Laptops and handwriting

While traveling in Europe and Russia (which is why you haven’t heard from me for a while), I could keep in touch with the official side of what was happening to educational initiatives in Maine but felt deprived of the vox populi. A constant theme of these columns has been my opinion that the success or (more commonly) the failure of education initiatives depends at least as much on how they are received by the public as on what is done in schools. My confidence in our laptop initiative is based on a vision of a transfer of ownership from the government of the state to the people of the state.

The laptop initiative differs from most attempts to change school by its ability to engage nonprofessionals in serious discussion of the issues. I include among these the students themselves, who are able to experiment with different ways of learning and so develop their thinking about how learning works. Surely you can do something better if you understand how it works! It is too soon to see deep effects of that kind of development, but striking up conversations wherever I can has confirmed my belief that the people of the state, adults as well as seventh-graders, have been drawn into thinking seriously about the issues and are hungry for more food for thought.

To the background of snipping scissors, hairdresser Michelle Williams (the concept of “barber” seems to be on the way out) gave me an excellent example of healthy thinking. Since I knew Michelle had a son in the seventh grade, I held my breath waiting for her reply to my first question. Phew! She was in favor! In the following weeks I learned that I don’t have to hold my breath: I have spoken to enough people to know that the first impressions are overwhelmingly positive. Most encouragingly, many who expressed skeptical or antagonistic views before the laptops came say they have switched to a favorable view and nobody I know has moved in the opposite direction.

Hearing people say “it’s just great” is good for the politics of the initiative because it will help silence politicians who are still trying to call it off. But as she trimmed my thinning hairs Michelle spoke about matters that are more important for the development of the initiative: She expressed criticisms and concerns and described how she had overcome some of them. I have space here for one example: What effect will the laptops have on the development of handwriting?

I choose the example because it is a simple question that raises a cloud of complex issues and because it is of a kind that has to be worked through by individual concerned parents and teachers – it cannot be resolved by edict from the state government. Michelle was initially worried by the prospect that the computers would undermine penmanship. The way the fear was dispelled was a good example of how the people (as opposed to the “experts”) can and should resolve such questions. In the Ellsworth American she read the views of a teacher who explained that the students would not necessarily be glued to a computer screen for all their work. Thinking about this led her to think in a balanced way and to escape from her concern.

I was even more pleased by the tone of the discussion that ensued. My own answer to the problem is rather different. I am far more willing than Michelle was to envisage a world in which skill at handwriting is no longer important. I did not convert her. In the end we “agreed to disagree.” But what was inspiring for me was that serious exchange of views on the deep issues about the role of writing could be seriously discussed in a small hairdressing shop in a small town in rural Maine.

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