Choices: The present or the future?

If there is any single skill that deserves to be ranked as the top goal of education for life, it is skill in making sensible choices when immediate gratification pulls against preparing for the future. For a child the skill might be needed to decide between playing one more round of a computer game or working on that book report. For a legislator in Maine at this time it might be needed to decide between responding to a skeptical constituent who will vote next November and honoring the decision of last year’s Legislature to invest in educational technologies for people who have six years to go before they can vote. My own choice of the Laptop Initiative rather than all the other good uses the money could serve is based largely the stories of similar situations. One of the most instructive is about Costa Rica, a small Central American country with about twice the population of Maine.

In 1948 Costa Rica threw off a stifling dictatorship and established a democratic government. One of the first major actions of the first president, Jose Maria (Don Pepe) Figueres, was to launch a program of road building. Many protested: Our people are poor, many don’t even have shoes. How can you talk about roads? Figueres replied: “If we buy shoes in a few years they will wear out and we’ll have to buy more. If we build roads the country will prosper and everyone will afford to buy shoes.” He was right. When I first saw Costa Rica, a generation later, it was not rich on U.S. standards but indeed it was prosperous enough for its people to be comfortably dressed and healthily fed.

I was invited to Costa Rica in 1987 because a new visionary president, Oscar Arias, soon to be given the Nobel Peace prize, had proposed putting computers in schools. Again many protested that the country could not afford this luxury. The schools were overcrowded and lacked ordinary supplies. ” How can Arias talk about spending money on computers?”

I had the honor of helping develop a design for the integration of technology into the education of a country that was still best known as the prototypical banana republic. And I had the pleasure of seeing over the next 15 years a shift of the economy to become the most modern in its region of the world. When Intel wanted to build a plant in a Latin country it selected Costa Rica. And when interest in the environment created the conditions for the development of sophisticated eco-tourism, Cost Rica became the world leader in this new field. Nobody has any doubt that these developments owe much to the fact that the project started by Oscar Arias brought into the country’s schools a level of sophistication far ahead of anything in the surrounding countries.

You will note that my last sentence used the word “sophistication” rather than “technology.” What happened could not have happened without technology, but it was much more than bringing machines into schools. It was a carefully and deliberately planned attempt to create the conditions for a long-term shift of the schools towards more modern ways of teaching and learning. Looking at how this happened brings out an observation that I have often made about the difference in approach to education in so-called “developing” and so-called “developed” countries. Countries that see themselves as “developing” are looking for change. For example I was asked to speak to a conference in Brazil on “Changing Society By Changing Education.” Can you imagine this in the USA? Countries that call themselves “developed” are saying that they have arrived – that they don’t need to change … “what was good enough for grandpa is good enough for my kids.”

Some decisions made in Costa Rica will make this thought more concrete.

An important early decision on which Costa Rica took a brave stance was about how the computers would be used. The tendency in the United States is to “integrate” the technology into the existing curriculum. It is seen as a new way to teach the same content. Costa Rica chose a harder route: students would learn to use the technology more deeply by learning to program the machines themselves. The challenge is greater and so are the rewards.

Anther key decision in any such project is the age at which the innovation should begin. Many school systems in the United States see high school as the most important age. These are the students who will get into the workplace soonest. Costa Rica took a much longer-term view by deciding to concentrate first on the elementary school. This is where habits of thinking and learning are formed and so where new methodologies can have the biggest impact.

A third feature of the Costa Rica experience grew out of the first two. One of the new habits of mind is what is expressed in Maine’s Learning Results as becoming an independent learner. In Costa Rica this is demonstrated by holding regular conferences at which elementary-school pupils present papers on their work in the same spirit as a conference of adult scientists.

Perhaps the most important component of Costa Rica’s use of technology to carry innovation in education is the existence of the Omar Dengo Foundation. This is an organization created and maintained to support teachers, to develop ideas and protect the activities from the vicissitudes of partisan politics. Many American visitors are surprised by its intellectual quality. All are surprised by its size: considering that Costa Rica has about double the population and a quarter of the total income of Maine, 40 full-time staff members is a large number. Looking at this makes it hard to consider Maine extravagant in its technology for education.

Seymour Papert is professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a Distinguished Computer Scientist at the University of Maine and a member of Maine Learning Technology Task Force. He may be contacted at Papert@midmaine.com.