The Elements of Writing

El•e•ment \’e-lə-mənt\ n [ME, fr. AF & L; AF, fr. L elementum] (13c)

1. one of the parts of something that makes it work, or a quality that makes someone or something effective: the heating element of a toaster.
Ex.: Having a second income is an important element for most homebuyers.They had all the elements of a great team.
2. in chemistry and physics, a substance that cannot be reduced to smaller chemical parts and that has an atom different from that of any other substance.

The beauty of any great thing—in nature, in people, in the arts and crafts, in science—lies in how simple elements can be combined in different ways to create something original.

In nature, scientists have identified 118 chemical elements that serve as the basic units of our world. An element is a pure substance consisting of one type of atom. It cannot be broken down into a smaller part or transformed into another element. It’s basic, fundamental, core. ,Elements—which fall into the three categories of metals, metalloids, and nonmetals—are combined with each other to create compounds. Water is a compound, made up of two molecules hydrogen and one molecule of oxygen. Chemical elements and compounds combine in countless ways to create everything we experience in the world, from the vitamin C in our oranges to the metal in our cars.

We can find basic elements—core building blocks—in all our endeavors. An artist’s composition includes a number of elements, from the form of a composition of an image to the colors used to represent that image. A photograph’s elements include light, shutter speed, and distance. An engine’s elements include cylinders, pistons, valves, rods, crankshafts, and rings. An economy’s elements include producers, commodities, sellers, buyers, money, and prices.

You get the idea. We can reduce everything in life to its basic elements. When we understand the elements, we can deploy them to create something bigger and more complex.

Welcome to The Elements of Writing.

You can find all you need to know about writing in this iconic YouTube video.

(Since we posted this video, we have changed the name of our business from the Writing Code to The Elements of Writing. Nota bene.)

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I remember a moment in college when our professor explained how bureaucrats gain control over dissidents in the organization.

“It’s what Harold Lasswell referred to as ‘selective partial incorporation,'” he said.

That moment came back to me while reading Rachel Toor’s terrific philippic against bad academic writing in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

In class, I could hear the scribble-scribble-scribble around the table. I was always one of the biggest scribblers. You could use my notes to reconstruct any class. But I stopped short here.

Selective partial incorporation? What the . . .

1. Selective: You pick one or more people in the organization to buy off. You;re going to bribe them — or, to use the language of the collective action literature, offer them “selective inducements.”

2. Partial: You don’t engage your targets in all of the important affairs of the organization, just enough to get their cooperation.

3. Incorporation: You bring them inside your tent.

“Oh,” I said in my loud way, “you mean buying ’em off!”

After a brief moment of silence, with 12 sets of eyes darting back and forth from me to the professor, the professor agreed.

“Why, yes, Charles, if that’s the way you want to put it. It’s a little crude, but I guess that’s the point.”

The way I see it, bad academic writing and speech stem from two major sources: the Breakdown Problem and the Fake Razzle-Dazzle Problem. The expression “selective partial incorporation” is a good example of both.

The Breakdown Problem occurs when you’re analyzing all the factors that contribute to something. Take a simple example: To explain the concept of force, you need to understand the concepts of mass and acceleration (f=ma). To understand mass, you need to understand density and volume (m=dv). To understand acceleration, you need to understand velocity and time (a=dv/dt). To understand velocity, which means the rate of change of position, you need to understand the displacement and time (v=Δ x/Δt). On and on we go, defining one simple term with two or more other terms.

When my professor talked about “selective partial incorporation,” he was trying to break down the concept of the bribe and put it in the context of government bureaucracy. Each word contributed something to the idea.

But along the way, the real meaning of the term got obscured. You hear “selective partial incorpioration” and you can’t really picture the process of buying someone off. It’s too abstract for such a flesh-and-blood aspect of politics.

When academic writing gets filled up with this kind of vocabulary, the real meaning of everything can get confused. Even when all the experts understand the arcane language — when all political scientists, for example, understand that ‘selective partial incorporation’ means bribing — you shut out a broader audience.

Change is scary.

You grow up wanting to “be” something—a ballplayer, business person, artist, public servant, union worker, builder, programmer, teacher, or writer. You get a fixed idea of what that means. You imagine the daily routines, the friendships, the rewards, the prestige. And if you get a taste of success, you decide, consciously and subconsciously, that the system rewarding you is the way things ought to be,

Then things change. New technologies change the way people do business. New markets emerge, undermining old markets and relationships. Jobs that used to reward people disappear. In their place, new jobs defy the old hopes and dreams. You lose your sense of self, your confidence, your faith in the system. You start to believe that the world does not honor you anymore. And maybe you’re right.

Joseph Schumpeter called this process “creative destruction.” As the market churns away, new technologies and processes render old ones obsolete. You get all kinds of exciting new industries and careers, products and services. But the old ones disappear, pitilessly. It’s hard. Just ask an old autoworker in Detroit, a steelworker in Pittsburgh, or a textile worker in North Carolina.

Or just ask a newspaper reporter or author.

We are in the midst of the greatest literary revolution since Gutenberg. A. J. Liebling once remarked that “freedom of the press belongs to those who own one.” Until the PC and Internet, the ability to speak to an audience was limited to the people in control of the presses and studios. If you wanted to write an article about, say, the city council’s zoning policy or the president’s wars, you needed to buy or rent the means of production (presses) or get the approval of one of their gatekeepers (publishers and editors). If you wanted to write a book, you needed to get the nod from the mandarins on Publisher’s Row.

To become a writer, you needed to be part of the guild. And that was not always easy.

It’s all different now. Anyone can put up a blog, for free. Anyone can post comments on an Internet site, for free. Anyone can post a book on Amazon, for free. Anyone can post a video on YouTube, for free. Anyone can start a movement and build a community, for free.

If you want to say something, you can do so. There’s no guarantee that anyone will read it, but you can put out your ideas and arguments, stories and plans, for all the world to see.

These days, everyone’s a writer. We are on the crest of a literary revolution. Roll over, Gutenberg.

The flip side of this openness is that the group troops of the old order – reporters, editors, researchers, authors – have lost their special place. Newspapers and magazines are dying or cutting back, laying off staff. Advertisers have found other media to sell their wares. Journalism and publishing have not figured out how to survive in this brave new world. It’s scary.

You talk with journalists and authors and editors these days, and there’s a brittleness. It’s doom-and-gloom time. They don’t know what the future holds, so they cling to their old ideas. They recognize that change is coming—hell, it’s arrived—but they want to play familiar roles in the new world.

A New Vision of Journalism

Revolutionary change requires visionaries. The best leaders not only embrace new technologies, but also hold on to the best values of the ancien regime. They understand that human needs and values are eternal, that new technologies offer new opportunities to pursue those values. They have empathy for the people who lose everything in the revolution. But they focus on opportunities rather than lamenting loss.

One of the leading figures in the Literary Revolution—Arianna Huffington, the founder of the online magazine The Huffington Post—is The Elements of Writing’s 2010 Person of the Year.

If Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington did not exist, someone would have to invent her. She is the perfect symbol of the media in the age of the internet, globalism, and amateur-specialists.

Born in Greece in 1950, Arianna Stassinopoulos convinced her mother Elli to leave her father because of his philandering. Elli had no money, education, or connections, but she left anyway anyway to claim her own identity and independence. And that’s what she encouraged Arianna to do as well, when she urged her to apply to Cambridge University. Arianna got in and excelled at debating and writing.

Arianna Huffington’s first book, The Female Woman, was a post-feminist manifesto. Since then she has written books about artists (Picasso and Maria Callas), mythology (The Gods of Greece), the modern spiritual malaise (After Reason and The Fourth Instinct), a satire on the Clinton-Gingrich years (Greetings from the Lincoln Bedroom), and the culture of corruption in Washington (Pigs at the Trough). Her latest, Fanatics and Fools, offers a new left vision for America.

At one point, everyone thought Arianna was angling to become America’s first lady. She married a Houston oil heir named Michael Huffington, who served in the State Department  in the Reagan years, in 1986. Michael spent an unprecedented sum of $5.4 million to win election to Congress as a Republican from California in 1992. Two years later he spent $28 million in an unsuccessful bid for the Senate. In 1998 he announced that he was bisexual. The couple divorced.

At this point Arianna was the glamour lady of conservatism. She was caught up in the Gingrich Revolution. Always a social butterfly, she alighted on Comedy Central with Al Franken and continued to articulate a new blend of independence and mutuality, feminism and traditionalism, glamour and combativeness. She extended her reach and vision beyond the right and the GOP. She gathered movie stars, academics, politicians, artists, authors, athletes in salons.

Rather than fearing change, she seemed to delight in it. Maybe it was her own personal odyssey of change that made its inevitability so obvious to her. But more than any other figure in the politico-media-art axis, she seemed to relish the coming of the new—while, in her own way, holding on to Old World values.

