The Once and Future Kid

In The Once and Future King, T.H. White tells the story of King Arthur, beginning in his childhood and spanning the prosperous years of Camelot to its eventual downfall. Unless you were required to read it in high school (as I was), you probably haven't read it (I wouldn't have) but it's a pretty good book. Many of you may in fact be very familiar with the first of its four sections: The Sword in the Stone (inspiration for one of the best Disney movies ever. Assuming we exclude anything by Pixar I would readily put it in their top 15).

In the Sword in the Stone section of the book, Merlin the mysterious wizard is brought to the castle where Arthur lives to give him an education. The master of the castle expects the experience to be very much like what parents today expect: Lots of sitting and listening. Silent reading. Plenty of written work. Familiar tenets of the passive, "sit and receive" theory of education.

What Arthur actually got was a radically constructivist approach to a leadership curriculum (Merlin knew where Arthur was headed in life) in which he was transformed into a variety of animals and sent to interact with other animals of that species. In the book (not the movie) he spoke with ants and saw that they were a mindless hive with no opportunity for individuality, spent the night with falcons and learned the perils of a system based too strongly on rank and social hierarchy, and swam with swans and realized that not every species must be territorial.

Arthur got all of this through experiential learning. Merlin didn't tell him what kinds of things to say or ask when he was among the animals (though he occasionally gave a tip on how not to be recognized as an outsider). Merlin even learned a lot from Arthur when "Wart" as he was called then returned and the two discussed what had been done, seen, and said.

By the by: An absolutely fantastic plot element of the book was that Merlin experienced time in reverse, so at this point in Arthur's life he had already seen everything that would happen to Camelot. It helped explained why he was a great teacher at the end of his life (the beginning of the story) but wasn't more help in stopping Camelot's downfall: at that point at the end of it all he was a largely inexperienced young man.

If I were you I would be thinking "Thanks for the Literature lesson, professor. What's he getting at?"

The Sword in the Stone section of The Once and Future King was released in the 1930s. I think it's pretty remarkable that the divide between experiential, constructivist learning and sit-listen-read learning was noted so far back that it was only a few years after the adoption of the factory system of education.

Obviously the divide still exists today and I'm going to connect it now briefly to (surprise, surprise) technology. Last week I wrote about Multi-User Virtual Environments (MUVEs) and their potential to become places of learning. As the 21st century progresses, digital video technology will become more and more robust. TVs can already display things at resolutions that are staggering. It's only a matter of time before we abandon flat screens for more immersive, 3D display options. Combine that with motion-sensing technology already prevalent on the Nintendo Wii and it seems more and more clear to me that within 20 years people are going to be spending a lot of time not just engaged in virtual environments (like they are now in World of Warcraft and other games) but experiencing these environments in a first-person sense that truly makes the user feel like they are there.

When this happens people are going to start disappearing. Whether you're into single-player adventure style games where you explore huge worlds to win quests, or you're into large multi-player shoot-em-up death matches, or you'd rather play sports games where you get to be the star quarterback in what really feels like Texas Stadium, kids will start dropping off the map. Reality will pale in comparison.

I think its likely that companies will even work out price plans that will allow people to remain inside games for long periods and still pay without necessarily having much of an income. I don't know HOW they'll do that but I think they WILL do it. This way when people are reluctant to emerge and go to their job, they'll be able to stay in the game. Maybe indefinitely. If automation hasn't reached the point where robots can take over for that loss of workers, I don't need to tell you what it will do to the economy (if it has, well, maybe we'd be better off inside the game anyway).

But assuming the machines can't do everything for us at that point (Let's call it the social science version of accounting's Going Concern Principle), education has got to keep up so we can handle that kind of competition. Right now we've got House Bill 4294, which will allow districts to purchase digital textbooks. I was excited about that in Austin but the more I think about it the more I cringe. I know when the list of approved purchases comes out in a year it will mostly involve computerized copies of textbooks by the big publishers. It will be taking the same stuff we've always taught, in the same way we've always taught it, and putting it on a computer screen. That's not going to do anything for today's learners (certainly not tomorrow's).

We've also got major software developers saying "There's no market for educational software." That's what I heard from a friend of Craig Hammonds' who worked for Microsoft two years ago when I asked him if they had anything in the works. No wonder, when schools can't buy non-textbook stuff. So Microsoft will keep making more Halo games instead of using some of that development muscle to revolutionize educational software. (I pray that what he told me was old information but I frankly don't hold out much hope.)

What's all this go to do with King Arthur?

Good question

Our current plans to adopt technology into education do not really seek to change the old ways we've done things, but simply to digitize them. We've got Merlin the wizard at the castle but we're asking him to make our kids read a book about fractions or Ancient Rome when we could ask him to take them there, to really help them experience these things.

As virtual reality worlds become, well, a reality, I see a strong potential to create character-developing, thinking-skill-developing learning experiences not unlike those Merlin offered to Arthur. Imagine what a kid could learn by actually spending some time with animals, or people from Kenya, or maybe hanging out with guys like that fat guy in the chair above to help them realize the value of things like knowledge, nature, and real human interaction.

As the 21st century moves on, we as leaders will not only have to fight for what is best for kids, but we will have to recognize that what's best for kids is changing as well. For now we can say that teaching them to be thinkers, how to read, how to interact with others, and how to problem solve are major goals for the education system. But in the future a major goal will also be simply convincing them that the real world is better than the fake world brought to them by technology.

Paradoxically, I submit that in the short term this involves embracing technology to the extent that we encourage the teaching philosophies espoused by educational software companies (and the bodies that they cater to like school districts and the government) to become more constructivist. Most of us would agree that detailed, project-based, constructivists approaches are ideal, but they are rarely used because of the challenges they present in terms of management. Software carries the potential to promote and manage this kind of learning much more easily.

We need to get started with this kind of thing now so that when the virtual worlds that are solely entertainment-based arrive, we have an answer that has a chance of engaging students while also helping them to see that at the end of class, it's best to take the 3D visor off and walk outside.