rediscovering the purpose of school: reply to Barry York's education revolution article

A response to Barry York's article, Can we have a real Education Revolution?

Barry commences by pointing out that class size has reduced from 50 to 25 over a generation.

It is often claimed, by the political right, that reduction in class size hasn't improved educational outcomes. The statistics support this position of the right. John Hattie has become an often quoted authority about effect sizes:

"... a synthesis of meta-analyses and other studies of class size demonstrate a typical effect-size of about 0.1–0.2, which relative to other educational interventions could be considered ‘‘small’’ or even ‘‘tiny’’, especially in relation to many other possible interventions—and certainly not worth the billions of dollars spent reducing the number of children per classroom. The more important question, therefore, should not be ‘‘What are the reasons for this enhanced effect-size?’’, but ‘‘Why are the effect-sizes from reducing class size so small?’’"
- Hattie, J. (2005).The paradox of reducing class size and improving learning outcomes. International Journal of Educational Research, 43, 387–425

I believe that the Gonski report is yet another iteration of this process. It throws money at schools but lacks an evidence-based plan to actually improve educational outcomes.

Barry fondly mentions "a wonderful History teacher by the name of Itiel Bereson". I agree that great teachers make a difference and that this is far more important than class size.

I also agree that the teachers union plays a very limited and sometimes negative role in real educational reform because they are more interested in teacher conditions than teacher quality. I'm angry at the Union for not supporting performance pay for teachers in remote indigenous communities, conditional on them achieving measurable improvements. If the teachers union had responsibility for determining the nature of teacher training in Universities then they would feel more pressure to actually come up with an educational approach that works, rather than focusing too narrowly on teacher rights.

But when Barry argues that classroom teachers "know best" there is some lack of the clear thinking he extols beginning to creep in. If there are only a few great teachers like Mr. Bereson, one wonders why they as a group "know best"? Barry is expressing the belief here that those who do the real work, those at the chalk face, as a result of their nitty gritty day to day experience, "know best". Yet, if they really know best why do they support a union that focuses on worker conditions, promotes the same green issues that Barry objects to and doesn't push hard enough for quality teaching?

Who really does know best? One group that I have been taking a lot of notice of recently are those who promote evidence-based criteria and have the skin in the game of actually working with and improving the learning of disadvantaged students. In Australia, this would include Kevin Wheldall, Robin Beaman-Wheldall and Kerry Hempenstall as well as the initiative promoted by Noel Pearson in Cape York, using the American derived teaching materials of Zig Engelmann.

Barry goes on to counterpose Learning to Teaching as though there is no real connection between them. Moreover, he claims that the social purpose of schools is to imprison the mind and that hasn't changed for two centuries. This is simplistic argument. As always, the devil is in the detail.

This leads into Barry arguing for the end of learning as we know it and it's replacement with learning over the world wide web. We are led to believe that we can do this now because in C21st we have a "very high literacy". If only this were true. Unfortunately, the literacy rate in Australia leaves much to be desired. Although it has improved massively since the late C19th, the really important measure is whether people have sufficient literacy to be highly functioning members in today's society.

My research indicates that roughly 44% or 13.6 million Australians aged 15 to 74 years have literacy skills that will make it difficult for them to independently extract useful information from the world wide web (source: Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies, Australia 2011-12

Moreover, Australian schools are not doing a very good job in teaching basic literacy. The PIRLS 2011 study into reading comprehension put Australia second bottom of all English speaking countries surveyed. 24% of Australian students had a Low or Below Low score in reading comprehension. See Kevin Wheldall's article, PIRLS before Swine for more detail.

The basic problem is that teachers have not been trained properly to teach literacy. This was the conclusion of the Brendan Nelson National Inquiry into the Teaching of Literacy in 2005 but none of the recommendations from that inquiry have been implemented. The real villains here are the teacher trainers in universities and the teacher unions who block reform. (the education establishment). Many of them are still wedded to discredited whole language approaches.

It has been argued that there are other, more modern forms of literacy than old-fashioned "reading comprehension". These arguments sometimes take the form that it is more important to "read the world" than read the word. But a little thought is enough to convince most people that old fashioned "reading comprehension" is a prerequisite to "really learning" on the Internet.

So, the statistics reveal that at least 44% of adult Australians and 24% of young Australians, still at school, are going to miss out if Barry's model of school reform is implemented. Of course, the internet has incredible learning potential for highly literate and self motivated learners. But Barry has made too many sweeping generalisations in his historical and social analysis of the actual nature of schools. If you are not clear about the actual problem then how can you be clear about a viable solution?

Is it possible to conceive of a useful purpose for schools? Yes, it is. Anthropological findings show that there is no easy or natural path to certain types of knowledge, including reading and writing. This type of knowledge has been called non universals (by Alan Kay) or "biologically secondary cognitive abilities" (by David Geary).

Universal knowledge, displayed by every human tribe, includes such things as:

• social
• language
• communication
• culture
• fantasies
• stories
• tools and art
• superstition
• religion and magic
• case based learning
• theatre
• play and games
• differences over similarities
• quick reactions to patterns
• loud noises and snakes
• supernormal responses
• vendetta and more (about 300 of these have been identified across cultures)

The above categorises the level of what most people do on the world wide web (social media), despite it's potential for higher learning.

On the other hand, the non universals include such things as:

• reading and writing
• deductive abstract mathematics
• model based science
• equal rights
• democracy
• perspective drawing
• theory of harmony
• similarities over differences
• slow deep thinking
• agriculture
• legal systems

These are much harder to learn than the universals because we are not directly wired to learn them. These things are actually inventions which are difficult to invent. And the rise of Schools going all the way back to the Sumerian and Egyptian times came about to start helping children learn some of these things that aren't easy to learn. For more details about the universals and non universals see The non universals

Some things are hard to learn. Although that hard to learn information is on the internet it is usually not sought out spontaneously by your average facebook junkie. I call the popularity of social media the you_twit_face phenomena (after youtube, twitter and facebook). Pop culture is the main form of discourse on the internet.

Learning to read is rocket science. But once you know how to read you totally forget the process you went through to learn to read. The literate then become blind to the plight of the illiterate. The idea that reading is natural, you just soak it up naturally from the surrounding environment, is BS.

The legitimate purpose of school should be to teach the non universals, the things which are not learnt naturally. That is one reason why schools were invented in the first place. They are not simply vehicles to imprison our minds.