In 2005—five short years ago, around the same time YouTube launched—she founded The Huffington Post. It was a natural extension of her personality, an online version of her ongoing salons. HuffPo provided … what?

The Power of the Post

On one level, HuffPo is just another aggregator—that is, a site that grabs other people’s work from the web and puts it all in a dynamic package. The site consists of hundreds of new links every day, arranged into traditional “sections” but also according to hot topics. HuffPo is, in fact, exactly what Old Media titans harrumph about. The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Reuters, Bloomberg, the TV networks and cable outlets, and countless other media invest millions in research and reporting. And HuffPo and other aggregators and bloggers grab it, format it for their own purposes.

Traditional media lack a viable business plan for the age of the Internet and mobile media — their fault — but the complaint has merit. The traditional media do all the heavy lifting and Arianna’s elves and their ilk go out and take it and give it their own sizzle.

But, as Richard Nixon used to say, let me say this about that:

First, the old media need to figure out their own plan. If they want to sell ideas, they need to figure out how to make it work. It looks like they are finally doing that, more than a decade after web surfing became a national obsession. Most of the major newspapers and many smaller papers are starting to charge for online content. The Wall Street Journal has for years. The New York Times and Washington Post have announced plans to charge. The emergence of ereaders like the iPad—combined with the new national habit of clicking, which Steve Jobs popularized on iTunes—make it possible for old media to start selling subscriptions and stories.

But the fact that it took so long is not the fault of bloggers and aggregators.

Second, even though you could say they have been somewhat parasitic, The Huffington Post and bloggers have also created new conduits to newspapers and other old media. You post something interesting on the web and Arianna’s elves post it. Those posts direct traffic to the original site.

But there’s more. HuffPo is generating mountains of its own content. Whenever a big story breaks, a new flock of experts and commentators emerges to talk about it. Hundreds of bloggers post on HuffPo. The list includes old-style pol pundits (Howard Fineman), academic wonks (Graham Allison), New Age gurus (Naomi Wolf, Judith Orlaff), health gurus and foodies (David Katz, Jeanne Ponessa Fratello), TV and movie executives (Aaron Sorkin), lapsed pols (Al Gore, Art Agnos), musicians (Neil Young, Madonna), humorists (Andy Borowitz), management gurus (Steve Covey), and more.

HuffPo has also been hiring a flock of new old media hands and developing video blog pages.

Everything seems to come HuffPo’s way, like marbles rolling down a slanted table. In fact, you could say that The Huffington Post is one of the prime centers of media reinvention.

Despite Arianna’s conservative past, HuffPo has a lib-prog-lefty slant. It does not represent right-wing thinking much. Oh, you’ll find Log Cabin Republicans and relatives of conservative politicians like Candace Gingrich. But you won’t find an all-out case for limited government or contracting out. Maybe that’s a flaw. Or maybe it’s a gap waiting to be filled. No reason why HuffPo couldn’t offer a home to Andrew Sullivan, Virginia Postrel, City Journal folks, flat taxers, foreign policy experts concerned about human rights and proliferation. In fact, I would expect HuffPo to become a much richer ideological stew over the years.

Arianna’s Way

If Arianna Huffington did not come along, someone else might have invented a similar aggregator site, right? Well, maybe. But would it be the same? Would it combine the smarts, the breadth of vision, the diversity of viewpoints, the verve?

You could say that someone might have invented a people-friendly computer, a people-friendly MP3 player, a people-friendly smartphone, and a people-friendly e-tablet had Steve Jobs and Apple not come along. But we don’t know. Sometimes, history bends to the vision of once-in-a-blue-moon entrepreneurs. I think you can say that about both Arianna Huffington and Steve Jobs.

The ultimate fuel for the Huffington Post comes from Arianna Huffington’s personality. She’s a case study of the Lois Weisman principle. Weissman, remember, is the woman who connects people in Chicago’s intersecting worlds of politics, policy, parks, media, the arts, and neighborhoods. Malcolm Gladwell made her famous with his 1999 New Yorker profile. Arianna plays the same role with writers, thinkers, performers, activists, builders, producers, futurists, and curiosity-seekers. She connects them — both in person and on her site.

The Internet is the ultimate free-for-all. Anyone who can say the words “dot” and “com” has a website. The quality is wildly uneven. There are no real standards.

But it’s one thing to post blogs, and quite another to give the blogosphere some coherence. Somehow, the centrifugal forces of the Internet needs something to relate them to each other.

HuffPo is, above all, a place of journalistic and civic experimentation. Arianna and her team play around with any story—or information, videos, pictures, whatever can be shared—to figure out what works. It’s still an open format, and it’s bound to face resistance from old-media producers. They make plenty of mistakes. But that’s the point.

Someone has to try new approaches to gathering and distributing the news. To be sure, HuffPo is far from the only kid on the block. But it’s the kid that seems to draw a crowd and delight in doing whatever possible to get them talking about the issues that people care about.

No one knows how the old media will emerge from this revolution. Will The Times get its sea legs again? Will old newspapers, magazines, and pubishers adapt to the electronic readers with an iTunes-style instant-click format? Will WikiLeaks transform investigative reporting into a game of document dumps, with blogs and reports by amateurs and pros? Will writers and artists create new combinations of words and images? Will any new media formula be able to recreate the voice of authority once held by The New York Times and Walter Cronkite?

No one knows. But it’s a fair bet that at the center of media reinvention will a woman who has spent a lifetime finding new roles and exploring new ideas.

Years ago, I made a stray comment to my students at Yale: “You know, the best model for explaining and process is the recipe.”

It makes sense. A recipe has to break the process down into simple steps. A recipe also has to get the sequence right. You can’t mix the eggs for an omelet until you break the crack the shell.

As the semester drew to a close, one student challenged me. “If recipes are such great models for writing,” she said, “let’s cook something together.”

So we reserved a kitchen in a dorm and someone found a recipe for an apple pie. I brought a recorder and made a foolish promise.

“If we talk about what we’re doing, and why, at every step of the process, we’ll end up with a first good draft,” I said. “You can actually talk out the first draft of almost anything you write, as long as you break it into steps.”

When we gathered, the instigator talked about her grandmother’s love of cooking and how she passed it on to her family. Other students piped in with stories about family cooking memories. Not a bad start.

Then we started mixing ingredients, preheating the oven, preparing the pie tin. We made a crust, then put the apples, raising, cinnamon, sugar, and other ingredients together.

Someone talked about the oven’s heat.

Someone took my recorder and interviewed other students about their attitudes about food and cooking. People talked about diets. Some people waxed poetic about the emotional response to entering a house while food bakes.

And the room filled with the aroma of homemade pie. These sophisticated college students, from all over the world, who had talked about all kinds of tough issues in their papers all semester softened.

If Michael Pollan had entered the room, he would have been proud. The students turned an ordinary event—cooking a pie—into an intelligent essay on the culture of food.

Then we talked about the end-of-semester blues, and how different moods affect attitude toward food. A few people confessed that they lost their discipline at the end of the semester and ate rank junk food that they would never consider at the beginning of the semester.

Finally, the pie came out of the oven. It was getting late. People had other places to be—classes, meetings, clubs, sports. We each took a slice. As we cleaned up, we continued talking into the recorder. Something about how the job is never done till the place is put back into order.

When I got home, I listened to the recording. Turned out I was right. A transcript of that event could have been a strong first draft. The piece would need some work. We’d have to figure out what point we were trying to make. We’d have to develop some ideas more fully and drop some meaningless asides.

But the recipe recipe works. Here’s why.

Too often, writers work to cram too many ideas, too soon, into their writing. They feel like they don’t have time to say everything they want to say.

The origin of this problem, I think, is school assignments. The introductory paragraph has to state the thesis, the supporting arguments for the thesis, and maybe even the significance of the topic.

Even when they know about a topic, readers have a limited capacity to take in new thoughts. In a series of psychology experiments in the 1950s, George Miller found that humans can only remember seven items at a time. The “scratchpad” that is our shortterm memory simply can’t hold any more. That’s why, legend has it, telephone numbers were seven digits long.

But experts on the brain say that our shortterm memory is actually a lot less. Some say we can only hold three ideas in our head at the same time. Others say that, actually, it’s . . . one. We can jump back and forth along , say, three ideas. But we can only focus on one at a time. And the parade of ideas makes sense only when they come in some logical sequence.

The genius of the recipe approach to writing is twofold. As a chef, you can only do one thing at a time: measure ingredients, sift flour, butter pan, chop apples, and so on. And you have to do them in the right order. You can’t scramble an egg until you break it, right?

Next time you have something complex to explain—how nuclear licensing works, how to code a website, how to close a sale, how to get to Aunt Tillie’s house in North Carolina—make it a recipe.

By Charlie Euchner
Education Week
July 27, 1983

Concern about mathematics and science education stems at least partly from the perception that today’s students need to be more “technologically literate” than the students of any previous generation. And the challenge posed by computers can, in turn, be met by using computers in the school.

