tablets in Ethiopia: learning vs teaching

Mary Lou Jepsen, Alan Kay and Nicholas Negroponte unveil the $100 Laptop. 
(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This research has been widely shared but it is worth reading these two articles originally published in the MIT Technology Review as well as the full-length video of Nicholas Negroponte and others. I have also included a link to the recent EmTech 2012 Conference video with some transcribed snippets of Negroponte presenting at the recent EmTech 2012 Conference.  (Additional conference videos at site. )

Nicholas Negroponte believes that kids can learn without being taught, something he learned while conducting global research using tablet computers in Ethiopia. I guess they don't read back issues of Growing Without Schooling at MIT: unschooling families have experienced this and much more across a wider span of years.

Even so, it is wonderful to hear this realization breaking ground somewhere since public schools seem entrenched in the factory model and aspire to uniformity of mental skills and knowledge, a form of brainwashing and an administrative overgrowth made possible by removing the regulatory influence of families in the public school system. When the users of a system have no power, it is not democratic and it is not efficient. We confuse education with schooling and we no longer think that people can learn, when people naturally learn as they live. These articles offer evidence of how children can learn far more than we imagine, something many  unschoolers have experienced firsthand.

EmTech Preview: Another Way to Think about Learning | MIT Technology Review:  "OLPC [One Laptop Per Child] represents about $1 billion in sales and deployment worldwide since 2005—it’s bigger than most people think. What have we learned? We learned that kids learn a great deal by themselves. The question is, how much?" ...

"To answer that question, we have now turned our attention to the 100 million kids worldwide who do not go to first grade. Most of them do not go because there is no school, there are no literate adults in their village, and there is little promise of that changing soon. My colleagues and I have started an experiment in two such villages, asking a simple question: can children learn how to read on their own?"

"I believe that we get into trouble when knowing becomes a surrogate for learning. We know that a vast recall of facts about something is in no way a measure of understanding them. At best, it is necessary but not sufficient. And yet we subject our kids to memorizing. We seem to believe that rote learning is akin to physical exercise, good for their minds. And, quite conveniently, we can test whether the facts stuck, like spaghetti to a wall. In some cases knowledge is so drilled in that you know and hate a subject at the same time."
...
Will this lead to deep reading? The votes are still out. But if a child can learn to read, he or she can read to learn. If these kids are reading at, say, a third-grade level in 18 months, that would be transformational. [NOTE: Again, they don't read about the ongoing control group unschoolers are raising.]

Given Tablets but No Teachers, Ethiopian Children Teach Themselves | MIT Technology Review: "Earlier this year, OLPC workers dropped off closed boxes containing the tablets, taped shut, with no instruction. “I thought the kids would play with the boxes. Within four minutes, one kid not only opened the box, found the on-off switch … powered it up. Within five days, they were using 47 apps per child, per day. Within two weeks, they were singing ABC songs in the village, and within five months, they had hacked Android,” Negroponte said. “Some idiot in our organization or in the Media Lab had disabled the camera, and they figured out the camera, and had hacked Android.”"

Emerging Technologies Conference at MIT:
Video metadata: Emerging technologies are democratizing education and rapidly expanding the availability and affordability of education around the globe. Participants: Jason Pontin (MIT Technology Review), Nicholas Negroponte (One Laptop Per Child), Idit Harel Caperton (World Wide Workshop), Brian Waniewski (Istitute of Play), Anant Agarwal (edX)

Nicholas Negroponte (selected snippets, my transcription)
" My views are very different than most ... particularly here at MIT ... I don't think our role is teaching at all ... what we came here to do is to move the boundaries of knowledge ... I am that somewhat different view of MITs role ...

