<html><head><style type="text/css"></style></head><body><div style="font-family:times new roman,new york,times,serif;font-size:12pt"><div>Heh heh, yes your comment about smog is quite a digression (because Henry Ford is just a stand in), but it does underline the huge qualitative difference between knowledge and outlook (a society with a much stronger outlook would choose to make vehicles that didn't generate smog and be willing to pay the whole price for it). Sounds like an interesting farmer, but one would expect that he would use his larger perspectives to be more successful (a digression also I confess). I pretty much agree that one of the purposes of schools is to exceed the parental context when that is below threshold (not so easy even when the school is terrific -- cf studies of "blue collar culture inertia" in the UK). I think there is a bit of an analogy to books and other materials. If there are a reasonable number of books in a freely available school library then a lot of progress can be made without personal ownership, in part because when a child wants to read for any reason, they have a good chance of finding a book without having to put off the impulse for too long. Seymour Papert observed that a school which had a special room in which the five pencils and the only writing materials available could only be used for a few hours a week, was not a viable model for pencils or books or for computers. A more complex question has to do the the customs of subsistence cultures which do a lot of sharing of scarce materials. Even though those might be the customs, it could be that that depth of sharing is simply a dead end -- this argument has been made strongly wrt the enormous change in outlook from the Middle Ages to the 17th century that was brought by both abundant and privately read printed books. I'm more on the side of this argument than against it. Being able to form your own point of view outside the prevailing social context seems very worthwhile to me, even with its dangers -- this is a very large part of the difference between traditional cultures which are good at coping but not good at progressing, and the much rarer cultures which have a sense that "normal" is not the same as "reality" and therefor it has the possibility of being changed for the better. </div><div style="font-family: times new roman,new york,times,serif; font-size: 12pt;"> Best wishes, Alan <div style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"><hr size="1">From: K. K. Subramaniam <subbukk@gmail.com> To: Alan Kay <alan.nemo@yahoo.com> Cc: iaep@lists.sugarlabs.org Sent: Thursday, July 2, 2009 6:12:02 AM Subject: Re: [IAEP] Comments on David Kokorowski, David Pritchard and "Mastering" Educational SW On Thursday 02 Jul 2009 5:19:58 pm Alan Kay wrote: > Knowledge - On the other hand, Henry Ford was not nearly as smart as > Leonardo, but was born at a very good time and in a good place, so he was > able to combine engineering and production inventions to make millions of > inexpensive automobiles. As I look out of my window at the smog hanging over the city, I wonder if this is really progress :-). But I digress .. > Being around adults who have interesting outlooks works the best for most > kids. This was the crux of the point that the farmer raised. He didn't want his kid associating with people whom he thought were ineffective as guides. BTW, his feedback was crucial in fixing some of the lacunae in his school and helped raise the bar. The kid is back in school and making good progress. > I was brought up on a farm (a somewhat unusual one), but the farms in the > region were not at all conducive for learning powerful outlooks, nor were > the schools particularly. However, my grandfather was "a writing farmer" > and had a huge library of books of all kinds in his farmhouse. Parents set a minimum bar. As I pointed out earlier, a school is relevant only to the extent that it can do better than that level; much better. > But, if I were trying to make things happen with IAEP, I would try to do > just a few main things, and one of them would be to make a > program/user-interface which could do a great job of teaching a child to > read and write their native language without requiring any more from the > adults around them than a little encouragement. This is exactly what we do (<a target="_blank" href="http://sikshana.blogspot.com">sikshana.blogspot.com</a>) but in a way that differs from Sugarlabs. Kids use computer as a tool to discover, to create, to simulate ideas; not as an appliance to be owned. Their projects are accumulated on a personal flash chip, but the tool itself is shared (and changes every year) and augments other learning aids in the schools. We don't know if this is the best way to use a computer. We started with this assumption and will tweak it as we learn more about its effectiveness. Subbu </div></div></div> </body></html>