[IAEP] changes in outlook with Sugar (was Re: Comments on David Kokorowski, David Pritchard and "Mastering" Educational SW)

[Tomeu Vizoso]

On Thu, Jul 2, 2009 at 13:49, Alan Kay<alan.nemo at yahoo.com> wrote:
[snip]
>
> 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. Part of the desired changes
> in outlook could be made part of the stories and other materials that the
> kid would encounter along the way (and part of the big change in outlook
> that we are a part of is fluent reading of non-story materials in general
> and about outlook changing ideas in particular).

Do you have already any vision about how to make that happen? I have
seen lately several people interested in working on better tools for
reading, may be a very interesting opportunity.

Regards,

Tomeu

> Best wishes,
>
> Alan
> ________________________________
> From: K. K. Subramaniam <subbukk at gmail.com>
> To: Alan Kay <alan.nemo at yahoo.com>
> Cc: iaep at lists.sugarlabs.org
> Sent: Wednesday, July 1, 2009 12:12:59 PM
> Subject: Re: [IAEP] Comments on David Kokorowski, David Pritchard and
> "Mastering" Educational SW
>
> On Wednesday 01 Jul 2009 9:03:26 am Alan Kay wrote:
>>Your last sentence is somewhat parallel to what many business types like to
>>say about how hard it is to measure Return On Investment for research
>>funding. But in the business case, this is actually a form of dissembling,
>>since an enormous percentage of all the GNP (and in fact GWP) comes
>> directly
>>as return from research.
> The top 10% of learners don't need school. The bottom 10% need more than a
> school. For the middle 80%, learning in school should be demonstrably better
> than that out of school. A school is relevant only if it can detect and weed
> out contexts that hinder learning (or have nothing to do with learning) as
> quickly as possible. Otherwise people will vote with their feet.
>
> In one of our local public school parents meet, a poor farmer challenged,
> "Why
> should I retain my kid in this school? Can you show me one student who
> studied
> here and became somebody in life? In the field, I can teach him to raise at
> least one crop a year". For him, there was lot more of physics in the farm
> than in school textbooks.
>
> Subbu
>
>
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>