Barry quotes Mao: "If you want knowledge, you must take part in the practice of changing reality". I can agree with the Mao quote but like any one liner it only represents a part of a more complete picture. Mao argued for an ongoing spiral of knowledge between practice and theory. If you are going to take part in the practice of changing reality then you had better also be prepared to study / research hard and acquire a lot of knowledge, including book knowledge. We all know activists who end up doing and thinking foolish things.

In fact, there are many former radicals from the late 60s who went onto become education establishment leaders and union activists promoting non authoritarian, constructivist teaching methodologies such as whole language that have led to a quarter of our students not becoming literate. They have changed reality in a bad way due to insufficient research informed by an intuitive dislike for a form of "authority", mistaking authoritative with authoritarian.

The factory model critique is problematic when applied to education because there is some good education that fits a factory model type of metaphor. Factories in capitalism are bad because they steal from the labour of workers. Another sense in which it is used is the replacement of artisan labour with mechanical labour, but that critique is more problematic according to Marx. There is nothing wrong with a machine replacing what was previously done by an artisan.

Many intelligent people report bad experiences at schools. For example, they were told to do things, such as write answers in sentences, over and over again, something that they already knew how to do and so the experience was boring, boring, boring ...

But, could you have a good factory model in an educational setting? In my opinion, yes. One answer here would be to improve the factory, each student having their own individualised, computerised assembly line programmed to help achieve both essential literacies but also electives beyond the basics.

Another popular, related argument is that individuals have multiple intelligences or different learning styles, which have to be catered for. But those positions have pretty much been abandoned by thinking educators. Lookup Dan Willingham on the net, he is very good at debunking both of those fads (multiple intelligences, learning styles)

Direct Instruction is pretty much a factory model, a far better factory model than what happens in most existing schools, and so the intuitive dislike of it by "progressives" is strong - but wrong. In teaching basic literacy and maths the research shows that one method fits all is a very good way to go. Kevin Wheldall calls this Non categorical teaching.

In conclusion, what is my idea of a good argument for school reform? It's a matter of getting the balance right between components that need to be highly structured and other components enabling freedom of expression. Thanks to people like the Wheldalls (MULTILIT) we now know how to achieve very close to 100% literacy education through a structured approach, an individualised factory model if you will. Direct Instruction models could also be beneficial for highly literate people wishing to extend their knowledge over particular domains, eg. the contribution of Einstein to our knowledge of physics. Beyond that I agree that Barry's ideas have merit. The internet has much potential for extending our knowledge further for those who are literate and motivated to do that. But as Mao also said, you have to lift the bucket from the ground, not start in mid-air.

science: the ancient / modern distinction

This is a longer extract from the Its An Education Project (IAEP) list (start here for original) that I mentioned a few days ago.

Alan Kay draws a distinction b/w Aristotle's way of doing science (thinking up a good answer) and the later way started by Galileo (inquiry plus tinkering or real experiments). He says that it is unfortunate that the ancients and the moderns used the same word (science) since the activity radically changed across the time span. Modern science is more than thinking and gathering knowledge, it also involves active debugging of our thinking based on rigorous experiments. This is something that is usually poorly done in schools, eg. most experiments done in science are prepackaged, with too much hand holding to be real scientific inquiry.

Here are some parts of the exchange b/w Alan (AK) and K.K. Subramanian (KKS). KKS argues that there has been continuity with the ancients whereas alan asserts that there has been a radical rupture with the past. I have bolded some parts which I think are particularly good

AK:
(However, it is difficult to find any physics text for high school or college that actually teaches physics and physical thinking. Even lab courses usually use the lab to verify the "truths of physics" (there are actually no such things) rather than to try to get evidence for formulating and guiding the creation of theories which can lead to further experiments.)

As an example, the lab for gravity is used to verify the Galilean formulas (which postulate constant acceleration). This is because with simple tools in air it is difficult to measure accurately enough to get data which more closely resembles what is going on. (Dropping a heavy object 14-16 feet in a vacuum measured very very carefully will reveal a difference of about 1 part in a million between constant acceleration and inverse square acceleration, and it takes incredible tools to show that inverse square acceleration is not the whole story either.)

The sad results according to those who have studied this in colleges for more than 30 years (for example Physicist Lillian McDermott) is that 70% of all students (including science majors) fail to understand even Galilean gravity, and a much higher percentage don't understand that Galilean gravity is an approximate theory, that Newton's theory is a much better but approximate theory, that Einstein's General Theory is a much better theory but also approximate). There are many reasons for all this, which can be gisted as (a) "the epistemology of science" is not at all what most people suppose, and it is rather distant from the normal ways our minds are set up to work, and (b) that most "educational" processes most places in the world including the US are still teaching "knowledge as religion to be believed in", which *is* what our minds are set up for, and this is how things have been since the Pleistocene.

KK Subramanian:
Could you please elaborate it? [referring to point (a) above)] Isn't the desire to seek the deeper principles behind things and events around us a unique aspect of human mind?

AK:
One of Anthropology's "human universals" (found everywhere in human societies) is indeed the "desire to seek the deeper principles ....." etc.

"Science" is used in at least two distinct ways these days. The roots of the word connote "the gathering of knowledge" and this sense some years ago in my European lunch companions led me into a very fruitless argument about e.g. whether Aristotle was a scientist. There I should have said "modern science" to denote the kind of science that Galileo and a few others started, which Francis Bacon discussed so well as a debugging process for what is wrong with our brains/minds, and which Newton first showed how different and incredibly more powerful it could be from all previous forms of thinking.

Human beings had been on the planet for at least 40,000 and as many as 100,000 years before the enormous qualitative leap was made in the 17th century. So we could say that the issue is really about (a) the kinds and forms of explanations that can satisfy "the desire to seek deeper principles", and (b) that qualitative leaps are changes in kind not just degree, changes in outlook, not just in quantity of knowledge gathered. The duration of time before the discovery/invention of modern science is an indication of how well our minds can be fooled by appearances and beliefs and customs, etc.

The difficulties of teaching real science have to do with the huge differences between the kinds of explanations which are sought and accepted, and with outlook changes that go considerably beyond our normal built in ways of perceiving, explaining, coping with the world, etc.

KKS:
There have been qualitative leaps (paradigm shifts) before too, esp. in south/east asia where philosophy developed without interruptions for thousands of years[1,2]. Patanjali's treatise [Yoga Sutras] on psychic processes is highly regarded even today. You can see applications of its theory in documentaries like "Ring of Fire" by Lawrence Blair [3]. I see people like Galileo, Newton, Einstein, Feynman, etc. as part of a long line of paradigm shifters.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_science
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Indian_science_and_technology
[3] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGnsMIvp1v0

AK:
The word "scientia" -- meaning knowledge -- is Latin and is old. And the use of the word "science" to denote the gathering of knowledge is also old. The big problem is that the 17th century inventors of modern science didn't pick a brand new word, but tried to overload the old one with new meanings. This has not worked well.

