| Chapter 28 | |
| Constructionism: Education | |
| for Makerism | |
| For those of you who came to this book expecting us to present a panacea for solving all the worldÕs problems, weÕre happy to report that we do indeed have one: Education. | |
| ThereÕs hardly a problem that we talk about in this book that wouldnÕt be helped enormously by improvements in education. Our major goal in writing this book is to convince people to be more cooperative. Educated people tend to be more cooperative, and cooperative people tend to be more educated. | |
| But we donÕt want to rely merely on correlations. We think a good chunk of education ought to be devoted explicitly to tools and techniques to help people to cooperate with one another more effectively. Besides solving adversity, and increasing productivity, we can learn to solve some of our most persistent problems by being more cooperative. | |
| Poverty? In the short term, education helps people get better jobs. In the long-term, we believe that education will help people advance to the point where poverty (and jobs!) are eliminated. | |
| Oppression? Educated societies are less susceptible to exploitation by messianic religions and dictators. | |
| Crime? Crime rates go down as education levels increase. | |
| Health? Educated people know more about their bodies and tend to have healthier lifestyles. | |
| War? The USA spends more money on war than any other country, despite the fact that our citizens are considered to be highly educated. This apparently contradicts the Òpanacea of educationÓ described in the opening of this chapter. First, wars are caused by leaders, not by average citizens. Now, itÕs true that citizens elect the leaders, so weÕre not letting the citizens completely off the hook. And the astute will observe that AmericaÕs leaders often graduate from top universities. With innovative research and education, we can design and deploy tools for governing that are more rational than causing war (See Reasonocracy). | |
| Instructionism: The factory model of education | |
| We argue that our present justice, political and economic systems are based on principles that are rapidly becoming obsolete. So too will we argue that the structure of most of todayÕs education systems are also organized along the principles of the Industrial Age. Far too many American schools implement what education reformers call Instructionism, or the factory model of education. | |
| A school is basically a factory for producing human robotsÑobedient factory workers that can perform repetitive tasks commanded by the power hierarchy. Bureaucracies are basically factories for human processing of information. | |
| If thereÕs a task to be done that can be done ÒroboticallyÓ, letÕs get an actual robot to do it, not a human. Makerism and disintermediation replace bureaucracies and hierarchies with do-it-yourself production and cooperative organization. Why do we need schools to educate people to be robots? | |
| TodayÕs schools aim to impart a minimal set of reading, writing, and math skills necessary for following orders in the workplace. Only incidentally, if at all, are schools genuinely concerned with helping students lead happy, productive, and fulfilling lives. Students toil at the assembly line of rigid classrooms and standardized curricula, with quality control of the product enforced by endless testing and grading. | |
| Note that many teachers are personally unhappy with Instructionism, but their more inclusive and diverse teaching styles are hampered by controlling Common Core curricula and other test-happy bureaucratic rules. | |
| If the Industrial Age, and its factory schools, are so lacking, what can better education look like in the Makerism age which is now upon us? | |
| Constructionism | |
| There are many ideas put forward by education reformers, and implemented on modest scales, that have merit. These go by many names: alternative education; student-centered learning; exploratory learning; project-based/experiential/hands-on learning; Montessori method; Constructionism. | |
| This last term, Constructionism [Papert 1993], refers to the educational philosophy of Seymour Papert, based on PiagetÕs theory of child development. It advocates using computers to provide microworlds that allow students to explore powerful ideas, acting like scientists in formulating and testing theories. It led to the programming language Logo, and its latest incarnation, Scratch, used by millions of children. Author Lieberman was a member of PapertÕs original research group at MIT. He was also a student and teacher in MITÕs Experimental Study Group (http://esg.mit.edu), another stronghold of the Constructionist education philosophy. | |
| There is a vast literature on reform of education, dating at least back to the 19th century, when the factory model for education first appeared (and, coincidentally, when factories first appeared). Maria Montessori [Motessori 1969], John Dewey, Ivan Illich, Paolo Friere and others wrote about how students should be active participants in their own learning, rather than passive recipients of knowledge. In 1921, A.S. Neill founded the Summerhill School [Neill 1960], which put these principles into practice and his book remains a classic. We also recommend the Òproject basedÓ (as opposed to test based) curricula of San DiegoÕs ÒHigh Tech HighÓ as exemplified in the documentary Most Likely to Succeed [Whitely 2015]. | |
| The role of schools and teachers should be to help students learn how to learn, and to provide a community of peers to help each other learn. Unfortunately our current practices and data-driven school systems often fall short of this objective. | |
| Cooperation and competition in education | |
| Educational philosopher Alfie Kohn thinks that the primary subject taught in US public schools isnÕt math, English, or chemistry: itÕs how to compete. Grades, sports, and vying for teacher praise, all pit students against one another. No wonder adults have such a fondness of war. | |
| We argue that technological and social changes are increasingly favoring cooperation over competition. In his book, No Contest: The Case Against Competition [Kohn 1986], Kohn systematically lays out the advantages of cooperation over competition in education. | |
