So basically David Shaw's position was: we need to get children to become fluent in computers, this will be essential in the 21st century, if we don't then a large part of our country will be for all intents and purposes a third world country. But don't expect this to be cheap in the short run. In the long run it will be cheap, because the alternative is a disaster.
Seymour Papert's position was: we need children to spend time with computers, and this is going to be dirt cheap.
The whole debate was not whether or not children need to be exposed to computers, but whether it will be cheap. David Shaw's points were that hardware depreciates faster than Papert's projection (1.5-2 years instead of 5) and that sysadmin costs are much higher than hardware costs (Papert said there's no need for sysadmin, the kids can do it themselves). On both counts I think Shaw was right in 1995.
Where are we 25 years later? All kids are exposed to computers, if anything they have too much screen time. And the sysadmin costs have plummeted; for NYC for example [1], out of a total annual budget for 2020 of $26.9 BN, only $36.6 MM are earmarked as "Prof. Services -Computer Services", or 0.14%.
The mess we are in right now (such as https://www.c-span.org/video/?462071-1/technology-companies-...)
might have been avoided if we had a few generations of kids grown up in the Professor Papert's vision of "Educational Jet" instead of "Educational Stage Coach with Jet Engine" (zoom?).
P.S.
This is also related to another discussion about Metaphors in teaching:
If there is a specific discussion direction you have in mind, you should put it forth. That clip helps add more context, for sure.
I don't have much to add, but I'll state that I adore Papert's vision, and that even those who disagree about "what we should do on Monday" should keep an eye on the vision. If it does not directly inform what steps to take in the short term, at least it should have an indirect influence. By a similar token, tearing everything down and trying to rebuilding it from scratch carefully is famously tempting and notoriously ineffective for software systems. Even with software it's hard to make that claim flat out, and I shouldn't dare try to draw an analogy to social systems, since, you know, revolutions happen and for good reason. But I am glad there are at least some people (though maybe there are relatively too many) with an eye toward incrementalism.
There are many similar ideas to Papert's and Kay's that could perhaps be organized under a theme of being visionary or radical or in stark contrast to the status quo. Coming to mind are: A Mathematician's Lament by Paul Lockhart [1] (2002) or much more narrowly Ten Lessons I Wish I Had Learned Before Teaching Differential Equations by Gian-Carlo Rota [2] (1997).
I'm also reminded of some work by Felienne that questions the idea that computer programming in particular is not amenable to traditional instruction. This idea is popular with this era's programmers (perhaps because for the most part, at least up until recently, programmers do not learn from school) [3].
Thank you for pointing out Professor Rota’s remarks on teaching differential equations; He was my Professor for my first course in Probability about 50 years ago. He was an unforgettable teacher!
Once, I went to visit him during office hours. There was a light on visible behind a frosted window so I knocked on the door and awaited a reply. Instead of a reply, I heard a strange ring of what sounded like a chime. I waited a second and knocked again, and again the strange bell-like chime sounded in response. I peeked though the door and there was Professor Rota. Surrounded by stacks of books, on his desk, on a table, in mounds on the floor, Professor Rota, wearing as he did every day a three piece brown suit with a red tie and holding a large musical bell said “Well, come in!”
My kids are now in their mid 20’s and I’ve been disappointed by the way that they were taught math before college. The “Industrial/political educational complex” has convinced the school that tablets and laptops and math books full of colorful pictures are what students need. The teachers are sent to workshops where they learn things like Russian Peasant and Egyptian multiplication. Sadly, many kids come out of such programs with remarkably poor basic math skills. I have a math degree and was comfortable tutoring my kids in math, but the schools themselves should have done a much better job.
I don’t think I understand the sentiment around the teacher workshops that you mentioned. How do you feel about the workshops teaching teachers about an “alternative” multiplication algorithm?
Yes, I didn't explain myself very well. The second paragraph touches on my feelings about introducing "technology" into math education for kids. Generally, I see very little value of introducing tablets, laptops, or computers as essential items in math instruction. And likewise, I see very little value in instructing children to use alternative methods for the fundamental operations of arithmetic.
I understand math, and I use math professionally in my work. I don't consider myself a mathematician; I'm far from that, but I have had at over twenty-five university courses on mathematics while pursuing degrees in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, and Mathematics from some of the best schools in the world.
Big book publishers lock schools into using a particular Math curriculum. The schools invest in a set of books that fit together from year to year to cover the basics of elementary, lower school, and high school math subjects. The publishers compete with one another by providing their own unique spin on how math should be taught, and I've seen several counterproductive approaches while my kids were in school. It's virtually impossible to get a school to change its approach. The schools commit to very large multi-year contract to purchase books across the entire system. Furthermore, the people making the decisions aren't themselves heavy users of math and are easily swayed by the sophisticated marketing and sales techniques used to justify each publisher's approach.
