A critique of technocentrism when thinking about schools of the future (Seymour Papert)

Based on Seymour Papert's presentation at the "Children in an Information Age: Opportunities for Creativity, Innovation, and New Activities" conference (Children in an Information Age: Opportunities for Creativity, Innovation, and New Activities) Bulgaria, Sofia, May 1987)

introduce

Everyone in this room will agree that we are entering the so-called "computer future" in which everything will be different thanks to computers and other new technologies. In some aspects of life, the presence of computers is already commonplace. Came here from my home and bought a plane ticket at the airport. Computer terminals have become part of the deal - you buy your ticket by dealing with a person in front of the computer. At some airports in the US, you don't even have to deal with staff. You can operate the computer directly: put your credit card in and the ticket comes out.

These computer performances may be superficial. They don't make much of a difference in our lives. Even buying a plane ticket takes the same amount of time. But in other areas of life, no one would say the use of computers is superficial, such as in medicine, CAT scans by computer. We're meeting here this week to discuss the use of computers in learning, education and children's lives, where the use of computers is still superficial. The presence of computers in this field will have a very profound impact, not only on the nature of the school itself, but on human society as a whole. The way computers come into learning will be decisive for the way future generations develop in technology and the larger culture.

We are entering the future of computing; but what will it be like? What kind of world will it be? Utopians promise us a new millennium, a wonderful world where computers will solve all our problems. Computer critics warn us of the dehumanizing effects of overuse of machines and the destruction of jobs and the economy.

who is right? Well, both are wrong - because they are asking the wrong question. The question is not "what will computers do to us?" the question is "how will we use computers?" The point is not to predict the future of computers. The key is to do it.

Our computers in the future can take many different forms. It is not determined by the nature of technology, but by a series of judgments of individual human beings. Ultimately, this is a political question, a social philosophical question and a social decision-making question, how we will reshape and rethink our world in the face of technology. When we talk about the use of computers in education, we should not think about the impact of machines. What we should be talking about is the opportunity that the existence of computers offers us to rethink what it means to learn, to rethink education.

For the past few generations, education has stayed away from the main arena of the world. Among our universities, the Faculty of Education is ranked second. Notable departments are Physics and Molecular Biology and Mathematics and Philosophy. educate? Here are some minor disciplines. In politics, when politicians meet at conferences and summits, they talk about finance, arms and trade. Education was set aside and, if at all, discussed only in the oral statements of the opening and closing ceremonies. But I think that is changing. The impact of these new technologies is that learning and education will take center stage – both out of intellectual interest, out of the opportunity and need for in-depth study and research, and even in the political arena.

We are already starting to see signs that the politics of learning is becoming a central issue, rather than something extraneous. As we face a world of ever-accelerating change, it is no longer possible to have a concept of 'learning' where people can acquire all skills at a young age and apply them throughout their lives. Learning must be an ongoing process. Everyone is saying that now, but soon it will also have to go to the highest and lowest decision-making levels in countries around the world. Who succeeds and who doesn't depends a lot on who gets into the future of computer learning.

My talk revolves around four core ideas, two of which (technocentrism and scientism) are my warnings about what we should avoid, and the other two (pedagogy and constructivism) that I make about developing our A framework for a vision of where it should go.

Technocentrism

I coined the term "technocentrism" from the term "egocentrism" used by Piaget. This does not mean that the child is selfish, it just means that when the child thinks, all problems are directed towards the self and related to the self. Technocentrism is the fallacy of pointing everything at technology.

In the minutes of technology and education conferences, there is the question: Does technology have an impact in one way or another? Does using a computer to teach math improve children's numeracy skills? Or will it encourage kids to be lazy because calculators can do calculations? Does using a word processor make kids more creative writers? Or will it lead to a loss of writing skills? Do Computers Increase Children's Creativity? Or will it lead to a mechanical, rote way of thinking? Will computers increase interpersonal skills? Or will it lead to children being isolated from each other?

These questions reflect technology-centric thinking. The same goes for all questions about whether a computer is right for one use or another. "Does training and practice improve children's arithmetic performance?" "Does Logo lead to more mathematical thinking?"