On that much, most educators agree. But just how educational technology can be used–and, in fact, whether it ever will–is a constant source of dispute.

Technology is likely to be used increasingly in all subjects, but experts believe that it holds special promise for math and science. The computer’s potential for “mass delivery” of instruction might help address the shortage of teachers, some educators say. Furthermore, computer use could make math problems less abstract, reduce tedious operations, and teach logic. And computer simulations could demonstrate complex physical phenomena that are impossible to show in standard science laboratories.

Some experts say “mass delivery” of instruction is where the computer’s greatest potential lies. Computers can illustrate the abstract concepts of mathematics and science better than traditional methods, they say, and will be able to help alleviate the shortage of teachers in those areas.

Others hold that to use the computer as a “solid-state Socrates,” or a means of delivering instruction, would be a waste. They say the computer is best used as a tool for doing tedious computation, working with complex mathematics problems, and aiding with some laboratory work.

Educators appear to agree that the computer is useful to introduce students to the basics of information technology, such as programming–which, according to a recent survey, is now one of the most common uses of the machines.

That study, conducted by the Center for Social Organization of Schools at the Johns Hopkins University, found that the computer so far has simply been “grafted” onto the traditional mathematics curriculum. The nationwide survey of 2,209 schools found that most teachers put greater emphasis on programming and less on computer-assisted instruction as they gain experience with the technology.

Such a practice has both positive and negative effects, says Arthur G. Powell, executive director of an independent national study of high schools. On one hand, such courses can attract students who normally would not take part in any program with a mathematical component. Computer science could teach many of the reasoning skills that are considered central to other math subjects, he says.

But such courses also serve as a way for schools to “get around” state mandates for stiffer graduation requirements. “It’s one way the school can respond without making the teaching of math more strenuous … and you don’t have to deal with problems of sequence,” Mr. Powell says.

THE COMPUTER AS TUTOR

Educators say the professional arguments about computers will intensify in the next several years as the number of computers in the schools and the range of educational software increase.

Few experts expect computer-assisted instruction to make the teacher obsolete, but many believe that the computer can at least free the teacher from many tedious tasks and do a better job teaching students basic skills–especially in areas such as mathematics and science.

According to a report by Technical Education Research Centers (terc), commissioned by the National Science Foundation, there are now 1,000 science and 650 mathematics software packages on the market, and 100 new mathematics and science packages appear every month. Those programs represent almost half of all of the educational software available. More than 90 percent of all the math software programs are for drill and practice.

There is almost no software for elementary-school science classes and for many high-school topics, terc found. Many software topics overlap, the survey found, and teachers reported that they are not aware of what software is available.

Robert Kansky, professor of mathematics education at the University of Wyoming, says many schools in his state “can’t afford to hire math and science teachers.” The only way students will be able to take advanced courses in these ares, he says, is through computer hookups.

Mr. Kansky, who in 1981 and 1982 served as a consultant for a computer-assisted-instruction experiment in South Africa, says a three-tiered computer systems–with mainframe computers on the top, minicomputers in the middle, and microcomputers on the bottom–eventually will make delivery of sophisticated programs cost-effective. In such an arrangement, desktop computers would be able to use more sophisticated programs now available only on the larger machines.

In addition to increasing access to math and science education, Mr. Kansky and others say, computer-based education can also actually improve student performance.

A recent analysis of data from 52 independent studies found that students who receive computer-based instruction in all subjects perform better academically than those who do not. The study, conducted by three researchers at the University of Michigan, found that students using computers earn better scores on tests in less time than other students.

Despite such findings, many experts contend that using the computer as a means of instruction will not be worthwhile for many years. Other methods of expanding schools’ teaching capacity, such as cross-peer tutoring, are more effective, these people say. For now, they conclude, the computer should be used only as a tool–to perform time-consuming computations, gather laboratory data, and analyze data–and for the practical skill-training that programming offers.

For tutorial software to keep the interest of the student, says Robert B. Davis, associate director of the research laboratory on computer-based education at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, it needs to be much more sophisticated–and for the software to be more sophisticated, the hardware needs to be more sophisticated. Mr. Davis said that almost all of the hardware available to schools is not powerful enough to handle worthwhile software. Because “the great pressure in education is to get something cheaply,” many schools buy the least sophisticated machines.

“Sitting in front of a computer for seven hours” will not keep students engaged, adds one science educator. “They need to talk to people, work on real-world activities.”

THE COMPUTER AS SIMULATOR

The value of simulation programs for the sciences is almost as much a matter of controversy as the tutorial programs. Simulations show simplified models of physical phenomena, such as biological functions.

At the recent National Educational Computing Conference in Baltimore, a panel of computer scientists and educators extolled the virtues of simulation programs that allow students to learn about science “intuitively.” But the participants also agreed with Tom Snyder, the president of a software firm, who said, “Right now, there is just a handful of good programs. It will take time and money to develop good programs.”

The participants never questioned whether simulation programs were worth developing. They agreed that some programs already available showed that simulations give students a better “intuitive” and “hands-on” understanding of mathematics and science than they had been able to offer.

Alfred Bork, professor of physics at the University of California at Irvine, says that his colleagues sometimes do not have a complete understanding of some physical concepts because they have not worked with variables in a dynamic setting such as a computer simulation.

“As soon as they saw a plot that didn’t appear in the books they had problems,” Mr. Bork says, referring to problems dealing with electrical phenomena.

Robert F. Tinker, director of the technology center at terc, says he has seen students develop a “working vocabulary” in complicated subjects such as nuclear power and the ecology with computer simulations. “There’s a lot of good science in it,” he says, referring to a simulation entitled “Three Mile Island,” in which students are required to operate a nuclear-power plant both safely and profitably.

But some science educators say they doubt that either computer-based tutorials or computer simulations will improve enough to make them worthwhile. One educator explains that simulations he has seen are not only inadequate, but harmful in some cases. The computer models, he says, oversimplify scientific phenomena to the point of teaching invalid concepts.

He cites two simulations–one which demonstrates the ideal gas law, and a second which demonstrates the law of universal gravitation–that “teach something that’s wrong.” Gases hold dozens of properties that cannot be expressed accurately in a simple model, the educator says.

The “intelligent videodisk” machine, a device that connects a videocassette player with a microcomputer, holds more promise, some educators believe. Using a computer program, the teacher can move to any single frame of a video tape in seconds.

The most useful tapes, these educators say, would demonstrate laboratory experiments with many variations. The teacher would be able to show students in seconds how hundreds of changes would affect an experiment’s outcome.

Educators also agree that the computer could be an important laboratory instrument–as long as it is used merely to manipulate data and not to replace most experiments.

An official with a leading manufacturer of laboratory equipment says that computer-based laboratory programs are so expensive that only about 300 have been sold nationwide. But, he adds, less expensive equipment that measures and analyzes data digitally is selling well.

The company has sold “thousands”of MPUTE “photogate” instruments, which measure the acceleration of objects at several points on an “air track,” and similar instruments that measure the movement of objects too small for the human eye, the official says.

Because mathematics and science require that students build on their knowledge, educators say, the computer can be valuable as a “manager” of educational programs. By entering data on student performance, teachers can track students’ progress in specific curricular goals–and give special attention to their weaker skills.

The computer can receive such information in several ways. Some testing programs evaluate the data and indicate which areas should receive special attention. Other programs require special “inputting” of information.

“These [computer programs] can analyze patterns of errors. Worksheets can’t do that,” says Mr. Powell.

THE COMPUTER AS SUBSTITUTE

The computer eventually could lead to fundamental changes in the mathematics and science curricula, the experts note. The computer not only requires greater familiarity with some complex mathematical concepts, they say, but it can also reduce the need for much of the arithmetic that is usually taught throughout elementary school.

Mr. Powell says students will need to have more advanced mathematics and science backgrounds than their parents. “In Japan, virtually every kid has some kind of calculus,” he says.

Jonathan Choate, chairman of the mathematics department at the Groton School, has developed a two-year mathematics curriculum for the computer that teaches high-school students systems dynamics–a subject that he says normally is not taught until college.

Mr. Tinker of TERC and others say educators should at least partly “prune” several areas from the math and science curricula because of the computer.

Among the topics that Mr. Tinker says he would give less emphasis are: rote algorithms; fractions; axiomatic geometry; several operations typical in algebra classes, such as root extraction, simultaneous equations, and trigonometric functions; many calculus proofs; and much of the specialized science vocabulary, which he says means little to most students.

“Much of what we now teach in elementary school can now be done with a $5 calculator,” says Mr. Kansky. “You could release students for at least half of their time … and move on to more problem solving.”

Decades ago, as a reporter for Education Week, I was assigned to explore why Europeans outperform American students on math and science. I interviewed experts from all over. The findings say something about the the teaching of writing as well. American schools tend to isolate learning by grade and subject; European schools blend learning in various subjects, spiraling from simple to complex subjects. 

