Constructing Learning with Dr. Gary Stager

In which Dan chats with Dr. Gary Stager, teacher, professor, author, and consultant (among other things) and a true constructivist. Gary is the founder of the Constructing Modern Knowledge summer institute for educators and the co-author of Invent To Learn – Making, Tinkering, and Engineering in the Classroom.

Dan and Gary talk about Gary's dear friend, the late Seymour Papert, and the meaning of a computer in a classroom, phones in schools, Gary's experience teaching in a prison in Maine, and why reading from actual books is so vital.

As always I welcome comments and questions on BlueSky @dankearney and on Instagram @BigIdeaEd

Mentioned in the episode:

Invent to Learn: Making, Tinkering, and Engineering in the Classroom by Gary Stager
Twenty Things to Do with a Computer Forward 50 by Gary Stager
The Children's Machine: Rethinking School in the Age of the Computer by Seymour Papert
Seymour Papert Obituary from MIT News
Torture in a Maine Prison from Prison Legal News
Mathworlds, the Substack from Dan Meyer
From Lunchboxes to Laptops: How Maine Went One-to-One by Audrey Waters
The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt
The Most Compelling Argument Against Tech in Schools from Haidt's After Babel Substack

Music: 

SPEAKEASY STRUT
royalty free Music by Giorgio Di Campo for @FreeSound Music
http://freesoundmusic.eu

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

A lot of this stuff is a lot is simpler than we think it is. You know, how do we make this the best seven hours of a kid's life? Is there some way to lower the level of antagonism between adults and children? Is there a way that we could behave more collegially? Um, could could I, you know, if if I see myself um in more of a carceral role of a prison guard than of a teacher, maybe I've made a vocational error.

SPEAKER_00 0:44

I've grown quite fond of going on to Blue Sky or LinkedIn to check Gary Steger's posts. Gary is today's guest, and he has a wit and an outlook I describe as refreshing, honest, critical, and real. Gary has spent a career in education as a teacher, professor, publisher, consultant, and more, and his work is a great reminder of the central tenets of constructivism. Remember that from teacher college? The idea that we build our own understanding through experiences and human interactions rather than receiving information, often passively. Gary is the founder of the Constructing Modern Knowledge Summer Institute for Educators, and he is the co-author of Invent to Learn: Making, Tinkering, and Engineering in the Classroom. Gary also has a unique perspective on how technology, not ed tech, but technology, can play a crucial role in a 21st century constructivist classroom. Gary doesn't equivocate, and as you'll hear in our conversation, he has a lifetime of experiences to back up his strong convictions about the way children should be treated and why schools should be human-centred places. Be sure to check out the show notes with links to the stuff mentioned in our chat, including Gary's books. I started out by mentioning a line from the introduction to his latest book, where Gary writes, If one seeks to improve education, the first step is to find a cure for amnesia.

SPEAKER_01 2:15

Well, we stand on the shoulders of giants. I actually heard Bill Clinton say to the National School Boards Association once, every problem in education has been solved somewhere before. Most of it's been written down. When I encounter a school principal and I work in schools all over the world, who you know write their hands and says, if only we knew what to do, you know, I now say, well, swing by my house. I've got one of a thousand, two thousand, three thousand books I could lend you, um, where some expert has shared what they've done and how and why. Um and I I think I we could pair that that quote with with another one that I've been saying a lot recently, which is that um evidence is no match for ideology. Um you know that any people who it's a fool's errand engaging with people who are looking for evidence because what they're really saying is I don't wanna. And we've got plenty of evidence for all sorts of things that are good for children. We're only ever asked to defend the things that kids like.

SPEAKER_00 3:17

Yeah, I was just um even just this morning, I was chatting with a colleague about um you know the math teacher, math thinker Dan Meyer. He's he's yeah, he's got a great uh Substack with lots of interesting ideas about learning math and learning in general. And he recently published uh something about uh you know, we know that accelerated learning doesn't work. We know this. And it's bad for kids, it's bad for families, but especially in the realm of math, people keep pushing for it. And my colleague and I were chatting about how many teachers know this, but somehow these ideas don't seem to filter up to the decision makers. And I wonder, in your view, to this idea of you know, Clinton, we've already figured things out. Is it I mean, is it just ideology? Is it willful ignorance? Is it status quo, inertia? What's what's really blocking uh our cure for amnesia?

SPEAKER_01 4:10

A bit of cowardice. Um you know, even in it it always amazes me how even in the most progressive, play-based, lovely, art-filled schools, um, you know, when you suggest that people do something that deviates from you know Mrs. Crabtree's classroom, um that you know, that there'll be there'll be pushback or hesitation. I uh you know, I I've I've taken to asking teachers, are you afraid that someone will look askance at you? Um, you know, absent the current political climate we find ourselves in, there don't tend to be real sanctions. It doesn't tend to be real sanctions for doing the right thing. Um and I think a lot of the decisions in education are really kind of theological in nature more than practical or anything else. It's just is it the is it right or wrong? Um, you know, should we be arbitrarily mean to children? Um, you know, is is is teaching kids to comply good for democracy? And I I don't know, just as I as I mature, I'm I I I kind of keep coming back to that that notion. Um I'm heavily inspired by my my friend, the great civil rights legend and hero and author Jonathan Kozel, you know, who who talks in you know urge about urgency and you know, you're only seven once. And saying manana, or we'll get to it next year, or maybe we'll consider that um when you have the opportunity to do the right thing right in front of you, I think is you know a serious decision that you that one one should make. And I think that a lot of a lot of what we do as as educators um could benefit from subtraction more than you know, addition or multiplication. Um a lot of this stuff is a lot is simpler than we think it is. You know, how do we make this the best seven hours of a kid's life? Is there some way to lower the level of antagonism between adults and children? Is there a way that we could behave more collegially? Um could could I you know if if I see myself um in more of a carceral role of a prison guard than of a teacher, maybe I've made a vocational error. Um you know, when every new technology comes along, we're concerned about cheating. Why are we concerned about cheating? I'm never concerned about cheating. I I know students' voice, and we have a climate of respect and and trust, um, then then cheating is not an issue. We don't, you know, we don't have to continuously update the don't copy that floppy poster in the classroom. Um so uh you know I think a lot of stuff just gets it gets back to you know um schools have an obligation to introduce children to things they don't yet know they love. The best thing we could do is as teachers is find ways for them to spend as much time as possible in the company of interesting adults. And I I just know personally, I do nutty stuff like voluntarily teach 247th graders for an entire day and then do it the same thing with eighth graders the next day. And um, no one has to confiscate phones. And you know, I worked in a prison for teenagers for three and a half years. We didn't have a single kid who had to leave the classroom for discipline reasons. Um because I walk in with an open mind and an open heart and say, hi, I'm Gary, we've got stuff to do. And um I don't ever worry about classroom management because I never walk into a classroom feeling like I need to manage it. And that and that's not being a Pollyanna, um, but I start from that default. I know sometimes you have to intervene in some way, and some kids are more damaged than others, and often often the culture is toxic, so you have to you know do some remediation to make your classroom safe within that toxic culture. Um but like I said, a lot of this is just it just comes down to you know, is it is it good for kids? And and and related to that is um good teacher working conditions are good student learning conditions. So if it's good for kids, it's good for teachers, if it's good for teachers, it's good for kids.