Of course, these are interesting questions, but they are not fundamental questions. It's not the training and practice, or the Logo, that achieves this or that result; it's how we use these things. In addition to questions about the most efficient way to teach arithmetic, there are questions that predate computers and relate to general theories of education.

Long before the advent of computers, the education world was divided into two camps. One that emphasizes the development of children and the active construction of children's understanding of the world. We can call these child-centred or development-centred approaches to education. On the other hand, the opposite is true for those who believe in a curriculum-centred approach.

I would like to take a point with the title of this conference - "Children in the Information Age". The title carries the danger of encouraging an information-centric approach to education, not unlike a technology-centric approach. Think of the future as an information age, and of course keep an eye on some exciting new developments. There is now more information than ever before. But from an educator's point of view, there is also a dangerous side: viewing the most important aspect of education as providing information, even providing access to information.

A clear distinction should be drawn between these two educational perspectives. In one view, the goal of education is to promote personal development. Another view focuses on the information an individual will receive. Closely related to this division is whether we believe that the goal of education is to develop a child's sense of independence and personal strength.

The best that computers can do has nothing to do with information. This is to give children a greater sense of empowerment to be able to do more than before. But many times I see computers being used to guide children step by step through the learning process. Ivan Illich says the most important thing you learn in school is that learning can only be achieved by being taught. This is the opposite of empowerment. What you should learn in school is that you don't need to learn to learn. This is not to say that teachers are not an important part of the learning process. The teacher is of course the most important person there. However, recognizing the importance of teachers is very different from turning learning into the passive side. This is the fundamental divide in educational theory: personal empowerment vs educating and being educated.

In the past, I have strongly disagreed with the notion of computer-aided instruction. One can criticize it from many angles. Now, I just want to take it as a symptom of a way of thinking. The fact that this statement is easily accepted by computer experts in the field of education shows that in their minds the computer is a teaching device. This is one aspect of education, but the smallest and least important. If we only devote computers to this, we are wasting it. It can do more.

How to use computers in education reflects deeper educational theories and philosophical issues. Long before the advent of computers, educators were divided on whether education was a matter of learning facts and skills, or personal development. Computers have sharpened these divisions in educational theory. However, even these debates reflect larger issues, those of social theory and social philosophy. What kind of people, what kind of citizens do we want? What do we want are empowered individuals who will feel empowered to make their own decisions and shape their own lives? Or do we prefer citizens who are willing to be disciplined and abide by the instructions and plans that others have laid out for them?

Scientism _

By scientism, I mean the attitude of treating all problems as scientific problems that can be solved through scientific research. This view evaluates educational methods by measuring their impact on test scores. Scientism makes educational research easy: we will do some experiments to see if this or that method is better, the experiment isolates only one factor, and everything else remains the same. Many people are fascinated by these experiments because they are statistically rigorous and seem to provide the kind of hard data one finds in physics. But if you're thinking about revolutionizing education, this approach isn't feasible.

This type of research does help answer certain questions. If you are considering a small change - is it better to paint the walls of the classroom green or white? - You can do a little experiment. You can keep everything else the same and just change the color of the walls and see what happens. Even if you're asking whether it's better to reward success or punish failure, you can do a little experiment.

But we cannot use these criteria to decide whether we want an open society or a totalitarian society. You can't decide through a scientific experiment whether you want to be an empowered citizen or a cyborg who wants to be guided and disciplined. It's not a scientific question; it's something deeper than that.

Education ( Educology )

I borrowed the word Educology from Jonas Salk, a great American thinker and inventor of the Salk polio vaccine, He's recently devoted himself to thinking about a new stage in human evolution, as he puts it. This evolution is about individual creativity—the individual controlling the creative evolutionary process.

The word educology reminds us that we need a theory of education. One might say the theory already exists. There's educational psychology; there's teaching theory; there's theoretical courses on how to run schools. But these are not holistic theories of education. They are theories about small aspects of what happens in the educational process. Focusing on these little aspects, these trees and shrubs, we get lost in the jungle.

