On Papert

It feels surreal to realise that the people who I admired some years ago, seem so distant from my current thinking and understanding of the world. How much must have I known and experienced in the intervening time? How ignorant must have I been then, or perhaps, how ignorant I am to prove to be later again.

This passage from Seymour Papert's Mind Storms:

The model of successful learning is the way a child learns to talk, a process that takes place without deliberate and organized teaching. I see the classroom as an artificial and inefficient learning environment . . . [and] I believe that the computer presence will . . . [mean] that much if not all the knowledge schools presently try to teach with such pain and expense and such limited success will be learned, as the child learns to talk, painlessly, successfully, and without organized instruction.

Programming a computer means nothing more or less than communicating to it in a language that it and the human user can both ‘understand.’ And learning languages is one of the things children do best. Every normal child learns to talk. Why then should a child not learn to ‘talk’ to a computer?

It seems terribly myopic, almost misanthropic to think that computers are as capable as, nay better than, human teachers. This cybernetic thinking that teaching, learning and education is fundamentally an information exchange mechanism was, continues to be, and will remain the foundation of failed educational thinking, policy and implementation.

I believe languages are fundamentally fluid, mutating and multi-modal. Whereas computer 'language' is fundamentally unimodal and inflexible. Once again, it is terribly mistaken to think that human languages are similar to computer 'language' simply because the latter comprehends the stunted inputs given by humans. I am not saying they are not languages in the broadest sense of the word. What I disagree with is the comparison.