I had to listen to wide-eyed school math consultant explain to me that there is "more than one way to perform multiplication that gets the same result!" as if this was some startling and life changing revelation. For those that don't yet have kids and don't realize what I'm talking about. I'll sum it up:
(a + b) * (c + d) = ac + ad + bc + bd
but its also true that:
(a + b) * (c + d) = ad + bc + ac + ad
Oh wow! Now, add a grid and a bunch of lines and pull the wool over the eyes of the people buying the books. See [1]
I studied one curriculum, Everyday Math, more than others in an attempt to get my children's school to consider an alternative. Everyday Math, like other curriculum, is based on work done at a University Education department. The University of Chicago is behind Everyday Math. It isn't the worst program in use, but in my opinion it isn't the best either. One glaring problem with the program was the focus on teaching elementary arithmetic operations using alternative methods for addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. I attended every presentation for parents at the schools on Everyday Math. I read the papers from the Education department at the University of Chicago that justified these alternative methods and I disagree with their conclusions. (For one thing, they completely misrepresent the Knuth's Art of Computer Programming volume 3 as justification for why learning these alternatives are useful.)
After studying the subject, I very much consider the approach used in Singapore for elementary math education to be better. The books are inexpensive (they are simple, straightforward black and white texts) and written in English so they could easily be adopted by schools in the USA. I learned arithmetic in the US many years ago. The way it is being taught now is much worse.
There is no obvious answer to addressing our schools inability to teach math well. If there was, we would be doing better. I'm no expert so my opinions count very little, but I would like to see less of: tablets, laptops and web-sites; and more of: drills, paper and pencil work, traditional methods and teaching of math basics. Everyone shouldn't learn to code. (Should everyone learn how to fix a car just because we drive them?) Those that are going to learn to code should focus on elementary algebra (even calculus) first. Most people need to learn how to divide fractions and what a percentage means before learning to code.
To be honest I don't know which direction the discussion might go. The context is this thread I posted on an Aug 1, 2016 discussion (Seymour Papert has died)
I have forgotten about it until four year later. Can't say we as a society had made any fundamental progress in education technology in the last 4 years, or 25 years.
- Shaw has no experience working in schools. Papert at the time of this video had spent decades running experiments in schools in the US and with entire school systems (e.g. Costa Rica). Not perfect work, but he was likely one of the few people in the room with actual experience introducing both computers and radically different approaches to learning in a wide array of contexts. Share this not to preclude Shaw's contributions, but to note that Papert's comments on budget / logistics are coming from experience actually trying this stuff.
- While Papert was harsh in his critique of traditional education research, he kept up with the research (Shaw's point that Papert doesn't know that world is frankly false). For example, see Papert's critique of a seminal book on school reform: https://learning.media.mit.edu/courses/mas713/readings/why_s...
- I haven't seen the entire video, but the bigger point Seymour would make is that introducing computers to school offers an opportunity to radically rethink learning and teaching. Instead of learning math through lectures and worksheets, a kid might learn through creating personally meaningful things in microworlds (see his discussion of Logo in Mindstorms): https://mindstorms.media.mit.edu or Andrea diSessa's later work.
Why is David Shaw even part of that conversation? Between graduation, research, and joining Morgan Stanley, he couldn't have taught classes for more than a few years.
A strong ditto: and when he did, it was hardly children as well e.g. CS under/grads. If he has any experience with children's education, it's in weaseling his own progeny into Ivy League schools, hardly general uplift.
I think I am missing the overall context. What is the question? Does someone have the full video?
Here is my attempt: They both agree there should be more computers in the classroom, and that they should not be used for aiding rote memorization. But Papert paints a less expensive picture than Shaw does. Furthermore, there is something about how deliberate the curriculum should be, and Papert sees a benefit to a more organic (so to speak) pedagogical experience.
What you see is a clip I made in 2016 out of an almost 5 hour long C-SPAN video aired on OCTOBER 12, 1995:
Technology In Education
Witnesses testified on technological advances in education.
That is an incredibly charitable interpretation of what Shaw said.
He paints a picture of a future where 80% of the population earns third-world wages unless they "compete for the kinds of jobs that are going to be at the top end".
Three minutes later, he rudely interrupts another speaker to argue against "one computer per student" on the grounds that system administration makes it too expensive and students shouldn't learn to sysadmin because its not a "high end" skill.
Basically, he wants an oligarchy and is unwilling to say it. It is interesting that his protege is doing more than any living person to make his neofeudal vision a reality.
I do not think he argued against "one computer per student". Did he not explicitly say he agree with the point, but wanted to be clear that he thinks it would cost more than what Papert was saying?
