An Interview with Dr. Alan Kay (1991)

in the factory approach to learning

amidst of our schools and is like how dumb can people be and the fears and the

self-confidence creativity and motivation are very high in the open

school yes a lot of computers make it make the difference or is it the

teachers and the computers or what what is what is the difference I don't think the difference has anything to do with

the computers at all because the the open school is a great school before we

ever showed up that's why we picked it when I walked in through the door I was

only there for a couple of minutes when I thought oh boy we could really do this great experiment there and the principal

was all for it and our main job of

putting the computers in was that line in the Hippocratic oath that says above

all do no harm I mean this was a great school we just wanted to slide the

computers in so that they were just another Crayola so there's no big deal

about you about using them and we learned how over a couple of years to do

that and no I don't think the I think the computer computers are just another

rich medium in this school of full of

different kinds of media that the children have to work with and that's the way it should be

there's there's just no question about the extraordinary advantages helps gains

that the computers offer when used correctly mm-hmm are there any losses we

mentioned harm what what oh yeah well I

think one of the ones is to assign it a significance it doesn't have like this

is going to save us from our problems or we can delegate things to it that we

don't have to do I mean there's a million things like that of thinking of the computer is some sort of magic

ointment that we can put on super aiding wounds and that doesn't work at all I

think another one is that the the kinds

of ways computers can be used because it can take on so many forms you can easily

pick one that will actually atrophy

something that was growing in the students that's true you can do that with

anything but the computer is particularly complex that way and the problem with putting a prosthetic limb

on a healthy limb is the healthy limb atrophies right because the prosthetic

is there and you can do it with instruments like the piano as well piano

removes you from the necessity from wearing about pitch and so your if you

assign all the responsibilities of pitch to the piano and the student doesn't

sing inside then they can play notes but they won't be playing music and the same

thing is true the with the computer you and I believe that you have to have a

fairly well fleshed out psychological model admittedly

there aren't any really great ones the one I've used for many years as Bruner's

and it still works well and and his ideas is was derived from Piaget but a

different way of looking at it that we have different ways in our mind of

dealing with the world we have in an active way that's kinesthetic

proprioceptive we have a visual iconic

way of dealing with the world we have a symbolic way of dealing with the world

and the reason McDonald's doesn't run a print ad saying if you eat McDonald's

hamburgers you'll become a better looking person is that the part of our

mind that deals with language we'll find that to be absurd but the part of our

mind that deals with images will perfectly accept really good-looking

people eating McDonald's hamburgers and one of the things you can do with

computers it's very popular is making images appear on the screen and the

thing that you have to be careful with about images is because they're so appealing because you don't have to

learn how to see them in the way that you have to learn to deal with symbols

you can try and load too much of the the

idea structures that you're trying to get across to the kids onto images where the images can't hold them images are

concrete and ideas are abstract whereas a friend of mine once said images beg to

be recognized and words beg to be understood and if you understand that

distinction between the two of them then you can use the computer wisely but if

you don't then the tendency is to make it into a kind of an interactive television which i think is

quite quite possibly the worst thing we could ever do in this century I

mentioned Piaget mmm-hmm there's no doubt about the ability of the new

technology to help an increase cognitive thinking what about emotional

development yeah well I think the way we

do emotional development in the open school and in fact one of the things

that we helped with when we went into the school is to restore all of the arts curriculum that proposition 13 took away

and this is because even though we are one of the kids to do things that were

like science most legislators don't

understand that science is an art in

other words most scientists do what they do because they have an aesthetic involvement in the stuff that they're

dealing with if you don't have an aesthetic involvement with the stuff you're not in the space that the

scientist is in and so removing all aesthetic things as a way of saving

money and saying we're the reason we're doing this we're going to emphasize technology and the science is throwing

out the baby with the bathwater the aesthetics of doing things on computers

are pretty rudimentary and so we prepare

in this in art school one of the things we did is we set up a very strong music program where there's a long-standing

aesthetic foundation things that everybody is familiar with that the kids

can get rich on and one of the things that we've discovered over the years is

that there's a very strong correlation between music and computers most

computer scientists are musicians of one kind or another antal musicians tend to

make awfully good computer people when they get interested in it and the reason

is is that a lot of the thought processes that you do in one are similar in the other and we computer scientists

