Alan Kay: cool concepts need love too

Original author: Alan Kay
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Let me start by showing a video recorded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) at a recent Harvard graduation ceremony in which they asked some graduates and their teachers to answer some simple questions about what caused the change of time. years and phases of the moon. Everyone was confident in their answers, but the explanations of approximately 95% of the respondents did not even closely resemble a scientific justification.

Their main theories were based on the fact that the change of seasons is a consequence of a decrease in the distance between the Earth and the Sun in the summer, and that the phases of the Moon are associated with the shadow cast by the Earth. Some of the graduates did quite a bit of science in high school and at Harvard. The NSF used this data to open a discussion on why science is not digested so well, even after many years of study. It is not absorbed so well even by most successful students, with high rates in SAT, in the best universities, with full access to computers, networks and information.

My reaction was a little different. I was still waiting for the “other questions” that NSF had to ask, but they never asked them. I got this chance a few weeks after speaking at UCLA. I asked some high school students, first-year graduate students, and several professors the same questions about changing the seasons and phases of the moon, and I got very similar results: about 95% of the respondents gave fictitious explanations, basing themselves on the same as the students and professors at Harvard, But now I have to ask the following questions.

Those who did not understand the change of seasons, I asked if they knew what time of the year in South America and Australia, when it is summer in North America. All answered: "Winter." Those who did not understand the phases of the moon, I asked if they had ever seen the moon and the sun in heaven at the same time. And everyone answered yes. Slowly, and only in a few respondents, I saw how they struggled to understand that the opposite seasons in different hemispheres do not fit the theory “closer to the sun means summer” and that the simultaneous finding of the sun and moon in the sky does not correspond to them theory "Earth blocks the sun's rays."

It seems to me that the NSF missed the most important. They thought they had discovered a “scientific problem”, but there are thousands of scientific “facts”, and not a single scientist knows them all; we must be grateful that Harvard and UCLA students did not “know the answers”. What this survey showed is a kind of “mathematical problem,” a problem of thinking and learning, which is much more serious.

Why more serious? Because UCLA students and teachers (and their Harvard counterparts) knew something that contradicted the theories they were trying to formulate, and none of them managed to get to this conflicting knowledge with the words: “Hey, wait a minute ... "! In one form or another, they “knew” about the opposite seasons, and that they simultaneously saw both the sun and the moon in the sky, but they did not “know” in any practical sense that they could extract this knowledge from their memories during thoughts on related topics. They isolated this “knowledge”, instead of constantly connecting with new concepts as soon as they are formed and realized.

What happened to them, and what happens to children every day at school? To understand this, we must find out how we humans are “naturally” inclined toward thinking and learning.

Hint can be found in the Bible. King Solomon was considered the wisest man who ever lived, and explains why: he knew more than 3,000 proverbs! And the proverbs work as follows: if you return home from a trip, and your family is glad to see you, then "Separation makes their hearts love more." But if you come back from a trip, and they are not very happy for you, then the reason for this ... what? Correct: "Out of sight, out of mind." Each proverb exists to give a specific situation a certain meaning, and each of them comes to mind from case to case. If the proverb that you use today (or the game, or the movie you are watching today) contradicts the one that was last week, then it does not matter, because the proverbs and stories are evaluated mainly on the basis of

This way of thinking and giving meaning to one’s life and society, from the point of view of stories and narratives, is universal in all cultures, and also serves as the basis for “setting up connections” with other people. This is part of what we call "common sense." And that’s exactly how most college students that NSF and I talked to “learned the science disciplines” - as separate cases, stories that could be applied in a similar situation, and not as a system of interconnected evidence that we think we know , and how well we think we know it. Story-based thinking won. Claude Levy-Strauss and Seymour Peypert called this incremental isolated "natural" learning through the process of creating "amateur crafts", which means doing something, "tinkering with technology." This is one of the reasons, by which engineering began its journey thousands of years before science; some designs can be implemented gradually, through trial and error, without requiring any detailed explanation of how it all works.

