When I get together with other scientists, at some point I ask them how they
got started. For most, it wasn't because of school, but because of direct
contact with adults, often a relative who was a scientist, and some of the
older generation got into it from reading the classic science fiction stories
of the 40s and 50s. (This is not a scientific survey, heh heh, but it would be
interesting to see the results of one.)
Seymour Papert liked to say "You can't think about thinking without thinking
about thinking about something". He meant that most thinking skills, even those
which are usable from subject area to subject area tend to be best learned via
learning and doing particular subject areas.
However, there do exist any number of ways to assess how well and what kinds of
thinking children can do and are learning to do. So please don't worry about
that.
Your last sentence is somewhat parallel to what many business types like to say
about how hard it is to measure Return On Investment for research funding. But
in the business case, this is actually a form of dissembling, since an enormous
percentage of all the GNP (and in fact GWP) comes directly as return from
research.
Most of these types do not really understand that the potential to make
progress and money is directly related to the abilities of humans to convert
stored energy of various kinds into constructions and actions. This came not
from tinkering and old style engineering, but from scientific research done
using the new ways of thinking we have been discussing.
As an example, the ROI for Xerox PARC has been estimated in excess of $28T
dollars now, spread around the world as more than $1T per year industry (and
Xerox made more than a 20,000 % ROI just on the laser printer). This all came
from special funding of just 25 people for the main inventions.
Another way to look at it is that deep thinking is primarily what has made the
difference between the Middle Ages and now, and between the average
productivity per person in the Middle Ages and the enormous average
productivity per person now.
The people who find this difficult to understand are those who did not learn to
think well themselves, and they are all too often in places of authority (where
they should absolutely not be!) in educational and business systems.
Best wishes,
Alan
________________________________
From: K. K. Subramaniam <subb...@gmail.com>
To: Alan Kay <alan.n...@yahoo.com>
Cc: iaep@lists.sugarlabs.org
Sent: Tuesday, June 30, 2009 7:31:07 PM
Subject: Re: [IAEP] Comments on David Kokorowski, David Pritchard and
"Mastering" Educational SW
On Tuesday 30 Jun 2009 11:23:24 pm Alan Kay wrote:
> what is more interesting is how well certain ways of thinking work
> in finding strong models of phenomena compared to others.
This is the part that interests me too ...
> 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.
... 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!
Subbu
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