The Naked Future (19 page)

This view is somewhat unusual for someone who is, at least in name, an educator. But Negroponte isn't the first teacher to condemn the institutionalization of education, which has been an evolving process throughout history. In his writings and speeches, educator
John Taylor Gatto describes the emergence of a teaching system that, from the 1800s onward, served primarily as a means to house the children of factory workers while their parents toiled in sewing rooms, slaughterhouses, and mills. The objective of public education was to create more of the same. By its very nature, Gatto observes, formal education works to suppress creativity and unnaturally lengthen—as well as dull—childhood. “Mandatory education serves children only incidentally; its real purpose is to turn them into servants . . . After a long life, and thirty years in the public school trenches, I've concluded that genius is as common as dirt. We suppress our genius only because we haven't yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves.”
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Negroponte's skepticism about school also recalls some of the more provocative insights of the British philosopher John Stuart Mill, who observed, “A general State education is a mere contrivance for molding people to be exactly like one another; and as the mold in
which it casts them is that which pleases the dominant power in the government, whether this be a monarch, an aristocracy, or a majority of the existing generation; in proportion as it is efficient and successful, it establishes a despotism over the mind, leading by a natural tendency to one over the body.”

The MIT Media Lab that Negroponte cofounded exists in stark contrast to the picture of education painted by Mill. Classes happen but the emphasis is on cobbling and tinkering. “We don't teach at the MIT Media Lab. We do research. We assemble teams. We don't have students so much as apprentices,” says Negroponte. His poor opinion of regimented schooling is, in part, why he created the OLPC Association. He had hopes that the program would decouple learning from teaching in the developing world just as the MIT Media Lab was helping young designers, inventors, and entrepreneurs build expertise outside the formal teacher-student relationship. He was soon deflated to realize that this emphasis on rote memorization, testing, discipline, and regimentation was even more pronounced in the developing world than it was in the United States.

In his lecture at MIT he recalled going to villages in Pakistan and meeting first-graders who were actually excited, “wide-eyed,” he described them, for the first day of school. He returned two years later and discovered those same children, who were then third-graders, as we encounter third-graders today: subdued, uninterested, and robbed of the desire to learn.

It was on one such trip while he was in nearby India that he met Sugata Mitra, a computer scientist with a PhD in the theoretical solid state physics of organic semiconductors from Indian Institute of Technology Delhi. As a physicist Mitra had an interest in complex ordered systems in which the actors organized themselves into coherent forms without outside intervention, similar to bee and ant colonies. Mitra believed that human learning and knowledge formation might be subject to the same invisible, cohesive forces. But how was he to test this idea, as any human-led effort to set the parameters for knowledge formation in a subject (in this case, a child) might be called teaching?

Mitra's solution was to go around the human.

In 1999, at his office in New Delhi, he launched an experiment he called the “hole in the wall” to demonstrate that self-organized learning via an electronic interface—with no teacher intervention at all—was possible.
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He and his team members “cut a hole inside that wall and put a pretty powerful PC into that hole, sort of embedded into the wall so that its monitor was sticking out at the other end,” Mitra explained at the 2007 Lift Conference in Geneva, Switzerland. The PC had a touch pad and Internet.

A few hours later, an eight-year-old boy, shoeless and dressed only in a dirty kurta (long shirt) from the nearby slum neighborhood (Mitra's description) of Kalkaji, approached the hole and began to play with the keyboard and the mouse. The boy had never seen a computer before. A few hours later, when his six-year-old sister showed up, the boy was able to tell her—without knowing exactly what he was talking about—how to browse on AltaVista.

Mitra performed the experiment several times across India. In a rural village called Madan Tusi there was no formal English instruction at all. He set up a hole-in-the-wall kiosk, left behind some educational CDs in English (the village was devoid of Internet service), and returned a few months later. “I found these two kids, eight- and twelve-year-olds, who were playing a game on the computer. And as soon as they saw me they said, ‘We need a faster processor and a better mouse,'” Mitra told the Swiss crowd.

When he surveyed the kids, he found they were using an average of two hundred English words in casual communication with each other. Though they couldn't pronounce the English correctly, they understood the proper usage for each of the words. In other cases, where the hole-in-the-wall computer was connected to the Internet, the children taught themselves how to browse and e-mail, how to use drawing applications and the most basic Windows functions. But this learning only took place when a big group of kids was crowded around the computer, jostling and shouting and playing, as kids do.

This is an important point. We associate educational technology with lots of individual screen time, such as those kids at desks in forest green uniforms, each kid burrowed into his own laptop. The kids in Mitra's experiments spent far less time learning from the machine than from one another.
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Mitra realized a startling conclusion.

A machine doesn't teach you as well as the act of teaching others.

“What you have, actually, is there is one child operating the computer. And surrounding him are usually three other children, who are advising him on what to do. If you test them, all four will get the same scores in whatever you ask them. Around these four are usually a group of about sixteen children, who are also advising, usually wrongly, about everything that's going on, on the computer. And all of them also will clear a test given on that subject. So they are learning as much by watching as they learn by doing,” Mitra explained to the Lift group.

In the OLPC program, Negroponte observed something similar. He estimates that of the 2.4 million cases where laptops were distributed, in 3 or 4 percent of the cases the kids taught their parents how to read and write.

The findings are inspiring but not particularly conclusive. They don't suffice as an argument for radically redefining primary school education. Mitra could only observe the aftereffects of putting the computer in the town square, just as Negroponte can't stand over the shoulder of 2.4 million kids to whom he's given laptops in order to observe how they learn and when.