The point is not that paradigms got and get shifted, but the qualitative power of the "modern science paradigm". So, while one can make a list of people and movements that have shifted the way people think, to me (at least), what is more interesting is how well certain ways of thinking work in finding strong models of phenomena compared to others. So, if we get pneumonia, there are lots of paradigms to choose from, but I'm betting that most will choose the one that knows how to find out about bacteria and how to make antibiotics.

KKS:
... and this is where I get stuck ;-), particularly in the context of school education (first 12 years). Unlike the 3Rs, thinking processes have no external manifestation that parents/teachers can monitor, assess or assist. The economic value of deep thinking is not realized until many years later. The latency between 'input' and 'output' can be as large as 12 years and 'evaluation' of output may stretch into decades!

AK:
Here's one way to look at this...

IQ - What if you had an "IQ" of 500, but were born in 10,000 BC. You would not be able to make a lot of progress. For example, Leonardo was very smart but couldn't come up with the engines his vehicle designs needed in order to work -- he was born in the wrong century for what he wanted to do.

Knowledge - On the other hand, Henry Ford was not nearly as smart as Leonardo, but was born at a very good time and in a good place, so he was able to combine engineering and production inventions to make millions of inexpensive automobiles.

Outlook - what made Henry Ford powerful (and most other things today) was an enormous change in Outlook (you called it a paradigm shift) which we can symbolize by invoking Newton.

"Knowledge is Silver, but Outlook is Gold" (IQ is Lead ... because most worthwhile problems we want to work on and solve are beyond mere IQ)

In other words, most human cultures accumulate and use a lot of knowledge (this is what a culture is all about) that is used to survive, to accommodate to the environment and even sometimes thrive. But the knowledge of a traditional society is very different from that of a feudal society which in turn is very different from a technological scientifically based society.

The bug most people have about schools (including many who set up schools) is the idea that they are there to teach knowledge. (Not a bad secondary goal, but it's a very bad idea for it to be the main goal.) Montessori was an early voice who pointed out that the main purpose of schooling (especially early schooling) was to help students learn and deeply internalize the most powerful outlooks that have been discovered/invented by humans. She observed that otherwise children wind up living in the 20th century but with a 10th century (or much earlier) outlook.

Both farms and schools (and books) can be limited or can be great learning environments for certain kinds of things. Historically, changes of outlook rarely happen on a farm, but sometimes happen in a school or from reading. Being around adults who have interesting outlooks works the best for most kids.

I was brought up on a farm (a somewhat unusual one), but the farms in the region were not at all conducive for learning powerful outlooks, nor were the schools particularly. However, my grandfather was "a writing farmer" and had a huge library of books of all kinds in his farmhouse. This allowed me to bypass both the farm and the school. But someone helped me to learn to read at an early age, and someone had the library of books in a farmhouse in the middle of nowhere. Someone decided that it was OK for me to read for hours every day instead of working on the farm (I had to do that too). So I very much depended on adult help but of a very different kind than my school friends got in their homes. The outlook in my farmhouse was that there was a lot more to life than learning to raise one crop a year.

One size doesn't fit all, so a personal story can't be generalized very usefully to cover the plight of other children and of their parents.

IQ is lead, knowledge is silver, outlook is gold

"The bug most people have about schools (including many who set up schools) is the idea that they are there to teach knowledge"

From a great discussion b/w alan kay, subbu and others on the IAEP list:

Alan Kay:

IQ - What if you had an "IQ" of 500, but were born in 10,000 BC. You would not be able to make a lot of progress. For example, Leonardo was very smart but couldn't come up with the engines his vehicle designs needed in order to work -- he was born in the wrong century for what he wanted to do.

Knowledge - On the other hand, Henry Ford was not nearly as smart as Leonardo, but was born at a very good time and in a good place, so he was able to combine engineering and production inventions to make millions of inexpensive automobiles.

Outlook - what made Henry Ford powerful (and most other things today) was an enormous change in Outlook (you called it a paradigm shift) which we can symbolize by invoking Newton.

"Knowledge is Silver, but Outlook is Gold" (IQ is Lead ... because most worthwhile problems we want to work on and solve are beyond mere IQ)

In other words, most human cultures accumulate and use a lot of knowledge (this is what a culture is all about) that is used to survive, to accommodate to the environment and even sometimes thrive. But the knowledge of a traditional society is very different from that of a feudal society which in turn is very different from a technological scientifically based society.

The bug most people have about schools (including many who set up schools) is the idea that they are there to teach knowledge. (Not a bad secondary goal, but it's a very bad idea for it to be the main goal.) Montessori was an early voice who pointed out that the main purpose of schooling (especially early schooling) was to help students learn and deeply internalize the most powerful outlooks that have been discovered/invented by humans. She observed that otherwise children wind up living in the 20th century but with a 10th century (or much earlier) outlook ...

Since outlook requires both a broad and deep knowledge of at least philosophy, history and science then getting education right is an arduous, difficult process.

computers as transformational media

I remember this quote or part of it from years ago but then lost it. Eugene Wallingford quotes it in a recent blog entry, Computer as Medium, and his comments about it are worth reading too.

I've been looking for a clear expression of this idea for my netbooks in schools presentation. Because of the way computers are often used in schools (as instrumental tools to support a paper and ink derived curriculum) their potential revolutionary or transformational significance is often lost sight of. The virtue of this quote is that it clearly and concisely compares the difference between the computer medium and other media.

"Devices" which variously store, retrieve, or manipulate information in the form of messages embedded in a medium have been in existence for thousands of years. People use them to communicate ideas and feelings both to others and back to themselves. Although thinking goes on in one's head, external media serve to materialize thoughts and, through feedback, to augment the actual paths the thinking follows. Methods discovered in one medium provide metaphors which contribute new ways to think about notions in other media.

For most of recorded history, the interactions of humans with their media have been primarily nonconversational and passive in the sense that marks on paper, paint on walls, even "motion" pictures and television, do not change in response to the viewer's wishes. A mathematical formulation -- which may symbolize the essence of an entire universe -- once put down on paper, remains static and requires the reader to expand its possibilities.