SPEAKER_00 8:25

It really resonates with me what you say about being more subtractive. Schools just seem to always want to add more things and we never take anything away. And then pretty soon the DAC is uh the deck the deck is stacked pretty full. You quoted somewhere, I think it's Marvin Minsky saying something like, you know, it it's not if you have a problem, you just need to find the right person to solve it. I think that was something along those lines. If uh when you think about a school, uh what who's the person that you think has the most influence over these things you're talking about? What level? Are we talking the classroom teacher, the principal, the superintendent? Where would you sort of plug in at what level the the the necessary mindset shift to change to change a school?

SPEAKER_01 9:11

The Minsky quote is i is interesting because it comes out of the context of comes from the context of we were really blessed to have you know the father of artificial intelligence, one of the smartest people of the 20th century, um come to constructing modern knowledge, the summer institute I run for educators, I think 10 or 11 times, where he just said, I just want to sit in a room and talk to anyone about anything they want to talk about. And it was often hilarious and radical. And um, and no one ever felt stupid being around one of the smartest living scientists. Um and he was sort of a little more melancholy in the last year or two that he was with us, and he was getting up there in age, and his health wasn't great. And someone asked him the question of, you know, how do you solve a really hairy problem? And he was saying, well, you know, he was saying things like, Well, I always knew I could get von Neumann or Oppenheimer or Seymour Papert on the phone. Um, and then he said, Um, don't worry about the problem, find the right person. You know, seek access to expertise was the answer there. And he also said kind of tangentially, when someone asked him a question about fixing schools, he said, I never needed to give that much thought because I knew I could always call Seymour, meaning Seymour Papert, who was my colleague and friend. Um, so that's a different question from who has the magic answer in a school. And I I think, you know, if you think back to your favorite memories of school, whether it was the teacher who ran dance parties or introduced you to gardening, or just you know, this sort of stuff that humanized them and and made you want to show up, um, they were sharing their passion and expertise for something, whether or not it was in the curriculum. And and I think we ought to look for those opportunities to humanize the environment, to free ourselves from the morbidly obese curriculum. You know, going back to our previous question, um, you know, every time some wise guy has a bright idea about what every child should be taught, a music teacher dies. Um, you know, and some of those are great ideas, but we ought to rack we ought to recognize that like there are consequences of these actions. As soon as you say every kid should learn X, you know instrumental music disappears, um, or things that matter to a lot of kids. Um, and so I I don't have a specific answer there, but I think we need to be thinking about this in terms of communities of practice. I I had the great luxury a couple weeks ago of amidst all this Michigas in the world, spending seven days in the the uh Gulf of whatever it is, um, on a cruise ship with a hundred of the world's leading jazz musicians. And I've been fortunate enough in my life to know most of the important progressive educators who have been alive during my career and worked with most of them. And um and my my other hat is hanging out with the world's best jazz musicians. And to see 78-year-old musical legends at the top of their game getting up at nine o'clock in the morning to see a 20-year-old perform, or watching 18-year-old Brandon Goldberg sitting on the deck in the dark at 2 a.m. talking with Kenny Washington, who's considered one of the leading authorities on jazz history and drumming, um, and exchanging ideas and loving on one another in an environment completely absent of competition, with a shared commitment to excellence, with with an abiding faith and desire and need for what they do to continue. I I wonder how many of our colleagues know what that looks or sounds or feels or tastes like. You know, I I was talking with the the great singer Kurt Elling the other night, and I said, I feel sorry for people who who have never been reduced to tears by one note played on a saxophone. Um and this is all just ways of being human and sort of you know elevating humanity. And and I think if teachers recognize that stuff and they they can find the talent in their children, and I often say that school has an obligation to introduce children to things they don't yet know they love, and then create the context in which they could be maybe good at something, um, I think it would it would make matters a lot better. I you know, I if you if you see some of these young musicians I know, um forget the the veterans, the legends, you know, this this 18-year-old, um, who's a freshman at Juilliard, he's been touring the world for a few years, he's got three records out. What he knows is extraordinary. Not just what he knows, but what he can do, which is even more important, and the thousands of pieces of music and the remarkable technical fluency. And um, and and those were the kinds of things we saw when we started going to maker fairs 15 years ago, where you know, you encountered these kids who could do who had all this technological wizardry, who could do these incredibly inventive, clever things, and and then their parents would take us aside and say, yeah, and every night we cry over math worksheets. And look what my kid's capable of doing. And how come no one gives a damn? And how come this isn't part of their educational diet? And that was the impetus for us writing Invent2Learn was to build a bridge between this informal learning community and and the formal schools and and share with both communities that there was uh there was knowledge that again that had been written down, that experiences we had all had as shared as a culture that we could learn from that would inform both the informal and the formal and create an environment that was a better place for kids to learn.