So he warmly welcomes the elimination of trade barriers, predicts it will create a large peasant class, then aggressively undermines a proposal to up-skill students by saying it is too expensive.
No one is ever going to come out and say "I hate poor people, do not design systems to empower them." They say things like "do X which will hurt poor people but also do Y to help them." X always happens before Y, and when the time to implement Y comes it is always too expensive.
Look at the 2008 financial crisis: banks bailed out early on, 40 million people experienced foreclosure. Look at the CARES act. Now that the market has rebounded, there will be no support for people facing eviction.
I say this as a relatively wealthy person in a high-skill profession.
Listen, I am about as left as they come. But do you want to try to respond to my actual comment?
What I heard in the clip was Shaw claiming it is expensive to put computers in the classroom, but that it is a worthwhile investment. And that not funding that effort would make (most) US Americans competitive on the order of textile workers in developing countries.
I'm sure the dude's politics suck. But can you try to stop trying to convince me of that?
What. A. Find. We are now living in the era of the $200 Chromebook for every child. But the ideal scenario Papert imagined is far from realized. Blocks-type environments, but extending past programming, to robotics, physics, biochemistry and beyond. And kids empowered to not just repair and administer complex systems, but to actually invent new objects themselves ;)
> We are now living in the era of the $200 Chromebook for every child. But the ideal scenario Papert imagined is far from realized.
There's no contradiction in those sentences. The $200 Chromebooks are a realization of what another commenter described as Shaw's neofeudal vision. Contrary to what Papert suggested, the kids themselves can't maintain them (at least not without sitting through a scary warning every time they boot into developer mode, IIUC), let alone assemble them. Outside of developer mode, Chromebooks can only receive OS updates from Google, and only as long as it wants to provide them. And as for the dispute between Shaw and Papert on the expected lifespan of a computer, while some new Chromebooks will receive updates from Google into 2028, I expect that their practical useful life will be much shorter, unless we software devs can somehow stop the bloat treadmill.
Un-disclosure: A few weeks ago, this would be the part where I mentioned that I was a developer at Microsoft, on the Windows accessibility team. I'm no longer there. Of course, they're not really any better than Google when it comes to really empowering kids like Papert envisioned. Indeed, the fact that both of them want to sell their systems and services to schools is IMO a big part of the problem.
Fair question; I shouldn't have ranted without proposing a solution. I guess what I'd like is for each student to have a Raspberry Pi, Pinebook Pro, or similarly cheap and open computer (and yes, I know Raspberry Pi isn't free enough for the purists), with which they are free to do whatever they want. And they should be encouraged to go as deep into it as their abilities and interests will allow.
I live in a community where an incredibly generous individual bought a chromebook for every student in 4 schools, spanning K-12. They are completely locked down. For obvious reasons. This is very unfortunate.
I would love to spend $199 a piece to replace them all with Pinebook Pros. It would add up to about $300,000 for the hardware. Many would suggest this is a poor choice because of lack of an app ecosystem. But the current chromebooks are not allowed to have any apps anyway. Still, the school district would refuse them because they are not so locked down. The freedom to use them any way you can imagine terrifies administrators.
Pine64 sells replacement screens, keyboards, motherboards, harddrives, whatever. A knockoff parts market would evolve very quickly. You actually _could_ have students maintain these. They could learn enormously.
This terrifies most adults in the chain of power that can prevent it from happening. And some of the most important of those people are not educators. They work for SV companies. They convince the educators it is a bad idea.
So much acrimony over a faulty premise. A DaVinci will still be a DaVinci, even if he only has charcoal instead of photoshop.
The right tool in the wrong hands is a curse, not a blessing. Think "lottery winner syndrome." We've minted far more digital addicts than Fabrice Bellards.
Not totally related to the video, but a fun fact about Seymour Papert is that he was an anti-apartheid activist and a socialist organizer during his time in London in the 1950s, which I think gives some background context to his thinking about education and technology. The _Socialist Review_ archive lists a little over a dozen articles penned by him during that time. https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/soc-rev-srg/i...
Seymour Papert's position was: we need children to spend time with computers, and this is going to be dirt cheap.
The whole debate was not whether or not children need to be exposed to computers, but whether it will be cheap. David Shaw's points were that hardware depreciates faster than Papert's projection (1.5-2 years instead of 5) and that sysadmin costs are much higher than hardware costs (Papert said there's no need for sysadmin, the kids can do it themselves). On both counts I think Shaw was right in 1995.
Where are we 25 years later? All kids are exposed to computers, if anything they have too much screen time. And the sysadmin costs have plummeted; for NYC for example [1], out of a total annual budget for 2020 of $26.9 BN, only $36.6 MM are earmarked as "Prof. Services -Computer Services", or 0.14%.
[1] https://council.nyc.gov/budget/wp-content/uploads/sites/54/2...