Every message is, in one sense or another, a simulation of some idea. It may be representational or abstract. The essence of a medium is very much dependent on the way messages are embedded, changed, and viewed. Although digital computers were originally designed to do arithmetic computation, the ability to simulate the details of any descriptive model means that the computer, viewed as a medium itself, can be all other media if the embedding and viewing methods are sufficiently well provided. Moreover, this new "metamedium" is active -- it can respond to queries and experiments -- so that the messages may involve the learner in a two-way conversation. This property has never been available before except through the medium of an individual teacher. We think the implications are vast and compelling.

Update (6th June 2009): There is a copy of the Kay / Goldberg paper, Personal Dynamic Media here

what lies behind spatial ability and computer ability?

Great comment from alan kay about spatial learning in response to mark guzdial's geek gene post:

Several things to think and read about here. First, Hadamard's "Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field" (amazon books link) is one of several non-optional prerequisites for any discussion of these ideas. (These and other careful studies from the past can cut out a lot of mere opinions if people would just read them -- "mere opinions" are the fatal disease of the web ...).

Second, it's worth trying to be a little more subtle in thinking about this issue. For example, is it "spatial ability" that is the actual correlate or is it what *lies behind* "spatial ability" *and* "computer ability". Quite a few of the best minds of the past (including Hadamard, Jerry Bruner, etc.) would say that "a feeling for cause and effect" and "an increased ability to use abstractions for ideas" actually come out of what can be learned first via manual manipulation and visual and other figurative modes of thought. Many of the tests for "spatial ability" are actually as much about "fitting together" as they are relative locations of things.

The notion of "variation" seems non-democratic and even politically incorrect to some, but nature doesn't care about our opinions on anything (this is why it is psychologically difficult to be a scientist). Significant variation exists, even for the most common human traits (like learning language). It would be astoundingly unusual if every child had the same propensities for learning computing. And at a deeper level, it would be astounding if every child had the same propensities for grokking cause and effect relationships and chains of reasoning.

I think a better ploy for general education is to embrace variation by having different strategies for different propensities. For subject x, it's a lucky child who has a lot of pre-wiring for it. But there's no shame for those who don't, to do enough extra skill learning to artificially build scaffolding that wasn't there. I think pedagogy is largely about how to help those who aren't blessed with supreme talents. (And for "great unusual inventions" -- like modern science, math, equal rights, etc. -- almost no humans have a lot of built-in skills (this is why it took thousands of years for them to be invented in the first place!)).

Every musician knows what I'm talking about (because music requires lots of different abilities and it is an extremely rare bird who is pre-wired for all of them -- instead when musicians talk with each other, they will exchange stories of what they had to work at and what came more naturally -- and the areas mentioned as being easy and hard are different for each musician -- but in the end they can all play with each other and create beauty together -- this is not just a metaphor, but a real analogy).

This is generally true for any highly developed field, whether in sports, the arts, or the mathematical sciences. And trying to do a good job with what this really means for pedagogy and curriculum, is certainly one of the most important yet most neglected processes in education.

Notes:

(1) The Hadamard book (google books link) was first published in 1945. Minsky mentions it in The Emotion Machine p. 240 stating that other authors have proposed similar models of thinking (Poincare, Koestler, Miller and Newell and Simon)

(2) Bruner: "doing with images makes symbols" provides a hint as to how to develop an honest children's version of powerful ideas. For instance, etoys (visual programming) is software developed around this concept. Children manipulate icons in a rich virtual environment, one idea is that this might lead to better symbolic or abstract understanding of how the simulations work.

How do we know what a "powerful idea" is apart from subjective assertion? For some ideas about this see non universals

Bruner

alan kay:

"Jerome Bruner ... wrote the best book on education that has ever been written, Towards a Theory of Instruction"
- Squeakers video at 2 min 30 seconds, included in this mark miller blog

I followed this up and found a great page (jerome bruner and the process of education) which summarises Bruner's thinking. I notice how Bruner takes concepts from both sides of the conventional curriculum wars and welds them together, for instance, he thinks that both structure and intuition are important. I summarise his approach as briefly as possible as incorporating structure, readiness, intuition, motivation.

I see this as the way forward - building a pyramid made up bits from both sides of the curriculum wars. eg. don't just focus on motivation but meld it with structure and readiness where readiness is "some intellectually honest form to any child at any stage of development" (Bruner)

Bruner was a key figure in the development of the "cognitive revolution" but later became critical. His thinking became increasingly influenced by writers like Lev Vygotsky and he began to be critical of the intrapersonal focus he had taken, and the lack of attention paid to social and political context

I've just ordered two books by Bruner:
The Process of Education (1960)
Toward a Theory of Instruction (1966)

Could it be that ideas that are 40-50 years old have more relevance to education reform than many of the educational ideas floating around today?

Could it be that ideas from the pioneers of computing (McCarthy, Engelbart, Papert, Kay) have more relevance than many of the computing ideas floating around today?

Probably.

alan kay: after 40 years the dynabook is not here yet

video Personal Computing: Historic Beginnings

I have transcribed a section of Alan Kay's recent presentation marking "40 years anniversary of the dynabook" because I see it as an important contribution to ongoing discussions about the significance and prospects for the XO, or OLPC

Alan Kay visited Seymour Papert in 1968

49 minutes: Slide that involves Alan Kay

About 40 years ago I went to visit Seymour Papert... because I had started to visit people who could be users of a desktop computer ... and Seymour was working with children ... Seymour was a mathematician who had worked with Piaget ... (talks about Seymour's tragic accident from which he has not recovered) ...

Kay's interpretation of Seymour's work: Children are egocentric in a charming way ...they do everything relative to them ... so if they were a co-ordinate system they would be an inertial co-ordinate system ... and an inertial co-ordinate system is the differential geometry of Gauss ... and if you keep track of this in the right way you get the differential geometry of vectors ... and a child is one of those vectors... and so is the turtle ... and he thought, boy(!), this is so close to the way children think already I wonder what would happen if we put some formalism on it and treat it as mathematics

So ask a little kid to draw a circle with their body and ask them what they are doing ... they say they are going a little and then turning a little, over and over

In logo: repeat 360 [forward 1 right 1]

Tell the turtle to do that ... and by golly you get a circle and you can put in different values to get circles of different sizes ... and so we have a differential equation here which is infinitely simpler than (traditional) differential geometry and which can be understood by a young child

This completely blew my mind! Once you've got something which is incredibly powerful that a child can learn you've no longer got an adult tool ... you've actually got something like a printing press that is one of the great 500 year inventions in human history

If children can learn these powerful ideas then you have a chance to not just increment on what is already known ... they will actually help over several generations to invent something new

So, that combined with just seeing this flat panel display with all these wise words of McLuhans in my mind (mentioned earlier in talk) on the plane back to Utah after meeting Seymour I drew this little cartoon with kids out in the grass ...