it's the very early stages [of learning] ... why do I think its all going in the wrong direction ... the difference between education and learning ...  education is like banking ... learning isn't necessarily going to be institutionalized ... there's not a person in this role that would ... [favor] age segregation .... the difference between knowing and understanding ... we test people on what they know .... you might test very well but you don't understand a thing ....  we put all of the value on knowing ... [so we can test] ... one laptop for child led us to what we do today ... sadly our partner was always the government and the government wanted us to use schools ... [shows pictures of kids in rows all doing the same thing vs pictures of kids gathered informally around the teacher or each other, collaborating] ... what do we learn from it? .... kids were teaching their parents how to read and write ... that turned around the equation where the child is the recipient ... versus the child as teacher .... and you have today 100 million kids who do not go to 1st grade ... maybe we can think about .... what if we go to these parts of the world where there are no schools .... we can try an experiment where the kids teach themselves .... two villages that ... had never seen a word ... all ... were illiterate .. we brought as many tablets as there were children and on the tablet were hundreds of applications .... all English ... left the boxes in the village closed, no instruction, no human being ... within 5 days they using 47 apps per child per day ... within two weeks they were singing ABC songs ... and within two months they had hacked Android ... [the laptops record every gesture etc done on the tablet; these SIM cards are removed once a week: this is available and open data] this village is transformed .... talk about collaboration [picture] .... they were all using different apps ... in a school setting, an adult was saying "now we do this" and "now we do that" ....  this was far richer, far more collaborative ... will they learn how to read? [Negroponte thinks that cusp happens in the third grade: MIT really should learn about unschooling and kids learning to read at different ages] ....  if they can, it not only has impact on the 100 million kids who don't go to school but it might tell them something about what we're doing in this country ....
...
what you're trying to do is develop the passion for learning ... school .. gets rid of that passion ... in developing countries its so rote ... by the third grade their heads are down and by the third grade ... in those three years the joy of learning was whipped out of those kids sometimes literally ... the focus, the attention, the passion is just incredible ...

the meteoric rise of modern instructionism is alarming ....
you want the kids to learn how to learn ....
for the first 5 or 6 years of school you really want them to learn about learning itself ....

an Austrian unschool

A video interview with an Austrian unschooler who speaks about her experiences. From the video page:

In Germany there still exists compulsory education. However, it doesn¹t exist in countries like Austria or France. 

Just a few months ago, we visited our friend, Daniela *Ela* Gumpoltsberger in Upper Austria and we were totally surprised by her positive UNSCHOOLING-project! We were very happy to see the space and the courses she offers for the children that they can learn freely and happily. Therefore we decided to make a short film about her project. It is a project not only for children, but also for adults, to learn voluntarily, with joy and freedom.

UNSCHOOLING in Austria - YouTube:



'via Blog this'

unschooling: the new class of learning

Unschooling is getting attention in Europe and this video profiles three unschooling people/families including two Americans, Dale Stevens, of Uncollege fame, and the Emerson family. Also mentioned in the story is the German group playducation.

Unschooling: the new class of learning - YouTube:

In Berlin, we meet a young American who turned his back on school by the time he was 11-years-old. Dale J. Stevens is writing a book that he describes as "a practical guide to learning the skills that school doesn't teach but are requisite for success in the real world". It is based on his experiences as an unschooler but also incorporates the stories of other people who found success in non-traditional ways.

In Paris, we meet the Stern family. André Stern is a well-known name in the world of music but he never went to school. He was raised in a household where passion is considered to be the perfect learning medium and the secret behind competence.

In New York state, the Emerson family are also embracing unschooling. They shun a formal curriculum in favour of encouraging their 12- and 9-year-old children to follow their passions and interests.

Video is also available here, at EuroNews

related 

• The Benefits of Unschooling: Report I from a Survey of 231 Families. (my.psychologytoday.com)

celebrating john holt

John Holt's writing has a deceptively simple eloquence that is not easy to achieve. In essays like "Schooling and Poverty" and "Deschooling and the Poor" or "Schools Against Themselves" from Freedom and Beyond, Holt grapples with the same issues that surface today in pieces like Dana Goldstein's shock bait "Liberals, Don't Homeschool Your Kids" where Goldstein advises parents to ignore the progressive activism of the past 30 years as well as their own child's needs in support of ed reform. (Perhaps we should stop growing organic and remain within the industrial food model, too.) Holt long ago wrote about these dilemmas with clarity and he offered a simple method any family could use to move outside mass institutions and toward a more humane way of relating. Homeschoolers have since changed the laws in almost all 50 states.

April 14th was John Holt's birthday and Lefty Parent has a very nice tribute to Holt up at his blog:

Happy Birthday John Holt – “Patron Saint” of Unschooling | Lefty Parent: 

"I think Holt is still the “patron saint” of the homeschooling movement to many parents and others in the progressive community. He framed the movement broadly as applying full human and civil rights to children, not just as an alternative venue for school. He represents a continuing thread in our culture carrying forward ideas of more egalitarian rules of engagement between adults and youth from his philosophical predecessors, including A.S. Neill, Homer Lane, Will Durant and Bronson Alcott. 

