Now, given that picture of a rapid change of society, one would expect to see a rapid evolution of the institutions charged with preparing the young for it. We do not see this. We see a much slower rate of evolution of the school and that means we’re seeing a bigger and bigger gap between school and society. This gap is what I believe is responsible for the deterioration of performance in our schools and our educational systems. Because the children can see this; they can see that school is irrelevant. They feel that the pace of school and the mood of the school culture is out of sync with the society in which they live. And so it becomes harder and harder to get them to buy into the idea that school is satisfying their needs, that school is a bridge to the 21st century, as our political leaders keep on reiterating.

Our political leaders and I am afraid most members of our educational establishment I believe miss this point and make a mistake which is best understood, in fact, in the kind of systems theory that Colin Cherry played such an important role in teaching us the importance of. And that is this is an example of feedback gone wrong.

Feedback, which is such a crucial idea in control engineering and cybernetics, means that if the temperature in the room, for example, is too low, you turn on the means that will raise it; if it is too high, you turn on the means that will lower it. But if you reverse the wires so your thermostat is connected in such a way that it will turn on the heat when it is too hot and turn on the cold when it is too cold, you’ll get an explosive runaway deterioration of the environmental conditions. And this is what’s happening to the educational system.

The tendency today is for people to interpret the failure of school, the problems in schools, to too much change. And so they push school backwards. They try to revert to the state which, at least in their version of history (and there’s something in this at an earlier stage), it did work more successfully. But by doing that, they are aggravating the problem. They’re in a state of reverse negative feedback that will lead to aggravation of the problem until the system breaks down, which is what I think will happen.

Putting it like that faces a different way of thinking about how change and resistance to change in the education world happens. There is a standard model that we were taught at education school, if you went there, that goes something like, "Well, scientific research will determine that certain methods of education are valid. We will measure and we’ll see if this way of teaching or that way of teaching is the best. We will then design a reform of the system that will implement these new methods."

I don’t think that there’s any trace of evidence for that model actually applying. I think that the process of change is of a very different nature. And the example of the broken-down feedback mechanism is, a case in point, one aspect of a different sort of mechanism that is saying to us, "Let’s understand what’s happening in education, not in terms of which theories are right about how learning happens and which theories are wrong, but rather in terms of looking at the education system as a dynamic system." It is a dynamic system that works like any engineering system that has stabilities where feedback operates, where it moves from disequilibriums to equilibriums and where the set of ideas to which we’re indebted to people like Colin Cherry are more relevant than the set of ideas to which we’re indebted to people like Piaget.

I want to give you another example, a slightly more detailed example, of looking at the system as a dynamic system. When I first saw microcomputers, that is, personal computers, in schools, they were invariably brought in by a visionary teacher who somehow managed to get one. The first one that I saw, in fact, had been constructed with a kit by this teacher with the help of his son over the summer vacation. Others were brought in. They bought them, people contributed them, they got a grant somewhere. But it was a visionary teacher who brought the computer into the school.

The teacher brought that computer into that school because she or he saw in ways that maybe were only dimly understood that there was a feeling that this technology could provide a way of breaking out of the rigid structure of the school system, that could allow that teacher to be more creative, to do something closer to creating the kind of learning environment that human intuition, human relationships and looking at people in the learning process would lead one to. This was different from the highly technical process that the curriculum established on the basis of scientific studies and implemented by lesson plans that cover the whole K-12 period. Well, the computer would break out of this.

We saw in those early days--around the early 1980s--some wonderful examples of teachers using very primitive computers to wonderful advantage. They were doing extremely creative things in which children were carrying out projects that cut across curriculum, that cut across the subdivision of mathematics, science, English, history, that combined all these things and produced a product that, like all the products of human effort, draws not on one discipline alone but on putting them all together.

That was a picture in the early ’80s and it inspired a lot of optimism. By the mid-80s, though, the situation had changed quite considerably. It changed in a way which I think one can best understand by a biological analogy. By the triggering of something like an immune system, and I am looking at the education system as kind of a living organism, this computer that came in was a foreign body that threatened the established order of the system and like all systems this triggered a defense mechanism.

The defense mechanism consisted of taking charge. The system, the administration, the ministries now began to take charge, so the computers were no longer in the hands of the visionary teacher but were in the hands of the administration. And, in principle, the bureaucratic administration has a deep, vested interest in maintaining the status quo. So very quickly we saw the computer converted from being the revolutionary instrument that the visionary teachers hoped to find in it and to become, instead, an instrument of reaction, a bulwark of conservatism. And we saw this in lots of ways.

One was instead of the computer cutting across the disciplines in the subjects, the computer is now confined to a computer room and it is a subject of its own, taken out of the mainstream of the learning environment. There’s now a specialized computer teacher. There’s a curriculum even for the study of the computer. It has been normalized by the system; it has been tamed. That’s not the only way in which it can be tamed.

Other ways are using it to put children through more effective drill and practice in the rote learning that is the goal of many parts of the curriculum. And the computer happens to lend itself, if you want to use it in that mode, to making the most objectionably rote aspects of the learning even more so. There are many other ways. I don’t have time to dwell on all of them.

The point I want to make is that I see this movement of enthusiasm and change in the attitude towards computers and how they are seen not as the result of the numerous scientific papers that were being published at the same time as the researchers rushed into print to offer the articles to prove the points they saw would be welcomed by the players in this game that was being played out there. That was not the causal process. The causal process was the system behavior.

Well, now, an aspect of the system is that once it started in the direction of this momentum and schools continued buying more and more computers, computers began to overflow outside of the computer lab. They began to fall back into situations where they could be used by visionary teachers again and used in the more visionary way. And so in the ’90s, we began to see the beginnings of sparks here and there of the situation more like the early ’80s.