> In other words, shouldn't the goal be to convince teachers, administrators, > and goverments that constructivism is a good thing, rather than telling them > that they need laptops so their country can produce the next Jobs or Gates? > Or am I misinterpreting something here? > > - Atul >
Hey Atul -- You ask some very fine questions, very topical. I think the paragraph above is revealing of your perspective and shows you are highly educated. You think this is about demonstrating to the world the value of "constructivism", an approach to pedagogy championed by many in the OLPC movement. And I'm not saying you're wrong. In this telling, the laptops are the avatars of a philosophy which combats rendering students passive, mere vessels for knowledge, and suggests rather that each has an existential responsibility for constructing a working model of reality -- so best get to work, as this may prove an arduous job. Constructivism makes room for the doctrine called "question authority" i.e. it has this troubling groundrule: you can't assume anyone around you has the better model e.g. maybe "the adults" got it wrong. That, in itself, is a troublesome attitude in many societies, including the American one at the turn of the last century, if we're to believe Bucky Fuller's account in which a "darling, never mind what you're thinking, we're trying to *teach* you" attitude prevailed among the all-knowing adults (who proved to be wrong, again and again, about matters of some consequence). However, in the minds of many, including some government officials, the arguments among the various philosophies of education are considered insufferably academic. What's really subversive about the Internet is it puts out tools that level the playing field in many ways, between insiders and outsiders, when it comes to matters of accessing an international database of media sources (only a top elite used have that level of access, making it easy to censor, to control the syllabus). For one reason or another (depends on the scenario), the idea of a local population becoming highly informed, higly computer literate, can feel threatening. All those school children are going to realize X about Y. Fill in the blanks. Makes 'em feel queasy. At the very least, we should admit that the Internet traffics in many alternative models of "what makes it all tick" [quick scroll of conspiracy theories] and teachers find it distracting to have to compete with so many alternatives at every turn (not because they're censorious by nature but because lots of arguments and back talk may mean one's own model will languish, neglected -- kids won't even bother to tune in some of their own best heritage, if persuaded by foreign media that "Hollywood knows best" or some other such dubious thesis). The Internet has the potential to flood a quiet way of life, balanced with an ecosystem, with endless noise, subversive simply in the sense of highly distracting. In a generation, the kids have forgotten which plants are poisonous and it's downhill from there. Anyway, let me change it around a little and put it this way: we don't like to see the minds of young children subverted and rendered prematurely ugly by dint of unfortunate sequencing. Why should we deprive them of their innocence? That being said, it's so open to question what I'm even talking about. Am I talking about porn? And that's just the thing. We're talking about multiple namespaces (a Pythonic concept). In some households, "porn" is not what's so threatening, whereas in other households it may have apocalyptic significance. BTW, I wonder if you noticed the 2nd link into Scheme World in my previous post linked to subverting imagery... Kirby _______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list [email protected] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
