Alan Kay: cool concepts also need love

Let me start by showing a video recorded by the National Science Foundation (National Science Foundation, hereafter NSF) at the recent Harvard graduation ceremony in which they asked some graduates and their teachers to answer a few simple questions about what caused the change of times year and moon phases. All were confident in their answers, but the explanations of approximately 95% of the respondents did not even closely resemble the scientific rationale.

Their basic theories were based on the fact that the change of seasons is a consequence of the decrease in the distance between the Earth and the Sun during the summer period, and that the phases of the Moon are connected with the shadow cast by the Earth. Some of the graduates did quite a bit of science in high school and at Harvard. The NSF used this data to open up a discussion on why science is not digested so well, even after many years of study. Even the majority of successful students, with high rates in SAT, in the best universities, with full access to computers, networks and information, do not assimilate so well.
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My reaction was a bit different. I kept waiting for “other questions” that the NSF should have asked, but they never asked them. I got the chance a few weeks after the UCLA performance. I asked some high school students, first-year graduate students, and several professors the same questions about the change of seasons and the moon phase, and got very similar results: about 95% of the respondents gave fictitious explanations, settling on the same thing as students and professor Harvard, But now I have to ask the following questions.

Those who did not understand the change of seasons, I asked if they knew what time of year in South America and Australia, when it was summer in North America. All answered: "Winter." Those who did not understand the phases of the moon, I asked if they had ever seen the moon and the sun at the same time in the sky. And everyone answered that yes. Slowly, and only in a few respondents, I saw how they are trying with all their might to understand that the opposite seasons in different hemispheres do not fit into the theory “closer to the sun means summer” and that the simultaneous presence of the sun and the moon in the sky does not match them theory "Earth blocks the sun's rays."

It seems to me that the NSF missed the most important thing. They thought they had discovered a “scientific problem,” but there are thousands of scientific “facts,” and no scientist knows all of them; We should be grateful that the students at Harvard and UCLA did not “know the answers.” What this survey has shown is a kind of "mathematical problem", a problem of thinking and learning, which is much more serious.

Why more serious? Because UCLA students and teachers (and their Harvard colleagues) knew something that contradicted the theories they tried to formulate, and none of them managed to get to this contradictory knowledge with the words: “Hey, wait ... "! In one form or another, they "knew" about the opposite seasons, and that they both saw the sun and the moon in the sky, but they did not "know" in any practical sense that they could pull this knowledge from their memories during reflections on related topics. They isolated this “knowledge,” instead of constantly establishing a connection with new concepts as soon as they are formed and realized.

What happened to them, and what happens to children every day at school? To understand this, we need to figure out how we humans are “naturally” inclined towards thinking and learning.

A clue can be found in the Bible. King Solomon was considered the wisest man who ever lived, and explains why: he knew more than 3000 proverbs! And the proverbs work like this: if you return home from a trip, and your family is glad to see you, then “Separation makes their hearts love more”. But if you return from a trip, and they are not very happy about you, then the reason for this ... what? That's right: "Out of sight, out of mind." Each proverb exists to give a specific situation a specific meaning, and each of them comes to mind from time to time. If the proverb you are using today (or the game, or the film you are watching today) contradicts the one that was last week, then it doesn’t matter, because proverbs and stories are evaluated mainly on the basis of how they are well suited at the current time, and not how they relate to other proverbs and stories in general.

This way of thinking and giving meaning to your life and society, in terms of stories and narratives, is universal in all cultures, and also serves as the basis for “setting up connections” with other people. This is part of what we call "common sense." And this is how most of the college students with whom the NSF and I communicated “learned the scientific disciplines” - as separate cases, stories that could be applied in a similar situation, and not as a system of interrelated evidence about what we think we know. and how well we think we know it. Thinking based on stories won out. Claude Levi-Strauss and Seymour Papert called this an incremental isolated “natural” learning through the process of creating “amateur handicrafts”, which means doing something “tinkering with technology”. This is one of the reasons why engineering began its journey thousands of years before science; Some designs can be implemented gradually, through trial and error, without requiring any detailed explanations of how it all works.

