Overhyping Tech & AI in Education - A Conversation with Dr. Gary Stager

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

If you're okay with curriculum and external assessment, then you have no right to criticize generative AI because you've already standardized human development. A lot of curriculum materials, and this is clearly the case when we involve technology, go from turn it on to oh shit in 3 pages.

Hi everyone. Thanks for joining me for another episode. My name is Tim Logan and the podcast is brought to you in partnership with Notosh. Since the public launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, we have all been wrestling with what this means for learning, schooling, and education. In May and June last year, I shared a number of episodes exploring this in more depth. During those conversations, I had the privilege of sitting down with Gary Steger. Gary has been supporting educators to embrace computational technology since 1982, so he's certainly seen a few hype cycles come and go. It was such a joy to chat with Gary about all of this in his beautiful, irreverent style, and there are loads more gems to share than in the 20 minutes I previously shared, so I'm really pleased to bring you the full conversation now. If you enjoyed this episode, we'd appreciate you taking a moment to rate or review the podcast, as this will help others to be able to find it and benefit from it as well.

Hi, I'm Gary Stager. I'm a teacher educator who's— I led professional development in the first two schools in the world where every kid had a laptop and created some of the early online graduate school programs for educators. And my own doctoral research was based on creating a multi-age project-based alternative learning environment inside a prison for teenagers where I collaborated with Seymour Papert on his last major institutional research project. And I'm the co-author of a book called Invent to Learn: Making Tinkering and Engineering in the Classroom, which is just celebrating its 10th anniversary. It's been translated into 9 languages and been called the Bible of the Maker Movement in schools. So I've been quite fortunate over my career to be able to be at the right place at the right time and seize opportunities to make schools the best 7 hours of a kid's life, potentially.

Amazing. Yeah. Well, it should be. Thank you. And so obviously with a focus on the current surge that we've just had in awareness about AI. Obviously, from your perspective, I imagine this was not radical news, and you've been watching this thing happen over the last few decades. What is your take on the kind of current recent surge?

I have multiple takes on it. One is that I'm bemused by the notion that education was revolutionized over Christmas break. And that many of the same people who are either overhyping or hysterical about about the threats of or promise of AI in education, or who have the audacity to put AI in education expert in their LinkedIn bio, are, are the very same people who have been an obstacle to teaching kids how to have agency over the computer over the last few decades. Um, that all my work has been about giving kids agency over an increasingly complex and technologically sophisticated world To answer the question that my colleague and friend and mentor Seymour Papert began asking in the 1960s, does the computer program the child or the child program the computer? And the way you get at that is by learning how to compute, to be actively engaged in making things with, with code, with making things with computers and, um, making things that have, have computational intelligence in them and, and are the result of developing fluency and agency over the system. So, My, my concern is that a lot of the rhetoric about AI and education is merely that it's just going to descend into another list of vocabulary words that kids have to learn, as opposed to providing powerful experiences for them to be able to not only learn what we've always wanted them to learn with greater efficiency or comprehension, but to know and do things that were impossible otherwise.

Yeah.

One of the things that Papert was reported to have said is that everyone needs a prosthetic. And, you know, I'm, I'm wearing eyeglasses now. Probably 30, 40% of the population wears eyeglasses. No one accuses us of cheating, right? We use technology all the time to, to enhance our lives, to go about our daily business. And it seems ridiculous that some primitive software is going to dramatically upend everything. Ironically, the threat of generative AI technologies like ChatGPT is that it's really good at doing the nonsense that schools overvalue. So the approach that I've taken has been to double down on timeless programming activities where kids are messing about with language, where they're understanding conditionals and rule-based systems and linguistics and logic. And then they spontaneously say, oh, this is just like AI. And they start understanding how the computer is thinking and, and what the sort of logical fallacies and weaknesses in a system are. And then I had a, a specific example that I've been writing and speaking a lot about recently where I asked ChatGPT a classic second grade maths problem. And had it said to me, I don't know what you're talking about, I would've been done with the discussion. Kind of like the arguments that I've had with it about Maria Montessori or constructionism. But it understood completely what I was talking about. It knew all about it. And then when I asked it to solve the problem, it gave me data that caused my BS detector to go off. And I realized that the data it was presenting to me was wrong. And in order to verify that it was wrong, I had to write some code to check it. And in that process, I realized that, well, I, I knew intellectually that it was basically just looking for pattern recognition in text, that it wasn't actually thinking, but does a pretty good job of creating the illusion of thinking. So I fell for the idea. Wonderful confluence of events where I received an email in the middle of the night from my friend Stephen Wolfram, who's arguably one of the most important living mathematicians and scientists. And I said, hey, check this problem out. And he said, that's wonderful. And when I woke up a few hours later, he had given me like 2 lines of code in Wolfram Language.