By Charlie Euchner
Education Week
July 27, 1983

Late last month, the Nissan Motor Corporation’s new plant in Smyrna, Tenn., produced its first 160 light trucks. The $300-million plant, which employs 2,200 American workers, is one of two in the United States owned by Japanese firms.

Officials at Nissan and other Japanese companies for years resisted pressure from the Japanese Ministry of International Trade and Industry to build a plant in the U.S., according to industry analysts. The ministry wanted the U.S. plants to counter a growing protectionist movement here.

That Japan felt a need to placate the American public is indicative that the U.S. might be losing the economic and strategic edge that it has held since World War II, experts say. And one major reason for the danger, they say, is that American mathematics and science education poorly prepares students for a technological society.

Isaak Wirszup, professor of mathematics at the University of Chicago, goes so far as to claim that “the education crisis is a threat to our national security.” The National Commission on Excellence in Education apparently concurred in that view, declaring in its report: “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might have viewed it as an act of war.”

Since 1966, when the Soviet Union enacted reforms to provide a strong, comprehensive program of math and science education, it has moved “far ahead” of any other nation in such training, Mr. Wirszup contends. “The Russians wouldn’t waste all that money unless it was for military power and political power,” he says.

According to a National Science Foundation report, the Soviet Union, Japan, and West Germany have been able to parlay improvements in mathematics and science instruction into significant military and economic gains.

Those countries’ education systems have developed a workforce, the report states, “which, at all levels, has a relatively high degree of science and mathematics skill, and this has been a factor in the very rapid expansion of technical industries.”

Herbert J. Walberg, research professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, agrees. “The Japanese are very fastidious about the product,” says Mr. Walberg. “Henry Ford says genius is attention to details. That’s the result of hard work in schools, six days a week.”

Between 1963 and 1977 Japanese industrial productivity grew 197 percent; the U.S. growth rate for the same period was 39 percent. Education was by no means the only or most significant factor involved in that difference, economists point out, but it was an important one.

The Nobel Prize-winning economist Theodore W. Schultz notes that studies of education and entrepreneurial activity clearly show “the pervasiveness of the favorable effects of schooling on the ability to deal with … economic modernization.”

Typical of society’s increasing need for knowledge of math and science is the military. About three-fourths of all Army and Navy jobs now require some technical expertise, according to Leopold E. Klopfer and Audrey B. Champagne of the University of Pittsburgh’s Learning Research and Development Center.

U.S. STUDENTS RANK LOW

The limited data available comparing mathematics and science achievement among students of different countries show U.S. students faring poorly, except among the top 5 to 10 percent of the students. At this level, U.S. students perform as well as or better than those of any country.

The International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA), an organization funded by the governments of several countries, is the only group that has tested students in several nations on the same subject matter.

A 1970-71 IEA survey of science achievement in 19 countries found that students in the U.S. and other countries learned similar things with similar success in the early grades, but that disparities in achievement grew in the later grades. The tests included 10-, 14-, and 18-year-olds. The American 18-year-olds finished last in the rankings.

Educators point out that the U.S. scores are affected by a policy of compulsory school attendance for all. The sample group of American students who took the test, for example, represented the 75 percent of American youths who attend high school at age 18; the sample represented only the 9 percent of West German youths of the same age who attend the Gymnasium, the upper-level high school.

But even by comparision with students in countries that also have mass-attendance policies, U.S. students performed poorly. Japanese 18-year-olds were not included in the test, but at the 14-year-old level, which had an enrollment rate of 99 percent, Japanese students scored better than those of any other country. Five other countries with similarly high rates of enrollment performed better than U.S. students at that level. (The survey did not include the Soviet Union or East Germany.)

An earlier IEA survey of mathematical achievement found the same pattern.

“Elite” American students perform as well as those of other countries, but Mr. Wirszup and other experts argue that those U.S. advantages are overshadowed by the fact that the great majority of the population is “illiterate” in basic mathematical and scientific concepts.

“It’s absolutely a mistake,” Mr. Wirszup says, to believe that only a strong “elite” is required for a strong economy. “The industrial countries until recently looked to the elite. But the educational mobilization in the Soviet Union for high-technology … means that that isn’t enough anymore.”

Twenty-four countries are now taking part in a new IEA survey for mathematics, and 30 countries are participating in an IEA science survey. Analyses of the testing probably will not be completed for three or four years, according to the organization.

Experts do not expect the U.S. to look much better on the new surveys. They point to an April report by the National Assessment of Educational Progress and to recent trends in educational policy in the U.S. and other countries.

The naep report found slight gains in “routine” mathematics skills such as computation, but a decline in problem-solving skills. For example, 48 percent of a representative sample of 17-year-old students incorrectly answered this problem: “A hockey team won five of the 20 games it played. What percent of the games did it win?” A higher percentage of students failed to solve complex word problems.

OTHER SYSTEMS REDUCE CHOICE

But even the most ardent critics of U.S. education acknowledge that the foreign systems have their own disadvantages.

Japanese schools may have more rigorous precollegiate programs, but American higher education is considered vastly superior. While the Soviet Union requires its students to take more advanced classes than the U.S., intense specialization reduces opportunity for career mobility. And West German families must decide their children’s course of formal education when the students are in the fourth grade.

None of the foreign education systems, the experts add, offer students as much choice as the American system. That freedom often is criticized for allowing students to avoid courses in the sciences. But Willard Jacobson, professor of mathematics and science education at Columbia University’s Teachers College, asserts that it is also the most decisive factor in the nation’s economic creativity.

“We should not try to imitate other countries,” says Mr. Jacobson, who is also a member of the IEA committee studying science education. “We ought to build on our own strength–the freedom to try different things. We can release a great deal more energy” in academic pursuits than other countries.

KEY FACTORS

But some experts have identified areas in which other nations excel that they believe deserve serious consideration here. Chief among these are teacher training, time on task, national academic standards, and the use of a “spiral” curriculum.

• Teacher training. In nations with higher levels of student achievement in mathematics and science, special care is taken to nurture able students for teaching roles, researchers point out.

Margrete Siebert Klein, a program officer at the National Science Foundation, notes that prospective teachers in both East and West Germany are among the most academically inclined students in those countries. Only university students, who have been extensively screened before being admitted, are eligible to become teachers.

“In West Germany, only the students who go to the Gymnasium [the upper-level high school] and pass [a special examination] go on to college, and you have to go to college to be a teacher,” Ms. Klein says. She added that only university-educated students in East Germany, or the top 12 percent of students, are eligible to be teachers in East Germany.

Japanese and Soviet teachers also must survive a rigorous screening process to attend college, and therefore are considered to be among the best students in the country. The Soviet Union produces in one year the total number of physics teachers that are now teaching in the U.S., Mr. Wirszup says, and their training is superior. Soviet secondary teachers must receive training in their fields that is comparable to the level of a U.S. master’s program, he says.

• Time on Task. Most other nations require their students to take courses in mathematics and science throughout their years in high school. U.S. standards vary from state to state, but probably less than 10 percent of the course time in American high schools is devoted to math and science, according to Ms. Klein.

A national guideline in Japan requires 25 percent of classroom time in grades 7 through 9 to be devoted to math and science. In the 9th through the 12th grades, nearly all Japanese students take four math and three science courses; only 34 percent of all American high-school students complete three math courses, according to Paul deHart Hurd, a highly regarded expert in science education who is now retired from the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University.

Japanese students attend school five days a week from 8:30 A.M. to 3:15 P.M. and on Saturdays until noon. Schools are in session for 240 to 250 days a year compared with an average of 180 days in the U.S.

The Soviet schedule is similar to the Japanese, and the emphasis on math and science is greater. Students study mathematics during all 10 years of their formal schooling, including calculus courses in both the 9th and 10th grades. In recent years, about 5 million Russian high-school graduates have studied calculus, compared with about 100,000 Americans, Mr. Wirszup says. All Soviet students also study mechanical drawing and astronomy, subjects that receive little attention in most American schools.

Rustin Roy, a science fellow at the Brookings Institution and a key figure in the development of “science appreciation” courses, asserts that the U.S. is so far behind the Soviet Union and Japan in math and science education that it has no hope of catching up any time soon. “Appreciation” courses offer the only cost-effective means of introducing students to the importance of science and technology in society, he says.

• “Spiral” curriculum. Most countries with advanced systems use a “spiral” curriculum, in which algebra, geometry, trigonometry, biology, chemistry, and physics are taught in a sequence over several years. In the U.S., such subjects are usually taught as one-year courses.

The strongest asset of the spiral approach, Ms. Klein and others say, is that it blends the course material of subjects so that students can understand how they are related. For example, principles in mathematics and physics that reinforce each other are taught at the same time.

The spiral curriculum also allows schools to introduce the subject in “concrete” ways before engaging students in abstract principles.

The experts disagree on whether U.S. schools do an adequate job of familiarizing students with the concrete before teaching them abstract principles.