However, if we look back at the last 400 years and think about which ideas have caused the most significant changes in human society, and which brought us into the modern era of democracy, science, technology and health, then we will be a little shocked when we realize that none of them is presented in the form of history! In Newton's treatise on the laws of motion, gravity and the behavior of the planets, a sequence of arguments is given that imitate Euclidean books on geometry. Since then, all scientific articles are also presented in the form of evidence, not stories. Tom Paine's “Obvious Truth” is forty pages of evidence of why monarchy is not a good form of government and why democracy is likely to be better. (It was, in fact, closer to the "not obvious truth", because historically, the movement towards democracy arose quite rarely). Articles from the Federalist series are evidence in support of various parts of the Constitution scheme. And the Constitution itself is a set of principles for building a very complex dynamic structure, which should exist for centuries, whose “parts” (that is, we!) Arise and disappear, and only slightly interact with each other. And this is definitely not just a story!

Recent studies have shown that less than 5% of American adults (less than 7% in the UK) have learned to think freely in these modern forms, without being tied to stories. A recent review of 150 best-selling books in the US (as of September 15, thanks to www.usatoday.com ) shows that 80% are based on the format of stories, 15% are books on self-improvement, only 1.5% can be attributed to the contents of some scientific approach , but the format of none of them corresponded to the form of a serious essay with reasoned evidence (sometimes voluminous essays appear, such as Bloom's American End of Mind, for example, but none of them are mentioned in the September list of 150 best books). And this is the alignment for a small number of Americans who buy books altogether. Let me remind you that a book sold in the amount of about 100,000 copies is called a bestseller, and the “instant bestseller” usually includes no more than 1,000,000 copies in a country of 250 million inhabitants! Television, of course, is all saturated with stories, and any other format is practically inapplicable to it. For example, pay attention to how PBS presents “serious topics” - they are still presented as stories, and at best they play the role of advertising for books, which the real problem is dealt with.

But I do not want to say that you need to completely abandon the stories. I like to listen and read them, and I love to watch them on stage. If in the theater we could not think of “stories”, then all that we would see are actors against the background of cardboard landscapes accompanied by various noises coming from the depths of the orchestra pit. In order to enjoy the theater, we have to surrender to the story, to feel the actors as ourselves, to perceive conventional landscapes as a place with a certain mood, and noises from the pit - as disturbing music. It works great, and through this process we can feel at a deeper level what it means to be human. But now imagine that you enter a similar building, with similar people on the scene, who utter similar bright phrases, and all this is reinforced by conventional landscapes and exciting music. Looks like a theater? But here I mean a political rally.

All that we so want to surrender in the theater, it is better to keep away from yourself! Since the whole meaning of our life and relationships with others requires us to give symbols meaning and give a part of ourselves to ideas, we have to work hard on two fronts: to be sensitive when we feel emotional and to be tough when someone tries to take it away us. I believe that the main purpose of the training is to learn to recognize these situations, to understand how to make the characters work for us.

But simply being able to criticize a story in which characters are involved is not enough, given how much of the important contemporary content, both from a political and scientific point of view, is presented in formats other than stories. In order to fully become free in the 21st century, it is very important for children to learn to navigate easily in the three main forms of thinking used now: in “history”, “logical evidence” and “system dynamics”. The question is how?

One of the arguments put forward in favor of why it is so difficult to make most children learn to think in new ways is that "such thinking is difficult to master." But after all, it is quite difficult to learn to ride a bike, and it is even more difficult to throw the ball into the basket, but the greatest difficulty on the way to this is a constant baseball game. If you watch children who are trying to master these skills, then you will see that most of their attempts fail, but they keep trying until they learn, and, as a rule, it takes many years. This is more like their attitude to when they learn to walk and talk, than to the defeatist attitude that occurs so often in school. In fact, the point is that children are ready to go to great lengths to learn very difficult things and endure a practically endless series of “failures” in this process, if they have a feeling that this activity is an integral part of their culture.

