Human Learning (Still) the Next Frontier
The archives collection at Wired.com has a transcribed discussion between computer gurus Alan Kay and Danny Hillis that, surprisingly perhaps, includes a few comments about learning and education. It’s a worthwhile read in many respects but I’m plucking a couple quotes from it that relate specifically to knowledge, learning and pedagogy:
“There’s this interesting interplay between what you might call talent and how much of a meta-system we can put down on top of meager talents to learn how to do things. Two recent tennis champions, Ivan Lendl and Chris Evert, were not actual athletes. They were people who just learned how to play tennis. Some of the most natural tennis players, like Nastasi and Agassi, only do well when things are going well – they don’t have learned skills to drop back on. So in any given population maybe 5 to 20 percent have a natural hacker sort of talent; they are often not helped by pedagogy. Pedagogy is about getting the other 80 percent of people within hailing distance. So I’ve been very interested in taking some very important ideas and wondering how you get them in a state where the 80 percent can actually learn them in an operational way. And that’s why I keep coming back to computers.”
Interestingly the conversation concludes with:
“DH:
The question that I keep asking myself is, where is the next frontier? Where is that place that a new world is being constructed? Do you know any candidates?
AK:
I think the frontier has to do with human learning. Knowledge is not completely relative. There are a hundred or so powerful ideas that basically mean the difference between life and death, and I think one of our major jobs should always be to be true and get as many people enfranchised into them as possible.
DH:
But in fact, if you look at what’s happening, it seems just the opposite. We’re very much heading toward a two-class society, where either you’re somebody who sort of knows about, or feels empowered to deal with all of the complexity in society, or you’re one of the people that is a victim of it and is just on the receiving end of it all.
AK:
And I think the gap actually gets bigger as the leading edge of knowledge gets less intuitive.”
The full transcript by Steven Levy and Kevin Kelly can be viewed here.