The Kids Will Be The Army For Our Cause

	Strategy And Tactics

In the CA Learning Hub I am working at hard with each Communication Agent to clarify and define the Focus and direction of their future path.

The process has produced lots of valuable content as well as the realization that some among us were really after issues and causes which were rather personal, business oriented or simply meant to support and refine the "system" as is.

I find it critical at this stage in the development of this project that the core group of Communication Agents effectively shares a wide, open-minded vision for what is outlined in the Areas for Change manifesto.

Unless we can tightly coalesce around the core axioms of our mission of agents of change, we can't expect our future efforts to have any singificant and lasting effect.

The latest challenge in this respect has been the area of Education where notions and ideas of what is change and why it is required is home for deep and heated discussion.

In order to further clarify the understanding of what the Communication Agents Initiative is set to achieve in one such critical area of human life, I have gone out of my way to bring back the vision and words of those great thinkers who have already preceeded us in this effort to create a vision and a pathway for better understanding of what Education should really be.

One of such visionary men of our time is Seymour Papert.

A mathematician, an early pioneer of artificial intelligence, and an internationally recognized seminal thinker about how computers can change learning, Seymour Papert worked with educational psychologist Jean Piaget at the University of Geneva from 1959 to 1963, a collaboration that led Papert to consider using mathematics in the service of understanding how children think and learn. As more and more students have gained access to computers and to the Internet, Papert has offered his prescriptions for consummating the marriage of education and digital media technologoes effectively. He sees most present uses of computers in schools as mere flirtation.

Here as some excerpts from his 1998 essay entitled "Let's Tie the Digital Knot". Papert writes:

"A call to redefine faculty roles from servers of education-as-it-was to inventors of education-as-it-will-be. Here I want to repeat this call and prescribe three remedies to help cure inhibitions that prevent some people from heeding it.

1) No such thing as fourth grade, because age segregation has gone the way of other arbitrary divisions of people.

2) No such thing as a classroom, because learning happens in a variety of settings.

3) And no such thing as curriculum, because the idea that everyone should have the same knowledge has come to be seen as totalitarian.

I am doing something different in kind from proposing or predicting: I am suggesting that seriously developing and seriously confronting alternative scenarios be recognized as a valuable kind of work—work needed to facilitate the emergence of the future.

What is needed is to mobilize an intellectual community to give to this kind of problem the level of attention and resources currently reserved for efforts to bolster a traditional curriculum that is in any case condemned by history.

I cannot make this last point too strongly: I believe that the major reason for the slow response of the education world to the possibilities opened by new technology is the failure of our community to assume intellectual responsibility for long and full discussion of such questions.

More inhibiting than the lack of technology or funding or brain research or anything like that is a lack of serious, controversy-rich, conceptual discussion about difficult issues such as the epistemological foundations of knowledge (for example, what is mathematics?), the nature of learning (how active must learning be to count as active learning?), and the sociopolitics of our own movement."

Professor Papert strikes all of the correct chords in portraying the vision of Education that the Communication Agents Initiative support. It is exactly in the direction that he so clearly outlines that our energies must be focused.

If our initial efforts will be successful as I am designing them to be, I can only envision with joy the opportunity that Kid Power, as Professor Papert so aptly labels his idea, will become a critical part of our very own Initiative.

Here is what he writes about "Kid Power":

"In this article I have been urging you—my colleagues—to action. Some of you will take up the challenge. Many have already done so.

But the real army that will make the system change is filled with troops of kids.

The ideas I have expressed will trickle down to these kids—or, more likely, be reinvented by them. Kids who have grown up with computers at home will be less and less inclined to let parents or teachers get away with loose talk and backward ideas.

They will be less and less willing to buy into a school system that offers learning that is inferior to what they can experience outside.

A hundred years ago John Dewey criticized school much as we do today. He had only a marginal effect because philosophical arguments have never budged an entrenched social system. At least not without an army.

The kids will be the army for our cause."

[via Stephen Downes]

Books by Seymour Papert

Mindstorms: Children, Computers and Powerful Ideas. New York: Basic Books, 1980.

The Children's Machine: Rethinking School in the Age of the Computer. New York: Basic Books, 1993.

The Connected Family: Bridging the Digital Generation Gap. Atlanta: Longstreet Press, 1996.

Essays by Seymour Papert

Exploration in the Space of Mathematics Education. International Journal of Computers for Mathematics Learning 1, pp 95-123. 1996.

Why Education Reform Is Impossible. Journal of Learning Sciences 6:4. 1997.

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Seymour Papert
Since the early 1960s, Seymour Papert has been at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where, with Marvin Minsky, he founded the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and coauthored the seminal Perceptrons (1970). Papert is the inventory of the Logo computer language and, in 1985, was one of the founders of the Media Arts and Sciences Program and the MIT Media Laboratory. In 1988 he was named LEGO Professor of Learning Research, a chair created for him. Papert, who lives in Maine, can be contacted at papert#ml.media.mit.edu.