However, if we look back over the past 400 years, and think about which ideas caused the most significant changes in human society, and which brought us to the modern era of democracy, science, technology and health, we will be a little shocked when we realize that not one of them is presented in the form of a story! In Newton's treatise on the laws of motion, gravity and planetary behavior, a sequence of arguments is set up that mimic Euclidean books on geometry. Since then, all scientific articles have also been presented in the form of evidence, not stories. Tom Payne's “Obvious Truth” is forty pages of evidence of why the monarchy is not a good form of government and why democracy is likely to be better. (This was, in fact, closer to the “not obvious truth”, because historically, movement towards democracy arose quite rarely). Articles from the Federalist series are evidence in support of various parts of the constitutional framework. And the Constitution itself is a set of principles for constructing a very complex dynamic structure that must exist for centuries, whose “parts” (that is, us!) Arise and disappear, and only interact with each other a little. And this is definitely not just a story!

Recent studies have shown that less than 5% of adult Americans (less than 7% in the UK) have learned to think freely in these modern forms, without being tied to stories. A recent review of the 150 best-selling books in the US (as of September 15th, thanks www.usatoday.com) shows that 80% are based on the format of stories, 15% - books on self-improvement, the content of only 1.5% can be attributed some scientific approach, but the format of none of them corresponded to the form of a serious essay with reasoned evidence (sometimes voluminous essays appear, such as “The End of the American Mind” by Bloom, but not one of them is mentioned in the September list of 150 best books). And this is the alignment for a small number of Americans who generally buy books. Let me remind you that a book sold in the volume of about 100,000 copies is called a bestseller, and an “instant bestseller” usually includes no more than 1,000,000 copies in a country of 250 million inhabitants! Television, of course, is all saturated with stories, and any other format is practically not applicable to it. For example, pay attention to

But I do not want to say that we must completely abandon the stories. I like to listen and read them, and I like to watch them on the stage of the theater. If in the theater we could not think in “stories”, then all that we would see is actors on the background of cardboard landscapes with accompaniment from various noises coming from the bowels of the orchestra pit. To enjoy the theater, we must surrender to the narrative, feel the actors as ourselves, perceive conventional landscapes as a place with a certain mood, and the noise from the pit - as an exciting music. This works great, and through this process we can feel at a deeper level what it means to be human. But now imagine that you go into a similar building, with similar people on the stage who pronounce similar vivid phrases, and all this is supported by conditional landscapes and exciting music. Sounds like a theater? But here I mean a political rally.

Everything that we so want to surrender in the theater is better to keep away from here! Since the whole meaning of our life and relations with others requires us to give symbols meaning and to give part of ourselves to ideas, we have to work hard on two fronts: to be sensitive when we feel an emotional upsurge and to be tough when someone tries to take it away us. I believe that the main purpose of training is to learn to recognize these situations, to understand how to make characters work for us.

But just being able to criticize a story in which the characters are involved is not enough, given how much significant modern content, both politically and scientifically, is presented in formats other than stories. In order to become completely free in the 21st century, it is very important for children to learn how to easily navigate the three main forms of thinking that are used now: in “history”, “logical evidence” and “system dynamics”. The question is how?

One of the arguments put forward in favor of why it is so difficult to get most children to learn to think in a new way is that "such thinking is hard to master." But it’s quite difficult to learn to ride a bicycle, and it’s even more difficult to throw the ball into the basket, but the biggest difficulty on the way to this is the constant game of baseball. If you observe children who are trying to learn these skills, you will see that most of their attempts fail, but they continue to try until they learn, and as a rule, it takes many years. This is more like their attitude to when they learn to walk and talk than to the defeatist attitude that is so common in school. In fact, the bottom line is that children are ready to do anything to learn very complex things,

Montezorri has quite successfully used this in her schools. Shinichi Suzuki achieved the same success in teaching music, creating a musical culture in which the child was immersed. Television and cultural continuity are well suited to create an environment that includes athletics, certain types of music and dance, and shows what it means to be a highly qualified specialist in these areas. For a huge number of scientists, one of the parents was either a scientist himself, or was very interested in science, and sometimes he was simply fond of “learning as the highest calling”. Here difficulties are not perceived as a problem. But belonging to culture and the formation of personal identity - yes. This could be called the incentive of the "rite of passage".

