Video Archive

Of course I'm oversimplifying, but within this context I'm going to recognize three stages of learning. Now, these are not stages like those Piaget might talk about, stages of development of the nature of the brain or the mind. They are stages in the relationship between the individual and knowledge.
Stage one happens when a baby is born. And from that time there starts a process of learning by exploration, by touching. Everything is put in the mouth. Of course it's not only in relation to things. It's people as well. But there's a learning going on that is driven by the individual, that the baby is determining. Parents might think that they are determining what the baby has learned, but it's only a minor factor. Probably the baby is learning in a self-directed way.
Now there comes a time when the infant is seeing a wider world than can be touched and felt. So the questions in the child's mind aren't only about this and this and this that I can see, but about something I heard, saw a picture of, or imagined. And I think here the child enters into a precarious and dangerous situation because not necessarily, but, I think, in point of fact in our societies, there is now a shift from experiential learning -- learning by exploring -- to another kind of learning, which is learning by being told: you have to find adults who will tell you things. And this stage reaches its climax in school.
And I think it's an exaggeration, but that there's a lot of truth in saying that when you go to school, the trauma is that you must stop learning and you must now accept being taught. That is stage two: it's school, it's learning by being taught, it's receiving deposits of knowledge. I think many children are destroyed by that, strangled. Some, of course, survive it, and all of us survived it, and that's one reason it's often dangerous discussing these questions among intellectual people. In spite of the school what happened to us was that in the course of this stage two we learned certain skills. We learned to read, for example; we learned to use libraries; we learned how to explore directly a much wider world.
Now I think that there's an important sense in which stage three is going back to stage one for those who've survived stage two -- creative people in any field, whether in a laboratory or in philosophy whether artists, businessmen, journalists  all the people in the world who are able, despite all the restrictions, to find a way of living creatively. We are very much like the baby again. We explore; it's driven from inside; it's experiential; it's not so verbal; it's not about being told.
So now I want to tell a story about my grandson that shows, I think, how new technologies might change the three-stage pattern. When this grandson was three years old, I saw him go and take from a shelf a videotape, put it in a VCR and press the buttons, and he said he forgot to rewind it and he pressed the button and he rewound it, and then he played the videotape.
Now what is interesting is that this child spent the next 30 minutes immersed in a piece of the world that was beyond his reach. And this particular tape was about road-making machines. You know, all those big machines on the side of the road. They are very fascinating for children, and he loves this tape, and he's gotten to know much more about these machines than I ever will. And I notice the difference when we're in the car and he sees one of the machines: he asks more intelligent questions than I can because he's thought about it more.
Now we're going to see what's remarkable about this. The first thing that amazed me was this little child working this machine. It's amazing, here's this little child working this VCR machine, and many adults don't know how to do that. But we really shouldn't be amazed at that, because it's not more complex than putting his toys away or getting his clothes out of the drawer. Working with these machines is not more complex in any way than the things that 3-year-old children all do. That's not what's amazing.
What's really amazing is the comparison between what he could do at 3 and what I could do at 3. Because if I was interested in road-making machines, it was quite a few years later than 3 when I would know enough to be able to learn something about them except by asking somebody and being told. So here I see the big break. What we're seeing is that stage two is becoming unraveled as a necessary stage. That this child is beginning to short-circuit stage two. And with what I saw there with this grandson who's got a few videotapes, it's only scratching the surface. It's just the beginning.
And already just a few years later -- this happened two years ago -- he could be using an interactive CD-ROM, or he could use the Internet and have that whole range, not just the few videotapes or CDs that he has in his house, but the whole range of human knowledge that, in principle, is accessible to him.
So that's the end of my speech. I think that the key point about this technology and education is that it short-circuits stage two. It enables us to not put children through that traumatic and dangerous and precarious process of schooling []