Mr. Jacobson of Columbia University and the IEA science committee says that early analyses of the international study indicate that U.S. schools do a “very, very good” job familiarizing elementary-school students with plants and animals, magnetism and electronics, and other basic topics.

“We have kids working with materials, doing ‘hands-on’ work,” Mr. Jacobson says. “I think the U.S. does a very good job.”

Still, American elementary schools often lack the basic equipment necessary to run a sophisticated program, he notes. And American elementary-school teachers do not specialize in subject areas as they do in other countries.

Others say that the American school system should give students basic work in subjects such as chemistry and physics before high school.

Those subjects now are taught in one-year courses.

In Japanese schools, field trips and experiments closely tied to textbook material are stressed for the primary-school students. In their first six years, students spend one-third of their time working on “hands-on” activities. Middle-school students spend one-seventh of their time on such work, and high-school students spend one-ninth of their time on such work.

Japanese schools also use “semiconcrete” representation of numbers to teach children mathematics, as opposed to the counting-up or counting-down strategy. Students work with numbers in fives, with each number having a pattern that a student can visualize. Japanese officials say the American stress on counting leads children to see numbers as abstractions.

J.A. Easley Jr., professor of teacher education at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, says Japanese students are able to write simple equations in the 1st grade and to understand word problems and everyday uses of math at an early age. According to a National Science Foundation report, 75 percent of American students are taught arithmetic for nine years or more. The result, the experts agree, is that students do not learn the “higher order” skills until they reach junior high school.

Some educators believe the spiral approach would not work in the U.S. because of the many levels of responsibility for education. A spiral curriculum would need to be coordinated at a national level so that a student would not repeat some course material and miss other material when he or she moves to a new school.

• National standards. According to Benjamin Bloom, professor of education at the University of Chicago, the biggest difference between the American education system and others is its decentralization. All other developed countries have a national curriculum.

Leadership in the United States is “absent,” F. James Rutherford, the education director of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, charges in a book to be published this fall. The curriculum, he writes, is a “model of inefficiency,” with “no planned sequence.”

Efforts to upgrade the curriculum, says Mr. Bloom, have consistently fallen short because of the lack of central control. With no national curriculum, Mr. Bloom and others say, mobile American families often see their children take some courses twice and others not at all, and the level of course content varies.

Many educators point out that the absence of a formal national curriculum has resulted in less rigorous textbooks. “Things tend to be reduced to the lowest common denominator” because publishers are competing for several different school markets, says Mr. Walberg.

On that much, most educators agree. But just how educational technology can be used–and, in fact, whether it ever will–is a constant source of dispute.

Technology is likely to be used increasingly in all subjects, but experts believe that it holds special promise for math and science. The computer’s potential for “mass delivery” of instruction might help address the shortage of teachers, some educators say. Furthermore, computer use could make math problems less abstract, reduce tedious operations, and teach logic. And computer simulations could demonstrate complex physical phenomena that are impossible to show in standard science laboratories.

Some experts say “mass delivery” of instruction is where the computer’s greatest potential lies. Computers can illustrate the abstract concepts of mathematics and science better than traditional methods, they say, and will be able to help alleviate the shortage of teachers in those areas.

Others hold that to use the computer as a “solid-state Socrates,” or a means of delivering instruction, would be a waste. They say the computer is best used as a tool for doing tedious computation, working with complex mathematics problems, and aiding with some laboratory work.

Educators appear to agree that the computer is useful to introduce students to the basics of information technology, such as programming–which, according to a recent survey, is now one of the most common uses of the machines.

That study, conducted by the Center for Social Organization of Schools at the Johns Hopkins University, found that the computer so far has simply been “grafted” onto the traditional mathematics curriculum. The nationwide survey of 2,209 schools found that most teachers put greater emphasis on programming and less on computer-assisted instruction as they gain experience with the technology.

Such a practice has both positive and negative effects, says Arthur G. Powell, executive director of an independent national study of high schools. On one hand, such courses can attract students who normally would not take part in any program with a mathematical component. Computer science could teach many of the reasoning skills that are considered central to other math subjects, he says.

But such courses also serve as a way for schools to “get around” state mandates for stiffer graduation requirements. “It’s one way the school can respond without making the teaching of math more strenuous … and you don’t have to deal with problems of sequence,” Mr. Powell says.

THE COMPUTER AS TUTOR

Educators say the professional arguments about computers will intensify in the next several years as the number of computers in the schools and the range of educational software increase.

Few experts expect computer-assisted instruction to make the teacher obsolete, but many believe that the computer can at least free the teacher from many tedious tasks and do a better job teaching students basic skills–especially in areas such as mathematics and science.

According to a report by Technical Education Research Centers (terc), commissioned by the National Science Foundation, there are now 1,000 science and 650 mathematics software packages on the market, and 100 new mathematics and science packages appear every month. Those programs represent almost half of all of the educational software available. More than 90 percent of all the math software programs are for drill and practice.

There is almost no software for elementary-school science classes and for many high-school topics, terc found. Many software topics overlap, the survey found, and teachers reported that they are not aware of what software is available.

Robert Kansky, professor of mathematics education at the University of Wyoming, says many schools in his state “can’t afford to hire math and science teachers.” The only way students will be able to take advanced courses in these ares, he says, is through computer hookups.

Mr. Kansky, who in 1981 and 1982 served as a consultant for a computer-assisted-instruction experiment in South Africa, says a three-tiered computer systems–with mainframe computers on the top, minicomputers in the middle, and microcomputers on the bottom–eventually will make delivery of sophisticated programs cost-effective. In such an arrangement, desktop computers would be able to use more sophisticated programs now available only on the larger machines.

In addition to increasing access to math and science education, Mr. Kansky and others say, computer-based education can also actually improve student performance.

A recent analysis of data from 52 independent studies found that students who receive computer-based instruction in all subjects perform better academically than those who do not. The study, conducted by three researchers at the University of Michigan, found that students using computers earn better scores on tests in less time than other students.

Despite such findings, many experts contend that using the computer as a means of instruction will not be worthwhile for many years. Other methods of expanding schools’ teaching capacity, such as cross-peer tutoring, are more effective, these people say. For now, they conclude, the computer should be used only as a tool–to perform time-consuming computations, gather laboratory data, and analyze data–and for the practical skill-training that programming offers.

For tutorial software to keep the interest of the student, says Robert B. Davis, associate director of the research laboratory on computer-based education at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, it needs to be much more sophisticated–and for the software to be more sophisticated, the hardware needs to be more sophisticated. Mr. Davis said that almost all of the hardware available to schools is not powerful enough to handle worthwhile software. Because “the great pressure in education is to get something cheaply,” many schools buy the least sophisticated machines.

“Sitting in front of a computer for seven hours” will not keep students engaged, adds one science educator. “They need to talk to people, work on real-world activities.”

THE COMPUTER AS SIMULATOR

The value of simulation programs for the sciences is almost as much a matter of controversy as the tutorial programs. Simulations show simplified models of physical phenomena, such as biological functions.

At the recent National Educational Computing Conference in Baltimore, a panel of computer scientists and educators extolled the virtues of simulation programs that allow students to learn about science “intuitively.” But the participants also agreed with Tom Snyder, the president of a software firm, who said, “Right now, there is just a handful of good programs. It will take time and money to develop good programs.”

The participants never questioned whether simulation programs were worth developing. They agreed that some programs already available showed that simulations give students a better “intuitive” and “hands-on” understanding of mathematics and science than they had been able to offer.

Alfred Bork, professor of physics at the University of California at Irvine, says that his colleagues sometimes do not have a complete understanding of some physical concepts because they have not worked with variables in a dynamic setting such as a computer simulation.

“As soon as they saw a plot that didn’t appear in the books they had problems,” Mr. Bork says, referring to problems dealing with electrical phenomena.

Robert F. Tinker, director of the technology center at terc, says he has seen students develop a “working vocabulary” in complicated subjects such as nuclear power and the ecology with computer simulations. “There’s a lot of good science in it,” he says, referring to a simulation entitled “Three Mile Island,” in which students are required to operate a nuclear-power plant both safely and profitably.

But some science educators say they doubt that either computer-based tutorials or computer simulations will improve enough to make them worthwhile. One educator explains that simulations he has seen are not only inadequate, but harmful in some cases. The computer models, he says, oversimplify scientific phenomena to the point of teaching invalid concepts.

He cites two simulations–one which demonstrates the ideal gas law, and a second which demonstrates the law of universal gravitation–that “teach something that’s wrong.” Gases hold dozens of properties that cannot be expressed accurately in a simple model, the educator says.

The “intelligent videodisk” machine, a device that connects a videocassette player with a microcomputer, holds more promise, some educators believe. Using a computer program, the teacher can move to any single frame of a video tape in seconds.

