Taking advantage of the “Christmas break,” we’ve tackled one of those favorites that we’ve had bookmarked for ages in our browser: It’s a conversation between Saymour Papert and Paulo Freire recorded in the late 80s! and broadcast at that time on Brazilian television. You can read an English transcript of the conversation on papert.org (it’s funny that one of the pioneers of computing has such a 1.0 website).
The conversation is framed by the title:
The Future of School
, so it partly focuses on the future consequences of implementing computers in classrooms. It is almost always very entertaining, as well as instructive, to hear about a future in the past that is now the present of the listener. At one point in the conversation, Papert states:
«I say it is inconceivable that the school will continue as we have known it. Inconceivable. And the reason why it is inconceivable I can glimpse in my grandson, who is used to finding knowledge when he wants and who can take it when he needs it, and be in contact with other people and with teachers, not because the state designates it, but because he can find them somewhere on some network. These children will not sit quietly in school listening to the teacher giving them pre-digested knowledge. I think they will rebel.»
It seems risky today to assess the degree of accuracy of this prediction, although perhaps many teachers will agree if we say that many of their students “do not sit quietly in school.” It is well known that in the USA have opted for the pathologization of this fact: in 2007, 9.5% of the school population between 4 and 17 years of age had been diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), a disorder whose diagnosis increased by 5.5% from 2003 to 2007 (according to statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention of the USA government); a 66,3% of the diagnosed students receives medical treatment, which mainly consists of the administration of Ritalin“, the trade name for methylphenidate, a compound that the human nervous system is unable to differentiate from cocaine or amphetamines according to the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) in the United States.
A few months ago we visited a secondary school; its principal, who kindly acted as a guide, showed us the facilities while explaining the pedagogical foundations of the center: its methodology was based on the fact that the students accumulate for a time a series of knowledge -defined in the curriculum- that they should reproduce later and as accurately as possible in an exam, and then forget them and retain again another series of knowledge that in turn should reproduce in a new exam and so repeatedly. Surprised, we asked if it would not be more convenient, given the vast amount of information currently available and the ease of accessing it, to enable students to equip themselves with tools to know where and how to find the information they need at any given time and accompany them in the formation of their own criteria when selecting, analyzing, evaluating and using the information they have access to. Faced with this question, the director’s response was a hesitant and brief ‘no’.
It seems evident that Papert’s prophecy has not been fulfilled in one point and that is that, however inconceivable it seemed to him then, the school still operates today, when ICTs are fully integrated into our daily habits, in the same way as twenty years ago. On the other hand, can we interpret the inability of many students to remain calm and seated in class as an unconscious and spontaneous form of revolt, the product of a lack of interest and not an attention deficit?
We must not lose sight of something that Freire himself points out during the conversation with Papert: the way in which the different technologies work and are assembled together is traversed by power relations that develop historically; for Papert, the modes of circulation and access to knowledge that the ‘new’ information and communication technologies allowed made the survival of the school inconceivable, from an ontological point of view, as if the existence of those logically excluded the possibility of the other. Paradoxically, Papert himself recognizes the way in which computers had already been “schooled” in the mid-80s: « now they have a computer room, there is a computer curriculum and a specific computer teacher. In other words, computers have been completely assimilated into the way things are done in school ». As Freire himself points out, these are not «[…] in any way, didactic or methodological errors but ideological and political ones. So, what we must do is change the world from a political perspective. »
If you can’t be bothered to go to YouTube and search for the rest of the video conversation, you’ll find it after the «Continue reading».