... because if you are going to make a personal computer for kids don't put it on a desk ... that isn't them ... so I immediately took the fun idea of a flat screen computer and made it paramount ... you had to make a computer that was in every way made for a child, that they could take away from adults and learn by themselves ... it would have to have wireless, a stylus, a touch screen, a keyboard (because even perfect character recognition is not fast enough to do bulk typing), removable memory ... and so all of those things coalesced ....

(describes how he made the model from a cardboard box)



Alan Kay's definition of portability ... that you can carry something else as well as the portable device ... arrived at the figure of two pounds (which is roughly 1kg)

(some information about head mounted display and a wrist detector by Negroponte left out here)

If you think about this as a service idea then what are the actual services ... (stuff snipped) ...

"IT'S NOT THE TECHNOLOGY, STUPID"

You really have to have some idea of the end users ... leads into new slide



DYNABOOK PLAN

It's a service idea with serious goals about education, especially self education

Kept (?) standards: Fluency in powerful ideas for > 90% of children

powerful ideas and how to learn them ...

CONTENT

... and with the aid of computing media


Human mentors

MENTORING

Computer mentors

[[Alan refers to these, here and later, as "four ideas", which I understand to be:

1. What are powerful ideas?
2. How can they be learned with the aid of computing media?
3. Can this work with human mentors?
4. Can it work with computing mentors?]]

I was interested in whether we could make computer mentors because my confidence in adults was very low back then ... and still is. The biggest bottleneck to education reform is the adults that are in the system

In the Third World it is the lack of adults ... But in our world it's almost the lack of adults ... almost no elementary school teachers understand anything about maths and science ... in a way things might be almost better if they weren't there because the children would not be getting misinformation about it

It has to be setup to succeed for 90% of the children, not just the 10% who are naturally good at it

The problem with technologists doing it is that we are all setup by nature to be good at it ... all of us here learnt to program within a weeek ... I'll bet you anything ... it's not that hard if you almost know what it is ... but if you don't almost know what it is, it can be really daunting

This is why computing people generally design terrible computing user interfaces ... they're not only willing to cope with something bad, they are pleased to ... because it's a little challenge for them ....
(this section finished at 1 hr 1 min)

At 1hr 15min the moderator asks:

"Why was the dynabook never built in spite of all these people trying to make it happen?"

Alan recapitulates the four ideas outlined above ... then ...

Working on the first two with our 90% success threshold ... led to 25 years of failure ... we were paying for this research ourselves ... nobody would fund the children's research because we did these long projects ... we didn't believe in most forms of testing that are reported in the education literature ... so we wanted to convince ourselves that the children were getting fluent and that 90% of them were getting fluent ... by those sorts of criteria it was one failure after another .... but after each failure we would learn something

And about 10 years ago one of the systems that we did started teaching many more children with adult help in a much stronger way (I think he means etoys) ... so I think after 40 years the first two ideas and a little bit of what sort of human mentoring you need have been solved ...

BUT, when Nicholas started up the OLPC project my heart sank, even as I supported it ... because if it's tough to get good mentors in the USA then it's really tough out in the Third World ... no user interace today can find out who its user is, what its user knows, what it can do ... it can't find out what level of reading the user can do and help find out the next level of reading

There is common sense in the world concept ... so we make a world populated with objects ... but they didn't interfere with the user strongly

That isn't enough ... pure discovery learning took us 100,000 years to get to science ... so you need learning that is facilitated ... and if you can't make thousands of good teachers in a year then you have to have an interactive user interface to save yourself

This dream of having a UI to facilitate is as old as AI ... it is AI ... if we had this we could make up for no teachers and bad teachers (but we still need good teachers) ... so when the OLPC project started I thought OMG, we are lacking the one piece of the technology ... if we could just ship that machine with a program that could teach children to read in their native language ... that would be the killer app and we wouldn't have to worry about anything else for a number of years ... but that technology doesn't exist ... it is that gap which has to be bridged in order to fulfil the educational goals that the dynabook has ... you have to have a way to get around the adults in the system that make educational reform difficult

40th anniversary of the dynabook

Alan Kay, Chuck Thacker, Mary Lou Jepsen and Steve Hamm (moderator) at the Computer History Museum (one hour 45 minutes), 5th November, 2008

Alan Kay outlines the history from 1958 (John McCarthy) through the personalities and inventions to circa 1972

The Dynabook plan (not yet realised):

1. What are powerful ideas?
2. How can they be learned with the aid of computing media?
3. Can this work with human mentors?
4. Can it work with computing mentors?

Alan Kay at 1:15
Points 1, 2 and 3 above have been solved partially but not yet point 4. Hence, there is a problem in deploying to the third world, since the teachers are not there in sufficient quantity or quality

"The person who only knows his own generation remains forever a child"
- Cicero

question 22 @ OLPC News

I'm hoping for some discussion of Walter's question 22 and the non universals at OLPC News and/or the learning evolves wiki page.

Thanks, Christoph

what alan kay said about Universals / Non Universals

What Alan Kay said about his Universals / Non Universals slide at the EuroPython 2006 keynote (transcribed by me from source). I've started a new page on the learning evolves wiki whose purpose is to expand and elaborate further on the meanings and educational implications of the list of non universals. Being accurate about what Alan said seemed to be a good place to start.

UNIVERSALS

• social
  
• language
• communication
• culture
  
• fantasies
• stories
• tools and art
• superstition
• religion and magic
• case based learning
• theatre
  
• play and games
• differences over similarities
• quick reactions to patterns
• loud noises and snakes
• supernormal responses
  
• vendetta, and more (about 300 of these have been identified across cultures)
  

"In effect anthropologists have been studying humans for about a Century now and firstly 3000 human cultures seem to be very very different. Then they start realising that they seemed surprisingly parametric. Every culture had a language, every culture told stories ... (goes through some of the items on the Universals list)

If you look at these you can see our modern internet culture - it's basically social, it enables us to communicate in various ways and so forth, basically a story based culture"

NON UNIVERSALS

• reading and writing
• deductive abstract mathematics
• model based science
• equal rights
• democracy
• perspective drawing
• theory of harmony
• similarities over differences
• slow deep thinking
• agriculture
• legal systems

"What's interesting is to look for things that are not universal, that seems to have some importance as well. Most people have lived and died on this Earth for 100,000 years without reading and writing, without having deductive maths and model based science .... (goes through non universals list)

These are a little harder to learn than the ones on the left because we are not directly wired to learn them. These things are actually inventions which are difficult to invent. And the rise of Schools going all the way back to the Sumerian and Egyptian times came about to start helping children learn some of these things that aren't easy to learn. It can be argued that if you are trying to be utopian about education what we should be doing is helping the children of the world learn these hard to learn things. Equal rights is a really good one to help children learn. No culture in the world is particularly good at it."

question 22

walter bender's question 22:

(22) What “shoulders of giants” should we stand on? What is it that children should learn? Are there any universals? How do children decide whom and what to believe?

