kirby urner wrote: >>If that means Shuttleworth is less interested, then so be it; but >>you might gain thousands of other developers from the unschooled ranks. >> >>--Paul Fernhout > > I don't get the impression you've really read up on the Shuttleworth > Project, which just had its first London summit, resulting in detailed > meeting notes, on-line in the Wiki, plus the various blog entries and > so on. If you want to speak specifically to the Shuttleworth > initiative, I suggest you follow more links and at least get on the > same page?
Maybe we are talking about different conferences or a different Mark Shuttleworth? :-) Obviously you were there, but perhaps you saw it mainly through the eyes of a curriculum writer? And so questioning the value of a curriculum may be bit like a fish suddenly noticing water? :-) Consider: http://www.tsf.org.za/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=107&Itemid=2 "Shuttleworth project for *schools*" Some of Mark's own phrases from: http://wiki.tsf.org.za/shuttleworthfoundationwiki/Day_20one as an indicator of what he is thinking about (taken out of context which would show he is open minded, true, but look at how many there are): "primary and secondary education" "to become a mathematics teacher" "Technology in classrooms" "supply technology in schools" "Aim: to produce a curriculum" "train teachers" "Institutionalize ... exceptional children" "correct portfolio of schools to implement the curriculum" And some phrases of Mark's from the second day: http://wiki.tsf.org.za/shuttleworthfoundationwiki/Day_20two "used in schools " "In their classroom work" "The child has to solve the problem" "Did he come to the right answer" "identify children who have the answers" "How do you deal with kids who work out their own " "the sort of skills the teachers should be taught" "With the curriculum" "If spent more time planning" "do all the curriculum training" "have a curriculum" Several are about control here -- planning and telling kids what to do. Granted, other people, specifically Alan Kay, made constructivist educational points (though even he still speaks from a somewhat school-oriented context), and Mark responded positively towards them. I clearly think Mark is looking for more ideas, and hence his summit. I acknowledge Mark's flexibility and potential to change; he's one of the few people (dozens?) who has looked at the Earth from space with his own eyes, and an ever rarer few (two? three?) who did it with their own money. Still, I think my point remains, that, acknowledging he had the Summit to look for new ideas, that a "mass schooling == education" equality was, and is still, the source of light illuminating how he is looking at things. And it was the "elephant in the living room" no one talked about (though see below). At best there seems to have been some discussion of how in one broad area of schooling (math & science) there might be a little constructivist approach used here and there in a few grades part of the time. But in reality, any conventional *compulsary* school http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/5i.htm based approach built on a *compulsary* curriculum will undermine the very notion of what he hopes for in wanting to help preparing kids for the future -- a one likely involving a lot of freewheeling free and open source volunteer community participation. Even forcing kids to help each other learn fixed materials undermines part of that message. Those sorts of truly collaborative skills stem out of self-motivation, not compulsion, and they will only grow ever more important as our society adopts more and more productive technologies worldwide, moving to a world transcending even the notion of "work" itself. http://www.whywork.org/ There was one section where the elephant was apparently mentioned, when the notion of radical changes was brought up and then dismissed on the secodn day: "HK2: Extreme crisis- complete overhaul would mean a higher impact ... VR: Although complete overhaul would be ideal- it would be counterproductive given the realities of South Africa." Time and time again that same conversation comes up the same way, with the same result. So we are left with a focus on: Curriculum, Curriculum, Curriculum -- that is a recurrent them in Mark's phrasing. Some comments by an unschooling advocate on the notion of a curriculum: http://www.naturalchild.com/guest/earl_stevens.html "Allowing curriculums, textbooks, and tests to be the defining, driving force behind the education of a child is a hindrance in the home as much as in the school - not only because it interferes with learning, but because it interferes with trust. As I have mentioned, even educators are beginning to question the pre-planned, year-long curriculum as an out-dated, 19th century educational system. There is no reason that families should be less flexible and innovative than schools." Or see links at: "Unschooling -- Delight-driven learning" http://home-educate.com/unschooling/ As New York State "Teacher of the Year" John Taylor Gatto puts it here in his essay, on what the real curriculum is in almost any schooling context: "The 7-Lesson Schoolteacher" http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt "It is time that we faced the fact squarely that institutional schoolteaching is destructive to children. ... After an adult lifetime spent teaching school I believe the method of mass-schooling is the only real content it has, don't be fooled into thinking that good curriculum or good equipment or good teachers are the critical determinants of your son and daughter's schooltime. All the pathologies we've considered come about in large measure because the lessons of school prevent children from keeping important appointments with themselves and with their families, to learn lessons in self- motivation, perseverance, self-reliance, courage, dignity and love and lessons in service to others, which are among the key lessons of home life. Thirty years ago these things could still be learned in the time left after school. But television has eaten up most of that time, and a combination of television and the stresses peculiar to two-income or single-parent families have swallowed up most of what used to be family time. Our kids have no time left to grow up fully human, and only thin- soil wastelands to do it in. A future is rushing down upon our culture which will insist that all of us learn the wisdom of non-material experience; a future which will demand as the price of survival that we follow a pace of natural life economical in material cost. These lessons cannot be learned in schools as they are. School is like starting life with a 12-year jail sentence in which bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned. I teach school and win awards doing it. I should know." For one