If we turn to estimates of less than 5% for the number of American people who have learned to think in these new ways, and remember that television is not the best way to present them, it means that in the preschool period, most children will not feel the whole cultural experience using these ideas. I do not have data on what percentage of primary school teachers have learned to think in a new way, but from personal experience I would suggest that it is similar to estimates for the total number of people in general. This means that most children are unlikely to be able to try out these new ways of thinking at home, at school or through television, not to mention their integration into the general process of thinking and the sequence of actions that are so important to consider when children begin to attach importance to what they really want to learn.

Now, that which requires a lot of work, and that the child does not perceive as an important "rite of passage", simply not enough attention will be paid. Persistence and tolerance for failure will be lacking, which is a prerequisite for overcoming obstacles. One of the main problems associated with the way most schools are organized is that children quickly realize that most of what they are asked to do is not related to the “real” world, especially when compared to electives, such as sports, art and music. They know that this is just from the "real" world, and the school needs to try hard to bring to these disciplines the degree of artificiality that will cause children to lose all interest in them.

Let me give an analogy on how the strategy of “recreating the environment” can be solved, it proceeds from the learning experience that I had in childhood.

Suppose that it is music that cares the nation the most. Our parents worry that their children will not succeed in life unless they become musicians. The scores for our music tests are the lowest in the world. After a wave of protests, Congress comes to the following technological solution: “By 2000, we will install a piano in every class! But there is no money to hire musicians, so every summer we will send existing teachers to two-week retraining courses. This should solve the problem! "But we know that a significant shift will not happen, because, as any musician will tell you, the music is not directly in the piano - if that were the case, we would have to let it vote! Music lives inside everyone from U.S.

And now here's what happens to the piano in every class. Children will love to play with him, and most likely, a "culture of primitive compositions" will begin to develop. Then there will be a “piano bricolage”. Some will be encouraged by parents to take lessons, and rarely will anyone decide to take matters into their own hands and find ways to learn real things without any formal support. Other technologies, such as recordings, promote the idea of ​​"musical perception." This seems like the exact opposite of the listening process, but you can look at it from a slightly different slant. The problem is that “musical perception” is like “perception of science”, or “mathematics”, or “computers”, but this is not the same as learning music, science, mathematics or computer engineering!

But 50 years ago, I grew up in a community that wanted “real music for everyone,” and I found a way to achieve this. In a small town in New England, in which there were only 200 students in high school, there was a tradition of recruiting people in a full group, orchestra and choir. Thus, almost every child became an experienced musician. The secret is that every child in the soul begins to follow the path of a musician, and everyone has a voice to sing. In the first grade, we were taught to sing all intervals and to read individual parts on notes. In the second grade we sang two parts. In the third grade, we performed four parts and began to choose instruments. Talent was not a determining factor, although, of course, it manifested itself. This was what everyone did, and everyone liked it. I began to realize that this was something unusual, only when I moved. An important side effect is that there was a piano in each class, and all the teachers knew how to play it a little, although I’m sure that at least one teacher had a little musical ear. Most likely, the system worked because an excellent music specialist was sent to this village to work with primary classes, who visited each class several times a week. I remember how one teacher did not like my pronunciation in the song, and he tried to fix it, but the invited specialist liked this style, and he suggested that I appreciate if I could sing the whole song in this manner. that to work with primary classes, an excellent music specialist was sent to this locality, who visited each class several times a week. I remember how one teacher did not like my pronunciation in the song, and he tried to fix it, but the invited specialist liked this style, and he suggested that I appreciate if I could sing the whole song in this manner. that to work with primary classes, an excellent music specialist was sent to this locality, who visited each class several times a week. I remember how one teacher did not like my pronunciation in the song, and he tried to fix it, but the invited specialist liked this style, and he suggested that I appreciate if I could sing the whole song in this manner.

The main thing in this story is not even that most of the children began to freely perform musical compositions by the time they moved to high school - they did it and have been doing it for many generations - but the fact that almost all of them, as far as I can tell, continue to love and compose music in adulthood (including me).