The most useful tapes, these educators say, would demonstrate laboratory experiments with many variations. The teacher would be able to show students in seconds how hundreds of changes would affect an experiment’s outcome.

Educators also agree that the computer could be an important laboratory instrument–as long as it is used merely to manipulate data and not to replace most experiments.

An official with a leading manufacturer of laboratory equipment says that computer-based laboratory programs are so expensive that only about 300 have been sold nationwide. But, he adds, less expensive equipment that measures and analyzes data digitally is selling well.

The company has sold “thousands”of MPUTE “photogate” instruments, which measure the acceleration of objects at several points on an “air track,” and similar instruments that measure the movement of objects too small for the human eye, the official says.

Because mathematics and science require that students build on their knowledge, educators say, the computer can be valuable as a “manager” of educational programs. By entering data on student performance, teachers can track students’ progress in specific curricular goals–and give special attention to their weaker skills.

The computer can receive such information in several ways. Some testing programs evaluate the data and indicate which areas should receive special attention. Other programs require special “inputting” of information.

“These [computer programs] can analyze patterns of errors. Worksheets can’t do that,” says Mr. Powell.

THE COMPUTER AS SUBSTITUTE

The computer eventually could lead to fundamental changes in the mathematics and science curricula, the experts note. The computer not only requires greater familiarity with some complex mathematical concepts, they say, but it can also reduce the need for much of the arithmetic that is usually taught throughout elementary school.

Mr. Powell says students will need to have more advanced mathematics and science backgrounds than their parents. “In Japan, virtually every kid has some kind of calculus,” he says.

Jonathan Choate, chairman of the mathematics department at the Groton School, has developed a two-year mathematics curriculum for the computer that teaches high-school students systems dynamics–a subject that he says normally is not taught until college.

Mr. Tinker of terc and others say educators should at least partly “prune” several areas from the math and science curricula because of the computer.

Among the topics that Mr. Tinker says he would give less emphasis are: rote algorithms; fractions; axiomatic geometry; several operations typical in algebra classes, such as root extraction, simultaneous equations, and trigonometric functions; many calculus proofs; and much of the specialized science vocabulary, which he says means little to most students.

“Much of what we now teach in elementary school can now be done with a $5 calculator,” says Mr. Kansky. “You could release students for at least half of their time … and move on to more problem solving.”

New York–At a meeting of the New York Academy of Sciences here this spring, Seymour Papert managed to take issue with just about every teaching method that schools use in education–particularly the way most of them are now using computers.

Mr. Papert, professor of education and mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), is considered one of the most revolutionary thinkers in educational technology.

He first became widely known when he and colleagues at MIT developed LOGO–a computer language specifically designed for elementary schools. Mr. Papert and his followers say that LOGO eventually could be the centerpiece of a movement to restructure education.

More recently, Mr. Papert has attracted attention because of his association with the Paris-based World Center for Microprocessors and Human Resources, an organization with the goal of using the computer to enable developing countries to “leapfrog” whole stages of development.

In his remarks at the New York meeting, Mr. Papert offered his scientific colleagues the kind of visionary perspective on computers and education for which he is noted. He began with a general critique of schools, saying the traditional K-12 system is arbitrary and should give way to a program of studies directed almost entirely by students–with few of the formal lecture situations that now typify schools.

Mr. Papert disputed the contention of many educators that extensive use of computers in schools is expensive and threatens to widen the gap between students in wealthy and poor districts.

By making a modest financial commitment over several years, he said, districts could provide every student with a terminal. But Mr. Papert does not want his remarks about computers and student-directed education to be considered an endorsement of computer-assisted instruction. Structured computer lessons, he said, are “a bad thing.”

Educational Development

In his address and in an interview, Mr. Papert outlined a philosophy not only of how education in industrialized countries should work, but also of the role it can play in the development of third-world nations in Africa, Asia, and Latin America and with people who have not succeeded in traditional schools.

At the World Center, founded by the French journalist and futurist Jeans Servan-Schreiber to test Mr. Papert’s ideas, researchers hope that the microcomputer will give developing countries the means to move into the modern era without the traditional stages of development.

The idea, described by one critic as putting “a computer in every hut,” is that the microcomputer will soon be as inexpensive as a portable television set and will respond to spoken commands–and therefore will offer third-world countries access to the information they need to increase literacy and become economically self-sufficient.

But with the center embroiled in political controversy, Mr. Papert quit as chief scientist last November and returned to his projects in the United States. If he can’t pursue his ideas for an “educational utopia” in Paris, he said, he will pursue them in the U.S.

LOGO Is Key

At the center of Mr. Papert’s educational utopia is LOGO, the language that grew out of his five years of study with the Swiss child psychologist Jean Piaget.

Using LOGO, which was developed during the 1970’s, students use a keyboard to manipulate a triangular cursor (the electronic directional signal found on most computer-terminal screens) called a “turtle.”

Through trial and error with the turtle–“discovery,” Mr. Papert calls it–children can understand concepts such as large numbers, angles, and curves that traditionally are taught to older students.

A child as young as three or four can design objects on the computer, line by line. For example, to program a box, the student might instruct the computer’s cursor to go forward a set number of spaces four times and make a 90-degree right turn three times.

The student, by pulling together many such simple sets of instructions, or “subprocedures,” eventually can write programs that become as complicated as variations of “Pac-Man” and other video games, according to the MIT scientist.

In the process of programming, Mr. Papert said, students create their own “microworlds.” The microworld involves a physical object–in this case, the turtle–that a student can use to play with and to become familiar with larger numbers and the ideas that go with them.

Microworlds, Mr. Papert said, enable children to learn much faster. ”Why is it that children have to do 98,000 repetitions of this?” Mr. Papert said, pointing to an addition problem. “One reason is that they don’t know what they’re looking at. They need an object to think about other things with.”

Mr. Papert contends that the ease with which students grasp LOGO and their own microworlds eventually could lead to a kind of educational utopia.

In that perfect world, all children would have access to a computer and LOGO programs throughout their years in school. They would use the computer to learn “powerful ideas,” not only in mathematics but also in physics, English, art, and music. The computer would make them significantly more curious and capable of understanding other fields, such as history and science.

Also in this perfect world, the traditional teacher-student relationship would change. Instead of attending several classes daily, children would be given sets of academic goals that they would be required to achieve. There might be one lecture per week in each area of study, and during the rest of the week the students would direct their own studies.

Such a vision is controversial–“subversive” is the word Mr. Papert uses–and he said he has no illusions about achieving it in the near future. But he added that he is confident that some programs under way in the U.S.–in New York City’s “Computers in the Schools” program and at the Lamplighter School in Dallas–will start to convince educators that such changes are desirable.

“This computers-in-the-schools project in New York [does not have] the shock of sudden change,” he said. “We started off by training some teachers … and then increasing [computer use] to two or three in the classroom, and now there are a few classrooms where there are 15 or 16 computers.

“It takes a little bit of time, but you begin to see in these contexts quite dramatic results,” he added. “It’s seeing those results, documenting them, making them as visible as possible” that eases the worst fears of teachers.

For the time being, Mr. Papert said, educators should “start clearing their heads about notions that computers are expensive. Every child should have a computer like an Apple II.”

Mr. Papert noted that New York City schools spend more than $30,000 on a student over the course of his 13 years of public schooling. If the computer were priced at its manufacturing cost, he said, it would cost no more than $1,000 to equip a student throughout his formal schooling.

“For a negligible cost, you can have this change that can transform education,” he said. “Get rid of any ideas that this is mythology.”

Plan for Development

It is the relatively low cost of computers and the lack of established educational systems in developing countries that attracted Mr. Papert to Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber’s ideas for the third world.

The idea for the Centre Mondial Informatique et Ressources Humaines grew out of Mr. Servan-Schreiber’s involvement with the Paris Group, a collection of international economists, politicians, and scientists formed in 1979 to study problems of world development. The Paris Group concluded that the microcomputer could be decisive to third-world development.

Mr. Servan-Schreiber convinced French President Francois Mitterand in the fall of 1981 to support the idea of an international center to use computers in third-world development, and the center opened its doors last March. But it has been embroiled in controversy ever since.

Mr. Papert and others blame Mr. Servan-Schreiber and their own political inexperience for the problems. The problems began, the participants said, when Mr. Servan-Schreiber took strong control of the organization and irritated officials from Kuwait, India, Saudi Arabia, and the Philippines who had expressed an interest in the project.

The problems continued when researchers, who Mr. Papert said were promised that they would be able to use whatever equipment they felt was necessary, were criticized for using non-French products.

“This was an example of how fundamental research gets diverted into something more trivial,” Mr. Papert said.

“There had been a very formal though verbal agreement that the center would never be restricted to use technology because it’s French, or for that matter to choose people who were French. But very quickly we were very severely criticized for accepting a gift from Digital Equipment Corporation.”