find that the aesthetics of music good to a try and apply across to what it is

that we're doing on the computer when we ask are we doing anything beautiful here

one of your goals is to use the new technology to amplify aesthetic

sensibility mm-hmm you just talk about that alone well I think all technology

is a kind of an ample as I said like the piano you have to

have a musical impulse inside of the human to amplify or nothing happens and

I think that the other side of the amplifier is the prosthetic where are

you costs things that and again by realizing the distinction like the

distinction between the image and the word and what each is good for you can

get the aesthetics magnified so again the musical analogy is I happen to play

keyboards among other things and I happen to like playing Bach fugues stuff

like that like I play pipe organ so I like I play with my feet as well as my hands and one of the things that any

organist will tell you is the organ is one of the least expressive of all musical instruments

you can't modulate the tone in any way

once you've pressed the key down okay on the other hand it has a space that you

can't do with a human voice which is multi Tom Braille it's big polyphonic it

has all of these other dimensions and if you can sing inside while you're doing

it you can sometimes fake the audience into thinking that the organ is a musical instrument

so if you do both of those things then you get something for it if you don't do

both of those things then the organ actually is deader than listening to aquire and I think that's the that's the

distinction of when you when you want to use technology to amplify something that

we can perfectly well do ourselves help me understand a student a seven

years old eight years old is drawing a

three-dimensional blue house he struggles he doesn't get the dimension

quite right the Blues a little off student B has a computer keyboard it's

working with the computer draws the basic structure of the house can maybe

push something and suddenly there's the three dimensions perfectly done pushes another thing on it's blue mm-hmm

to me there's a loss maybe or something or well I think what about the learning

yep I mean once it has this to invent the first painting systems at Xerox PARC

was wanting people to sketch on a computer not just to draw a crisp drawings because the one of the

complaints we had is that people did all of their design on the backs of envelopes and use the computers for

rendering and so we put a lot of effort and the display is today are still not

you know go item to workstation to the

kinds of post-production like the paint box we I think any artists would agree

box is in mansions as physical pain but

yeah in order to get to the you like

you're moving stuff around and there's a clothes augment with a material to place

the computer you can think of as more of a rendering engine for various kinds of

things and allows you to explore a different set of dimensions my belief is

on all of these things again like a musical instrument which can't do all the things the human voice can do what

you want to do is understand what it can do and what it can't do try and get the value of what it what it can do and try

and minimize the tendency of assuming that it's the whole world

now we're going to the generic okay this

is very helpful thank you what are the

obstacles to the new technology and how can they be overcome well I think

they're not mean there are lots of obstacles to the new technology there

are the fact that the technology isn't quite there yet

I think it's going to happen before the end of the decade but right now what you

buy is basically an approximation to what you really want the price is too

high even for the approximation they're

not easy enough to use commensurate with what they give back to you and people

are tend to be afraid of them even if they were good just because they're new

so those are four obstacles and each one has a different pathway and I think that

in a sense the approach that Martin Luther took is the is the right one

where he wanted people have a personal relationship with God believe that meant

that they should read the Bible and he had a choice should he teach everybody in German to read Latin or should he try

and invent a German that the Bible could be translated into because German the

German was 20 or so regional dialects that did not have the philosophical

strength to carry what the Bible had and Martin Luther sat down and designed a

new language the language of the German speak today called Hoch Deutsch and

translated the Bible into it and it worked and to you know among many things

you could consider him one of the world's first user interface designers because he did that thing that all

interface designers have to do which is to take something in terms that are

already familiar to people renders something more profound in those terms

with the result that the person comes out of the experience living in a bigger

world and they were when they went in that's what we tried to do with the Macintosh and many more essays like that

are going to have to be done in the next 10 years in order to bring the revolution to drop the other shoe

what are the best features of the new technologies and one of the worst I

think they're the best well I think of the new to me new technology is the

stuff that's going to happen so the best features of the stuff that's going to

happen is that it's going to be portable it's going to be connected in a variety

of different ways it's going to be something in in which the user gets to

define a lot of the connections rather than having somebody else do the

definition for them and I think the one

of the basic drawbacks of a technology is the thing we always have a technology

is the tendency to try and assign it the responsibility for saving us from things