Here is Holt counseling parents on how to homeschool their children (and a bit of Nancy Wallace, as well), from 1984, in that bastion of left-wing extremism, Mother Earth News:

How to Home School: Home Schooling Requirements and Information - Modern Homesteading - MOTHER EARTH NEWS: "Find out what your state laws say about school attendance, the legal alternatives to it, the possibilities of home instruction or tutoring, and the requirements for setting up a private school. There are several ways to get this information, all of them good." 

One method is to look up the laws yourself. It's easier than you think. Most good-sized public libraries, or law libraries, or lawyers will have a set of all the laws of your state. Look under "Education" in the index of one such collection . . . most or all of what you want will be in this section. Read carefully and copy, if possible, everything dealing with attendance, home schooling, private schools, etc. Also, read and copy everything in your state constitution concerning education and the rights of parents and families.  

Looking up the law yourself is a good exercise. It will help cure you of thinking that the law is a mystery known only to lawyers. Also, since you'll know the regulations yourself, you can speak to school officials with the authority of an expert and can correct them if (as often happens) their incorrect or incomplete version of the law fails to mention some of your important rights. 

And this:

You may also wonder, particularly if you did not do well or go far in school yourself, whether you know enough to help your children with their learning. Again, in my journal you will hear from people without much schooling who are doing a wonderful job of helping their children, mostly because they have been able to discover from the children themselves what the schools have never been able to realize: It is the interest, ingenuity, and activity of the learner, not the teacher, that is primarily responsible for creating learning. 

Another interview with Holt is linked to at the end of the Mother Earth News article:
John Holt: Homeschooling Advocate:

The truth is the home-schooling movement is good for the schools. We provide, among other things, extremely important educational research. Besides that, if-in the long run schools are going to have a future, they will eventually have to function as learning and activity centers which more and more people come to voluntarily . . . and the sooner our institutions begin to move in such a direction, and some community schools already are moving that way, the better off they'll be.

Home schooling is good for society as a whole, too. Most young people come out of high school today with feelings of alienation, self hatred, bottled-up anger, and the sense that life is useless. Such emotions constitute a largescale and potentially dangerous social problem. I don't entirely blame the schools for this situation, of course, but they have pretty well demonstrated that they can't change it . . . and I don't expect home-schooled teenagers-since they've grown up in contact with serious adults who take young people seriously-to have the same problems.

John Holt: Unassuming Reformer «: "By the early seventies, Holt was reluctantly coming to see that the school reform he had so fervently worked towards for so long was not ever going to come because the system was fundamentally flawed. Inspired by his contact with Ivan Illich, author of Deschooling Society, Holt’s books from this period show his thinking moving from the classroom and school system to an analysis of children’s place in society. School reform, he said, was “doomed from the start, simply because nobody really wanted to make the schools better. You can’t believe how much I hated facing that truth.”" 

John Holt by Sandra Dodd
A Reluctant Guru by Wendy Priesnitz
John Holt and the Origins of Contemporary Homeschooling: by Pat Farenga



Partial Transcription/Summary
In this segment, Holt talks a lot about teachers. Holt recounts the frenzy about math and science and back to basics ...  he mentions the closing of small schools to make big ones ... he talks about howreforms have the result of "reducing the independence, the authority, the autonomy, and the responsibility of the classroom teacher, and more and more making the teacher into a factory worker"  ... "we run education as if it was a quasi-industrial process" .... "as if we were running a bottling plant and the kids are like empty bottles" ... "all these assumptions are wrong, learning is an activity carried out by learners" ... "the only experiments that will ever improve education are the experiments done by teachers in their own classrooms" ....  "learning can't be quantified ... it can be observed .... but you can't measure it in numbers" .... Holt is critical of testing and merit pay ....  the lack of reading happening in schools ... he discusses possible changes ...  "and it wouldn't cost more money" (Holt thought the sums spent were outlandish) .... "cut down the non-teaching personnel"  .... "I do think a decentralization of power and authority is essential"  .... "it's a day jail for kids, preventive detention"  ....  "school is basically a machine for putting winner labels on a few and loser labels on the rest" ...  "as long as schools have those tasks [day jail, grading and labeling, and ... teaching them that life is tough, they aren't going to do anything else]  ... it ends with Holt saying "I am a teacher."