SPEAKER_00 15:03

Can we talk a bit about Seymour Pappert? Um I'm just so intrigued by this combination of constructionism as an educational philosophy and computing. Um, and this idea that the computer is this tool not to sort of promote things we already know how to do or create efficiency, but to reveal and discover. And how did you come to be Papert's colleague and friend and how he influenced your own thinking? Maybe you just introduce my listener to Pappert in general and not many people know him.

SPEAKER_01 15:40

Um yeah, I'll try to try to answer both questions. I'll I'll introduce you to Pappert and then I'll um tell you how I came to meet him.

SPEAKER_00 15:48

Sorry for my double-neckered questions here.

SPEAKER_01 15:50

No, that's fine. Uh and I'm like a free I'm a random access guy, so me trying to keep the two thoughts in my head at the same time is a is a good challenge. Um Seymour Pappert was born in South Africa. He was a white man born in South Africa. Um, his father was an entomologist, studied bugs, I think the TC fly in particular. He was a gifted mathematician, um, earned a couple PhDs in mathematics. In the late 40s, early 50s, he was a dissident with the African National Congress and actually had to flee South Africa for his own safety, um, and found his way to Europe, where he ended up working with Jean Piaget to help Piaget understand how children construct mathematical knowledge. And and not long after that, got invited to MIT to teach. And with with Marvin Mitzke formed the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, which eventually became the Logo Laboratory. And it was during that time um artificial intelligence research was based on trying to understand how humans learn in order to teach machines how to learn and think. And it was very deeply connected to Piagetian ideas of knowledge being a consequence of experience, that um experience is much more vital to learning than instruction. And um and came out of the sort of progressive brew of that era of civil rights and anti-war and women's rights and voting rights. Um and um in 1966-67, Seymour and Cynthia Solomon and Wally Fertzik began creating Logo, which was the first programming language for children. In 1970, 71, they published an article called 20 Things to do with a computer. That um if schools are looking for a tech plan today, most of them haven't satisfied the 20 things that were suggested in 1971. And they weren't mere speculation. In fact, the paper says um more than half of these things have already been done in elementary school classrooms more than a half century ago. Um and Pappert was the remarkable combination of um theoretician and gifted mathematician, except rather than saying, I'm good at math, math is important, I love math, you should do what I do, and you should learn it the way I did, and we should get tough and make sure that this is rigorous so kids can learn like I do. Um, Heme was genuinely intrigued by learning differences and why other people didn't love what he loved as much as he did, and why all the attempts to get kids to be good at math were failing. And suggested that rather than find tricks to coerce and dishonestly trick kids into um learning something that they find irrelevant and noxious, that we needed to invent a mathematics that they could love. Recognizing that the world was changing, that even a National Council teachers mathematics in 89 said that half of mathematics has been invented since World War II as a result of both computation, the social sciences demand for number. And not only can't we find any of that reflected in the current curriculum, you can't even find the right symbol for multiplication and division. Um and so creating creating logo was a way to start thinking about creating a math land, establishing a mathland where children would learn mathematics as naturally and as fluently as they learn natural language, that it would have meaning, it would have purpose, it would have function, it would have joy and beauty. That he used the analogy of no one says to a child in Paris, you don't have a head for French. They're immersed in a culture where French is being spoken all the time and where it has power and meaning and significance and utility. And the computer could be a math land where children can be mathematicians rather than being taught math. There were three logo conferences at MIT that were giant international events in 84, 85, 86. Um, and I got attracted to educational computing as a young educator, someone who had had a terrible schooling experience, but found a computer as kind of an interesting intellectual laboratory and vehicle for self-expression that helped me feel smart and capable and I could become obsessed with. So in public school in New Jersey in the 70s, when I became a teacher, um, I got interested in educational computing because um it's where the most radical, wisest educators were. They were the folks who, you know, held hands around the Pentagon to levitate it 3,000 feet in the air and rid it of its evil spirits during Vietnam and worked on you know at Highlander Folk School and were involved in the civil rights movement and women's rights movement and such. Um and they were some of the smartest people I'd ever witnessed in any any capacity. And I just decided I wanted more of that. And I'm often introduced as a student of Seymour Patts, but I I like to joke that on several occasions I was rejected as a student. Um we only ever we only ever worked together. In fact, Seymour worked for me more often than I worked for him. Um, but I'm incredibly indebted to the couple of decades we got to spend together. And my his final major institutional research project was the subject of my doctoral dissertation, which consisted of us creating a high tech, multi age, um, project based alternative learning environment inside a prison for teenagers in Maine where kids were. Able to work five hours a day uninterrupted on a personally meaningful project. And we we set aside all the nonsense of school and tried to create an environment where kids can learn. Where Seymour said explicitly at the beginning, let's see if we can go into this place where Amnesty International is accusing the state of torturing children and create an environment that the best private schools are jealous of. And we did it in a portable classroom with a couple of crazy volunteers and a lot of naivete and really good instincts and experience of working with kids and computers and other materials. And like I said, in three and a half years, we didn't have a single kid who had to leave the classroom for discipline reasons. We had kids who were abject school failures, who hadn't been in school since they were in the fifth or sixth grade. You know, I'm a white kid from suburban New Jersey. I didn't know there were kids who dropped out at 10. That didn't even occur to me. Kids who had lost a parental lottery, you know, they had an IEP, you know, 50 feet long, who were unbelievably brilliant. Um and so we had kids who literally spent a couple months with us and went to college afterwards. Um so again, you know, come back to the issue of evidence. I have a PhD, I wrote 450 pages about this work. Um, there's not a lot of people interested in that evidence.

SPEAKER_00 23:13

But I think you're yo, what you're describing, that that model of true progressive education, improvising, instincts, adapting. I think that scares, that idea scares a lot of people in education, school leaders, because they can't be sure what's going to happen. You can't you can't control what's going to happen.