we don't want to do ourselves how do you

see the classroom of the future what would you like to see it well I don't

see classrooms going away just because I

believe there's a lot of use in fact you could make the you could say that the

most important thing about classrooms right now is the socialization stuff

because there's not a lot of learning that goes on in most classrooms and I

think the socialization parts of the classroom stuff are going to be as

important as we go into the future but I

think that to me a good classroom is one that's right okay if you think of it the

state that the kids are in there like graduate student studying for PhDs

they're trying to work on things that they don't know about they're trying to

find them out using they're using sources of knowledge that have been

around they're trying to invent things they're doing all the things that people do after they've gone through 16 years

of standard schooling so you know to put

it in a nutshell why not cut out to 16 years of standard schooling and get on to the good stuff just view the kids as

little researchers try and help them do the research and realize that knowledge

isn't a fluid that you can transfer from full teacher vessels to empty student

vessels what you have instead is a process called learning and that you

can't teach but you can facilitate the learning of somebody else so when you go

from a teacher model to a coach model to a facilitator model

to one where you realize that the process in the the learner is the one

that's important to fan then you start winning big that's something you do not need any technology at all to do it is

really a shift in attitude it's a paradigm shift in what you think

learning is about and what it's for how

essential to the well-being of a child is an education in the arts well I don't

know what education in the arts means but I think for a child to be creative

to feel that they are a mover in a shaper I think that's one of the most

important things in the life of a child cause it doesn't matter what they want

to do later on they need to feel that they're not just a passive receiver of

somebody else's information they have to move in shape and that's what art is

right art is putting your your mark on some medium that can convey a message

and usually in a way that's as beautiful or as practical as possible you know the

Bell Labs motto that they had up for many years was either do something very

useful or very beautiful the idea is that anything in between was not that

worthwhile and I think that's an also a definition of art years ago the poet

Muriel Rukeyser we were talking about art and children she said in school and

education she said one of the worst things are the shoulds and the should

nots yeah yeah well I think the and that the

trick in our civilization is one that is founded on technique that was the big

change as we as we went went from the the dark ages you know into the Middle

Ages and started building cathedrals and then gradually got so we could step back

enough from our common sense view of the world to do science and we we suddenly

realized that we at there was actually a science of developing technique and it

spread into the arts as well it became the ability to learn how to paint I

think one of the biggest hits I ever had

was the first time I went to the fec gallery in Florence and we

that they're in an awful lot of really bad paintings done in the Renaissance

but that almost anybody who could hold a brush back then had learned how to paint

drapes you know it was just something you learned they learned how to decorate

space and you only see the really good ones in the art books but in you go to a

place like that it has ten thousand twenty thousand paintings you see these incredible drawings of drapes and stuff

it was a technique and the biggest problem is the technique should be the

servant of the art and not the master that's what everybody in our

civilization who does anything remotely artistic has to battle with over and

over again every musician if you want to play the great music you have to have a

ton of technique takes years to do it and you can easily get what is called

conservatory disease where your goal now becomes playing Chopin's minor third

etudes faster than the guy down the hall all of a sudden where's the music go all

right and so that is that to me is the big thing on the other hand I don't want

to go back from the twentieth century and so I believe that people have to

develop technique but they have to develop in some sort of context where we

understand what it's doing what we are doing when we're developing technique

we're not doing art when we're doing the technique we're developing a set of

tools for expressing ourselves and we don't want to get submerged by it do any

of the computers synthesizers all of the

electronic tools that are command now short-circuit some of that just what

you're talking about that struggle to get the technique well again it's yeah

you that's I mean you can go out and buy

a gadget that purports to be a musical instrument and makes something that

sounds like music but in fact there isn't enough involvement of you in it

for it to be called a musical instrument it's more like a musical robot okay and

I'm basically against those because I think that they they do the worst thing

they give you the form but not the content of doing something neat as I one

of the first scientific American articles I wrote we're talking about value systems and

