On Sep 7, 2007, at 5:14 PM, Albert Cahalan wrote: > Dear my. I'm all in favor of supporting the bright kids, but that > suggestion sounds like grade 12 honors at minimum.
Based on what? Preconceived notions of kids' capabilities as funneled through modern assembly-line education systems? You've got to stop thinking this way. There were virtually no widespread public systems of education until the industrial revolution. Once they came about, they came about with a purpose: creating skilled industrial workers. Creativity and pushing the limits of individual ability were very much not on the agenda, and in a sense, they couldn't be: learning was a strictly unidirectional process, teacher conveying knowledge to pupils, and with only a limited amount of time to do so each day. If you were more capable than you were expected to be in this kind of system, you were out of luck. Harnessing your creativity and intelligence wasn't economically useful, and thus couldn't be used to justify extraneous financial expenditure by the system to provide you with additional learning. The scarcity of access to information that one could use to learn on one's own made sure that, short of this additional time with a teacher that you couldn't get, you had very few options to try and work around the status quo. That's broken. The reason the XO has the potential to change the equation in unimaginable ways is because it decouples teaching and learning, thus fundamentally eroding this brokenness. Suddenly, you can have your cake and eat it too -- if your *teaching* system is great, the XO can happily take the passenger seat and become an invaluable sidekick to the teacher running the show. But hey, if you don't have a teacher AND you're interested, or you simply want to learn more than you're taught, you're no longer out of luck. You get to learn as much as you want, and in whichever way you want -- without having to adhere to someone else's idea of what your capabilities are. I'm here today doing what I'm doing because I was allowed to install Linux when I was 9. It took me two weeks to get a working machine. By 10, I wrote my first (horrible, never submitted, but entirely working) kernel patch to support a SCSI drive that wasn't working properly. Those 100 lines took three months to write. If someone said "what? Linux and a compiler? You don't get to play with that until you're grade 12 honors at a minimum," I wouldn't be where I am. It's that simple. So, about the original suggestion about making the code behind the math operations viewable, I think it's a fantastic one. It leverages the onion model -- expose simplicity by default, but make complexity easily available for those who care. Don't limit those who want more, but don't force anything on those who don't. If that's how most software was built, our industry would be in far, far better shape than it is. -- Ivan Krstić <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> | http://radian.org _______________________________________________ Devel mailing list [email protected] http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
