[MWForum]Cosmic Thinkers etc.... translation

[Wendy Petti]

Harvey, some of your messages are sort of poetic feasts... they are an intriguing challenge, and I'm not always sure I quite understand them, but I enjoy trying to catch the gist and to see if I can boil them down to simplest terms for myself.

Below is my simplest-terms translation of your message to Lisa.  Have I got it straight?

Wendy

paraphrasing of Harvey's message to Lisa: 

Hi Lisa.  I'm glad to find another forward-thinker.  Here are some thoughts.

We educators need to rethink the relationship between teaching and learning.  A traditional model views teacher as boss.  Papert invites us to view teacher as mentor and facilitator.  This is a liberating, stimulating idea which helps us connect our own thoughts to the world around us.

How can we best help schools to educate effectively and use computers effectively?  

Many schools are more concerned with heavy-handed mandates and standardized testing than with creativity and meaningful sharing.  This focus stifles innovation, wonder, and exploration.  We must fight back.

The goal of your site, to stimulate curiosity and open-ended thinking, is inspiring.  But... most brains need awakening!

I have found success for over 14 years in setting up pioneering communities of teachers, parents and students who use computers in personally meaningful ways.  These programs have coexisted with traditional approaches in the same building and have inspired some to jump ship to try innovation.

During regular community nights, Native American parents and children have enjoyed creating fun, meaningful projects (such as fake money with faces of family members, a solar system whose speed is controlled with sliders, and dinosaurs with the faces of children who spoke when clicked).  The learning climate has been alive with spark and spunk. 

We begin by imagining it possible, and then we begin to make it possible.


-----Original Message-----
From: mwforum-admin@lists.mathcats.com [mailto:mwforum-admin@lists.mathcats.com]On Behalf Of Harvey Bornfield
Sent: Saturday, February 15, 2003 12:10 PM
To: mwforum@lists.mathcats.com
Subject: Re: [MWForum]Cosmic Thinkers, web games, getting schools enthused

Lisa:
Welcome. It is awesome to find another prophet in a world of mannequins. If these opening remarks seem for now but largely philosophical, let them be 'oceanically so'. Then launch your ship on these waters.

I agree that the optimism is wings, labor boots. Between these two pulsing poles we navigate mortal waters. And so, for starters, entertain the notion which Papert spawned, and hold to it as a 'basal metabolism' for what follows: that the relationship between teaching and learning is in long overdue need of chiropractic realignment. And so it follows as true also that if we indulge time to reflect upon the notion of the role of teacher as "boss", borrowed from top-down hard-core industrial models of western externally-driven ambition, to an invitation to view the teacher as a mentor, as Socrate's Ethereal Daemon, as a facilitating voice of genius within, then the outer person, the warrior who must survive and triumph, finds a connection to the cosmos, and discovers the lyric poet within, elastic, mysterious, elusive, a would-be immortal.

Syrveyed in this way, so now an intense imagination appears to visualize this turning point in time when schools must learn how de-mechanize their operating premises, and divest themselves of the euphoria and obsession with the promulgation of machine-based visions of what education really is, if civilization itself is to survive and thrive:
So I imagine, and offer this for your consideration:

Educational Bureaucracies are habit-driven, dogmatic, heavy-handed, and their way of life is like brushstrokes of a the sledge-hammer, and like stampeding rhinos in the Ewok forest, the thunder of fear-based assessment, standardization associated with norms-based testing deafens most to the flutter and flight of celebration-based sharing. To suffocate enchantment, and the arising of daring and courage which lives in unrehearsed oral tradition energy, and replace it now with a system of thought that deserves the noble name philosophy, but instead is downsized to policy and formula which commends and applauds knowledge and skills as weapons rather than instruments of wonder, this is the very crux of the malaise, and its utter reversal the greatest challenge in our schools today. 

To toast the wonderful intent of your site, one entertains an interesting, expansive notion: "All Thinking is Cosmic Thinking." Otherwise one has but rote. But to kindle, to engage, to sustain on a long-term-basis a durable curiosity in those who have inadvertently bought into the slave mentality of business-as-usual, which, to coin a new verb, "Darth Vaders" most institutions of higher learning, and trickles down, like the gait of a solemn pall-bearer, into the shrapnelled, jigsawed wasteland of public education, - this is a noble, desirable idea; More, it is indeed an inspiration, a consciousness-leavening paradigm whose time has come. Nonetheless, here's the rub:

First go upstairs where the (Cosmic) Thinking should be occurring, and observe: Snow White's spinning wheel is still spinless, numb, and like her, frozen in carbonite, lies inert in an attic of human abstraction, and for most of the Snow Whites in the world, trapped in same-old same-old, the gleam, the promise, the adventure of a Prince Charming, the voice which lives in muses and bursts misgiving, the taste of his kiss, is still but a lifeless, hypothetical speculation! 

To overcome taking on educational systems, with whom I have been sparring and jousting for the greater part of the last 14 years on various reservations throughout Arizona, I have found that setting up energy-enthusiastic communities of teachers, parents and students who engage in authoring and pioneering and count bravery as an acceptable cover charge to the arena of exploration, and letting these communities of computer, constructivist-saavy enclaves live modestly in parallel, perhaps better, in an inner concentric circle with traditional teaching modalities, like lighthouses pouring out their wares upon the land, setting up working models of the alternative, in what some educators call the "Innovation Diffusion" model, I have found that this works well to welcome those who would jump ship in search of vibrationally greener pastures.

Thus it came to pass in many of the schools within the Navajo and Hopi reservations in which I taught computer to elementary school children, that from one to three days a week, community nights where parents and their children could mint fresh money, impressed in various denominations with the faces of a digitally-photographed family, or a revolving solar system whose planetary velocities were slider-adjustable in a one-minute equals one year swerve rate, or dinosaurs with the faces of children who spoke when clicked, found their way south from realms of joy and created learning climates and ambience of unrivalled spark and spunk. 

It is creative visualization which melts the ice, and replaces the military siege-mentality of schools with "the first day of spring", which Tucson sports at least 180 days a year.

Wam regards,
Harvey Bornfield
www.mythologics.org