SPEAKER_01 23:34

Well, they can control what's going to happen otherwise. It'll be whatever they define as failure. Um, you know, the the thing that the thing that surprised me that that makes me kind of optimistic and and allows me to continue to do the work is that we went into this incredibly nutty situation. And and it's kind of a funny story because Seymour was being approached by the governor of Maine, Angus King, who's now a U.S. senator, and um about this project. And the governor was saying, we want you to create a model of what learning could look like in the future. What we didn't realize was that he had a he was in trouble because the state was torturing children. Um and he needed something to sort of distract people and thought maybe we could help. Um now we went into this really hostile, you know, awful environment and met just kids. They were just kids. And um I I thought from the beginning no one's gonna believe any of this, no one's gonna be interested. God, it's gonna be hard to convince them. And and a couple of things happened. One, while the the prison side of the system never embraced what we were doing, or only did it begrudgingly, or for the wrong reasons, um, it didn't take very long before this the mental health professionals in the state to say, oh, what they're doing is exactly right. That that talk therapy doesn't work with with adolescents, doing does. Which again is related to the the the dichotomy that Papert created between instructionism and constructionism. That in instructionists believe that you come up with a new, you write a new textbook, you adopt a new curriculum, you administer a new test, you teach louder, you reduce class size, you expand class size, you you know, change it, um, that that learning is a result of having been taught. And constructionists believe that it's that the learner is central to the process. The knowledge is socially constructed by the learner or with others. Um so the mental health people became our greatest fans. That was one thing that that was really lovely. The second thing was um I often refer to the prison environment. It was like Gilligan's Island. Um, we had visitors nearly every day. And it was it was like you know, Gilligan's Island in that the visitors arrive, but the you know, the castaways never get off the island. So the kids never left, but we had visitors all the time. And the most amazing thing happened, Dan, when someone walked into this, you know, kind of off-putting environment, to say the least, and was greeted by a 12-year-old kid full of energy who said, Hey, I'm Billy, you want to see what I'm working on? And then Billy would talk to them for 45 minutes about the project he's been involved in for three months. Um, not a single one of those people ever left thinking anything other than, of course, this is what we should be doing for kids. And then the pathology got even crazier because then they would have to rationalize why they weren't doing it. And then they would start inventing all kinds of theories like, well, these are secret geniuses. Right? And I was like, oh, the secret genius theory. Now, the genius of Seymour Pappert was when I discussed the secret genius theory with him. Like, you know, that's why these kids get into trouble because they're secret geniuses, and you know, school can't contain their giant brains and you know that kind of stuff. They're diabolical, you know. Um Seymour said, well, yeah, they're right. They are secret geniuses. Um, but in kind of a way that like we're all secret geniuses. That it wasn't quite so it wasn't quite so diabolical. And and I'll I'll say just one more thing about these kids because I think about them all the time. They, you know, most of them had lost a parental lottery. Um, but I was really touched by and moved by how their kindness and their humanity. Um, we had a couple kids who were dangerous, but by and large, you know, I don't know if you have kids, I have three three adult children. And, you know, uh, you know, you probably had the experience where you buy donuts for guests and your kids ate them all, or they took two and someone else doesn't get one. Or um you know, I got into the habit of if I drove by a donut shop on the way to work and I would have bought donuts to share with my colleagues, why wouldn't I share them with my classmates, with my students? And and I just remember how you know the kids would make sure if another kid was somewhere else that they saved a donut for them. And they would write a thank you letter to us for buying donuts, or um, you know, the kid who came to class agitated one morning, and I turned to my colleague John Stetson and I said, It's the kid was hungry and something bad had happened. That I said, Go get the kid a sandwich somewhere, go find, you know, whatever you have to do. And you know, this teenage girl wrote a letter thanking us for buying her a sandwich and said, you know, you saved my life. And that could have been over overdramatic. It could have also been true. And it wasn't that big a deal to get a hungry kid a sandwich.

SPEAKER_00 28:52

You form partnerships with these kids. Sounds like, you know, it's you sort of flattened the traditional hierarchy that we think of in the classroom. Is that a fair fair way to put it?

SPEAKER_01 29:04

Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, when I you know, the other great thing that I got to do, and this is the 35th anniversary, I I led professional development in the first schools in the world where every kid had a laptop. And I arrived at these, I arrived at this place called Methodist Ladies College in Australia, and these kids were dressed as Victorian, you know, dolls, and um teachers wore name badges, and um the the um publicity what's the the the sh the public relations company Hill and Nolten that was at the time representing both the CIA and Saddam Hussein was representing the school to promote the work we were doing together. And I was just like, oh, this is I I went and got a yo-yo. I mean I started doing yo-yo tricks while I was teaching because I just needed to like cool things out a little bit. The you know, the the hierarchy was kind of nutty. And and you can tell in you know places when I go into classrooms, I can't I'd like to be called Gary. It's uh unless the school has some deep-seated prohibition on that. Um, you know, I mentioned I mentioned you know teaching 248th graders, and at the end of his day, and we were in a terrible environment. If you asked me what I want to teach 248th graders every day, I would happily do it if I could have invoked if I could design the room. Uh, you know, this the physical space was working against me. I was like in an auditorium where kids were behind and under things and on a stage, and it would just become unwieldy. But you know, we were we were engaged in um number theory and physical computing and some stuff for an entire day. And at the end of the day, a couple kids asked if they could take a selfie with me. And it was the first time where I realized they had cell phones. Um and you know, it hadn't been a problem all day because they were engaged in something that they found valuable and interesting, and maybe because I don't suck. Um, and you know, it was lovely. They wanted to take a cell phone photo, uh selfie with me, and they just took their phone out and they did what they did with it, and it wasn't disruptive or anything else. And it was like, oh yeah, right. We can, you know, we we don't have to go into classroom like it's a like it's a war zone, like it's a battlefield where it's us versus them. We like I said, you can go in and say, you know, hey, yeah, we've got stuff to do, let's let's give it a go.

SPEAKER_00 31:22

Yeah, like many teachers and parents, of which I'm both, I read Jonathan Heights, The Anxious Generation. Um fascinating book. Um I know that uh this is something you've had a lot of thoughts on. Um you recently wrote, you published 20 reasons to resist cell phone bans and you're putting on seminars for people. What I'm trying, I haven't found any school that's call that's courageous enough to have me do it.

