September 06, 2006: Education at the "Singularity Point"

There has been a great discussion about education reform at Truthdig; but, unfortunately, there has been an attempt to hijack it by a techno-centrist with a passion for Ray Kurzweil. Those unfamiliar with Kurzweil's most recent work can start with the logarithmic plot at the head of this item. His basic thesis is that change accelerates and that, if plotted on a logarithmic scale, that acceleration is linear. In other words thing keep changing at a more and more rapid pace and it will not be long before we hit a "singularity point" at which that rate is infinitely fast. If this were just the latest bit of off-the-wall thinking from one of the more impressive inventors of our time, one could probably leave it in peace. However, like other such inventors, Kurzweil has used this as an excuse to write a book and then fill the book with implications in a variety of directions, one of which happens to be education reform.

Fortunately, Kurzweil has laid is thoughts about education on the table in an interview he gave to the ACM magazine Ubiquity:

Well, I do think that for kids (or really for people at any age) the best way to learn something is to try to solve real problems that are meaningful to them. If, for example, you're trying to create a reading machine, then you learn about optics. And you learn about signal processing, and image enhancement techniques and all of these different things that you need to know in order to solve the problem. If you really have a compelling need to solve these problems, you will learn about them. If you're trying to create, let's say, a hip hop song, well you learn about the history of hip hop, and how it emerged from other forms of music. And you learn something about urban culture. So learning things in context, where you're actually trying to make a contribution yourself, is a very motivating way to learn -- as opposed to just trying to dryly learn facts out of context and without a purpose for learning them.

There are all sorts of aggravations in this analysis; but, at the end of the day, the most important is the assumption that education is fundamentally a solitary, rather than social, pursuit. Thus, when he talks about creating hip hop, in never seems to occur to him that it might be a good idea to hang out with other people trying to create hip hop! Similarly, creating a reading machine is presented as what is sometimes called "backward-chaining goal satisfaction." (If you want to do A, first you recognize that this requires doing B and C; so you commit to doing B. Rinse and repeat.) This may be the sort of thing that a brain in a bell jar (or a computer) might do, but it overlooks the fact what lots of different kinds of reading have to take place. For example, learning about optics involves engaging with an expository text, while image enhancement techniques are involved with a more prescriptive text. Furthermore, while you might be able to do this all on your own, doing it within a classroom experience is likely to be more enriching for your command of both the theory and the practice.

So, once again, we are confronted with the hazards of techno-centrism in a setting where promotion seems to trump justification. The author of the Truthdig article bemoans "that a generation of dumbed-down products of this current system is out on the streets and doesn’t even recognize the importance of the issues I am raising." They also apparently cannot recognize when a brilliant inventor like Kurzweil is pulling a fast one on them!