My attack on technocentrism and scientism points to one reason why we need the new discipline of pedagogy. We need a methodology that is different from other sciences such as educational psychology. To illustrate this need, I will give an example from my own work. Someone asked, "What is the impact of Logo on learning math -- or planning skills or whatever?" Some experimenters answered in the affirmative, others in the negative. But they're on the wrong side. The approach they take is to study the effects of something by changing it while keeping other things the same.

This method is ideal for studying the effects of drugs or botanical treatments. But in the case of Logo, people see the absurdity of it, because its whole point is to change everything else. People don't introduce a logo into a classroom and do other things like it doesn't exist. This approach completely misses the point. Logo is a tool designed to help you change the way you talk and think about math and writing, and how they relate to each other, the way you talk about learning, and even the relationship between people in school - between children and teachers relationship, and between children.

Traditional methods of studying innovations in education may have been sufficient, when only small changes were possible, when in fact people did change one aspect of the math curriculum while keeping everything else the same. But when we envision a fundamental change in education, we need a completely different approach. I would like to make some comments on the scale of these changes.

It's important to recognize that the scope of these changes could rival those we've seen in transportation, communications, and medicine. We used to walk or ride horses; now we fly by jet. We used to send or deliver letters; now, we pick up a phone and call the furthest corners of the planet. Modern technology has also transformed the practice of medicine. But when it comes to learning and education, there have been only minor changes so far. Perhaps it's an open question whether equally significant changes will occur in other areas -- but we'll never know without trying. I think it is this goal that brings us together at this meeting. I believe that we can decide this issue by doing our best, by doing what we can to guide these profound changes.

Pedagogy has two aspects: one for society and one for individuals. When pedagogy studies new technologies, it focuses on two types of questions, neither of which consider technology to have an impact: How does society apply technology? And how do individuals use technology?

I've already talked about social applications. My discussion of technocentrism raises the question of whether technology determines how people think, or how people think determines what technology they make. These questions are not the first to be raised. They sparked many discussions about social theory, economics, and politics. The same is true of Karl Marx's debate with Hegel: Does material matter determine thought? Or does thought determine material material?

We are facing the same problem. Many times, we are still in a technology-centric mindset. Our thinking reflects a primitive materialism - we believe that technology will determine the way we think. This is almost as crude as primitive idealism, which underlies the optimistic idea that thinking about education will determine how we practice it. Clearly, we need a more interactive approach to these problems.

I like to use analogies to better understand this problem. It's often helpful to look at some of the early technologies and see how they've been exploited. In particular, let's look at the history of cinema.

When the dolly camera was invented at the turn of the century, the first thing people did with it was the same as you do with any new technology tool: you try to do what you've done before, and then you try to do it better. So the actors put the camera in front of the stage and performed a scene. Instead of taking notes on paper, journalists took to the streets and turned on their cameras. This is different from the concepts of film, television and other media that have been developed before. Movies aren't just about putting a moving camera in front of the stage and putting out a play.

Obviously, the movies are different, but in what way? It is important that we conceptualize the different dimensions. One point I want to emphasize and focus on today is that cinema is a new and different culture. It has its own language and metaphors. It gives people new roles. Filmmaker? There is no such thing at all. movie star? what is that? Also, movies have entered our social relationships - hanging out on a Saturday night and so on. Movies have become part of wider culture; that's how it's developed. This is what has to happen in the field of education. We're talking about a new culture of learning and how this new culture will grow in a new technological environment.

These themes are the challenges we face in the future - we need to think more deeply about how technology will be integrated into educational transformation. To clarify this, I will give an example.

The skeleton was made by four nine- and ten-year-olds. This was done at the Hennigan School, which we run in Boston, as a collaboration between my research group at MIT and the Boston Public School System. The school is located in a very poor working-class area of ​​Boston. This is what we call an inner city school. According to the usual statistics of success or failure in the school system, most students do not do well and have very few chances to do well.