alternative: http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/3d.htm "I know a school for kids ages three to eighteen that doesn’t teach anybody to read, yet everyone who goes there learns to do it, most very well. It’s the beautiful Sudbury Valley School, twenty miles west of Boston in the old Nathaniel Bowditch "cottage" (which looks suspiciously like a mansion), a place ringed by handsome outbuildings, a private lake, woods, and acres of magnificent grounds. Sudbury is a private school, but with a tuition under $4,000 a year it’s considerably cheaper than a seat in a New York City public school. At Sudbury kids teach themselves to read; they learn at many different ages, even into the teen years (though that’s rare). When each kid is ready he or she self-instructs, if such a formal label isn’t inappropriate for such a natural undertaking. During this time they are free to request as much adult assistance as needed. That usually isn’t much. In thirty years of operation, Sudbury has never had a single kid who didn’t learn to read. All this is aided by a magnificent school library on open shelves where books are borrowed and returned on the honor system. About 65 percent of Sudbury kids go on to good colleges. The place has never seen a case of dyslexia. (That’s not to say some kids don’t reverse letters and such from time to time, but such conditions are temporary and self-correcting unless institutionalized into a disease.) So Sudbury doesn’t even teach reading yet all its kids learn to read and even like reading. What could be going on there that we don’t understand?" So why build software tools oriented towards schools and a compulsory "curriculum" if the real goal is helping kids educate themselves and become productive citizens of the 21st century? Yes, schools could be made a bit less terrible, but why spend rare philanthropic dollars for such a meager outcome? Someone like Mark Shuttleworth has so much potential as an agent of positive change, but it seems like, despite the fact that his effort will do some small good for some school kids, it is mostly a non-starter as far as significant change. Of course, this is to be expected. As Gatto points out in his book: http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc5.htm "Chapter Seventeen -- The Politics Of Schooling -- At the heart of the durability of mass schooling is a brilliantly designed power fragmentation system which distributes decision-making so widely among so many warring interests that large-scale change is impossible without a guidebook. Few insiders understand how to steer this ship and the few who do may have lost the will to control it." That is the elephant in the educational living room in all its glory. To be clear, this note isn't meant personally, even though it obviously hacks at the roots of the notion of a fixed curriculum for kids, and you personally make such curricula. I have no problems with people writing good tutorials, or people figuring out useful educational widgets to make, or people helping other people who spend time around kids learn how to interact productively with them, or people thinking about what types of things are useful to learn and laying out interesting paths for kids to follow at their own choosing. The best part of our garden simulator is perhaps the help system my wife spent six months writing, which is a resource for many thousands of people on the web now. If one looks at writing curricula in that sense, then such aids can be useful. But add compulsion to any of those notions (even our garden simulator!), and you get back to the problem we have today with mass compulsory schooling. It undermines your very own work, by turning your labors of love on curricula into instruments of torture (boredom is in a sense a form of torture) wielded by "teachers" who (often unknowingly) teach mainly the seven real lessons of schooling Gatto outlines instead. And you don't get someone like Bucky Fuller through conventional compulsory schooling, and we certainly need more people like him in the 21st century. From: http://www.madrone.com/Home-ed/hs35.htm "Almost no one who has changed our world, has reached his or her new knowledge through [learning that results because you are forced]. ... To me, one of the most striking examples of this is Buckminster Fuller. Until he got glasses in elementary school, he was essentially blind. He developed his ideas about shape and structure playing with dried peas in kindergarten." So in that sense, Bucky's poor physical vision protected him from the compulsory school curriculum that might have ruined his true inner vision. Science education in compulsory schools is essentially a machine grinding out diamonds (PhDs). It is also a failing pyramid scheme, since it produces more specialists then the world needs, each of which wants to turn out many more of the same specialist. In the words of the Vice Provost of Caltech, Dr. David L. Goodstein: http://www.house.gov/science/goodstein_04-01.htm "Science education in America is a mining and sorting operation in which we seek out diamonds in the rough that can be cut and polished into gems just like us, the existing scientists, and we discard all the rest. This system has produced the best scientists in the world, but it is also responsible for the woeful technical illiteracy of the American workforce. Furthermore, now that the period of exponential growth is over we find ourselves with a surplus of gems that we can’t afford. That is why the Internet crackles with the complaints of young Ph.D.’s who can’t get jobs doing the research they were trained for." Mark sets out to do good; my worry is how many Bucky Fullers the curriculum he plans is about to grind to ruin. Still, his may ruin less of them then some other worse curricula, but is that the best we can hope for, to save just a few children from the griding gears of a compulsory schooling machine? Even in the face of impossible odds against worldwide compulsory school machinery costing trillions of dollars a year to operate to keep grinding down most children into dirt (cue Pink Floyd :-), http://www.lyricsfreak.com/p/pink-floyd/108776.html [*] or as Gatto puts it: "Bianca, You Animal, Shut Up!" http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/prologue.htm even then, shouldn't we desperately hope for something more? And shouldn't that desperate hope inform our vision of what truly educational software and "computer programming for everyone" should be all about? --Paul Fernhout [*] Too bad Pink Floyd didn't use the word "schooling" instead of "education" in "Another Brick in The Wall". In that sense, even they succumbed unwittingly to the evil they try to fight. _______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list [email protected] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
