"it is possible to design computers so that learning to communicate with them can be a natural process, more like learning in French by living in France."
"learning to communicate with a computer may change the way other [non-computer] learning takes place."
In his 1980 book, Mindstorms, especially in the chapters "Computers for Children" and "Mathophobia," Seymour Papert is not simply arguing that computers change things. He invests in the computer the possibility of radically transforming the nature of education and the cultures which propagate the "factory" model he despises. Papert aimed to shift education thinking away from the idea of teaching to the idea of learning. To do this, Papert articulates the opportunity created by the computer a device whose value was recognised but whose potential for education were poorly understood. He sees the computer as a wedge of two kinds: possessing the potential to enable better learning; and possessing the political power needed to create better learning cultures.
A well educated person, in Papert's view, possesses a large toolset of intellectual strategies and the confidence to use them. Intellectual strategies might be so simple that adults cannot even call them strategies: knowing how to group things appreciating that a fluid's quantity will be the same in a different container; being able to imagine a process to do something. He argues that children learn these strategies from the natural affordances of the world around them. Papert argues that cultures offer similar kinds of affordances as well, when he explains that "our culture is rich in pairs, couples, and one-to-one correspondences." Yet our cultural and physical surroundings can also hinder us. Papert points out that "our culture is relatively poor in models of systematic procedures" (22). In "Mathophobia," Papert details numerous ways that people are made to believe that they cannot do things. Lacking confidence, they never acquire the full intellectual toolset of which they are capable.
As a South African mathematician who studied and worked at Witwatersrand, Cambridge, Geneva, and MIT, Papert had an unusually multicultural education for someone in the mid-20th century. So when Papert talks about "our culture," he is addressing more than just the American public school system. Papert witnessed the formation of the National Party in 1948 and the systematic oppression of non-Whites through economic and education injustice. Papert was an outspoken opponent of Apartheid. The murder in 1977 of Steve Biko, leader of the Black Consciousness movement, must certainly have been on his mind as he wrote Mindstorms in the late 70s. Biko argued that Apartheid colonised the mind as well as the landscape and economy. "The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed, " wrote Biko in 1978. To Biko, the whites of South Africa had convinced blacks that only whites could use their intellect, and that blacks were only good for manual labour and servitude. We can hear echoes of this debate as Papert argues more generally against the binary categories used by educators in his day:
Our children grow up in a culture permeated with the idea that they are "smart people" and "dumb people." The social construction of the individual is as a bundle of aptitudes. There are people who are "good at math" and people who "can't do math." Everything is set up for children to attribute their first unsuccessful or unpleasant learning experience to their own disabilities. (Mathophobia, 43)
Papert argues that good education focuses on learners rather than teachers, introducing objects into an environment where young people are encouraged to develop new intellectual capabilities. Chief among these objects is the computer, whose possible benefits go beyond maths education to include grammar and writing. Most of all, Papert hoped that conversations with computers would offer children the opportunity to reflect on the nature of thinking itself.
Papert's reflections draw largely from his experience developing the Logo Turtle in the late 1960s. The Logo Turtle was a simple robot on wheels which children could program using the Logo programming language. First, the children would be asked to use their own body to model the behaviour they wished the turtle to exhibit. They would then reflect on the movements they took, and then articulate those movements to the computer using the Logo language. In this way, children would learn more than how to instruct a computer. They would learn the skill of designing and evaluating processes for use in all of life.
Papert's attack on the practice of teaching is not limited to mathematics. He argues that writing and grammar are also "taught and taken as medicine." A learned-focused education embeds learning in activities for which learning is clearly relevant. To illustrate this, Papert describes a girl who learns the necessity of grammar while trying to teach a computer how to write poetry. He argues that word processors bring children closer to the experience of writing by offering the possibility of revision rather than the obstacles of longhand. He argues that categories of right and wrong, which make school more efficient, distract young people from the more critical question of whether or not something is fixable (27).
Papert argues for "teaching without curriculum," since curriculum is designed to make schools efficient rather than to educate children. In his view, the best education will "[change] the culture, planting new constructive elements within it and eliminating noxious ones" (32). Achieving this vision, says Papert, requires good design, careful politics, and perhaps mass market computers.
Papert briefly toys with the idea that the introduction of computers would open a wedge to change the culture of schools but despairs that computers are simply used to reinforce old structures of learning. By the end of his chapter on Computers and Computer Cultures, he places his hope in the home computer and the desire of parents for their children to learn how to use them. Institutions may not be willing to change, but perhaps parents will be more open to new ways to learn.
Additional notes