We have brought in quite a few computers in this school, about one for every three students, so students spend a lot of time on computers. For the first six months of this experiment, our goal was to have each child work with a computer for one or an hour and a half a day, with no other goal than to become proficient in computer operation. So we teach kids to program with Logo and how to write with a computer as a word processor. We don't have any dedicated software or teaching materials related to computers, nor the idea of ​​changing the curriculum because of computers, not at that stage. We wanted to see how computers entered the culture of schools. How did teachers pick up computers? What will the children do? The story I'm going to tell, to me, is a prime example of how computers came into a cultural environment like this school.

This skeleton was made in February or March 1986, about six months after our research at the Hennigan School began. Teacher Joanne Ronkin has taught at the school for years — and in January or February, it's time to study human biology with her fifth-grade students. She found that studying the skeleton was a good place to start. The course only stipulates that she teach human biology. She chose skeletons because she liked it.

In the past, she has used a combination of methods to teach children about bones. She has a book that they read. She showed them a few bones. She also tried to get some people from outside, a nurse parent, and occasionally even a doctor, although that was rare at that school. But usually people in medical related fields can talk about it. In the past, she had always asked each child to choose a bone, which she then carefully studied and depicted in a notebook. This year, as children have mastered drawing logo graphics on computer screens, she told them, "Okay, draw bones on the screen," not on paper.

The effect was dramatic - it's important to note that she didn't do anything special. She just did what she had always done, only with a different medium for drawing: with a computer instead of paper and pencil. But the difference in medium can sometimes have a huge impact on performance. She wants every child to draw a bone as they used to. But to her surprise, everyone chose to draw a full skeleton. This is completely spontaneous and voluntary. No one suggested or told them to do so. In this particular case, the four students decided to collaborate because they realized that it was impossible for one person to draw the skeleton in full detail, so four people had to work together. This is the first way that technological infrastructure has changed culture: it has changed the relationship between people.

The first change is between teachers and students because these students are doing things that teachers don't know how to do. Their expertise in computers has surpassed hers. Second, the relationship between students is different. Unlike the competitive, isolated student relationships we often see in schools where imitating others is plagiarism and therefore taboo and bad, these students come together because they realize they can be better cooperation.

Once they come together, some new elements emerge. They have to divide the skeleton and decide what the natural division is. Likewise, if one does the arms and the other the vertebrae, they have to consider how the arms and vertebrae are connected together, and do it in the same proportions. Therefore, this new environment is a natural entry point for many new thinking about the skeleton.

Most striking, however, is the mobilized energy. The teacher changed her role in a very important way. She no longer needs to tell the children what to do. Instead of motivating the kids, she ended up having to stop them, but she couldn't stop them because they wanted to keep doing it, even when it was time to do something else. They came at lunchtime, they came during the entertainment, they came after school; it aroused their enthusiasm. Therefore, instead of urging students to learn, teachers should be conservative and stop them from over-learning.

In this case, we're adding something very small - which goes against all accepted wisdom about educational technology issues. You'll hear over and over again that the problem with using computers in school is that we don't have the software, and it's too expensive to make it. Here, the only software is a very good graphics system. Computers don't know what a skeleton is, and programmers don't spend hundreds of hours entering information about a skeleton into a computer. It's just a powerful tool to empower these students.

I want to emphasize another aspect. The class is called a biology class, but it involves much more than biology. All students, without exception, want to make something beautiful. You can see the aesthetic aspect, you can also see the scientific and logical, this aesthetic is equally important.

To me, this particular example has become a metaphor for something more general. One of the worst things we do in school is divide. We cut things into small pieces. One of the worst cuts we've ever made is to separate aesthetics from knowledge and science. It's a disaster because children's energy comes primarily from two areas we see here: their social relationships and their aesthetic drives. That's what generates energy, and we cut it off. In the skeleton example, we see it coming back.

We also saw individuality. Here is another skeleton [Figure 2]. This was created by a girl alone, so her bones have less detail. It doesn't mean she didn't study hard. Each skeleton has its own characteristics.