SPEAKER_01 31:51

Why why do you think that is? I don't know. Because fear sells. I you know, the lemmings, I you know, it's that's the that you know, one of the things that really disappoints me is that schools that have good enrollment and happy parents and happy kids will eagerly embrace bad ideas if someone else is doing them. There's this crazy FOMO that's you know, and look, look, if you're you know Jefferson Davis middle school and your community decides for whatever reason you want to ban cell phones, okay, fine. Okay, fine. Um, but you don't have a right morally or legally to pass legislation that makes a decision for everyone else. It's on the wrong side of history, it's a bad idea. I I'm old enough to remember the last two or three cell phone bands. I'm old enough to remember channel one. Do you remember channel one?

SPEAKER_00 32:47

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 32:48

Right? I grew up in New Jersey. You know, channel one may have may or may not have been a good idea, you know, for those who don't know what it was. It was, you know, um you could get a free TV and satellite dish. You get a free TV for every classroom and some VCRs and a satellite dish to get programming into classrooms and for free. And in return, kids had to watch a 12-minute news program that had two commercials in it. Um well, again, commercialization, you know, bias. By all accounts, the news show was pretty good. Um and I just know that when I was working in New Jersey, uh the schools in Newark were desperate to get this hardware. And they were cool with the Faustian bargain. But then along came lily white affluent suburbs that pushed for legislation to make this impossible. And I think this is just another version of it. And when your kids have the latest iPhone and a burner phone, and a laptop, and an iPad, and a shoe that can call a taxi. And um, that when you pass this legislation, it's it's fundamentally a tax on poor children. And it, you know, there's there's the old the old political adage of you know, punching a hippie that no one ever pays a political price. You know, no Democrat ever pays a political price for punching a hippie. No schools ever pay a price for being mean to children. Um, but I don't think this ages well, and I think the consequences of it are quite severe. And Jonathan Haidt is now also saying he's not he's not hiding that he wants all the technology out of classrooms. And um that's a real problem. And you know, I come from another approach. You know, I'm running an event in Ridge Amelia in April. Um, you know, the probably the most progressive construct constructivist, learner-centered, beautiful, artistic, subtle, complex, humane approach to education in the world comes from Ridge Real Amelia. And they say explicitly it's irresponsible to build pens around children, to create an artificial wall between them and their world, that it's our job as parents and educators to find constructive ways to engage kids in their world and to look for opportunities to leverage these fabulous new technologies. You know, Papert said once, everyone needs a prosthetic. Both of us are wearing eyeglasses. No one accuses us of cheating. Um, we use technology every day to go about our lives. You know, I recently tangled with some schools that are banning YouTube. And I get it, YouTube is full of shit. And I'm and and I watched my six-year-old granddaughter spend way too much time watching mindless and garbage. Um, that said, I don't know about you, but I couldn't go a single day without learning something from YouTube. And the consequences of severing a connection to that would be really dramatic. And I'm I'm not going to tolerate it for myself. Why would I ask of it for somebody else? Um so you know, coming back to Pappert, when when he was talking about a laptop for every kid in Maine, he gave a great speech where he began by saying, you know, people are asking, you know, why should every kid in Maine have a laptop? And he said, Well, because I do. And I couldn't do one one thousandth percent of the intellectual work that I'm engaged in without it. And the bigger question is, why would it even occur to you to deprive kids of such intellectual tools in laboratories and vehicles for self-expression? So, I mean, I I I think coming back to what we talked about about amnesia early on and about standing on the shoulders of giants and respecting our elders and our own community of practice and the lessons we've learned as educators, um, I am quite reluctant in general. My default position is not to take a lot of pedagogical advice from a no-show business school professor. Um, you know, I don't learn to teach from TED Talks either. And um, you know, the question I ask a lot of people who are excited about Jonathan Haidt is I'd love to know which terror he has promised his publishers next. Um because he's making a killing, like, you know, $100,000 and up a speech for terrifying parents about phones. And and then there's all you know the safety stuff. And I mean, I wrote an article more than 20 years ago about my daughter was at you know, drama practice till 11 p.m. at the high school on a darkened campus, and she couldn't call home for a ride or or for help because the cell phones, the the the payphones at the time were locked for their safety, but the kids were allowed to wander around the campus. And I wrote an article 20 or 25 years ago about how you didn't have a right to endanger my child's safety. Um to just the simple stuff of I was at a conference and I found myself taking photos of a slide. And then I realized, well, why am I doing that? I may never look at that slide again. Maybe I will. Maybe I want to remember what they said. Um, but one, it didn't hurt anybody, two, it was convenient. Three, I think it's an act of curation. And that act of curation is a powerful learning tool as well, of making a decision of, hey, Dan is saying something I should pay attention to. And if going like this is the way for me to pay attention to that, that seems perfectly reasonable.

SPEAKER_00 38:32

You're talking a lot about technology used for education, which I think is maybe what you would categorize as different than ed tech, a word that you say is increasingly losing its meaning. What's your when you think back especially your early work? Oh, by the way, I should mention I so I grew up in Maine. My mom was a teacher in Maine, and in the 90s I remember the Every Child Laptop program. Uh it was, it was, I recall it being a success fondly. What what's your what what's your what are your thoughts on ed tech? Um maybe that's a pretty broad question, but particularly in the context of Papper's work and thinking about the the the visible learning power of a computer, and then all the other stuff we have at our fingertips in the classroom today.

