An unknown but certainly significant proportion of the population has almost completely given up on learning… — Seymour A. Papert
An unknown but certainly significant proportion of the population has almost completely given up on learning. These people seldom, if ever engage in deliberate learning and see themselves as neither competent at it nor likely to enjoy it. The social and personal cost is enormous... Deficiency becomes identity: "I can't learn French, I don't have an ear for languages;" "I could never be a businessman, I don't have a head for figures;"... These beliefs are often repeated ritualistically, like superstitions... Although these negative self-images can be overcome, in the life of and individual they are extremely robust and powerfully self-reinforcing. If people believe firmly enough that they cannot do math, they will usually succeed in preventing themselves from doing whatever they recognize as math. The consequences of such self-sabotage is personal failure, and each failure reinforces the original belief. And such beliefs may be most insidious when held not only by individuals, but by our entire culture.
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In many schools today, the phrase "computer-aided instruction" means making the computer teach the child. One might say the computer is being used to program the child. In my vision, the child programs the computer and, in doing so, both acquires a sense of master over a piece of the most modern and powerful technology and establishes an intimate contact with some of the deepest ideas from science, from mathematics, and from the art of intellectual model building.
One might ask why the teachers do not notice the difficulty children have in learning BASIC. The answer is simple: Most teachers do not expect high performance from most students, especially in a domain of work that appears to be as "mathematical" and "formal" as programming. Thus the culture's general perception of mathematics as inaccessible bolsters the maintenance of BASIC, which in turn confirms these perceptions.
I have asked many teachers and parents what they thought mathematics to be and why it was important to learn it. Few held a view of mathematics that was sufficiently coherent to justify devoting several thousand hours of a child's life to learning it, and children sense this. When a teacher tells a student that the reason for those many hours of arithmetic is to be able to check the change at the supermarket, the teacher is simply not believed. Children see such "reasons" as one more example of adult double talk. The same effect is produced when children are told school math is "fun" when they are pretty sure that teachers who say so spend their leisure hours on anything except this allegedly fun-filled activity. Nor does it help to tell them that they need math to become scientists---most children don't have such a plan. The children can see perfectly well that the teacher does not enjoy math any more than they do and that the reason for doing it is simply that it has been inscribed into the curriculum. All of this erodes children's confidence in the adult world and the process of education. And I think it introduces a deep element of dishonestly into the education relationship.