So, in addition to the beauty in appearance, we also have the beauty in expressing our view of the world. Just to illustrate that the styles are different, here is another skeleton [Figure 3]. The kid didn't want to draw the skeleton, we knew the kid well. In fact, part of our research at the Hennigan School is that we're really trying to understand these kids as individuals. This child is very concerned with language and the names of things. So in her skeleton project, she put a lot of effort into knowing the names of the bones. Humorous is certainly "humorous". No one corrected her, but in the end she found it wasn't spelled that way. But it doesn't matter how she spells it. The point is that she had an intense experience because she thought she put the bone's name on her computer screen so the rest of the school could see the bone's name through her work. Therefore, personal style becomes an important part of the experience.

That's why it's wrong to ask, "How do computers affect children?" It affects different children differently, depending on what they are interested in. In fact, the children went in the opposite direction; if statistically, the mean is zero. Children with stronger language propensities are more able to use language. Visually oriented children use visual and geometric representations more. People who like to plan compulsively become better planners. People who like to create freely in an expressionist way can do better. If this environment has any impact, it's that everyone can follow their own style. You can become more yourself; you can be yourself, whatever that is.

Constructionism

What I want to emphasize is constructionism as part of a theoretical approach, as another branch of pedagogical theory. We need a social, historical theory to understand how technologies entered society and how they were used by society. We also need a theory to explain how they are exploited by individuals.

The word constructionism is made up of two words. I first learned of a psychological theory from Piaget, but also found it in Vygotsky and other theorists. The theory argues that knowledge does not pass through pipes like information. In fact, there is something called information theory that gives us a completely wrong picture of education in many ways. Knowledge is not transmitted, but constructed. Everyone must rebuild knowledge. Of course, one does not necessarily have to do this alone. Everyone needs the help of others, the support of the physical environment, culture and society. But knowledge must be constructed—this is what Piaget called constructivism.

Constructivism adds a second dimension to Piaget's ideas of constructivism. Constructivism believes that knowledge is something you build in your mind. Constructionism reminds us that the best way to do this is to build something tangible—something outside your head—that also has meaning to you personally. In the skeleton project, the kids are making something. They create a skeleton on the screen. Because they are doing something, they can mobilize their whole selves: their aesthetic sense, their sense of a meaningful project, their sense of the project in relation to who they are as individuals and their most important values. Children interested in language saw what she was doing on screen as part of a larger cause: She was influencing her classmates and expressing herself through a project she could work on for weeks on end.

This is what I call constructivism. She was creating something, a project rooted in her self-awareness. She's not sitting on paper with meaningless numbers. She does not learn through a fragmented process in which knowledge is broken up into small pieces and the learner has to figure out how it fits together.

I would like to highlight this idea with another example from the Hennigan School. In the case of bones, what is built is what is on the computer screen. Of course, some critics of the use of computers in schools argue that it can be dangerous to be too immersed in the electronic world, rather than the physical world you can feel, touch and smell. I totally agree. So one of the themes of our work over the past few years, especially at this school, has been to take informatics out of computers. We use activities not directly related to computers that use real, three-dimensional, physical things. My favorite example is a project we call LEGO/Logo that shows the most striking results.

In this project, children use Logo as a programming system and use Lego bricks to build various objects. We have developed an interface between the two. You can build something out of LEGO bricks - maybe a small car with motors and sensors like light and touch - and then you can hook it up to a computer. You can write a program to make this car do something, so you get into a kind of control theory, a kind of robotics. This combines the constructionist principle we use in computers with the constructionist principle in the world outside the physical object. Some events will illustrate how this can change the learning environment, in my opinion, as the basis for a constructionist.

My first example doesn't involve computers at all. We developed a model experience with LEGO/Logo. On the first day, we gave the kids a very clear task: build a car they love. Then we put the car on top of the sloping cardboard track and let it run along the track. Our first intention was to make them race, but that's unpleasant competition. Instead, each vehicle is driven individually. When it reaches the bottom of the track, it travels along the floor -- maybe just a short distance, or farther, depending on how it's built. When the cart stops, the student places a piece of tape on the floor and writes his or her name on the tape.

What's next? The student picks up his or her car and starts changing it to make it go further. Everyone does it. They don't need the teacher to say, "Now try to make it go further." When the car stops at a certain point, they say to themselves, "Why stop there?" They try to make it go further. So they started thinking about what they should change. Some aspects are clearly irrelevant. No one thought changing the color would make it go any further. In fact, almost everyone agrees that changing the weight will make it go farther. Most people think they should make it heavier, but some people think they should make it lighter. So in a sense, they are revisiting part of the history of physics. Aristotle would say it's weight - make it heavier and it will go faster and farther.