SPEAKER_01 39:22

Um I'm confused, I'm saddened. Um look, going back to the late 70s, early 80s, Robert Taylor at Columbia University and others, he wrote a book called Computer in the Computers in the Classroom, Tool Tutor 2T, um, where he said that you know there were three ways in which you could use computers in the classroom. Um in my book, 20 things to do with the computer forward 50, I talked about how Papert said that the the computer can be used to benefit one of three constituent groups, the system, teachers, or learners, the greatest return on investment is learners. That's what I'm focused on, is is personal computing for the learner. Um, but we're not even having those discussions anymore. Now it's just anything that happens to plug in. And and it occurred to me in in some discussions I had last week that um, you know, if you're like the ed tech director at a school or in a district and your job is consumed with blocking things and confiscation, um, maybe you've made a vocational error. Um this the technology ought to be a way to give kids wings, to allow them to learn and do and make and invent and create in ways that were unimaginable even just a couple of years ago. And again, I've I've had enough experience to know what's possible. You know, I I've been playing with this idea of maybe we ought to have a rubric, uh, you know, a set of expectations as a teacher where given a prompt, um, you know, 10% of the kids are going to do something interesting, and 5% are gonna do something that you never saw before. Um, and that's the stuff that excites me when when kids do, how'd you figure that out? Where'd that idea come from? And uh that's that's what excites me, that's what gets me up in the morning. And um that's why I got interested in educational computing. You know, when when I was at the ISTE conference last year, um, this is an organization that I signed the charter for, um, that I keynoted their con the conference before it became ISTE when it was the National Educational Computing Conference, something I care deeply about. And someone asked me, you know, why are you here? And I said, um, in a rather cheeky way, I'm I'm here to represent the powerful ideas of the original landowners that I'm I'm not going to let it become meaningless. Um and and and we have there has been a shift in the language. It was originally educational computing, and computing is a verb, it's something you do. Um, and now it's kind of educational technology that becomes increasingly diminutive to be just ed tech or and and you know, there's always been a boat show aspect to it. That's fine. I'm not opposed to commerce. Um and we should recognize that it's not even driven by profits. I mean, when when I have my good liberal friend say to me, look at the boat show, you know, this is all about making a buck. If you add it up the revenue of all those companies, it doesn't do scrub daddy business or the sham wow. Um, it's still kind of it's it's infinitesimal. You know, I mean, there's pockets of people profiting from it, but that's not what it's about. It's it's more rooted in a lack, an absence of powerful ideas or a outmoded, unproductive vision of education, which is about efficiency and rationalizing costs and reducing the number of teachers because they're pesky and a pain in the ass, um, and want to get paid and fed and things. Um, and so if we could just come up with you know the right electronic flashcard system or you know, place where we you know strap the kids in, set the machine on stun, and come back for them in 12 years. Um and those sort of dystopian fantasies have existed forever. I mean, I I I I leafletted the predecessor to the ISTE conference in 1992 with an article called Integrated Learning Systems, the New Slavery, um, which which was that day's equivalent of everything that Sal Khan is pushing today. It was just in a different box, it was just in a different shape. And those those ideas. Coming back again to your initial question about amnesia, it's also funny how we forget our failures and how the people who get to set the agenda for education policy who demand evidence sit atop a mountain of serial failure.

SPEAKER_00 44:16

Yeah, I heard someone recently talking about the very same people who promised us personalized learning was going to change education are back. And now they're promising us that AI is going to, and I think that amnesia, that they're banking on that amnesia.

SPEAKER_01 44:36

You know, right. And there's two, there's two um I think there's two different kinds of people in that realm. There's, you know, I think Bill Gates means well. I actually give him the benefit of the doubt. Um, but he's no Seymour Papper. And the thing that I think differentiates the two of them is Gates has zero empathy. So we've seen play out a million times with Gates Foundation funding, um, where Gates Gates encounters a history writer, historian that he likes, and finds out that the guy wrote a curriculum. And instead of Bill Gates saying, Hey, teachers around the world, I think this is fabulous. And if you would like this guy's curriculum, I would be happy to pay for it and just and give it to you. What he does instead is he calls up governors and presidents and prime ministers and says, everyone should do this. And why can't everyone be like me? This is I like this thing. So therefore, I decree everyone should. Um, so that's well-meaning but misguided. And uh, you know, ask about the Philadelphia School of the Future sometime. You probably can't find a Wikipedia entry on it, but that was gonna be Microsoft's invention of education or anytime anywhere learning. Or I mean, there's been a lot of forays that have been just spectacular failures. Um and yet they and and then there's also related to that the idea that we're gonna use public treasure as a private play thing. Uh, you may have seen if you follow me on social media. I'm re I'm a big Adams family fan, and I'm I'm often um sharing video or a still of Gomez Adams blowing up his train set. And and the Zuckerberg Jobs, Gates, Height, Khan, Musk view of education reminds me of the blowing up the train set. Um, you know, the the public schools are this train set that the the Robert Barons can can use as their plaything, and they don't care if they blow it up. Um then there's the other folks who just hate to hold enterprise and hate civil servants and the the public comp the public good and the commonwealth. And um, you know, people have never liked school, but they always had affection for their kids' teacher. And what's happened clearly in the last 25 years is a really successful campaign that's undermined the public's confidence in their kids' teacher. And and that's why, you know, I asked, I I was at a reading a couple weeks ago with Chris Hayes of MSNBC, who's got the number one best-selling book, interestingly about attention. So there's overlap with height, but he doesn't prescribe everyone should take to the woods. Um and um and I asked him, I had 10 seconds with him, and I asked him a question, I've asked him on social media a million times, I've asked a million other journalists I rec respect. Um, why is there so little credible education journalism? And the education journalism that does exist is just stenography. I mean, they just reprint press releases or they quote each other. It's just laughable. Uh, you know, and these assumptions, you know, the reading crisis, and it whether you're on for or against, just the assumption that there's a literacy crisis does never get challenged. Um and I asked him why there's so little credible education journalism, given the expenditure and how many people are involved in it. Um and and he said because it ceased to become a partisan issue. And he's absolutely right about that. And in our kumbaya politically naive world of let's all find balance and the center and hold hands, um, that's not a good outcome. Because what it's resulted in for folks like you is um it's not just the right that hate you, now the left hates you too. And the rise of explicit, you know, direct explicit instruction and systemic phonics, um, that's now the plaything of the of the NPR latte sipping crowd as much as it is mom's for liberty. And that that and I've been I I don't want to say I've told you so, but you could read anything I've written over the last 30 years, and I said that was coming. Um and and that's that's a problem, and I don't know how we what we do about that. Because when you say to the liberals, well, um, did you learn to read that way? Did your kids learn to read that way? They say, Well, we love our children. And we have books. Well, so they don't call for getting books in the classroom, or the fact that my friend Rebecca Constantino has to run a charity that's constantly at war with LA Unified, where she's building libraries and schools because they've been under federal court decree for decades of depriving kids access to books. Um, we don't we don't get kids books. What we do instead is turn reading into this mechanized, joyless pursuit that ensures that fewer and fewer kids have access to powerful ideas. So the right likes it because they believe in the literal interpretation of text and they want compliance and they don't want kids dealing with you know pesky ideas. And the left the left is genuinely concerned about other people's children not learning to read without recognizing that um someone stole their books.