I've been providing what I think is a good answer to these questions for some time now (since December 2006: what should schools teach?) but often the response is muted and contradictory. It's not my original answer, it originates from alan kay and his analysis originates from anthropologists.

The answer is not that children should learn the universals but what Kay has called the "non universals". From anthropological research of over 3000 human cultures, Kay presented two lists, the first were universals, the things that all human cultures have in common. This list included things like:

• language
• communication
• fantasies
• stories
• tools and art
• superstition
• religion and magic
• play and games
• differences over similarities
• quick reactions to patterns
• vendetta, and more

He then presented a list of non universals, the things that humans find harder to learn. This list was shorter and included:

• reading and writing
• deductive abstract mathematics
• model based science
• equal rights
• democracy
• perspective drawing
• theory of harmony
• similarities over differences
• slow deep thinking
• agriculture
• legal systems

The non universals have not arisen spontaneously, they have been discovered by the smartest humans after hundreds or thousands of years of civilisation. Hence, it follows that children need guidance in learning them, they will not be discovered by open ended discovery learning. There is an objective need for some version of “school” - where advanced knowledge is somehow communicated from those who know it to those who don't.

The resolution of the tension (between how children learn and the complex, non spontaneous nature of the development of advanced scientific or Enlightenment ideas) is to develop an honest children's version of the advanced ideas. For some of these ideas (not all) the computer can aid this process. Which ones? The list would include the laws of motion, turtle geometry, calculus by vectors, exponential growth, feedback and system ecologies. I think this should be the starting point or at least one of the starting points for thinking about how computers should be used in schools.

Part of the discussion here is establishing that computers are not currently used to their full potential in schools. IMO once the above vision of how computers could be used in schools is understood then it becomes obvious that they are currently poorly used in schools.

I've been wondering why this particular idea, the non universals, is not spreading more. I think it's because it goes against the culture of pseudo progressiveness which advocates that process is more important than content, that discovery is more important than knowledge and/or that education should be entertaining or at least laid back, that we shouldn't put too much pressure on children. The problem is how to teach the non universals without sounding like a "back to basics" fundamentalist. But that is a real problem that needs to be faced and resolved.

Is this an example of the unsane, the mental state where our ideas don't fit reality, the map doesn't represent the territory. We like to think of ourselves as mostly "sane" and contrast that with a few "insane" personal moments or the more permanent state of a few unfortunates. But the "unsane" idea makes room for a different self perception. What if more often than not we are unsane?

reference:
powerful ideas discourse (follow the links there for a fuller discussion)
in general programmers are not creatures of the Enlightenment (or why I quit teaching year 9 computing skills and went back to teaching maths and science)
our human condition "from space" (sources the unsane idea)
alan kay's educational vision (summary of a presentation I gave about alan kay's ideas)

science transcends "normal" (alan kay)

Read the comments on these posts from Mark Guzdial, mainly for the extensive comments by Alan Kay about the failures of the university system to achieve the education required for future social progress in science and computer science (reasons outlined in selected quotes below)

Prediction and invention: object-oriented v. functional
Recap:Prediction and invention: object-oriented v. functional

Neil Postman wrote a number of essays lamenting the huge change in universities -- which have pretty rapidly shifted from being the definers of "what higher education means" to vendors serving customers. He pointed out how ludicrous it could be to have uneducated people demanding courses and rejecting others, largely driven by perceptions of what would help with future jobs as opposed to future abilities to think well and with perspective (Kay)

... the present "normals" are much more arbitrary and accidental constructs than most people think (Kay)

vocational pressure today from students is greater than before (Guzdial)

we need educated adults not skilled children, quotes Jefferson:

"I know no safe depositary of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education." -- Jefferson (Kay)

The 1-8 and now K-12 system has quite broken down, and the universities are well on their way to breaking (Kay)

Science is a pretty good model ... The first level has to admit any and all ideas for consideration (to avoid dogma and becoming just another belief system). But the dues for "free and open" are that science has built the strongest system of critical thinking in human history to make the next level threshold for "worthy ideas" as high as possible (Kay)

"needs" are not the same as "wants" (Kay)

Because of the whacky way our brains work, the pooled diverse human opinions for a hundred thousand years on the planet don't get above threshold compared to the invention of better thinking and discerning with the advent of real science only 400 years ago. This invention was very rare in human history, and it is so far away from normal ken that it is dangerously fragile, and actually invisible to most people even today (Kay)

it would be unthinkable for a physicist not to either know what Newton did, or be incurious about what Newton did. But I found in visiting and giving talks at many conferences, universities and businesses in 2004 that most computer people I talked to (including the academics) were both hazy and incurious about what Doug Engelbart did. A few thought he might have invented the mouse, some were aware of hyperlinking -- but astoundingly, I could not find anyone who actually knew about Engelbart's ideas (Kay)

Another part of the problem has to do with the psychology of being a programmer (I worked my way through college as one) and it's mostly about *coping* (with someone else's computer, OS, programming language, problem, techniques and architectures, etc.). I did just that until I got into an ARPA grad school by complete accident and into a culture that was as "anti-cope" as one could imagine -- they were quite happy to invent everything they needed, and to build from scratch everything they needed, including every gate of the HW if necessary, and every bit of the SW (Kay)

... the biologists absolutely did not dilute their field by devolving into an "air guitar" pop culture. (Having an unforgiving Nature as the ultimate critic really helps here. Computing, being a synthetic design oriented field is not governed strongly by Nature and is all too prone to mindless fads and enthusiasms.) (Kay)

... my main observations in this thread were about the incuriousity, not of the general public, nor of pop computer wanabees, but of folks with PhDs in universities "professing" CS (Kay)

if Neil (Postman) were alive and going to write another book along these lines today, he would title it "Distracting Ourselves To Death", and would focus on the difficulties for serious thought in an age of over-information and under-content (Kay)

... it is possible for students to spend their entire undergrad career doing nothing but learning parts of the Linux world -- or parts of the web world -- or parts of the Java world, etc. All of these have millions of lines of code and all are in use and in play. ... They could easily miss most or even all of the big ideas in computing in their efforts to cope-and-join with what already exists. (Kay)

As Susan Sontag once remarked, "All understanding begins with our not accepting the world as it appears." And, conversely, the lack of understanding that we see so much of through history and our own time in no small part is caused by people accepting the world as it appears (Kay)

making better maps

Schools (and many adults) introduce another barrier, which is a profound misunderstanding of what it means to be fluent in math and science (the misunderstanding is usually in the form of thinking that math and science are fact and pattern based, and that learning the facts and the patterns is what is required)
- Alan Kay, Squeakland list reference

This confused me. If science and maths were not about facts and pattern recognition, then what were they about?

