I want to end by putting it to you that this is a true megachange in the nature of learning and the possibilities of learning open to children. Dewey would have liked us to believe that the child will learn only that which is rooted in that child’s interests. But there’s a fundamental contradiction there between this and the idea that certain subjects like mathematics should be learned by children, because what if the child doesn’t have any interest that is related to mathematics? Well, in a sense that can’t be; everything is related to mathematics. But it can be and it was the case until recently that most children who were interested in music could not get any access to a mathematical activity that significantly related to their musical instrument.

But these children building this new musical instrument, this is just meant as one way, just an example of one way in which a child whose passion is music could be drawn into a situation with deep mathematical and physical and other ideas closely related to that child’s passion. And I think that couldn’t happen [before]. This is my sense of Leonardo vs. the Wright Brothers and aviation--that with this technology we have the infrastructure that can enable us to realize their dream, which in the particular case, would be putting together our sense that mathematics is an enormously powerful area of knowledge and should be learned by this kid in this kid sense that "I care about music" and Dewey’s idea that you could learn everything through what you care about.

So that is a vision, but let’s notice as we close that this vision is radically incompatible with the structure of school. Because although you need mathematics and mathematical ideas to build your musical instrument, if you are a seven- or eight-year-old child these mathematical ideas are very unlikely to have occurred in the curriculum of your school up to that point or maybe anywhere. You need that mathematical knowledge now, not on the seventh of May in your eighth year of school or whenever it might be. This is, I think, a fundamental, radical incompatibility.

Of course, it raises a problem--the problem that the motivation of learning mathematics has been replaced by the problem of access. Where can a child get that knowledge? Well, the other side of digital technology gives us the answer--the information side. And as the information available and the communicational possibilities of contacting people somewhere in the world who might share your interests and be willing to share knowledge with you increase through the informational side of digital technology, the implementation of the constructional side as the driving force, as the main guiding metaphor for the learning environment for schooling, becomes possible.

And so, I see megachange as happening. But this megachange requires us to think more clearly about the nature of school, to recognize the informational and constructional sides, to think more clearly about the technology, to recognize its two sides, to think about how they’re related, to think in system terms about the way learning as an activity, as an environment is going to evolve and to have the courage to realize that we are living in an education system that is inconsistent. There are schools in educational systems that are inconsistent with the technological, intellectual, social milieu of this 21st century. You’re not going to answer this by taking tests, where the children take tests of 19th century knowledge. Doing that is building a bridge to the 19th century. It’s not opening a gate to the 21st.

I think that a good image to close with on this change is one that I have used before and I’ll use again. I think that it might be useful to think of the collapse of the Soviet Union. I think that seemed to be a system that was as unchangeable as our education system seems to be. It’s a system, I think, that was becoming increasingly incompatible with the modern world for reasons not very different from those that operate in the education system. It tried to run a country as a production line, as a top-down command economy where what people made would be determined by a committee somewhere. We try in our school systems to decide what people will learn in this top-down, centralized way and, for the same reason, it is not compatible with the complexities and dynamic possibilities of the modern world.

And I think the subject is increasing strain. The decision to make is not whether we will continue with school or change it. It will collapse. Our question is whether we’ll wait until we’re driven to the wall and the system is collapsed from within from its own internal contradictions before we decide that we’re going to create conditions that will allow a new system where there’ll be diversity of learning paths, diversity of teaching methods, diversity of subjects to be learned.

And, if we believe in our free enterprise economies, I think that a blossoming of a
Darwinian evolution in the learning sphere is going to take place. Thank you very much.