| Kohn also shows how competition among students, teachers, and schools is antithetical to achieving educational goals. The disastrous No Child Left Behind and Common Core movements emphasize standardized curriculum, competition, and testing. They provoke outrage and despair amongst students and concerned adults. ItÕll be years before we completely recover from them. Kohn presents countless ways in which education can be made more cooperative. | |
| Kohn also puts his finger on one of the most important issues in education: student motivation, in his book, Punished by Rewards [Kohn 1993]. As soon as you finish this book, the two Kohn books should be next on your reading list. | |
| Motivated students learn, to the best of their ability; students who are not motivated do not. But there are two kinds of motivation: intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation. We explored the differences between them, and the fact that extrinsic motivation inhibits intrinsic motivation, in Intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. | |
| Competition is extrinsic motivation. This kind of motivation, like educational games and grades, may be useful in the short term to spur students to become exposed to a topic they might not otherwise explore. However it is only intrinsic motivation that ignites the passion that animates true learning in the long-term. | |
| Therein lies the real difference between the two visions of education. The factory model requires that motivation for learning be imposed externally. It completely ignores the internal motivation of the learner. It is completely oblivious to the interests and idiosyncrasies of each person. The standardized curriculum tells you what to learn next, not allowing for variation. It is oblivious to learning for its own sake, or if the student is lost. Rewards that the student feels from learning must come from success in passing tests and receiving high grades. Because the competition for grades is a zero-sum game, there will be few winners and many losers. Where does that leave the losers? | |
| The Constructionist vision of education, on the other hand, emphasizes the intrinsic motivation of the student. It encourages students to follow their own interests, express their own unique personality, and share their interests with others. It encourages each student to become a creative problem solverÑformulating theories, learning from experience, sharing their passion. It also seeks to cultivate emotional and social intelligence in students. | |
| The role of the teacher is less like a factory foreman, and more like a personal trainerÑencouraging the student, nudging along the studentÕs intrinsic motivation, providing training that helps acquire needed skills, and helping the student get unstuck when they encounter difficulties. | |
| Meta-knowledge | |
| The essence of the Constructionist model of education is basically to turn students into Makers. What do you need to learn to be a successful Maker? | |
| First, weÕll tell you what you donÕt need to know, because simply piling on more things to learn doesnÕt scale. There is not much point in being able to memorize large collections of obscure factual information when you can simply look it up on the Web. There is not much point in being able to ßawlessly execute procedures that you could program a computer or robot to do. The stark reality is that you wonÕt look information up, or program it, unless you are curious and interested. | |
| Curiosity, passionate interest, and resourcefulness, are examples of skills and traits that will become increasingly important. When production of hardware and software becomes increasingly automated, itÕs the creativity and good judgment about what to produce thatÕs essential. Troubleshooting and debugging skills are crucial, because, as we know, when you use technology, things donÕt always go right the first time. | |
| The biggest irony about our education system is that its goal is to impart knowledge, yet it doesnÕt impart much knowledge about knowledge itself. So the most important kind of knowledge might be meta-knowledge. Students need to learn not just how to learn, but how they learn best. | |
| Often, people say they have ÒintuitionÓ, when they think they know something, but they have no idea how they know it. Intuition is not a thing, itÕs a lack of something. That something is the knowledge about how you know that something is true, i.e. its rationale. This is an important kind of meta-knowledge. | |
| If people can introspect and articulate about the reasons for something, they donÕt have to rely on intuitionÑthey can access their meta-knowledge. | |
| Understanding yourself is perhaps the most important meta-knowledge you can obtain. Even meta-knowledge is best utilized when itÕs in the context of the learner knowing about how they learn best. We all have cognitive biases that cloud our judgement. We can compensate, at least to some extent, if we understand cognitive biases. A great article on ignorance is [Dunning 2014]. If youÕre confused about why Americans vote against their own self-interest, read this article. And, last but not least, you sometimes need to be able to figure out what it is that you donÕt know. | |
| Complexity | |
| Many of our largest problems remain unsolved simply because theyÕre complex. So we should go meta on complexity, and study complexity itself. So what academic field best gives us tools for complexity? | |
| Well, weÕre programmers. Our answer is that computer science has developed some extremely powerful, and under-appreciated, tools for managing complexity. Chief among them is the idea of integrated development environments (IDE) for authoring programming languages. | |
| Why are these so powerful? In problem solving, certain ideas and techniques tend to occur again and again. If you encapsulate these ideas in a language, naming them with words, you vastly increase your ability to solve problems by composing phrases. The idea of a development environment is software that helps you manage this use of language. It helps you compose words and phrases, test them, and fix problems when the occur. For example, you could think of Microsoft Word as an interactive development environment for English authors. | |
| The power of a formal language with an IDE shouldnÕt be limited to programming and English. Even the large-scale problems we discuss in this book, such as the economy and government, could benefit from this approach. We develop these ideas further in the chapter Software Makerism. We present a specific design for a language and environment for decision-making in government in the chapter Tools for Reasonocracy. | |