The pressure to buy French never abated, Mr. Papert and others said. Finally, the center passed from the control of the Ministry of Research to the Ministry of Communications–without the consultation of Nicholas Negroponte, the executive director, or Mr. Papert. It was considered a coup for the French electronics industry, and the ultimate defeat for the center’s foreign researchers.

World Center Projects

But before that development–which led both Mr. Negroponte and Mr. Papert to announce their resignations–the center had started work on research and pilot-development projects in Marseille, France, and Dakar, Senegal.

In both places, officials from the center sought out members of the community who expressed an interest in using computers and gave them training in everything from programming to repairing a broken computer. The job of those “vectors” was to introduce computers to every segment of society possible.

If residents of the community expressed a desire to use computers to plan agriculture or medical programs, Mr. Papert said, the researchers in Paris set out to either find the appropriate software or to create new software.

The project now “is going at a snail’s pace,” Mr. Papert said. If it were on schedule, he said, the World Center’s projects would be moving from the cities to smaller towns–“ultimately aiming at the most un-urban, traditional village, with a low level of literacy.”

A training program for unemployed youths in Paris using LOGO, Mr. Papert said, showed the promise of computers for the most desperately troubled people.

“My experience working with this group is really quite moving,” Mr. Papert said. “Generally, their attitude to computers is very negative–they blame the computer for bureaucracy, for putting people out of work. They are very militant about it. They are very angry.

“The other element, the paradoxical element, is that they absolutely can’t keep their hands off. In the end, bit by bit, some of the people were expert enough to be able to go out and work with [unemployed people] on their own. [Such programs] can magnify literacy.”

The ability to achieve some success with these youths is not that surprising, Mr. Papert suggested, when one considers the way children of all ages and backgrounds enjoy playing “Pac-Man.”

“There’s no question that there’s a certain real holding power,” he said. “This tells us that we can harness these powers. We have to think in terms of what will make children fall in love with learning.”

By Charlie Euchner

New York–P. Kenneth Komoski was giving a visitor a tour of his offices at the Teachers College of Columbia University when he paused before a row of cubicles that contained desktop computer terminals.

Here, he said, is where researchers evaluate the computer hardware and software that is marketed for educational uses. “Do you know what used to be here?” he asked, smiling. “Language labs.”

Mr. Komoski, the executive director of a nonprofit organization called the Educational Products Information Exchange (EPIE), took great delight in the irony. His self-appointed job is seeing that educational applications of computers do not meet the same fate that earlier attempts to bring innovations into the classroom have.

To accomplish that, one of Mr. Komoski’s highest priorities these days is convincing educators that EPIE is the place to turn to for sophisticated evaluations of all educational computer products–from hardware to software to printers to user manuals. EPIE’s evaluations are now printed on large, shiny file cards, but, appropriately, they will soon be accessible electronically

Early Signs

Mr. Komoski says he hopes eventually to be able to convince one-fourth of the nation’s nearly 16,000 school districts to subscribe to the service.

And he has dreams of creating a databank that would integrate evaluations of all kinds of educational products–a project that would cost about $2 million per year, or about $25 for each public school, he estimates.

EPIE has taken a major step toward its goal by joining forces with Consumers Union, the national organization that evaluates consumer goods, to study computer products.

The EPIE-Consumers Union project has received a two-year, $300,000 grant from the Ford Foundation, $200,000 of which will be spent this year.

EPIE’s $700,000 budget for this year also includes a $100,000 grant from the Carnegie Foundation and about $400,000 in revenues from product evaluations and newsletter subscriptions.

Mr. Komoski says he has initiated negotiations with several state governments to sell the product evaluations in mass quantities–a process that has been helped by the availability of block-grant money.

With a full- and part-time staff of about 25 and more than 300 free-lance product evaluators nationwide, Mr. Komoski says he has the base necessary not only to keep a steady stream of evaluations, but also to increase his contacts with schools.

Elementary schools and smaller districts have been among the most receptive to EPIE’s computer-evaluation services thus far, Mr. Komoski says.

Rather than eschewing evaluation altogether because their staffs are too small to warrant the investment, he said, they have come to view EPIE as their research department.

If EPIE gets the district subscribers it wants and creates the databank it dreams of, its influence over the sales of all educational products–which are already esti-mated at more than $1 billion annually–could be considerable.

Teachers Uneasy

Some educators are uneasy about using computers in schools, Mr. Komoski acknowledges. Teachers fear that computers are just another of what they have come to see as a long line of “fads.” The earlier “fads” included just about everything besides textbooks and chalkboards–overhead projectors, teaching machines, filmstrips, movies, television, and, of course, language laboratories.

Mr. Komoski and others founded EPIE in 1967 after spending years developing such now-spurned teaching aids. The idea, he says, was to ensure that educational products are evaluated, and when they are found wanting, to give the schools the information they need to demand better ones.

Mr. Komoski still has faith in the early innovations. To explain a point about the way teachers structure class time, he pulls out a plastic sheet with a grease-pencil chart, the kind used on overhead projectors. “These things are great,” he says, waving the transparent sheet, “if you know how to use them.”

The innovations of the 1960’s, Mr. Komoski says, failed because schools acquired materials without knowing what to do with them and, consequently, there was no imperative for the manufacturers of educational products to make them fit the needs of teachers in the classroom.

There was a great influx of federal money for education in that era, Mr. Komoski explains, but much of it was spent without a clear sense of purpose. The clearest guidance came from the manufacturers, he notes, suggesting that that only added to the problem.

“That money was play money,” Mr Komoski says. “The sales representatives in many cases became the partners in writing purchase orders and helping [the schools] through the federal labyrinth. It was very difficult to get across the idea that the money should be spent wisely.”

The ideas behind the innovations, Mr. Komoski still says, were good. But, he adds, the products were hustled onto the market so quickly that most schools were not adequately prepared to judge which products actually were worthwhile.

Many of the teaching tools that had been lauded in theory by Mr. Komoski and others–as a way to help teachers better develop a curriculum, a way to give students more exact and personalized instruction–were soon collecting dust on school shelves and ridicule from critics.

Educators’ Computer Needs

Although there are signs that computers might receive more of the scrutiny needed to assure effective classroom use, computer products to date have been ill-suited, for the most part, to the needs of educators, Mr. Komoski contends.

Evaluations by EPIE staff members of most educational computer products produced in the last few years have concluded that:

No large-scale software package is available for high schools, and most programs available are for drill and practice.

The major emphasis of most computer programs is on recall of previously learned facts. There is little emphasis on “higher-order skills,” such as analysis and synthesis of material.

The programs that are available perpetuate a myth that computers largely are designed for mathematics applications. Ninety-five percent of the large, computer-managed packages are for arithmetic.

Graphics are rarely an integral part of the instruction. Mr. Komoski says that the visual representation of ideas is often easier for students to understand. But graphics usually are no more than supplements to the written text, and the graphics that are used are often are distracting.

Users usually cannot control more than the speed of the program and getting out of the program. There is little choice in the sequence of activities the student goes through.

The “diagnostic help” provided by most computer software is minimal. When a student makes an error, he generally is not told what went wrong. Programs often involve simply a series of cues and guesses through which a student can eventually get the right answer but learn little from the experience.

Past Problems–and Hope

Publishers, Mr. Komoski asserts, have never been held accountable for the materials they produce. The most telling example, Mr. Komoski says, is the story of how “Dick and Jane” readers were brought into schools–a clear case, he adds, of “industry-created demand.”

Such texts using a limited number of repeated words, called “controlled vocabularies” by reading experts, were first used to teach English to adults in India, according to Mr. Komoski. Without conducting any research on their effectiveness, Scott, Foresman & Co. published a controlled-vocabulary reader for elementary schools that sold briskly. Other publishers followed suit.

Control over teaching devices must shift back into the hands of educators, argues EPIE’s founder; he points to three developments that may encourage such a change.

First, the advent of the microcomputer marks a shift in the way the whole society conducts its business. Businesses and parents are demanding that schools get involved with computers and that school programs respond to the changing educational needs of students.

“Did you ever remember community leaders saying, ‘We must have filmstrips, we must have overhead projectors’?” Mr. Komoski says.

Second, in era of budget-cutting, schools are more likely to subject purchases–including computers–to careful scrutiny.

Third, most teachers are willing to admit–and redress–their ignorance of computers. More than half of the respondents in a recent survey by the National Education Association expressed an interest in learning about instructional applications of computers, operating computers, and programming, and more than 80 percent said they would like to take a computer-related course. (See Education Week, Jan. 12, 1983.)

This last development is perhaps most important, Mr. Komoski says. Earlier EPIE studies and anecdotal evidence had suggested that many teachers would not or could not deviate from their lesson plans. One survey, for example, found that 90 percent of classroom time is devoted to a textbook-based curriculum.

“The teachers were saying [of the earlier innovations], ‘Oh, I don’t know. … Is that any better than what we’re doing now?”‘ Mr. Komoski says. “They became so dependent on the textbook” to plan classroom activities that they failed to understand the new products.

