On Mon, Dec 8, 2008 at 6:57 AM, David MacQuigg <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Kirby, > > This is very well written appeal, but in this mailing list, you may be > preaching to the choir. What I would like to see is a discussion of *why* > there is not more teaching of programming in high school. I can't seem to > get an answer from the few high-school teachers and students I have asked. I > suspect it has something to do with requiring all kids to have their own > computers, not wanting the rich to have an advantage over the poor, etc. > I've thought about teaching high school myself, but the bureaucracy seems > overwhelming.
It is a much more systemic problem than that. I put a lot of blame on the anti-intellectual forces in society that want education dumbed down so that they can lie to their own children, and then to the general public that grows up on this pablum. The fundamental problem is the insistence on factory-style efficiency in education, a trend started by Prussia in the 18th century. The result is that schools nearly always teach only material for which there is an official right answer, while in real life, whether business, government, the arts, or politics, all of the interesting questions have no right answer. The education of teachers was also radically dumbed-down in the Prussian system. Teachers were expected to know no more than was in the textbooks they would teach from, except at the highest levels in research universities. In this view of society, those who needed to deal with the unanswered questions on a daily basis (other than scientists and engineers) were to be children of the elite class who could afford to send them to private schools to receive an entirely different sort of education. The sort of exceedingly unpleasant system for generating leaders within an Empire that Kipling described in Stalky & Co. http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Academy/6422/rev0882.html The Prussian system was put in place by a King who wanted a compliant public that would make no attempt to interfere in his planning of the next war, and by a right-wing Calvinist church movement that the King preferred over the more liberal-minded Lutherans. _All_ of the Imperial powers and the churches and business interests that supported them supported this system for public education at home and abroad. Japan and the State Shinto authorities particularly loved the German educational system. Plus ça change, plus ç'est la même chose. To come back to programming, what we have had since the introduction of personal computers in the 1970s has not been programming but so-called "computer literacy", in which children might get as much as an hour or two a week in the computer lab. As an immediate consequence, nothing they learned about computers, or from using computers, could have any relevance to the curriculum. It is only now, with the advent of one-to-one computing, that we can even think of addressing this problem. If we compare the "computer literacy" approach to programming with the actual idea of literacy, we see that what we have been doing is pretending to think we are teaching reading and writing if we have one room in a school with 30 pencils and pads of paper, but no library, and we let kids practice handwriting for as much as an hour a week. But not at home, or in public, no of course not. But what would schools do with programming in a one-to-one computing environment? Well, I predict that if left to themselves, they would mess it up as badly as we mess up literacy, or math and science, or indeed any subject today. We only let students have access to an utterly boring and stultifying version. It is just like exposing children to killed or attenuated viruses in order to make them immune to those viral diseases. Our schoolbooks contain nothing like the versions of any of these fields that made the practitioners fall in love with the possibilities enough to put forth the effort to master some part of it, and our schools make far too many children immune to learning anything ever again. Earth Treasury has just recently, actually just yesterday, come to the conclusion that we are ready to rethink the notion of a textbook, and to rework the curriculum from top to bottom, in order to integrate Free Software into every aspect of every subject. Some things in education actually take place in the material world, of course, including gym, manual training, art, and music. Even there, the computer is an important tool. Think of all of the computerized athletic training and analysis systems of Olympic athletes and the pros; or of CAD/CAM; or digital art and electronic music. The occasion yesterday was the Program for the Future conference at the Tech Museum (San Jose CA), Adobe Systems, and Stanford, and the celebration of the 40th anniversary of Doug Engelbart's Mother of All Demos (look it up and watch the video), which laid the foundations for all modern user interfaces, and much else in software engineering, innovation support, and more. We have come nowhere near realizing it all. I talked with Doug, with Alan Kay (of Dynabook, Smalltalk and GUI fame) of Viewpoints Research Institute and with Mike Linksvayer from Creative Commons (look up their cc:Learn project) yesterday, and with Sugar Labs, FLOSS Manuals, and Open Learning Exchange before that, and they are all ready to talk about how we can do all this. So let me know about any subject and age range you want to work on. > At 11:37 AM 12/6/2008 -0800, kirby urner wrote: > >>... >> >>As such a manager, I'm frustrated with the schooling around here, but rather >>than just whine and complain, I get access to classrooms and start showing >>off how it might really be done, were those of my breed allowed to interact >>with the kids (rarely happens, rules prevent -- even though I've been cleared >>at the state level to work with kids, with fingerprinting and everything, >>same as any union teacher). We can let you at a few hundred thousand kids, even if not face to face. -- Silent Thunder (默雷/धर्ममेघशब्दगर्ज/دھرممیگھشبدگر ج) is my name And Children are my nation. The Cosmos is my dwelling place, The Truth my destination. http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/User:Mokurai _______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list Edu-sig@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
