even in the smallest sense of that the

the adults to kid ratio or the what you

might call the the student to the teacher ratio is way off now we have a

friend by the name of Betty Edwards who teaches people to draw really well after

30 or 40 hours and we've seen her do it

many many times and it's basically

teaching people how to see she's not trying to teach them art just trying to

teach them the skill of seeing what is actually in their retina so they can

actually draw it down on on paper and

over 25 years she's evolved a very beautiful method for doing it that can

be done in a week and she basically will

guarantee success if you let her have a student-teacher ratio no worse than one

teacher for every seven students and she says it's it's basically it's

not so much for imparting knowledge it's that when you're doing something like

this you do not want to let any student stray too far you want to sort of keep

them orbiting around where the where the real stuff is happening when they're in

this place where they don't have automatic reflexes and skills to do

things and I think that's one of the best things about learning in a home one

of the worst things about learning in a school but i think if i were a

benevolent despot and we're trying to to make something happen i think it'd be

very difficult because what you're really asking you're either doing

something incredibly artificial like the Victorians did in the 19th century to

create Britain's to run the British Empire where you simply took the kids

away from their parents or you did what the Catholic Church didn't in the Middle

Ages which is the same thing from every village they took the children away from

the parents this is Plato's method in the Republic is to use education as a

sorting system take the best ones away from their parents and raise them in an

artificial environment and that is one way recapitulating a culture that is

artificial that you want to have happen so it's a kind of a tough way of doing

and it can be done by drakonian measures

but I think in the democracy what we have today that would be a tough one

even for a benevolent despot to do i

think the death spot having evil in order to make it work and i think the

end result of it as the Victorian culture would lack a really important

element of art they became the best art credit in the

world but their ability to produce great art suffered incredibly because of their

educational system I I think we would not that's really throwing out the baby

with the bathwater so I think that's a that's a toughy and I don't think

anybody has really great solutions I remember I guess five or ten years ago I

was in the UK at a dinner party talking about education is one of these typical

ones in the woman across from me at some point said oh you Americans have the

best high school education in the world I I looked down and said what and she

said what a pity you have to go to college to get it and there was a very

British way of you know twitting the cousins across the pond but she was

basically right that if you look at what people had to mass if you even look at

mcgaughys reader which has been reprinted now it's it's absolutely worth

paying whatever it is 75 bucks to get it's a bound set of the six volumes of

mcgaughys reader and to look at what sixth graders were expected to read is

beyond installing because most college

students couldn't read what sixth graders were expected to be able to be

fluent enough to read and so I think what and this happened also in the US

when the baby boom came to college immediately they need to be many more

professors if there wasn't a plan for it and so the academic standards went down

so if you look at that standpoint the some of the best schools that I've seen

in this country what you've solved all

the problems people are wearing about nonetheless are the worst possible

schools to send kids in the 20th century to because they are simply not getting

any whiff of the 20th century ways of

thinking about things and doing things in their most formative years their

common sense is that same old common sense that is going to lead them

completely astray when they go any distance from these sort of ritualize

cookbook methods that they're basically taught and our human brain

is set up to like case based things is why engineering has been around for five

thousand years and science has only been around for 400 years and it's because

there are a lot of things you can do with the world by trial and error by

case based reasoning and having a recipe for this in a recipe for that and we

found that this works and that a lot of great things have been done that way but

there's a whole area of human existence that cannot be approached that way at

all most of the things in modern medicine cannot be approached that way at all most of the things in modern

technology cannot be approached that way at all you just can't do it do it's like

me learning to play the pipe organ now the fact that I wanted to do it was not

a big factor in what happened the

problem was I had to I only had an hour or so a day to do it and I basically had

to do it for five or eight years before

things started happening that we're pleasing right and just one of like I

say it was the hardest thing I've done partly because I just didn't have the

time I was already doing things out delts are already doing things teachers are already doing things so the idea of

learning something that is harder than learning another for you know another language in what adults normal life is

like is is basically unrealistic most of them simply won't be able to muster the

will power of the motivation to do it and that is what our biggest crisis is

and so the real question is now what is

the probability that you can get kids to learn by themselves probably the most

important thing they'll ever discover in their education is the world is not as it seems and from there there's lots of

things that it can do they don't have to learn nuclear physics or chemistry

because of course science in the terms i'm talking about is how can you

correlate the real world of things you can say in language that's that's 24

hours a day type stuff that has to do with politics it has to do with every

aspect of life it has to do with being married you know one of the famous

activities in history was when Galileo

took his telescope to Rome and the Cardinals with

look in it to see the moons of Jupiter because according to their beliefs there

could be no centre of motion besides that of the earth that's what Aristotle

said and Aristotle had been rationalized by Saint Thomas Aquinas and that was

part of their doctrine tied together in using logic and logic is kind of like

clockwork where there's anything wrong and if the whole clock doesn't work and

the Cardinals knew that if there really were centers of motion other than the

earth that this would bring this whole thing down which in fact it did however

the Catholic Church only acknowledged Galileo recently that's another

interesting one because the other way of doing it is this what cats do when they

don't know what to do which is to groom themselves so you have some displacement

activity which is get interested in something else when there's something

going on that you don't want to want to confront but I think I as I say I like

to use I like for me education and I

have to say it carefully because people most people think of science as learning physics and chemistry but when I say

education is about science I mean it in this sense of science as making the most

honest attempt we've ever been able to do in the hundreds of thousands of years

that humans have been on this earth to actually try and find out as much as

possible about what's actually going on render it as reasonably as we can in our

symbolic systems and then to act reasonably on top of it

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