I received several stimulating e-mails from Dr. Leo Leonidas who speaks from long experience as a pediatrician. He writes:

“Why is it that many Asian immigrants who graduated [from] college get a good job when they arrive here? Is it their school system? Or is it their ‘Family culture’?”

My guess is the latter. “Family culture” or social factors has a strong influence on learning, creativity and productivity. I think the school system is only secondary or even tertiary.

If we want to improve learning … or if we want to make our state “The Learning State” or “Learning Land” we should really start studying the role of the family.

From my practice (as a pediatrician), I can predict from age 2 who will be honor students in their elementary and high school years by just looking at the family history and language and cognitive development at 18 and 24 months old.

I am sure that Dr. Leonidas would agree with my own belief that whatever the relative weights of the two factors, school policies and home cultures, a lot of work is needed in order to bring the two into greater harmony. In my view this is all the more urgent since I see many learning problems as coming from an increasing dissonance between school and the rest of life. Society has changed radically; school has behind. The result is that children, who are not blind to the gap, are increasingly unwilling to “buy into” school.

One reason why students from some other countries do better than Americans is that we are a step ahead of them in the social changes that are sweeping the world. So the dissonance between school and society has not yet developed in those places to the same degree. But they are catching up and are beginning to experience the problems of disaffection, violence, drugs and learning disabilities that have become endemic in American schools over the past few decades. They like us will soon have to face the problem of bringing schools into line with the twenty-first century.

The school-home culture gap is a complex phenomenon with many facets. One of these was vividly brought out for me by a coincidence: immediately before reading Leonidas’ remark about predictions from early observation immediately I had been listening to a teacher complaining about losing most of her class time this week to the annual test known as the Maine Educational Assessment. Leonidas’ kind of observation and the MEA are both attempts to see how well the child is doing. We could call them “family-style” and “school-style” testing.

One is based on knowing the child as a whole person and as a member of a social group. The other is based on the child’s skill at answering questions in a socially isolating situation. I don’t have space here for my views about which would be “better” if we had to choose. What I see as a poignant situation is that they give different views of the child. Thus parents and school come to see different intellectual beings and, what is worse, very often the child’s perception is of a third person different from both in essential ways.

There is a heated national debate about testing. What disturbs me is that the debate is about whether tests are needed and not about what kind of test is needed and for what purpose. President Bush has said that we need more tests to ensure that no third-grade student fails to learn to read. I am all for knowing which third grade children cannot read. But finding out whether a child can read takes about five minutes. For the rest something very different is needed.

Perhaps the biggest step we could take towards closing the home-school gap could be to develop ways of identifying and communicating a shared perception on both sides of what is most important about the individual and especially of what makes this person thrive. The current modes of testing are far too separated from what parents (and pediatricians) see and value. Doing this means going beyond academic performance but even within academic performance it implies something very different from current testing.

In particular I want to see tests that identify the strengths of the individual rather than the weaknesses. This doesn’t mean making tests easier: it means making them much harder but providing choice so that individuals who excel at something can show their excellence without being penalized for not being able to perform in their other areas.

If that sounds crazy think of this: Olympic medals and Nobel prizes come to people who do very well at what they do well. Imagine refusing Bode his silver on the grounds that he is a poor figure skater!

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.