This text was the base of this discussion during the Learning chat for April 14, 2010.

I first heard the following joke from Walter Bender:

What do you call someone who speaks 3 or more languages?

Poly-lingual

What do you call someone who speaks 2 languages?

Bilingual

What do you call someone who speaks 1 language?

• 
  

American

This is only a joke, certainly a caricature, and obviously not 100% true. Yet there is sufficient truth in the joke (or else it wouldn’t be funny) to merit some thinking.

Almost all American children receive language instruction in school beginning around age 8 and continuing through the end of high school, typically in Spanish or French. For those that go on to university, they receive further classes. That is a lot of instruction, with curriculum, qualified teachers, texts, support, and all the things that are alleged to be the essentials for learning.

Think about that. Children receive years and years of language instruction but do not learn the language. How can that be?

Seymour Papert long ago pointed out that an accepted excuse is that one comes to blame the learners as they come to believe “I don’t have a head for languages.” He further pointed out that this too applies to mathematics and other fields, as in “I don’t have a head for math.”

He went on to say that people who grow up in countries where that particular language is spoken never appear to have the problem that they don’t have a head for the native language. Everyone learns the language. Are certain heads only made for French, others for English, and so on? Obviously not. So the idea that one does not have a head for a language [and by extension, for math or whatever] should not be true.

Rwanda is a compelling example exactly of this. (Europe is another example where being poly-lingual is the norm, but Rwanda is more emphatic as an example). Millions of people, despite little formal education of quality, speak multiple languages. They speak Kinyarwanda, the native language. And it appears that after a certain age, people tend to often speak around 4 languages: Kinyarwanda, Swahili, French and English, often including others as people are now learning Chinese and Korean with the increasing presence of Chinese and Koreans doing business in Rwanda. Is it because they take better language courses? Definitely not. The learning happens through motivation, practice, and culture; not by being a recipient of didactic instruction.

Are Rwandans born with heads for language? Hardly. Rather, there is strong motivation for the other languages in order to accomplish what one desires. And desire for learning, the lacune, the need to fill a gap, is an essential part of successful learning.

More importantly, there is a culture that facilitates the learning of languages. If one travels to another country and needs to communicate, to live, one manages to learn the language, having a head for one or not.

What makes the difference?

Language instruction often is merely the teaching of grammatical rules combined with the memorization of vocabulary and decontextualized usage without motivation. Thus people often do not learn. There is no need. With full information people still often do not learn; they do not construct the knowledge and cannot put it into use. Without need and context, the information is forgotten and not put into a web of knowing.

However, with need and motivation, people learn. With context and interest, people learn. As Seymour Papert pointed out, “with culture, people learn.” When one feels the desire, when one is in the company of knowledgeable and passionate people, when one is in a culture, one learns.

As we introduce laptops for learning, we need to avoid both the trap of merely presenting information, assuming that makes the learning environment complete. We need to build learning cultures where people feel the desire to learn and put the knowledge into use. We need to build learning environments where people learn by doing activities about which they care in collaboration with others who are passionate and knowledgeable.

We see that while the solutions to certain problems lend themselves to computational approaches, computational cultures have difficulty taking root in many schools, particularly in primary schools. However, computational thinking tends to be taught in the same manner as languages: teaching grammar and syntax in a decontextualized manner without regard to the types of problems about which learners care so that they have motivation and context.

However, when we introduce programming languages to work on problems children can care about, whether it is programming games, or addressing local problems, or for the arts as in our RoBallet project, or for creating their own computational environments and worlds, or as puzzles, children do learn to program and think computationally. They do learn certain powerful ideas such as variables, abstraction, naming, and more. They do gain a deeper understanding into issues of dynamics versus state, of complexity, of concurrency, and more.

Historically, we have had difficulty introducing computation into schools except with exceptional teachers and with what children do on their own. School culture tends to stick to presentation of information. Many teachers, through no fault of their own, are not familiar with or passionate about computational thinking and programming. Thus, programming, if introduced at all, is introduced in the denatured, decontextualized manner of languages and thus suffers the same fate: children do not learn. The same can be said of mathematics, or music, or good writing, and so on. We teach the mechanics of the domain in a decontextualized manner. And children do not learn.

Our challenge is to create different learning cultures where children do have motivation; where children can learn by doing and reflecting on what they do; where children can learn and practice with people who are knowledgeable and passionate. High density access to connected laptops provides such an environment that enables learning cultures that go beyond mere presentation of information or drill and practice.

How can we best help such environments to take root and grow?

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