But it doesn't matter what Aristotle would say. In this class, the children start changing weights. But in reality, the weight change didn't make much of a difference. As Galileo discovered and these kids rediscovered, you can't make any radical changes just by changing the weight. But they tried all sorts of things, and it was a re-enactment of something else that Thomas Kuhn taught us about the history of science. When your assumption seems wrong, you don't give up; you reinterpret it. If you think making the car heavier will make it go further, but that won't work, you'll think, "Okay, make it lighter." You still use weight as your mindset. If making it lighter doesn't work, you can put the weight in the back or front or higher or lower. You change various weights until eventually you realize it's not working and you have to give up. In addition, some are starting to embrace another view that is spreading in this group: the key to thinking is not weight, but friction.

Few of these kids knew the word "rubbing," but they understood what it meant: rubbing. The parts are rubbing against each other and that's the problem. This immediately prompted them to rebuild. They rethink their vehicles to make them simpler and less friction. Now the car is going fast and far. So, in this small scientific community of children, there is a paradigm shift.

This is a great place to learn about science. This is much better than learning the law of friction as the formula F=mf. The point is, these kids go through a social process, and within that community, there's a paradigm shift. The knowledge they have is not a quantitative formula, but something more important: a paradigm, a way of thinking. Do you think about weight? Or do you need to think in other ways? When you think of something else, maybe you need to give it a name. This is where the teacher becomes important. The teacher would say, "We're going to fix it. It's called friction. You can have friction in a lot of other places, so we can talk a lot about friction."

This is another way to learn science. It is similar to what is commonly called "hands-on". But note that this isn't just hands-on. It's not just kids doing something; they're doing something that is intrinsically motivated. Like the skeleton, it's not just because they made it. The things they make come from their own desires and are driven by their own values. The same goes for dolly and friction. So it was in the process of making these little cars—in constructivism—that we created a different way of learning physics.

The trolley experience may last one to three days (one day means an hour or an hour and a half), and the next phase may be the following week. After two or three days, when it's all used up, we go the other way and say, "Now do whatever you want." By building the car, they've learned some basic ways to put these Lego pieces together. They all know some early logo programming. Now they're starting to put on the motors, and in the process we noticed a very interesting phenomenon. Many children think that to install the motor on the car, just stick the motor on it. They were very surprised that putting the motor on top of the trolley didn't make it run. They had another discovery: The motor had to be attached to the wheel. So most of the curriculum turned to electrification and computerization.

The next story I want to tell is about four girls, but it's also a story about all the people in the world who, for some reason, grew up timid about technology, science, or formal things. The characters in this story happen to be girls, and in many cultures, girls are the ones most affected by this repression. But of course, they are not the only victims.

So when we said, "Okay, do whatever you want with it," some kids -- especially the macho boys -- started building trucks, trying to make them stronger, faster, and so on. But the four girls didn't do it. Instead, they did what they already knew how to use Lego: They built a beautiful house. It's important that LEGO is already familiar to children. Lego is very popular in the United States and many European countries, which means girls can do something spontaneous: build an elaborate house with ornate walls, towers and windows.

What we start to see in that classroom is a reconstruction of another historical event. Earlier, we saw the split between Aristotle and Galileo. This time, we see the so-called "two culture divide." These technocratic macho boys are building their trucks and these girls are building these beautiful little things. So the familiar rift, the familiar divide between these two cultures, is building in that class. What are they going to do? We saw it.

Our purpose at the Hennigan School is not just to instruct or teach, but to understand in the spirit of anthropology. What will happen? What happened tells us again that the teacher's role should be to be sensitive, watch and wait, and then find the right moment to intervene, because those girls are doing a lot smarter than I thought. Anything I did to get them out of this trap was disastrous compared to what they did. After a long time, someone noticed that in the middle of that house, buried deep inside, there was a small light that kept flickering.