SPEAKER_00 50:32

The joy of exploring literature has been reduced to passages.

SPEAKER_01 50:37

Um and and incidentally, this isn't unique to here. Um I was working in a school in India in last spring. I mean, this is a school that like flew me to India. So I mean you're like they're a little nutty to begin with. Um and and I was talking about interdisciplinary learning and projects and computers and and and and I like to work in every classroom and and do things with kids and their teachers so they can see what's possible and create models of what could be. And it occurred to me that there were no books anywhere. And when I asked about it, they said, oh yeah, well, we don't have textbooks. And I said, Yeah, yeah, I get I get the you don't have textbooks. Although they did have tens of thousands of PowerPoint slides created by their teachers and you know, a billion worksheets created by the teacher. And somehow they got the idea that because they didn't buy them from somebody, it was somehow better. Um, but but it was the exact same educational model. Um I'm like, no, you missed the point on that. But but the larger point I wanted to make was it had never occurred to me that there was zero tradition in Indian education of children reading book books. That the idea that you could read Bridget Terabiffio or The Invention of Hugo Cabray and make the entire curriculum unify around this piece of literature. I was playing tennis yesterday here in Torrance. There are a bunch of moms playing pickleball, annoying the shit out of me next to me, and um, you know, chatting on chatting about you know gouging their their tenants and you know what not paying taxes and whatever other things that concern pickleball players. Um but but I heard two of the women explaining to a third what 1984 was. And like so, you know, I'm not sure I read all the assigned novels in school, but I like I I I figured out a way to get over. Uh, you know, I I knew about them. I you know, I carried them for a while. Um, and and it would it turned out that this school in India was like fascinated by the idea that you could build a curriculum around literature. You know, and India has rich literary culture and stuff. Just schools had always been based on you read some tiny atomized passage of stuff and then you answer a question about it. Um, so again, it's sort of this idea of going into situations, you know, eyes wide open. And the other, the other, you know, if I have a superpower, it's I've been able to sort of see trends. And when when people say to me, well, you know, you know, well, what was the last time you were in a classroom? And and the answer is typically I'm in classrooms all the time. But if we were really to get to the heart of the question you just asked me, what you're really asking is why aren't you miserable like I am? Um, you know, why aren't you being a martyr? And the fact that I'm in lots of classrooms lets me see patterns and trends emerging and um and a commonality of experiences. And by and large, if you blindfold me and drop me in a classroom, and I don't care private school, public school, almost anywhere in the world, I couldn't tell you where I was because there's kind of a sameness that happens. Um and and I've been you know fighting for a long time against against that um homogeneity, against that sameness, recognizing that you know this is a fundamentally human pursuit and it should it should have diversity in it.

unknown 54:16

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 54:17

Well did we talk about anything relevant?

SPEAKER_00 54:21

We talked about it's all relevant, Gary, all of that. I I I just I would just want to wrap up here on books, though. I I heard you say recently that you kind of you want to start a progressive ed book club and on the subject of books. What can you give my listeners a couple recommendations? Books that can help us move forward on some of these issues, a couple that have shaped the way you think.

SPEAKER_01 54:46

Um Seymour Papert's book, The Children's Machine, which was his second of three books about learning. Um a lot of people go back to his original book, Mindstorms, Children's Computers and Powerful Ideas, but I think the children's machine is richer, um particularly for educators. You know, Seymour wrote three books that are essentially fractal images of each other. The first one was for academics, the second one was for educators, the third one was for parents. So I think the children's machine is great. Um I think Frank Smith's book, The Book of Learning and Forgetting, is fantastic. I think Seymour Sarison's book and What Do You Mean by Learning? Um, David Perkins' um book, Making Learning Whole, which is a really practical way of doing the kinds of things that uh that I espouse and believe in of anytime you want to teach something to someone, you should find a junior version of the whole game that they can play. That if you're you go to a seven-year-old who's got a baseball uniform on, they don't say I'm learning to hit or throw or catch or um or memorize rules or learn statistics. They're they say I'm playing baseball. They're playing a even if there's a T and a wiffle ball, they're they're playing a junior version of the whole game. So if you want to teach kids number theory or cellular automata or synthetic biology or about the constitution, figuring out what's the junior version of the whole game they can play, I think, is really practical. I'm a giant fan of the Regiomilia approach, Carlo Rinaldi's most recent book about reomelia. I can't think of the title off the top of my head, it's fantastic. Um, the Bible of that is called Um The Hundred Languages of Children. I Love Everything by Herb Cole, Deborah Meyer's book, um In Schools We Trust is Important, or The Power of Their Ideas. Um my favorite Jonathan Kozel book isn't Savage Inequalities, it's it's um ordinary resurrections, children in years of hope. And that's the one that made me sort of philosophical and theological in this stuff about um you know Kozel said before in public um on the Plessy versus Ferguson centennial um at Harvard that this is a I'm gonna paraphrase, but this is a how do you say he said, you know, I go to Congress and I say, you know, if you invest in Head Start, you save seven times more in prison. And you know, if you if you give the kid a hot lunch, then you know they'll do better on their math scores. Um if you have books in the classroom, their literacy rates will go up. And he said, you know, these are the this is the thinking of Dickensian shopkeepers. And what we really need to focus on, this is a little girl who is given to us by God and she deserves to have some fun before she dies. And it is kind of like hitting you over the head with a sledgehammer. But um, yeah, like that that's the point. You know, let's let's let's create surplus value, let's leave the campsite better than we found it. And if I sounded uh melancholy or pessimistic in this conversation, I I've been joking recently that um I I I think my curse was that I got to work with brilliant, smart, caring, powerful people early in my career, and it's been downhill since. Um you know, uh you know when you start with, you know, you start with Seymour Papert and um you know David Thornburg and a lot of just endless and endless heroes and shiroes, teachers, just Marion Rosen, Maria Mee, you know, people, anonymous people doing brilliant things in classrooms. Um, and you see my Fran Hammocks, when you see what's possible, um then it's it's hard to see what's happening and not want to scream, why don't you do the right thing? And I'm fascinated by folks like myself who saw what was possible, who did the right thing, who for whatever reason have decided that they they can let go of that. Why? And I'm I don't have a great explanation for it. Um pre-pandemic, I wrote an article called Time for Optimism. I thought there was there was a lot of reasons to think that really good stuff could happen. And you know, we go back to the robber barons, they all send their kids to schools like we would want to work in or send our kids to. Elon Musk, Sal Kahn, Gates, they they they you know, they're big fans of progressive education for their children. Um, you know, I I tangled with Sal Kahn once, he was talking about, you know, why do we have to have bell schedules and bifurcated subjects and silos and you know, why can't kids be working on projects? And I said, hey Sal, I got a rental car out front. Hop in, I'll take you to the future. Um, you know, that with no sense that there are schools doing this, there are folks like you fighting every day to make it a reality. Um and and so like a lot of what I'm doing now is is playing for posterity of making sure people don't forget. You know, I'm I'm running the Papert archives because MIT, where he spent 50 years, doesn't seem to care. Um, and I'm still collecting videos and texts that that people have never seen that that are important to keep alive. I um I've been scanning books by and getting rights of progressive education works and things to make sure that um these ideas don't disappear. Because I, you know, I I I joke about the 20 things to do with a computer forward 50 book that I that I put together a couple years ago. You know, that it's gonna be huge a hundred years from now. Um to to to leave leave the campsite better than we found it, to leave some historical record that um though those of us who knew better tried to do better. And that hopefully that'll inspire others to to do the right thing going forward.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:14