Short answer: Making better maps

Thoughts about teaching science and mathematics to young children

the maps "are always subject to improvement and rediscovery: they never completely represent the territory they are trying to map ..."

"... helping children actually do real science at the earliest possible ages is the best known way to help them move from simple beliefs in dogma to the more skeptical, empirically derived models of science"

"... as Piaget pointed out, it is best to think of children as thinking beings in their own right ..."

our culture is confusing and the science is often not central, it can easily be missed

Computers are seductive. I may have been focusing too much on motivation, or game making or programming as goals in themselves.

Also, computers are marketed as productivity tools with applications that attempt to do it all for us. Is that the best thing for learning? Probably not, but its more seduction.

Alan Kay points out that science knowledge in particular is a more expansive goal, perhaps a better pathway to help young children. The goal is to find child appropriate ways of teaching science. Computers can help here but that is just one possibility.

a technology-human iteration: part three

Part one and part two

third iteration: the tension between a computer user interface and the underlying computational model

Alan Kay was directly involved in development of the GUI (MVC), the first OOPs language, Smalltalk (an object <- message model for programming complexity) the personal computer and the dynabook vision (an integration of these ideas into a meta medium for children)

USER INTERFACE

What sort of user interface is suitable for learning?

We have become very used to a certain style of user interface, one which is “user friendly” and which gives us access to the function of the computer. The user friendly user interface has been designed by experts to not demand too much of the end user. Some systems take this a step further and actively discourage the user from becoming curious about how things work under the hood.

It is not just a matter of “user friendly”, in itself that is not serious grounds for complaint. It is the idea of users as users of clearly defined applications that have been developed by “experts”. In large part this state of things has arisen through commercialisation. A marketable commodity requires a clear definition. So proprietary applications are developed as a black box as an expression of “efficient software engineering”. In this commercial vision the “personal computer” is not really personal because most of its interfaces have been standardised which transforms the actors into docile agents who respond in predictable ways to stimuli.

“my life belongs to the engineers ... we hesitate to exist” (Latour)
“The self evident state of the art blinds people to other possibilities” (Andy diSessa)

If you start from a more philosophical perspective of amplifying human reach or of computer as a meta medium for expressing the creative spirit then the attitude to the user is different. The user, as well as being a user, is also a potential constructionist designer and developer who eventually will be able to create their own tools. So, the tools for exploring and making the system should be powerful and easily accessible. This is one of the features of Smalltalk.

The ethic is one of mutability and simplicity. Every component of a system is open to be explored, investigated, modified and built upon. The tool / medium distinction is blurred and so is a lot of other false clarity. Rather than a world of reified “experts”, “engineers”, “designers”, “end-users”, “miracle workers” and “plain folks” it would be better to blur these boundaries, particularly for learning environments.

ETOYS and OBJECT ORIENTED PROGRAMMING

One piece of educational software that attempts to put much of this together is Etoys, which incorporates features from logo, smalltalk (including late binding), hypercard, starlogo and morphic – an integration of some of the most interesting programs over the past 35 years. Etoys is part of the OLPC project.

A slogan that helps understands some of the thinking behind the etoys user interface is “doing with images makes symbols” (Bruner / Kay)

Jerome Bruner (1960s) identified three mentalities: enactive (kinesthenic), iconic and symbolic (abstraction). The idea is that repeated doing of visual manipulations will gradually lead to the students developing abstract ideas.

Etoys is a "live" system. The code can be written and variables manipulated directly while the system is still running in front of you. This makes powerful ideas such as variables and feedback far more accessible. It has transparent parallelism (aka late binding)

Etoys represents an attempt to make an object <-- message model of programming accessible to children, a better underlying model to represent complexity than a procedural model. Some people have argued that this OOPs model cannot be taught to children but Etoys represents an attempt to show that it is possible. In etoys the GUI consistently represents the underlying model. For example, you have drag and drop visual tiles which then spell out something like: ball's heading <-- 45 + random(90) This is like an English sentence: <object> receives <message>

Another metaphor here is cell biology. One kind of building block which can differentiate into all the needed building blocks. You need an evolutionary approach.

Smalltalk has a recursive design. Why divide a computer into weaker things such as data structures and procedures? Instead why not divide it up into little computers?

The foundational premises of Smalltalk are:

• everything is an object
• objects send and receive messages
• objects have their own memory
• every object is an instance of a class
• the class holds the shared behaviour of its instances
• to evaluate a program list control is passed to the first object and the remainder is treated as its message

Alan Kay regrets the terminology, object orientated, thinking later that message orientated would have expressed it better

Reference:
Tracing the Dynabook: A Study of Technocultural Transformations (PhD Dissertation) by John W. Maxwell

This pulls together a lot of scattered information about Alan Kay into one place, very valuable from that point of view. Start with Chapter 4 to obtain an overview of Alan Kay's educational vision. Maxwell correctly stresses the importance of a historical perspective, going back to the 1960s, in order to understand how educational computing got to the place it is now.

a technology-human iteration: part two

Part one is here

second iteration: the tension between how children learn and the complex, non spontaneous nature of the development of advanced scientific or Enlightenment ideas

the non universals:

• reading and writing
• deductive abstract mathematics
• model based science
• equal rights
• democracy
• perspective drawing
• theory of harmony
• similarities over differences
• slow deep thinking
• agriculture
• legal systems

The non universals have not arisen spontaneously, they have been discovered by the smartest humans after hundreds or thousands of years of civilisation. Hence, it follows that children need guidance in learning them, they will not be discovered by open ended discovery learning. There is an objective need for some version of “school” - where advanced knowledge is somehow communicated from those who know it to those who don't.

The resolution of this tension is to develop an honest children's version of the advanced ideas. For some of these ideas (not all) the computer can aid this process. Which ones? The list would include the laws of motion, turtle geometry, calculus by vectors, exponential growth, feedback and system ecologies. I think this should be the starting point or at least one of the starting points for thinking about how computers should be used in schools.