Today, a number of schools are joining the strategy of "creating an integrated environment and supporting the activities of teachers with the assistance of invited experts." An open autonomous school in Los Angeles successfully managed to implement a “design culture” in classrooms for third-year classes, so for the whole year children are involved in an exciting and challenging adventure in the world of large-scale urban design. The most successful science program for elementary school that I know of is implemented in all Pasadena elementary schools and is organized according to the same principles. It was developed by Jim Bowers and Jerry Pines, two scientists from the California Institute of Technology. And it is based not just on a wonderful set of ideas and approaches to the implementation of the curriculum. The main principle is

Once again, I note that children initially love to learn, and most of them can learn everything that their culture faces. But best of all, they are given the comprehension of ideas that are an integral part of the surrounding culture. The presence of a parent or teacher who encourages the study of mathematics and science does not compare with when a parent or teacher lives in mathematics and science (or makes such an impression). This is the strongest pedagogical strategy that I met over more than 25 years of working with children. Technologies such as books, musical instruments, pen and paper, bats and balls can have the desired effect, but they are clearly not enough to help children overcome critical obstacles on their own. Literacy, music, art, on the other hand, Dances and sports can develop very well almost without any technology support. All that is needed is adult support.

When developing a curriculum, one should strive to ensure that it is based on ideas, and not on the means of disseminating information. Every good teacher understood this. The media can sometimes support the study of ideas, but often, the best decisions come in the course of thinking about how these ideas can be taught at all without using multimedia tools. Using the knowledge and skills of children works best. Once good methods have been identified, then some useful ideas on multimedia might come up.

Now let me turn for a moment towards the magnificent new technologies in the field of computer technology and networks. For me, perhaps the saddest moment will come when they bring me to a computerized class and show how children joyfully use these computers. And everyone is happy: children, their parents, teachers and administrators. Nevertheless, in most of these rooms, upon closer inspection, you can see that the children do nothing special at all: nothing interesting and nothing that would contribute to their development! These technologies are like fast food: people love it, but there is no talk of any nutritious nutrition. In the worst case, this is similar to the “cult of cargo," when it is believed that the very presence of computers will somehow return the learning process to the classroom. In general, any use of computers in the 21st century is a symbol of increased mobility. With such a new “piano” in most classrooms and homes, there is no real feeling of whether it plays music, or another “primitive song”.

I found that analogies with books and typography stories help to understand the computer. Like books, a computer has the ability to represent arbitrary characters, which means that its limit is determined by the full range of human capabilities that can be expressed through language. This range extends from the most trivial (astrology, comics, romance novels, pornography) to the most serious (political, artistic and scientific discussions). The computer also brings something completely new, namely its ability to read and write its own characters and do it at an incredible speed. And as a result, a computer can also present dynamic situations, again with the same range: from “cartoons on Saturdays,” to games and sports, cinema and theater, to modeling complex social and scientific theories.

In a dynamic network of millions of computers on the Internet, an analogy with the library and communication systems is traced. You can use this new library from anywhere in the world. It is constantly updated, and users can correspond and even work together on projects without the need for a physical presence in the same place.

Working on these ideas 30 years ago, it seemed to us that this is the next great “invention in the last 500 years” since the advent of the printing press. And for a certain percentage of people, as well as for those few who used the book to study, comprehend and discuss powerful concepts, as well as identify new ways of thinking and representing our world, computers and networks are starting to gain the same level of importance. The computer has truly been a terrific invention since the advent of the book. But, as in the case of the book, much remains behind the scenes.

And here is where the analogy of the “book against television” is the most sobering. In America, for most people, printing has failed as a disseminator of important ideas. Few can read quite freely, and at the same time understand and participate in the development of powerful concepts about our world. Many people are illiterate, and most of those who read read at home for entertainment, and at work to get new information (i.e. 95% of best sellers are presented in the form of stories and books on self-development). Posting a series of Federalist articles on the Internet will ultimately allow them to be read freely, but even the fact that this large collection of discussions has become more accessible in the 21st century than the same texts in current public libraries will not affect the total number those who dare to read this difficult but worthy prose.