Well, Gary, thanks so much. Uh I look forward to linking so much in the show notes so listeners can check out the books and resources you talked about and just think. And I appreciate you just getting on here. I can see why you're a big jazz fan.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:28

It's uh there's a lot of Yeah, no, it's I it's like that's it. I've and I couldn't figure out, you know, I live in Los Angeles, which is largely a cultural desert. I couldn't figure out why I've been going to three or four concerts a week the last couple weeks, and then someone said to me, You idiot, it's Black History Month. So apparently this is this is the month where all the jazz is. I actually had to choose between things this week. Um and then there'll be nothing for another 11 months. So thank God for Black History Month. Yes, at least at least that happened. Yeah, culture month. At least that happened. Um, but yeah, I mean, uh I it I've learned so much, including I'll let's you know, I'll leave you with this last idea that came from the great saxophonist Jimmy Heath. And and he said, what was good is good. And I think educators would be um well served by making a really clear, mindful distinction between timeless and old. We should abandon old ideas and old practices, but we should keep the timeless ones. And the stuff that I'm doing with AI and kids is based on work that my colleagues were doing in the 1960s. The timeless activities that now we can supercharge. That, you know, math land has never been more possible than it is today. You look at what Stephen Wolfram has just released with their computational notebook assistant, where a kid can ask the computer to solve any problem. And it will solve it and model it and show all work and explain how it did it. And that becomes a springboard to ask a deeper question, test a larger hypothesis, you know, learn something new. That if we make simple things easy to do, we make complexity possible. So that distinction between timeless and old I think is really important. And we should really embrace the timeless stuff and then see the technological progress that emerges through the lens of how will that allow us to get closer to what we had hoped had been possible? Um, how will it allow us to leverage our human potential? I mean, I'll just make one one quick plug. This is a proof, but we're we're we're releasing a book next week called The Learner's Apprentice. What's the subtitle? Um AI and the amplification of human creativity. Ken Khan's an old friend and colleague who was part of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab in the early 70s, where um they referred to the computer as the children's machine. And they were genuinely concerned with um how children learn in order to teach computers how to learn. And he's had a really rich career in research and academic roles since. And about 14, 16 months ago, he started posting really cool, complex, interesting things he was doing with the new generative AI tools that weren't, you know, write me a five-paragraph essay about penguins. But it was, can you make a piece of software that does the following? Or could could we create an adventure story where we're living in ancient Greece and we have to grapple with you know forms of democracy, democratic governance? Or and um I said, hey, you want to write a book? And we're we're publishing it in the next couple weeks. And I think it's a game changer. It's not just a don't copy that floppy, oh my god, how to catch kids cheating, ethics around AI. It's hundreds of examples of ridiculously cool things you can do. Not just because it's cool to do cool things, but because when you do cool things, there's a neat phenomena associated with it that inspires you want to learn more. And and so I like I said, I looked at this AI stuff, and some of it is trashy and misguided and badly designed. And well, but is there some stuff that lets me get closer to Mathland? Um, and absolutely there is. And and so that's that excites me, and I think that we ought to be looking for those kinds of opportunities and and recognizing that you know one of my favorite tweets ever was I'm trying to decide which should I ignore more, Google Buzz or Google Wave. And I don't remember what either of them did, but I can assure you, neither like no one remembers what they did. Um but my intuition was like, I've seen this schlock before, and this isn't something I need to spend any time worrying about. And I was right, it went away. Um AI is not going away, phones aren't going away. And um I think the affordances are extraordinary, and I'm I'm kind of in general a technological optimist that it's the only way we're gonna solve increasingly intractable problems. And we so um we should find ways to engage kids with the stuff in in ways that enhances our humanity, allows them to go further and they could have ever gone on their own.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:51

And you ended on optimism, Gary.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:55

I'm uh I'm a rainbow dressed up in a something.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:01

Thank you so much. This was so this was so fun. I knew it would be. I just told them your personality you write with. I was like, this is gonna be a good one.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:09

Well, since we're since we're apparently neighbors of some sort, we should actually meet each other one day. Oh, yeah, absolutely.