Hi Stephen
1. Let me try to answer the second question first -- since it is really
central, and it is also the first of "the important questions". Here are a few
more:
-- Should various levels of a child's society be able to choose some of what a
child should learn? If so, what and why?
-- What kinds of learning are we going to try to help the child accomplish?
(Cased-based recognition of situations, and actions to take? Deep understanding
and fluency that resembles practitioners in a subject area? Etc.)
-- What is the spectrum (or the dimensions) of children's abilities to learn a
wide variety of subjects (e.g. from sports to physics)?
-- What is the similar spectrum (or dimensions) of internal and external
motivations for putting effort into learning various subjects?
-- How can we ascertain what kinds of help are needed by the different kinds of
children?
-- What are the tradeoffs and pathways of teaching children how to learn vs.
teaching subject matter?
-- What are the best kinds of situations/environmens/processes to help children
learn difficult to learn ideas?
-- And so forth. There are lots more. A really important one that is germane to
this discussion is:
-- Is "this curriculum" worth trying to improve, study or measure?
My own thinking about these questions has been shaped by five main forces (a)
my own experiences with learning vs being in school (b) contact with the ideas
of Montessori, Froebel, Piaget, Vygotsky, Bruner, Papert, Postman, Friere, etc.
(c) the deep ideas of the human life sciences, especially including Cognitive
Psychology (of the Bruner variety), Neuroethology and Anthropology, (d) "lots"
of reading in lots of areas, and (e) 40+ years of trying to design, implement
and test situations that might help deep learning of powerful ideas.
For example, Anthropology started by looking at human differences, and then
found that the differences were situated in universally found "parameters" or
"traits". There were 3000+ different languages, but every culture studied had a
language. Different stories, but every culture had stories. Etc. About 300 of
these have been identified by now. A large number of them (including the ones
above) are strongly believed to be genetic (and some of these have been studied
extensively in young children by neuroethologists like Bower)
Along the way, it became very clear that there were some ideas/processes that
were not found in every culture, some quite rare, and some of these are quite
powerful -- such as reading and writing, deductive abstract mathematics,
empirical model based science, the idea of equal rights, attempts at democracy,
etc. -- These are deemed to be inventions/discoveries. Seymour Papert came up
with the nice term "powerful ideas". They are much less strongly built into our
genes. Partly because of this, they seem more difficult to learn, and much of
the invention of formal schooling came about to teach these harder to learn
ideas.
One way of thinking about the larger question of learning ideas for which we
don't have strong built in mental mechanisms, is to ask the question: to what
extent can we shape our abilities to deal with symbolic models and to learn
skills to make "symbolic brainlets" which can carry the ideas fluently?
For example, mitochondrial DNA indicates that our species had been on the
planet for 190,000+ years before the calculus was invented/discovered. So it
wasn't easy, obvious, or built in. Once learned deeply and with skill, rather
ordinary people can think thoughts that could not be thought by the greatest
geniuses of history. It's a powerful idea. My saying for this is "Point of view
is worth 80 "IQ" points". (Sometimes "perspective" is a better term than "point
of view".)
"Ethics" has to do with theories of "right decisions and actions", and it is
not known how to get a theory of ethical behavior via scientific study of the
universe. It's more like mathematics, in that one has to make some "postulates"
and then try to use logic to derive an ethical system. One of my postulates is
that our human abilities to think are deeply flawed -- at best what Korzybski
termed "unsanity" -- and that we should put an enormous amount of effort into
finding ways to get around this. This is what science is really about -- it is
a set of successful heuristics for getting around *some* of what is poor about
our approaches to learning about our world and ourselves.
So in an ethical system I would try to derive for my society, I would want to
have a maximum effort to help children get fluent with many of the invented
"powerful ideas" particularly those which help us see some important aspects of
the world and our behavior more clearly. (Not everyone agrees with this of
course -- there would be enormous interferences with long held beliefs, fond
stories, etc.).
In any case, as Neil Postman has pointed out about both technology and
education, it's really important to get clear just what issues you are trying
to address, what problems you are trying to solve by making advances in either.
An excellent recent book (much better than his essay) is "A Mathematician's
Lament" by Paul Lockart. I agree very strongly with much of what he has to say,
not just with regard to mathematics, but most school subjects, and the
"educators" who propagate this mind and personality destroying poison. (I'm not
referring to all educators, but to many.)
2. Now as to your first question. Let me ask if it is really incumbent on me to
supply a reading list about one of the most important and influential set of
technological inventions of all time? Why wouldn't people be curious enough
(and use one of these technological inventions -- the Internet --this is why we
invented it!) to find out what happened, by whom, how and why?
When I was traveling around to give invited talks at many universities in 2004,
I started to ask the audience if they had ever heard of Doug Engelbart. "Didn't
he invent the mouse, or was it you?" I then got to ask them whether they had
taken the trouble to simply type "E n g e l b a r t" into Google and look at
the first few hits. On the first page is a bio, his website where his ~75
highly influential papers can be found, and links to the cataclysmic "mother of
all demos" in 1968.
At every university, none of them had enough curiosity and motivation to do
this. And none of them knew some of the deep philosophical background behind
the technological inventions.
Or, to get closer to home. Has anyone taken the trouble to find out what
Nicholas Negroponte has fostered over the last 40+ years? (Hint, two of the
best books ever written about computing's destiny were written by Nicholas, and
they were early.) Or what Walter Bender has done, especially when working with
Nicholas? Or what Seymour Papert thought? Or Jerome Bruner (especially as the
designer of MACOS -- by far the best from scratch deep curriculum for 5th and
6th graders ever designed and deployed)?
Very best wishes,
Alan
________________________________
From: Steve Thomas <stevesar...@gmail.com>
To: Alan Kay <alan.n...@yahoo.com>
Cc: Caryl Bigenho <cbige...@hotmail.com>; Bert Freudenberg
<b...@freudenbergs.de>; IAEP SugarLabs <iaep@lists.sugarlabs.org>
Sent: Sat, June 12, 2010 10:03:13 PM
Subject: Re: [IAEP] Apple Eases Restrictions On iPhone Developers
On Sun, Jun 13, 2010 at 12:18 AM, Alan Kay <alan.n...@yahoo.com> wrote:
2. Have you put in the effort to learn about the psychological,
anthropological, neurological and educational sources that were drawn on to
invent both personal computing and the "powerful ideas" curricula which have
been done and carefully tested over the years? (Hint, most of this information
has been published and is readily available ...)
>
Do you have a suggested reading list?
The deeper scientific questions in soft areas like educational theory and
curriculum design have to be concerned first asking important questions, and
second with whether all the relevant cases have been identified and considered
and factored into the actual designs and experimental methodology. (And I'm a
big fan of being really careful and getting real criticism from real peers too)
>
What are the important questions?
Thanks,
Stephen
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