Copyright ©Tatar 2006
My first job out of college was at the Logo Lab at M.I.T.. Logo was a computer language for children and an associated way of thinking. It changed my life. Naturally, I've spent a lot of time thinking about it, both its successes and its considerable vulnerabilities. A few comments about two levels of thought follow: (1) what is and should be the nature of educational improvement in the United States and (2) dilemmas in coming to know what is true and what is not about education.
Goals for education in United States
There are two societal level goals for education in America today: excellence and equity. I often talk about these factors this from a scholarly perspective.
Few could argue that I was in tremendous need of support when I encountered Logo. Athough my undergraduate degree ended up being in English literature, I had won Math and Science awards in high school, and had studied two years of math beyond introducory calculus as well as completing lab and course work in Chemistry, Organic Chemistry, Physics and Biology. I had high SAT and GRE scores. I was pretty darn proud of my acheivements in math and science.
However, Logo and the associated work on procedural thinking and misconceptions of physics and math, helped me understand that, unbeknownest to myself, I had only the shallowest booklearning in the natural sciences. I was shocked to realize that I had gone through a considerable amount of the best the systemhad to offer---at a tony private school in New York and at Harvard---and put my heart into it, without encountering hints that there was deeper knowledge. Logo gave me the tools of the cognitive revolution---procedural thinking, abstraction, problem decomposition, the notion of local vs. global affects---in a way with which I could act.
One question is how I could have gotten so far without a clue. What does this say about education for excellence in America?
We could argue that my deficit represented what psychology professor Lee Ross at Stanford calls a "high class worry." So, a privileged white woman---or a group of privileged people---might not know how to decompose a problem and create a procedural or object oriented abstraction. What does this have to do with the important problems of the world? Hunger? Ecology? Health? Social justice writ large?
What is and ought to be the relationship between excellence and equity in education? Two different attitudes are that: 1) educational needs, analogously to Maslow's prioritization of needs in general, have a hierarchy. You can't expect people to be "self actualized" when they are "starving", educationally speaking; 2) to differentiate between learners is to further reify an implicit class system, aligned with SES. This argument runs that "As information has become more of a commodity, status differentiation has moved into kinds and uses of information. We educate most to a literacy and numeracy sufficient to offer "fries with that, ma'am." This, though not blue collar, is vocational training. Access to the knowlege associated with power and privilege is disguised in plain sight. All high schools offer classes that are called 'algebra' but some teach the good stuff while others disguise it."
Both of these attitudes have a component of truth. The art is to balance them in a way that reveals rather than conceals possibilities and respects the free will of learners.
Dilemmas in Coming to Know What Educational Interventions are Good
Educational interventions have different statuses, and not all should be evaluated the same way.
Logo changed my life. I love(d) it. But there is sad tale with a moral about it. The sad tale is that people were too hasty to embrace and too hasty to dismiss Logo. The moral was that both the unreasonable popularity and the abandonment of Logo were missed opportunities to make thoughtful, differentiated change.
Sometimes people today say that we should have a medical model of educational interventions, which emphasizes rigorous experimental evidence that the educational intervention "works." Scientific evidence is important, but even in medicine, evidence is only part of the practice. Systematic, differential diagnosis has arisen together with and often pre-dating scientific understanding. It is phenomenological in nature.
Despite my own work in experimental areas, both in education and in technology development, I believe that science is the icing on phenomena. To notice the important phenomena is that main thing and then to explore the entailments of that phenomena. Thus, the scientific demonstration of the benefits of immunization was important, but far more important for human health was the development of better sewers.