Montesorri quite successfully used it in their schools. Shinichi Suzuki achieved the same success in teaching music, creating a musical culture in which the child sank. Television and cultural continuity are well suited to create an environment that includes athletics, certain types of music and dance, and shows what it means to be a highly qualified specialist in these areas. With a huge number of scientists, one of the parents was either a scientist himself, or was very interested in science, and sometimes he was just keen on “learning as a higher vocation.” Here difficulties are not perceived as a problem. But belonging to the culture and the formation of personal individuality - yes. This could be called a “initiation rite”.

If we turn to estimates of less than 5% for the number of the American population who have learned to think in these new ways, and remember that television is not the best means for presenting them, this means that during the preschool period, most children will not feel the whole cultural experience. experience using these ideas. I do not have data on what percentage of primary school teachers have learned to think in a new way, but from personal experience I would suggest that it is similar to the estimates of the total population. This means that most children will hardly be able to try out these new ways of thinking at home, at school or through television, not to mention integrating them into the general thinking process and sequence of actions that are so important to consider when children begin to value what they very much want to learn.

Now, the fact that it requires great work, and that the child does not perceive as an important “rite of passage”, will simply not receive enough attention. There will be a lack of perseverance and tolerance for failure, which is a prerequisite for overcoming obstacles. One of the main problems associated with the way most schools are structured is that children quickly realize that most of what they are asked to do is not in the “real” world, especially when compared to electives like sports, art and music. They know that this is something from the “real” world, and the school needs to try hard to bring to the disciplines the degree of artificiality that will cause children to lose all interest in them.

Let me give an analogy on how the strategy of “re-creating the environment” can be solved, it comes from the learning experience that I had in my childhood.

Suppose that it is music that most cares about the nation. Our parents worry that their children will not succeed in life if they do not become musicians. The scores for our music tests are the lowest in the world. After a wave of protests, Congress comes to the following technological decision: “By the year 2000, we will install a piano in each class! But there are no funds to hire musicians, so every summer we will send available teachers to two-week retraining courses. This should solve the problem! "But we know that there will not be a significant shift, because, as any musician will tell you, the music is not included directly in the piano - if that were the case, we would have to let her vote! Music lives inside everyone from U.S.

And now what happens to the piano in each class. Children will love to play with him, and, most likely, the “culture of primitive compositions” will begin to develop. There will be a "piano bricolage". Some parents will be encouraged to take lessons, and rarely will anyone decide to take matters into their own hands, and find ways to learn real things without any official support. Other types of technology, such as recordings, promote the idea of ​​"musical perception." It seems that this is completely opposite to the listening process, but you can look at it under a slightly different bias. The problem is that “musical perception” is like “perception of science,” or “mathematics,” or “computers,” but this is not the same thing as learning music, science, mathematics, or computing!

But 50 years ago I grew up in a community that wanted “real music for everyone”, and I found a way to achieve this. In a small town in New England, in which there were only 200 students in high school, there was a tradition to recruit people into a full group, orchestra and choir. Thus, almost every child became an experienced musician. The secret is that every child in the shower begins to follow the path of the musician, and everyone has a voice to sing. In the first class, we were taught to sing all the intervals and read individual parts on notes. In the second grade, we sang two parts. In the third grade, we played four parts and began to choose instruments. Talent was not the determining factor, although, of course, it manifested itself. This was what everyone was doing, and everyone liked everything. I began to realize that it was something unusual only when I moved. An important side effect is that in each class there was a piano, and all teachers were able to play a little on it, although I am sure that, at least for one teacher, the ear for music was not very developed. Most likely, the system worked because for work with primary classes in this locality sent an excellent specialist in music, who visited each class several times a week. I remember how one teacher did not like my pronunciation in the song, and he tried to correct it, but the invited expert liked this manner, and he offered me to evaluate if I could sing the whole song in such a manner.

The main thing in this story is not even the fact that most children began to freely perform musical compositions by the time they went to high school - they did and do for many generations - but the fact that almost all of them, as far as I can tell, continue to love and compose music and in adulthood (including me).

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