| Leaning about life skills | |
| Schools fail to teach life skills. Some of the most important aspects of contemporary human life go almost completely unmentioned in school curricula. | |
| The details of getting a job, buying a car, eating and exercising properly, moving to another city, maintaining romantic relationships, maintaining a home, or what to do when a cop pulls you over, receive almost no formal instruction in schools. Go find those subjects in the Common Core curriculum. | |
| If your parents or peers didnÕt teach you properly about such things, youÕll probably fumble through these processes on your own, and are likely to make serious mistakes that will drastically affect your quality of life. Universal education in life skills would almost certainly be cheaper and more humane than trying to mitigate the consequences of peopleÕs trial-and-error disasters. | |
| Self-Sufficient U. | |
| One possible way to create a community where life skills and education are integrated might be a project to create a ÒSelf-Sufficient U.Ó Can we provide the equivalent of a college education, without the $60K/year costs? | |
| The school can grow its own food (aeroponics for fruits and vegetables, aquaponics for fish and seaweed, chickens for eggs and meat), build its own buildings (bamboo is strong and fast growing), generate its own energy (solar and wind) and handle most of its own health care (smart phones with peripherals are amazingly capable). | |
| Such a school wouldnÕt have an Astronomy or Russian Literature Department, nor a football team, but agriculture, architecture, energy and medicine will be front and center. In addition to teaching life-skills, there will be classes in efficient business management (aka: cooperation), justice, government and, of course, education, will fit right in with this practical agenda. The best way to learn something is to live it, just like learning a foreign language is easier, when youÕre living in the country that speaks that language. The more experienced students can carry much of the teaching load, especially if mentored by seasoned professors. Students perform administration tasks including admissions. How better to learn about management or hiring? The education of Òrunning your own showÓ is powerful and practical. ItÕs also a motivating platform for research into self-sufficiency, which will become essential as Capitalism crumbles. | |
| Can this be done? An agricultural high school in Paraguay has developed a model for self-sufficient schools [School-in-a-Box 2017]. Tuskegee University in Alabama was founded in 1881 with very little money and a program wherein students maintained farms and built campus buildings to cover costs. The Israeli Kibbutz had success in the 1960Õs. While TU and Kibbutzim may have diluted their initial focus, with tech advances, self-sufficiency is easier now and will get even easier. | |
| Online education | |
| Technology is providing even more educational opportunities. Online courses, and resources like MITÕs Open Courseware, are available for almost every academic subject. TED talks provide insight from the worldÕs great thinkers. Automated translation will make the worldÕs knowledge available to people who speak minority languages in remote places, and help them share their unique perspective with the world. Peer-to-peer learning will help alleviate teacher shortages. Intelligent tutoring systems will make online learning more effective and personalized. And, of course, online learning holds the promise of reducing costs and making education more accessible to all. | |
| But thatÕs a worse education, right? According to a report from the US Dept. of Education ÒThe meta-analysis found that, on average, students in online learning conditions performed modestly better than those receiving face-to-face instruction.Ó Consortia of universities are putting their courses on line and charging very little if anything for them. EdX and Coursera, just to name two systems, attempt to capture the best courses from Stanford, Harvard, MIT and a host of other top universities. | |
| Making curricula | |
| Constructionism has, at its core, a philosophy of allow students to learn by constructing things. By becoming a maker. Going meta, one of the most instructive things to make is a curriculum. | |
| One of the best ways to learn something is to be put into the position of teaching it. YouÕre motivated to do a good job because you donÕt want to be embarrassed in front of the students, This also forces you to take a studentÕs eye view of the information youÕll be presenting, causing the kind of reßection thatÕs likely to improve the educational presentation of the subject matter. | |
| But are there enough students to go around to make everyone a teacher? Yes, if thereÕs just one student you teach: yourself. | |
| Today billions of people teach themselves things when they use a web search engine to find out things they donÕt know. A quick way to find what youÕre after is what we call Search By Design. First you design (to a low resolution) the solution youÕre looking for. Now that you know its parameters (roughly what it looks like) you can form more targeted queries that return more relevant results. Plus, because you know what it should look like, you have a much better chance of recognizing it when it shows up in your queryÕs results. | |
| This works when searching for isolated things, but isnÕt so effective for learning an entire subject. ThatÕs better done with Learn By Design. You design the curriculum that you think would best meet your needs. Now you can search for it with a greater chance of success. Or you can Search by Design for the various pieces of your curricula. If you have a hard time getting what you seek, its an opportunity to help others by compiling what you do find, combined with your own design, into a new web page that will expand useful curricula for all. | |
| Education: The real panacea | |
| ItÕs fashionably cynical to greet starry-eyed innovators like us with the warning: There are no panaceas. No silver bullets. | |
| But if we set out to solve all the worldÕs problems, improving education is about as close as you can get to a silver bullet. A palladium bullet, maybe (Silver is Element 47 in the Periodic Table. Palladium (which is even more valuable!) is Element 46.). | |