dimanche 30 avril 2006
Alan Kay en entrevue
Par Gilles Jobin, dimanche 30 avril 2006 :: Squeak(Scratch)eries
La musique n'est pas dans le piano.
Il faut absolument lire Alan Kay dans cette excellente entrevue : FACE to FACE: Alan Kay Still waiting for the Revolution.
Quelques extraits :
One of the things that pollutes a lot of computer use in schools is a heightened sense of vocationalism. Parents are concerned about whether their children are going to get jobs, and so they really want the schools to train the kids. But my belief is that the training part is kind of like driver's ed: It takes about as long to learn how to use a computer as it takes to learn how to drive a car, maybe less. So it's not something you really want to pin twelve years of school on.
That's one of the reasons why, in my research, I've retreated into early childhood. The earlier you go, the further away you are from the thing that parents are worried about—which is whether the kids are going to get jobs. However, vocationalism is now rampant in elementary schools, even in kindergarten.
[...] the computer can be a kind of thought amplifier.
Think about it: How many books do schools have—and how well are children doing at reading? How many pencils do schools have—and how well are kids doing at math? It's like missing the difference between music and instruments. You can put a piano in every classroom, but that won't give you a developed music culture, because the music culture is embodied in people.
On the other hand, if you have a musician who is a teacher, then you don't need musical instruments, because the kids can sing and dance. But if you don't have a teacher who is a carrier of music, then all efforts to do music in the classroom will fail—because existing teachers who are not musicians will decide to teach the C Major scale and see what the bell curve is on that.
The important thing here is that the music is not in the piano. And knowledge and edification is not in the computer. The computer is simply an instrument whose music is ideas.
Educators have to face up to what 21st-century education needs to be about, and start thinking about solving that problem long before they bring the computer on the scene.
Virtually all learning difficulties that children face are caused by adults' inability to set up reasonable environments for them. The biggest barrier to improving education for children, with or without computers, is the completely impoverished imaginations of most adults.
Liane : Alan Kay, Computers, Networks and Education, Scientific American, septembre 1991.