catalogue of damage

What a wonderful resource this is! David Gribble has collected so many resources and so many pieces of educational activism, wisdom and ideas. Clickthrough to see the pages underneath, come back and study a bit more.  Authoritarian Schooling: A catalogue of damage by David Gribble, from the Don't Let That Bother You pane:

No school would deliberately cultivate selfishness, and yet children are told that they must go to school for their own good. Children are trained to work only for their own personal benefit, and then society is blamed for a 'me me me' attitude.

When they are at home some children look after younger siblings or care for a sick parent, but when they get to school they are treated as incompetents who cannot take any responsibility. School is a place where their responsibilities and caring skills are forgotten, and they are encouraged to concentrate on their own needs rather than the needs of other people. The school restricts their activities to what the school has decided they must do for their own benefit.

Examination results become the dominant issue, and social interaction is simply not valued. Even the discussion of important issues may be forbidden. As I heard one young person say, 'You can't talk about mental health because you have to read this poem.'

Mental health is not the only important issue that there is no time to discuss. There is no time to discuss poverty, or parental discord, or sibling rivalry, or love, or death. Teachers often declare openly that their work is to teach, not to care for the children in their classes. The remark I overheard could as well have been, 'You can't talk about Susie's mum dying, because you have to learn this list.'

You have to learn this list for your own good, in order to be able to earn a good living in society. Forget about your mother's illness or your friend's distress. Think of your own needs. Be selfish.

not better, different

"We have to stop thinking about better, and start thinking about different."  Will Richardson's video is astute in showing that in the current debate "better schools=good test scores" and how that is a fundamentally flawed approach.

The opening example of his daughter teaching herself a piano piece from uTube and the piano teacher who  says "she's not ready for that" is a classic example of the control mentality we use, derived I am guessing from our lengthy curricular schemes, and our view of human learning in factory metaphors.

mistakes must be a part of the process

The Role of Mistakes in the Classroom | Edutopia:

"Embracing such an ideology also means, to circle back, that the emphasis in schools must be on the process of learning, not solely the results. I know this is difficult in our country now, particularly when so much stress is put on standardized tests -- which are all about results and not exploring different ideas -- as a way to measure the success of both teachers and children." 

It is grading that restricts the ability of kids in schools to try things and fail or discover they dislike them or just experiment and enjoy the process.  This is one of the fundamental reasons why grading is an issue: it literally reduces learning. The immense pressure grading puts on students and teachers by grading everything constantly could be changed and that alone could transform many learners and many schools.

Grading is everywhere and constant. From quizzes to tests to standardized tests to exit exams and then other exams. It is used in primary grades and upper grades. It is used for behavioral manipulation ("helping learn") to assessment to long-term credential management. It is punitive and hopelessly flawed. It greatly restricts the curriculum and methods. It wastes enormous amounts of a teacher's time. It greatly reduces the quality of the relationship between teacher and student. It is invasive and inappropriate developmentally.

Zach Weiner, SMBC

End Credential Manufacture: Let Students Choose Their Focus
Any grading alters the learning but massive and constant grading, in the name of a defunct behavioral psychology, annihilates learning and trivializes time and effort. We cannot move toward valuing the learning process until we stop grading and make spaces for learning: it really is that simple. Grading is part of manufacturing a person with a standard credential. If we were not manufacturing credentials, grades would be meaningless, except when applying to external programs. And that would mean that schools could provide more and students could engage in a much, much wider variety of activities and classes.

Grading is not necessary. Homeschoolers preparing for college study subjects they target as necessary to the college they are pursuing. And since they have the ability to choose when to "go on the record," learners have much more freedom and can make mistakes that do not penalize them. Students and families would need ongoing counseling to provide knowledge of and access to credentials of all sorts.

For example, my oldest took an online class for Algebra II that was not a good fit. She didn't like it and after a month or two, she switched to using a textbook to study from. Her transcript showed Algebra II but not the dropped class. There was no penalty for a mistake or a poor fit. This is impossible in a public high school. Students have no choices and are always on the record and therefore can never make a mistake, change a class, or try something else. There can be no mistakes and no changes. It is a manufacturing process driven by standards instead of a learning environment driven by learners with knowledge of possible goals.