Television in America has gained mass status, but it is a rather poor means of disseminating powerful concepts. Television is the greatest “learning machine” ever created. Unfortunately, what it can best teach is not on the list of the most important things to learn. But when it encounters them, it does so poorly in the role of a teacher that it convinces most viewers that these important concepts do not exist at all!

But now computers can perform not only their immediate functions, but also play the role of television or books. Today's commercial trends in the education and home entertainment market are such that there is a desire to bring computers as close to television as possible. And the number of billions of dollars that is involved can seem quite impressive. The fact that in 1600, 150 years after the invention of the printing press, the Bible and astrology were the two most popular books on the British Isles is sobering! Scientific and political ways of thinking have just begun to appear. As Marshall McLuhan noted, a real revolution requires a lot of time, because the main content and value in a new means of disseminating information is always taken from the old.

Now the only thing that can be realized at the level of computers and networks, and which will help to contain the onslaught of “information noise”, is to make media resources on the Internet “self-learning”. Imagine that a child or an adult who is just looking for fun on the Internet suddenly finds something exciting (an article on rockets or gene splicing). If this were something like an encyclopedic article, then the explanatory character (at the level that the author chose when writing it) should be traced in its text in order to convey the idea. For most internet surfers, this will be a real problem, especially considering the current low level of fluency in reading skills. The computer version of the media will be able to determine the age of the Internet user, how experienced he is, and instantly adapt the learning process. It will be much more likely to introduce each user to the "good material" that underlies most human knowledge. Toddlers would begin to experience different from what older children would gain, which would help to teach the child to read and reason better, and present this as a side effect of satisfying their own interest. This is the view of the Montesorri method on how media resources can be organized on the Internet: own interests provide motivation for traveling through an environment full of learning opportunities disguised as toys. which would help teach the child to read and reason better, and present this as a side effect of satisfying one’s own interest. This is the view of the Montesorri method on how media resources can be organized on the Internet: own interests provide motivation for traveling through an environment full of learning opportunities disguised as toys. which would help teach the child to read and reason better, and present this as a side effect of satisfying one’s own interest. This is the view of the Montesorri method on how media resources can be organized on the Internet: own interests provide motivation for traveling through an environment full of learning opportunities disguised as toys.

This new kind of "dynamic multimedia tools" can be created now, but it will be very expensive and difficult. And yet, this is exactly the investment that the whole country should recognize and make. And I still doubt that this can be replaced by upbringing in culture with a love of learning and thinking. But in this culture, such new-type multimedia tools will allow everyone to dig deeper, in more directions, and look at the world from a greater number of sides than is possible today with the best books. Most likely, without such a culture, these multimedia tools will be simply necessary to prevent the rapid approach of the next era of Dark Times.

Schools are perhaps the last line of defense in the fight against the global trivialization of knowledge, but at the same time, they have not yet studied enough new technologies and multimedia to draw a line that clearly separates the formal but meaningless work on computers and the network, and free possession of the skills necessary for the development of true thinking in the 21st century. At best, schools are research centers for identifying interesting phenomena, and, as in large research centers, this work is best done with colleagues. Such training centers will always make sense, but the biggest problem is that most schools today do not even closely resemble training centers that are suitable for the 21st century.

Will Rogers once said that it hurts you not from not knowing something, but from what you think you know! The best thing to do here (this applies to computer and natural sciences, mathematics, literature, art and music): schools need to clearly understand that they do not know the whole picture, that they are like those blind people trying to recognize an elephant, and what they need devise strategies that will gradually help this elephant discover. This is what the best professionals in their fields do. And we see how Rudolf Serkin, with tears in his eyes, at the age of 75, accepts a Beethoven medal with the words: "I do not deserve this." And he really thinks so. Before us, Nobel Prize winner in physics, Richard Feynman, tells his students in a physics course at the California Institute of Technology, how far he is from understanding the science of physics itself, and especially those that are part of his specialization! We cannot learn to see until we realize that we are blind.

The reason is that understanding, like civilization, happiness, music, science and many other great aspirations, is not a state of being, but a way to travel.

And the main goal in helping children learn is to find a way to show them this way, where there is no final stop, and such a way of moving that the process itself is already a reward.

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