These girls are very feminine in a traditional sense - they have bows in their hair and they often giggle. However, despite the obstacles, I believe that deep down in their hearts, they want to take advantage of the technological and scientific things they see in society, just like everyone does.

All children want to own everything in the society around them. But these girls believe, "I'm not the kind of person who can do it." It's their self-image, so they're repressed. They had to find a way to master the technology with little to no look. What they are doing can be described as taking the technology from the "little end". They put this little light in their house and wrote a minimal Logo program to control it. This program is:

on wait 10 off wait 10

Then repeated many times.

If someone said, "Do it, hook it up to the computer", I think it would have the completely wrong effect. They have to do it when no one is looking, when they are not looking, almost behind their own backs. But once they start, they enter the world of possessing technology.

The next day, two lights came on in the house. The following week, several more lights went out in very complicated ways. A week after that, a Christmas tree started turning. They had to do quite a bit to get that Christmas tree to turn. Lego's motors run very fast. If you try to put a LEGO Christmas tree on it, it will fly away right away. So they have to think about gears or pulleys, which is what they actually use. They had to slow it down. They had to slow it down. They have to be involved in many issues that children of this age group, 8 and 9 years old, find difficult and delicate.

So they find the entrance into the world of technology, science and formal things, and through this new technology, can do it in such a subtle way. It's so delicate and subtle, it takes these delicate and subtle girls to find their way to appropriate it and make it their own.

I want to end with the word "appropriate". Make it your own. pick it up. Make it part of your life, thought and culture.

What does it mean to take something and make it your own? In experiments at the Hennigan School, we asked children what they were doing. These simple questions yield some results that illustrate possession. Some of our graduate students asked kids, "What are you doing?" In the first few months, if we asked this question while they were using a computer, they would say "computer" or "Logo" or "programming." But six months later, when we came to the kids and asked them what they were doing, no one said that. They say, "I'm making a skeleton. Can't you see?" or "I'm writing a story." Nobody talks about computers anymore.

The computer has been absorbed; it has become part of the culture. This is not surprising. If you walked up to a poet who was busy writing poetry and asked him what he was doing, you would be very surprised if he said, "I'm using a pencil." Of course he was using a pencil, but the pencil had become invisible. It does not exist as a separate thing; it is part of his life. It's part of the world. You don't think about it. The same goes for computers. We succeeded only when it became invisible. That doesn't mean you don't think about it. When you need it, when you want to do something, you think about it. But you think about what you want to do with it; you think about that subject matter. It's part of possession, make it yours. It's like yourself.

Closely related to "appropriate" is another word, love. Einstein said: "Love is a better master than duty." This is often forgotten in many modern educational theories. Take cognitive science, for example. I don't think the person who gave it this name is malicious, but in psychology cognition means thinking, not feelings, emotions, unconsciousness, personality, motivation. Cognitive science distinguishes thinking as separate things. If you read these reports and look at these jobs funded by government agencies, it's a perception. But they were wrong.

They're wrong because the reason you need all these tedious teaching methods is because you're trying to teach people something they don't want to learn. When they want to learn, if you create the right intellectual environment, they will learn it quickly and easily. Therefore, you can create the conditions for children to acquire knowledge by falling in love with it.

there are more. I had an interesting experience yesterday at a school in Sofia, a very touching one. I visited a school where kids were using computers and making programs. At the end, they said they had a problem and wanted to interview me. One of the questions was, "Do kids anywhere else have such good teachers?"

I was so moved that I didn't know what to say, I said some very clumsy and embarrassing things. But I thought, "Wouldn't that be great?" The work they did made them feel that way about the teacher. Of course, their teacher is a wonderful person, but we can create educational environments that bring out both the love for the teacher and the love for everyone else in the room. Above all, there is a principle beyond the love of knowledge: if you love what you learn, you will love yourself even more. (If you love what you learn, you'll get to love yourself more.) This must be the goal of education so that everyone can have a sense of self-esteem, empowerment, and love for oneself, because all other love is created by Born here: love for people, for knowledge, for the society you live in.

Compiled from: A Critique of Technocentrism in Thinking About the School of the Future