INTERVIEW:
Question 1
What is your opinion on the use of new technologies in education?
Answer
When we think of technologies in schools, it is important to be clear about whether we are
talking about a long-term perspective - what is going to happen 20 years or in ten year's
time - or are we thinking about what is going to happen tomorrow. Use this metaphor:
imagine some time travellers who came from the year 1800 to see how things are done
nowadays. Among them, there is a surgeon, and imagine the surgeon from 1800 in a modern
operating room. He would be totally confused. He would not have the faintest idea of what
was going on with all this electronic stuff beeping. He would think the patient was dead.
He would not know anything about anaesthesia. That is what I call mega-change. We are
going to see mega-change in education. It is going to change as much as medicine or
transportation or telecommunications has. And you are just bluffing yourself if you
pretend that there will only be small changes. What are the big changes? Well I think
school is based on a production-line model of putting knowledge into people's heads. You
start with the first period and then go to the second period and are given a little bit of
knowledge each time. You go from first grade to second grade, to third grade, and all this
is necessary because our idea is that teachers have to give out each piece of knowledge.
It is no longer necessary for children to get knowledge in that way. With modern
information technology they can learn much more by doing. They can learn by exploring
themselves, by finding out for themselves. The teachers' role is not to hand out each
piece of knowledge but to be a guide, to deal with the very difficult situations, to
stimulate the child, perhaps, to be a counsellor. But this is a totally different picture
of schools. I think the real problem is how do we act today with this long-term
perspective in mind, because we cannot make mega-changes overnight. We can only make small
changes. But stop thinking of these small changes as making little improvements in the
system as we know it. Think of the small changes as steps towards preparing for the big
change that is to come. So we need a vision of where it's going, and then how to prepare.
I think the strongest way we can do that is by creating situations within schools where
children pursue with their own passion from their hearts. They pursue projects that
they're really interested in, they find out by getting the information they need from the
Internet. They work with one another. They do something difficult. The teacher acts as a
counsellor, as a guide. So the teacher has to get used to the idea of respecting the
children as learners, of recognising that they create their own knowledge, that the old
ambition that many educators have had - that children can learn by doing experientially in
a way that's really meaningful for them - can finally be realised. So, this is not about
what technology does to learning. It is about old well-established ideas of how we would
like children to learn and technology makes possible to make these dreams of the past
educators come true.
Question 2
Let's speak about Logo language. Is the Logo programming language suitable for children?
Answer
The idea of Logo has always been an idea that children should be in charge. Very often
computers are used in a way that I think of as the child being programmed by the machine.
The computer is programming the child to give the right answers to multiplication tables
and all the rest. For 30 years I've been trying to turn this around, that it is the child
who should program the computer. And by programming the computer, the child learns by
teaching and by doing. Moreover, I think It is analogous to what happens with reading and
writing. We don't expect children to learn to read other people's stories but never write.
You've got to write in order to learn to read well. You've got to draw in order to
appreciate art. So I think you've got to program the computer and know how to program the
computer if you are going to really appreciate its power. So this is a matter of putting
the power of the computer into the child's hands so the child can feel the power of this
intellectual amplifier. By giving a child a sense of power of ideas, of being able to do
much more difficult projects than were possible before, we're doing the most important
thing for the development of that child's sense of self, of what one can do, of what one
can undertake in one's life.
Question 3
Let's speak about educational opportunities. What are the education opportunities and who
would benefit from them most? Will poor people who cannot access computers and the
Internet be more disadvantaged than others?
Answer
Of course if we look around, we see that some children get access to the Internet, to
computers, and their learning is accelerated. Other children who do not have this access
will fall behind and the gap will increase. And the only way you can prevent that is by
taking responsibility for making sure that every child has real access to computers.
Putting one computer in a classroom is not giving children access to computers. I think
that Italy, like the United States, can afford to give every child a computer. And, if
anybody tells you that you cannot afford it, don't believe them. They're cheating you. We
could afford it. If you do just a little bit of arithmetic, you will see that it would
only add about 3% or 4% to the cost of education to give every child access to a computer.
I think that is the answer. Don't blame the computer for the fact that we are too greedy
to give our children the equipment and the tools they need for the best learning possible.
Question 4
What about the teachers? Do we need to teach the teachers and build a new generation of
teachers?
Answer
My experience is that a large proportion of teachers really would like to do things
differently. They know that it is possible to do something better than go through this
curriculum and this rote learning in the school. But there's a curriculum and all the
school structures forced on them. These teachers would welcome the opportunity to do
something different. But, of course, in order to do that they've got to have the time to
learn and the freedom to experiment with different ways of encouraging the learning in
their children. I've seen so many teachers put their own time and effort and worked very
hard at learning to use these new media, and they come back into the school and the school
won't allow them to do anything different. And so they become disillusioned. We've seen
this over and over again and this is shocking that teachers who want to change and want to
teach in a more human and effective way are not allowed to by a bureaucratic system that
refuses to trust them enough to let them follow their own instincts. Of course, there are
some teachers who don't want to change. There are some teachers who are lazy, who are
really conservative. There are even some who honestly believe that our old-fashioned ways
of organising school, which come from the 18th and 19th centuries, are the right things
for the 21st century. I don't think we should throw them into prison or anything, but
they're among a minority of teachers. I think the best arrangement is to not think that
all teachers must do the same thing anymore than all children should learn in the same
way. We should have a school system that allows those teachers who want to try to do
something very different to be a able to do that. And then if there are other teachers who
really believe that the old way is the best way, they should be allowed to do that too,
and then parents and kids should be able to choose which they want to go with. I think the
biggest disaster is the idea that you take a big school where there are 50 teachers and
you decide: I'm going to have all these teachers do whatever it is. Of course that's
impossible because the teachers all have different views. The only way you can get them to
move in the same direction is to make them take a tiny, little step. If you want them to
take big steps, you've got to let this one go that way and that one go that way. So the
key question is to allow teachers the freedom to form small school, schools within
schools, allowing half the school to go in one direction, the other half to go in the
other direction. I think this is the way it is going to be in the future.
Question 5
What is going to happen in the near future?
Answer
In New York City already there's a policy in many school districts where if ten teachers
want to do something different and if they can have a meeting of parents and the parents
say, yes, they're allowed to set up their own curriculum, which has to be approved by the
School Board but it doesn't have to look the same as the standard curriculum.
Question 6
So the school of the future is the school of today.
Answer
The sooner we realize that there's going to be a very different sort of school of the
future, the better it will be. And the sooner we allow ourselves to take big steps, the
better it will be. But I don't think that we can know what it is really going to be like
in 20 or 30 years time. This is going to be a social evolution. Creative people are going
to do things that will always surprise us. Our job - if you want to think about the future
- is how to let human creativity have the freedom and the trust to explore new directions.
What's really terrible about the school system is that it does not allow the individual
teacher or the individual student to freely explore different directions for learning and
for teaching. I would like to say one thing: the best models for what we can do with
technology may be schools where, without technology, they're trying to do very different
things. For me, one of the inspiring models for doing something different in school is the
pre-schools of the Reggio Emilia district, where they really have been able to do
something very different from pre-schools anywhere else. I think that this shows how
diversity can let a community identify itself with a new direction, and it grows and it is
rich because people believe in it, and they believe it is theirs. I think this is the
model. Not to follow exactly what they do, of course. I don't want anyone to follow
exactly what I do. We should see that school system as an example of what can happen if we
allow diversity, if we allow some place for some schools to take their own paths. And
technology increases our potential, our opportunities to do that.
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