But Negroponte's Ethiopian tablet initiative takes an important step forward; it closes that feedback gap in the way it records every interaction that takes place over the medium. Though not exactly telemetric, this data could provide clues as to the causal link between group interaction and learning. Those clues exist in a time between the two moments—months apart—when the cardboard box was dropped off in Wonchi village and when the kids hacked Android. The data are open to anyone.

You might describe the one tablet experiment as exploitative.
It's hard to imagine an American parent reacting well to the idea of her child coming home from school with a “free device” loaded with shadowy surveillance software, even if it is part of an experiment that comports with International Review Board standards. Many others have criticized the entire OLPC project as expressing too much faith in the Western technologies of personal electronics, particularly the emphasis on English. In 2005 computer designer Lee Felsenstein likened the initiative to dropping flat-screen TVs on villagers from helicopters: “It is sufficiently discomfiting to consider that the outcome of a massive project like OLPC may be a different form of commercial television for the developing countries. Worse yet would be the preemption of funding for many other projects designed under a community model. Future talk of computer systems for the developing world would meet the dismissive response that ‘it's been tried and it failed.'”
^8
,
9

As an act of charity, dropping computers on the world's poorest kids is self-serving and patronizing.

This is one view.

An opposing view holds that Mitra's and Negroponte's work is a long-overdue response to one of the more enduring legacies of
actual
colonialism: the continued export of the classroom model to ever-poorer communities where the model does not always work. In separate research conducted throughout India, Mitra has found that the quality of education declines as a function of distance from the capital. Teachers in the more remote villages simply lacked either the desire or the ability to perform at the same level as their urban counterparts.
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Mitra doesn't share Negroponte's animus against all schooling but he does argue that educational technology programs are implemented in a way that protects the status quo first and foremost, as new ed tech is piloted in schools that are already well funded and where students are high performing. Poorer or remote schools where educational technology can do the greatest amount of good don't get the same opportunities to try out new solutions.

As Mitra told the Swiss crowd, a computer can't replace a good
teacher, but if it can replace a
poor
teacher, then we should let that happen. “I'm proposing an alternative primary education is required where schools do not exist, where schools are not good enough, where teachers are not available, or where teachers are not good enough.”

This simple plea doesn't sound mutinous but it is. Telemetric platforms and technology hold the potential for a change in education that will resemble revolution. When metrics are no longer constrained by the time it takes to grade paper tests,
any
metric could fall by the wayside and be replaced by new signals that are more truthful.

For instance, Laura Matzen of Sandia National Laboratories and some of her colleagues have demonstrated that the brain's electrical activity, detectable via electroencephalogram (EEG), predicts how well-studied material has been incorporated into memory, thus how well a subject will perform on memory tests.

The researchers asked twenty-three people to attempt to memorize a list of words while undergoing a brain scan. The average subject recalled 45 percent of the words on the list. The EEG data correctly predicted which five of the twenty-three subjects would remember 72 percent of the words, beating the average.
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“If you had someone learning new material and you were recording the EEG, you might be able to tell them, ‘You're going to forget this, you should study this again,' or tell them, ‘Okay, you got it and go on to the next thing,'” Matzen said in a press release.
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Imagine for a moment the power of knowing beforehand how well you would perform on a test but how disempowered you would feel if that same future was naked to your competition, or to your future potential employers.

Telemetrically gathered scores aren't a perfect indication of future performance, so an inherent danger exists in relying too much on them. Likewise, educators, and particularly school districts, should avoid the temptation to rely on MOOCs to quickly solve education disparities that have been building up for decades. In 2013 San Jose State University (SJSU) entered into a deal with Sebastian Thrun's
Udacity to allow the online platform to provide remedial instruction in certain classes. SJSU has a lot of students who need basic training in math and language before they can take regular college-level courses. To some, the deal looked like a cheap way of getting around the fact that public primary and secondary education in California is anything but equal. On the
Atlantic
blog Ian Bogost mockingly summarized the deal: “The answer to underfunded, lower effectiveness primary and secondary education requires subsidizing a private, VC-funded bet made on a roulette wheel fashioned from the already precarious prospects of a disadvantaged population.”
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Other critics point out that the primary user group for MOOCs isn't kids who are having a hard time getting into higher education but students who have already completed two years of college. Some members of the online education community with whom I've spoken are quietly aghast at the idea of replacing remedial classes with MOOCs. They feel that the real potential of these education platforms is in adult and continuing education. The Udacity-San Jose State online college partnership has been marked by low completion rates for the course among students who need it most. Thrun has since suggested that Udacity will “pivot” away from general education toward corporate training. The critics clearly have a point.

Even if it's radically transformed, one reason school will probably endure is because the act of establishing interpersonal connections can't easily be digitized. For this you need co-location, a setting in the real world.

Andrew Ng began his experiment in online education with his colleague Daphne Kohler. It was an experiment that began simply, a few lectures posted to YouTube, no feedback, no two-way collaboration, and no interaction. It was the standard VHS lecture but with a cheaper look and on a cheaper medium. By Ng's account it didn't result in much and that's how history would have left it had he not had the fortune to be teaching machine learning in the heart of Silicon Valley where there are a lot of people with a keen interest in such obscure technical subjects as machine learning. There are students who match this description in Oklahoma City, or Cleveland,
or Lyon, France, but you don't run into them with the frequency that you do in Silicon Valley.