Credentials are a huge issue and there are many problems out there. The major one, in my view, is that we now allow employers to require a BA when there is no public, free path to a BA. That is a separate issue and one I follow here. But opening schools up to learning and choice means separating the credential from the school. This approach would allow learners to make mistakes, explore and grow and make schools far more focused on learning.

background posts

not making the grade

how is requiring a BA legal?

hiring practices at Zoho

the compulsory attendance mindset

home college and uncollege resources

The School of Continuing Education | Brain Pickings  has a post up with links and intros to one fairly traditional and four DIY online schools.

The DIY platforms are new:  (un) classes whose logline is community powered learning,  Skillsharing, another community sharing platform and Supercool School  (which also has a blog) as well as School of Everything and their blog.  For that matter, check in at BrainPickings form time to time.

The most traditional in approach is The University of the People which offers tuition-free access to two and four year degrees in Business and Computer Science, and a General Studies section, using a peer-to-peer format and 10-week terms.  It is a non-profit approach that will use a sliding scale according to country of origin that does intend to apply for accreditation in the US in the future. Admissions are closed right now, they open every 2.5 weeks,  but follow at Shai Reshef's blog (where he has a post on why a $10,000 degree is too high as in the future, a student from a wealthy country would pay about $4000 for a full degree when they reach 15,000 students). There are already schools in that range online. 

Homeschoolers should know The University of the People has to certify that a student has received a high school diploma and that is because of the demands of accreditation, as stated in this video clip, which also looks at the technology and sharing side of the program that does not require bandwidth; all is text-based yet global.  Study with people all over the world: 



And their peer-to-peer grading approach which they use that has students do this themselves:

Astra Taylor on the Unschooled Life

Astra Taylor is articulate and her talk has great depth to it.  There is an overview of the school change movement in the 1960s and 1970s which was the fertile soil for homeschooling, the real school change movement today.  The legacy of these reformers is not lost:  homeschooling is alive and well and growing worldwide.  We are only beginning to emerge from the 19th-century literacy factories into a democratic world of living and learning together.

Note the stat cited at ~18.35 that, roughly, of Americans polled, 1 in 3 agreed with the statement "Politics and government are too complicated to understand." Homeschoolers polled on this point found only 1 in 25 would agree with the statement.

Homeschooling has created a knowledge base of people outside the system, a necessary first step in real change.  And many things are being learned when enough people have enough comfort with working outside of the school system.  Those seeking school change would do well to learn some of the lessons that a broad range of citizens now know and understand, if the activism necessary to change the schools is to grow.

But listen for yourself to this wonderful talk:

unschooling is like a passive house

This article about passive homes in Europe reminds me a lot about unschooling:  if passive-solar houses are eclectic and teach-at-home lite, then unschooling may be like these passive homes that require no heat at all.  Like unschooling, these homes seem impossible to many people because they so deeply call into question accepted viewpoints. Unschooling is like that:  people want to know where the heater is or, more exactly, where the teaching is and its not there.  

motivation

The Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Daniel Pink at the RSA website is yet another instance of the sea change within our knowledge of human beings and how they learn in the 20th century.  But our public school production line was developed before a lot of this research was done (Peter Gray's work comes to mind). 

unschooling Helen Keller

From a National Geographic book, Helen's Eyes: A Photobiography of Annie Sullivan by M. Delano, about teaching Helen Keller after she was able to learn words (after the water pump incident):

"From that point on, learning became an exciting adventure, and Annie let Helen's interests lead the way to learning opportunities. No more boring, repetitious classroom lessons for them! Instead, they spent most of their days outdoors. ... Helen later recalled that 'everything that could hum, or buzz, or sing, or bloom, had a part in my education.' "

Helen Keller would go on to take classes at Perkins Institution for the Blind in Boston and eventually attend Radcliffe (and was a Socialist). Image at right is Helen Keller holding a doll with Anne Sullivan, 1888, thanks to Creative Commons.

I have read so many biographies where someone leaves school for economic or health reasons and it becomes a pivotal time in that person's life. In fact, there is a lot written about steady institutionalization and what it does to human beings. (see Illich and Holt)