Got your attention?

This is a quote from Alan Kay (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Kay) in his keynote at Educomm 2007 in Anaheim, California.

How about these:

"Science is a way of debugging human brains, not necessarily just understanding the universe"

Or:

"Euclid's proof of Pythagoras given to children is really a sort of pornography in that kids are exposed to adult behaviour which they can't possibly understand"

Rather than:

"Children can derive the maths themselves, rather than understand a 2nd order differential equation provided to them"

And:

"Greater than 90% of 10-11 year olds can do real science, not air science"

He made a lot of the scientist Giordano Bruno (1548-1600), the scientist who burned at the stake because he raised questions about the Church's teachings by relying on measurements rather than hearsay.

He related this to a lot of current curriculum as the equivalent of  "air guitar" rather than real guitar. Classroom experiences are essentially not "doing it". Even though government testing may indicate an increase in student ability over the years, it is referenced to a poor benchmark in that it has increased to from "really not doing it" to just "not doing it". Science will now consider experiments as important but kids rarely do a real experiment; mostly lab work is to confirm existing knowledge and any departure from the expected outcome is attributed to a “bad experiment”!

In other words, lip service to true Science or Maths. It’s "Science appreciation" compared to Science. "Maths Appreciation" compared to Maths.

So, 70% of all students go through the whole Galileo & gravity thing and yet fail to understand."

He demonstrated year 1 kids essentially deriving second order differential equations by investigating motion to build true understanding (very much a constructivist philosophy)

He put "outlook" as more important than IQ or "knowledge". Outlook is the response to "what do I do when I don't know what to do?" What heuristic will I use?

Historically, a human's response to this has been Spiritual (early thought attributed natural phenomena to deities) or Gear-like (the mechanistic solutions characteristic of a Newtonian approach), then negotiated - a more modern approach used in Cosmology, quantum mechanics or biological or ecological systems.

An example: a wristwatch with 100 parts can be seen as magic (spiritual) analysed as a set of gears (mechanistic), but a system such as an ecological system has 100's of thousands of components and as such has to be negotiated. You can't push it or fix problems with the equivalent of replacing cogs as feedback loops and system memory will mitigate against change.

For example, Rabbits + Australia is not simply additive; the results interfere with feedback chains and are multiplicative. Similarly, our minds are ecologies and behave similarly.

Combine this with a child’s egocentric view and you’ll see that cartesian coordinates won't make much sense as they want 0,0 to be where they are. This is why Logo (and the modern variants such as Scratch) make so much sense to kids.

The challenge for Maths is to find situations that have relationships which can form useful explorations by children.

Explorations are more useful than the "Let's fill the kids with facts as if they were sponges" approach not only on a philosophical basis.

For example: California education has proclaimed that "all matter is made of atoms" and kids have to answer tests with this answer otherwise they fail, even though the answer is incorrect!

Kay considers that many scientists are annoyed at this and a few are considering writing a text for free. Will this mark the beginnings of a move to OpenSource education?