that with the first children we worked with they even worried about this this

is in the 70s and we finally decided that the the ethic was you should

automate the fringes of what you're interested in so if you're a player you

shouldn't automate playing what you should do is automate the instruments

the that you you can't get it you know like when I play chamber music and so I

use a synthesizer so I can have the string parts playing at any speed while

I'm learning the piano part and to me that's not a prosthetic because I can't

get those players every day to come and often I don't get to see him except once

a year that I'm going to going to play with and on the other hand if I oughta

mated to playing the piano stuff that would where would I be the synthesizer

stuff is wonderful if you go straight it's terrible if you want to learn about playing unless you're doing it so again

it's to me it's it all comes down that you have to have a value system that

allows you to use this stuff without losing your own soul you know the

existentialist philosophers say our biggest problem is our civilization got

control over the world by alienating ourselves from it that's what you have

to do in order to do science and technology and it's our lack of groundedness that has caused us to 20th

century man to feel that he's lost his soul and the way you get away from that

is not getting rid of the technology not by becoming a Luddite but saying we

among all the things that we are as human beings we are also mammals we have

to contact the earth it's not we have to do things with our body or else we're

not real we don't feel like we're real anymore and just by sticking with that

that tells you what you can do with the technology that's going to make you feel good and amplify what you're trying to

do

do we kill it one last thing okay you've really you've really covered everything

I want one I think that's it just occurred to me yesterday's New York

Times reports the tremendous concern of children in the war yeah so of that did

you read that thing and certain people came out and children's television workshop said no they're not going to do

anything because the parent is much better to talk to a child about this have some do you just want to address it

because I also heard the Israeli ambassador this morning saying for the first time we're having a war in real

time yeah well again it's the I was

thinking about it I grew up in World War two and I lived in Australia and we the

Japanese actually came in and bombed the Harbour Bridge once with a suicide

submarine while we were living there and we had air raids and stuff like that you

know and I hardly remember I have vivid memories of living in Australia but I

hardly remember the war and the reason is my parents didn't talk to me that

much about it and they listen to the radio after I went to bed and they very

correctly realized that that I didn't

have the scope to deal with what was actually happening and so what they told

me about it was just about exactly what I needed to know at that time as my

friend Neil postman likes to say on television there are no secrets he wrote

a book called the disappearance of childhood which is all about what

happens when you can't separate the adult world from the child world and television just absolutely devastates

the gap between the two I think it's one of the most harmful and then you know

Here I am sitting on television but as Neil likes to say television is at its

worst when it's trying to do good because when it's trying to do good it

tries to cover important like you're doing right now right but the the

problem is that this isn't the right medium talking-head isn't even close to

what I could do with an essay right and that is the thing it's not you can't

make television better it's what it is it's all about people and people are

watching my haircut as I speak here and

they're learning something about me but if they want to learn about my ideas they should read something because

that's where the ideas are best thought about they can go back over them they

can think about then they can argue with them they can do all of these things but

they can't do it while they're watching my haircut and I feel exactly the same

way about the the way the children are being affected

there is the children's television workshop does not i think standing what

it does even when it's trying to do good with Sesame Street which i think is not

good and they have no understanding whatsoever as to the particular way

television is treated by parents with regard to their children yeah it's it's

really a question of turning the thing off then the parents trying to repair

something that has been presented to the child with the full fitness and

production value that television has I don't think it's a match and that's the

big one of the biggest problems in schooling today if people turned off the

damn tube that I mean really turned it off and confined it to something like

seeing a movie once a week or something that would do more America than almost

anything else if people would have each

other turn off the television you wouldn't necessarily have them go over

to the computer not monitor no I hope not at all of course was very well

illustrate in the research after the Jack Ruby shooting of Oswald and the kid

there are surveys ose bolts don't really

in a strong way associate playing the

Royal Television that that I mean there there's several surveys that I've seen

that have to do with we verse and about things that they see on television

they're deeply disturbing if the percentages are anywhere I don't know

whether they're true but there's

oh yes I'm sorry freeze-frame zooms back

and forth okay and some close-ups from

the camera decide to be a good one for a

burp right

okay just terrific just a tiny bit of

room tone

a long time