If computers are to be used wisely in the schools, Mr. Komoski says, teachers must not only learn enough programming to alter software, but also stop treating all pupils in the same way.

A drill-and-practice program, which is appropriate for students who have trouble organizing thoughts in a structured way, would be worthless to a student who is capable of learning “higher-order skills,” Mr. Komoski asserts.

“Teachers have to learn to fit the students with [the proper program],” he says.

“I think teachers would rather do that than stand all day in front of a chalkboard.”

Are teachers today able to develop more flexible attitudes about the structure of their lesson plans?

“I wouldn’t have said so ten years ago, and I probably wouldn’t have said so five years ago,” Mr. Komoski answers. “But now you have this situation where things are changing so rapidly that teachers are saying, ‘That’s the way things are. I have to deal with it.”‘

Early Involvement

Mr. Komoski–educated at Arcadia University in Nova Scotia and the Union Theological Seminary–got involved in educational technology in the late 1950’s through B.F. Skinner, the behaviorist who developed the teaching machines that were at the heart of educational innovation in the 1960’s.

Then a teacher at the Collegiate School in New York City, Mr. Komoski and other faculty members learned to program the machines, which presented the student with questions and offered immediate responses to their answers.

“I became fascinated by the idea that the machines taught a lot about instruction,” he says. “You have to know each step of the way what’s going on, how to lead the learning. Every teacher should have to go through the steps to see what it is that works.”

Eventually, Mr. Komoski says, he became disenchanted with the “incredible commercialization and oversell” of the products–and with Mr. Skinner’s theory that learning occurs through a series of physiological responses to stimuli.

The problem with Mr. Skinner’s approach, Mr. Komoski says, is the idea that learning progresses in small increments.

“Learning often takes place in larger chunks,” Mr. Komoski says. “The way some of these people turned out these programs, kids could get through them and not learn anything. The machine didn’t take into account the contingencies of the environment.

“What I’m saying is that you have to open the thing up and allow the programmer of the tutorial or the simulation to be somehow shaped by the learners’ responses.”

Out of the such failures of such educational machinery, Mr. Komoski adds, grew “my intense conviction that until we got consumers out there demanding that [producers] make better things, we weren’t going to get any good out of technological change.”

Enter EPIE.

The obvious challenge of seeing is to apprehend what is present—what is there, within the compass of one’s sight.

Ideally, we see something clearly, and in enough detail to make sense of it, and to give it meaning and to put it in the context. Seeing clearly requires looking with intent and purpose—with an open mind, a will to search, and even with a beginners mind.

To look clearly, and in detail, we need to pay attention to not just what is in front of us, but what we bring to the process, including our biases and limitations, as well as our physical limitations. Rather than just accepting whatever our eyes and our distorted processing deliver to us; we also need to pause and think and reflect.

Usually, we see objects with little clarity and detail. Lacking the appropriate level of detail, we give it less meaning.

We allow our emotions and biases and other limitation’s color and distort what we are seeing. It’s like listening to a phone conversation with a bad connection. We hear or see bits and pieces and can strain to make some sense of it. But that doesn’t mean we here at Hall or that we understand it. We are improvising. We are operating on incomplete information. we might be able to convince ourselves that we are looking at the “real thing.” But deep down, we know that we are looking at the equivalent of a broken plate and thinking that it is a whole and complete plate.

We are more likely to believe what we see when we want to see it – when we have an emotional or other stake in actually seeing some thing. This is true with all of our senses, as well as all of our intellectual, emotional, and social engagements with the world.

Even when we consciously try to say something, clearly, we struggle to do so accurately. We could be surprised by the onset of an event or a scene and therefore I have a hard time focusing in on what’s happening. We spend so much time trying to frame the scene that we do not, take in the details that might be telling. If the scene is fast, moving, what we notice might be gone before we have a chance to check it. We also operate in a world of noise. It is often times hard to separate the signal from the noise —any subject that we want to focus on and the surrounding clutter. Also, when we are assessing a scene or a situation, we are often at war with ourselves or others. We are fighting over, not only what we see, but what we should see, and what we should do about it. And so even the most obvious elements of a scene can be missed.

Looking Forward

• Seeing for Future-Oriented Leadership
• Exercise: Plato’s Allegory of the Cave
• Seeing: Starting with Saccades
• Seeing What is There (you are here)
• Seeing What’s Not There
• Seeing What’s Not There: Cases in Point
• Not Seeing What’s There
• Not Seeing What’s Not There
• Stillness and Motion
• Making Seeing a Superpower
• A Whole Strategy for Seeing, Thinking, and Leading
• Videos on Seeing for Leadership

In civilizations going back to antiquity—in Aristotle’s ideal state in The Politics, for example—people who perform physical labor are excluded from full citizenship. Farmers, mechanics, and shopkeepers are considered lesser beings. Incapable of the broad thinking necessary for making decisions for others.

In a way, this makes sense. The carpenter’s ability to connect two joints or sand the edges of an object has little to do with making decisions for fellow citizens. The farmer’s understanding of planting cycles, seeds and ground conditions, and harvesting techniques offers few skills for inspiring other people.

The Power of Focus

These crafts require immersion with objects that are tangible and specific. The same goes for arts like dance, sculpture, and music. The artist needs to focus entirely on something specific and unique. There can be only one Gene Kelly version of “Singing in the Rain,” only one Michaelangelo masterpiece David, and only one Rachmaninoff Concerto No. 2. The arts (and some crafts) are sui generis—constituting a unique class in itself.

As such, the artist and craftsman must work to concentrate totally on the objects and movements of her craft. Gloria Liu says:

As a dancer in training, you learn to dissociate your self from your body, to relinquish your agency to the structure and aesthetic of the form – whether that’s classical ballet, modern dance or something else.

At times, we need to separate our actions from the surrounding environment. We need to focus totally on our craft, ignoring the larger swirl of activities around us. We need to go “all in” on our project. Especially in activities involving movement, our actions involve all aspects of the neural system.

People in business, the law, medicine, tech, and other professions understand this basic truth. By concentrating intensely on an isolated task, they bring their whole selves to bear on the challenge.

Beyond Focus

But wait. As we focus on the object of our work, we also connect to other ideas. We cannot help but relate one process to another process. The work of a artist, sculptor, or composer offers insights that can inform other activities.

As we narrow our attention, we broaden it as well. Arts and crafts—especially the physical ones—help us to move beyond our limited patterns of thinking. We may train ourselves—with conscious, repetitive movement—to make our actions automatic. But that process, in turn, opens our mind to think and at more consciously.

Athletes understand that developing a broad range of skills and actions enables them to use their whole selves. A trainer named Edythe Heus uses bouncy balls and wobble boards and to put her clients off balance when they exercise. When they are unbalanced, they cannot focus on just one muscle group, like pectorals. They need to activate hundreds of tiny muscles in their back and other parts of the body.

When people move their bodies—running, jumping, twisting, reaching, accelerating, slowing, braking—they gain an intuitive sense of how objects relate to place. When a baseball outfielder sprints after a fly ball and leaps to catch it, he is making countless calculations. He is coordinating dozens of separate actions, in an exquisite sequence of moves. The same goes for a ballet dancer, an assembly-line worker, and a cook.

Toggling

The magic—for people to know themselves and to improve themselves—happens when they toggle back and forth between action and reflection. A danger might perform a routine enough times to make her steps automatic. Then she can step back and analyze what she did, moment by moment, and then consider how to improve or add to her routine.

Leaders do this too. One of the most powerful self-help programs in America, Dale Carnegie Training, teaches people how to overcome whatever is “holding them back” by teaching how to deliver a one-minute speech. Carnegie students, who are not allowed to use notes, must speak directly to the whole class about a different topic every week. The speech has three parts:

• “So there I was…” Start by bringing the audience into the middle of a scene or situation.
• “And then, … And then, … And then, … Finally, …” State three to five things that happened and how the sequence concluded.
• “And so I learned…” Conclude by stating the lesson to be learned from this moment.

For a century, this exercise has helped even the shyest, angriest, uncertain, and agitated people how to focus their minds, collect their thoughts, and connect with other people.

Body and Mind

The exercise works because it is a whole-body exercise. Like a trapeze artist without a net, the speaker must master her command of mind and body in real time. Most students start to get good at the one-minute exercise within three or four weeks of the program. They can use this skill in just about every aspect of their lives. Thinking and connecting with other people become part of their body memory.

All kinds of strategies help budding leaders master their use of bodies and minds. Simple meditation and breathing exercises help to regulate blood flow and attention. Consider this simple 10-minute breathing exercise from “The Iceman,” a Dutch extreme athlete named Wim Hof:

As his nickname suggests, Hof also exposes himself to freezing temperatures for sustained periods. This exposure teaches him to concentrate his mind and to manage his breathing and attention. Again, a physical challenge—especially one that takes us out of our comfort zones—can transform the way we think and behave.