Part of the discussion here is establishing that computers are not currently used to their full potential in schools. IMO once the above vision of how computers could be used in schools is understood then it becomes obvious that they are currently poorly used in schools.

This part of the discussion is still at the level of the broad overall vision. Part three gets down to the nitty gritty.

(end of part two)

a technology-human iteration: part one

What is this? An attempt to iterate over some different positions about the co-evolution of technology with humans, the “technology and progress” debate and how this relates to child development and education. This is meant to represent some sort of progression but also with feedback loops to earlier iterations as the later ones are developed.

first iteration: the tension between computers and human development

second iteration: the tension between how children learn and the complex, non spontaneous nature of the development of advanced scientific or Enlightenment ideas

third iteration: the tension between a computer user interface and the underlying computational model

first iteration: the tension between computers and human development

"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers,"
- alleged 1943 quote, Thomas Watson, IBM President

Once Moores Law was articulated (1965) then the idea that the predominant mainframes would be overwhelmed by personal computers arose. Alan Kay was one of those who had this idea (in 1967), which was quite unsettling at that time:

"For the first time I made the leap of putting the room-sized interactive TX-2 or even a 10 MIP 6600 on a desk. I was almost frightened by the implications; computing as we knew it couldn't survive--the actual meaning of the word changed--it must have been the same kind of disorientation people had after reading Copernicus and first looked up from a different Earth to a different Heaven"
- Early History of SmallTalk

Kay was also influenced by Papert's use of logo in schools. This led onto him developing a notion of children using computers as a personal meta medium to explore powerful ideas

This thinking takes place in the context of the more general backdrop of different positions taken with respect to computers and human development – with scenarios such as Damnation, Salvation and Cyborgs as outlined, for example, by Rodney Brooks in his book, Flesh and Machines: How Robots Will Change Us, Ch.9.

Alan Kay's position was similar to one articulated earlier by Doug Engelbart and J. C. R. Licklider --> computer-human symbiosis, the personal computer as an amplifier of human reach, or "augmentation of human intellect". or computer as a "thought amplifier"

This is a very different ("futurist") vision from the non vision that Schools tend to have, that computers are just tools which require skill to use, but which are subservient to the real education represented by the curriculum. However, this tension and inter-relationship between the computer and the curriculum needs to be explored in a more detailed and nuanced fashion
(end of part one)

my VITTA presentations

I'm travelling to Melbourne soon to present at VITTA:

1) Alan Kay's educational vision. My notes, slides, some history and annotated references are here. Also, I have compiled some nice quotes from Alan here

2) Etoys squeak workshop. I'll be basing this mainly on making pong in etoys with maybe a kedama demo thrown in, if time.

towards an intelligent user interface

Most interfaces today present the very same "face" to a vast variety of users, from children to adults, from novices to experts. Most pieces of knowledge on the Internet have exactly the same form regardless of who is trying to understand it. The future demands that adaptable learning be the center of all knowledge presentations, including that of the user interface itself. The user interfaces have to be able to create a fairly accurate model of each user and use that model to modify the presentation of its knowledge structures, including finding other humans on the net that might be able to help. This area constitutes new frontiers in adaptable systems, models of humans and human knowledge, etc.
- Make it Happen in the Best Possible Way

Good flexible, interactive teachers continually adapt what they are delivering to their students as they pick up on the feedback which helps inform the teacher of which pathway to take through the materials to reach some desired goal.

Good constructionist learning environments (eg. Harel's ISDP) can also be created in which the learning materials themselves become "objects to think with" and sometimes help the learner without the teacher intervening directly. Although the teacher might help directly and the teacher has used a lot of knowledge to help create the learning environment

A possible next step along this trajectory is one envisaged in the alan kay quote. Live knowledge adapts the way it presents itself to the learner in ways that invite learning depending on the current knowledge state of the learner.

Intelligent knowledge interacts with intelligent human. Sometimes the knowledge is smarter, at other times the human is smarter.

everyone is happy with the way computers are used in School, right?

Alan Kay Still waiting for the Revolution

Computers could be used as a "thought amplifier" (eg. model the exponential growth of a contagious disease) but there are underlying problems of:
(1) the poor maths / science knowledge of most adults;
(2) Schools preoccupied with vocational training, which is now even rampant in elementary schools.

So, although everyone is happy with students busily using computers in school very little of importance is actually happening.

Q: U.S. schools have spent $40 billion on computers and Internet access. Do you think they've put that technology to good use?

A: It's a chicken and the egg thing. What's happened is probably a successful egg—but with no chicken yet in sight. I can go into virtually any school that has computers and see children who are happily using them, as well as see teachers who are happy that the kids are using them. Parents are happy, principals are happy, and school boards are happy. But if you know anything about computing or about math and science, you can see that very little of importance is going on there.

the tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living

Predicting the Future by Alan Kay

Great article which examines a variety ways in which the future becomes blocked. Includes elaborations of some quotable quotes from Alan Kay, Marshall McLuhan and others (and some brand new ones from Kay):

Kay:

"the best way to predict the future is to invent it"
"Point of view is worth 80 IQ points"
"the biggest thing we need to invent is the invention of the future itself"
"the weakest way to solve a problem is just to solve it"

McLuhan

"I don't know who discovered water, but it wasn't a fish."
"Innovation for holders of conventional wisdom is not novelty but annihilation."
"We're driving faster and faster into the future, trying to steer by using only the rear-view mirror."
"The 20th century is the century in which change changed."

Whitehead:

"the greatest invention of the 19th century was the invention of invention itself"

Marvin Minsky:

"You don't understand something until you understand it more than one way."

I like this paragraph:

But McLuhan was saying something else, that when change changes, you can't predict the future in the same way anymore; you have some second order or third order effects. So the biggest thing we need to invent in the 1990s is the invention of the future itself. In other words, to think of the concept of future not as a thing that comes from the past--although it has come from the past in a way--but to realize that the forces that are bringing about change right now are so great that it's very difficult to sit down and make simple extrapolations

Our current systems (educational, political) do seem to operate in a zone of total failure of imagination and the ethos of the least worst choice.

But looking backwards it is clear that hardly anyone in the past predicted our current present. Who predicted 9/11, the fall of the Berlin wall, the personal computer, the GUI, the rise of the internet, the advent of free software or one laptop per child ...? A handful of people predicted some of those things before they happened but no one predicted all of them or anything like that. And institutions like School are struggling without much success to adapt to these changes ... introduce this innovation, block this one, put you head in the sand about that one etc.

"Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living ..."

- The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Karl Marx 1852