Wow.

That did everything I would ever have hoped to have explored with this problem and said, it's terrific. Do you mind if we put this on our website? And then that created something that I was able to share with kids and teachers. And within a couple of weeks, not only had the Wolfram Company put that second-grade timeless math problem on their website, but they had added a, a ChatGPT plugin that allowed ChatGPT to actually perform calculations like that. And so all of this was an embodiment of, of kind of a utopian vision that Seymour Papert was for more than 50 years, which was, yeah, imagine a computer as a math land, which would allow you to learn mathematics as naturally and as playfully and as meaningfully as one would learn French by living in France. That he, he used to point out that no one would go up to a child in France and say, you don't seem to have a head for French. That, that French was natural, it was powerful, it had a utility. And that the computer could be a math land where children could be mathematicians just as easily as they could be taught math. And they could actually be historians as opposed to being taught history and artists as opposed to being taught art. That building upon the Piagetian notion of knowledge as a consequence of experience, we could have a scenario in which kids could be actively engaged in constructing knowledge across disciplines, sometimes even on the frontiers of those domains. So the emerging technology has context in which I could take a timeless Marilyn Burns Year 2 arithmetic problem that kids find challenging and puzzling and playful, and use it as an invitation to think about large language models and computation and engage real mathematicians in the conversation and have everyone learning together with great reciprocity by democratizing the quality of experience.

That's great. And I'd like, just in relation to the current shift, or if there is one, do you think there is a substantive change that has just happened in terms of the technological capabilities, or is it just a kind of a process of evolution and suddenly it's become into the public consciousness about what is possible?

No, the, the publicly available software got a lot better really quickly.

Okay. Yeah.

But it's still terrible. Um, and, and the more you use it, the more terrible you realize it is.

Yeah.

So Ian Bogost just wrote a great article for The Atlantic about the trauma this is causing in, in higher education with concerns about plagiarism and, you know, how about the students who are engaged for the first time? How about the students who are using it to brainstorm? How about the students who are using it to have it clarify their meaning? How about, you know, what about the false positives for plagiarism? You know, all these various issues. But if I have any superpower as an educator, it is that there's a whole lot of stuff that I couldn't care less about that most people in the system care a great deal about. I have no interest in playing gotcha. I have no interest in quizzing or testing people or catching them cheat. That if we're engaged in meaningful work that's mutually beneficial, then all those concerns fade away. And if you're fair dinkum, to use an Australian term, about lifelong learning, or teacher as learner, then who gives a shit if someone used a prosthetic device to get back up?

Yeah. But so do you have a sense of optimism that there will be a shift towards more meaningful work in that way that you've just described? Or do you think there are just, there's so much inertia and so much kind of perverse incentives in the system to just try and fix and patch the things that, that need patching in order to stay—

Well, I, I don't know. I mean, it's, it's funny because, you know, the, the, the current generation of generative AI is mostly good at text, and most people are terrible writers. And, and I've been saying for any number of years that no matter what career path you go into, you're going to be doing more writing than anyone in school ever told you. You would be doing, and it would be a qualitatively different kind of writing than school has taught you how to write. You're writing manuals and proposals and contracts and descriptions and guides. And given the fact that people are such terrible writers to begin with, I don't know how it could get worse. You know, the fact that this might help you be a better writer, communicate more articul— you know what I mean? Just a simple example of As you get chronologically older, what you write for school has to get longer. Why is that? Everything I do as a professional writer, and I've written a few thousand articles and a few books, everything I have to write professionally needs to be shorter.

Yeah.

I'm really good at 1,100, 1,200-word essays that need to be 600 words. What was the last time a kid was told that their work should be 60% shorter?

So true. Yeah.

And so, so, so I can't imagine that it gets worse in that regard. So if we just sort of relaxed and looked for opportunities that might be a healthier way of looking at this. But we tend to overreact. And I think the hysteria is just the flip side of the overhyping of it. I mean, it's extraordinary to me how many conferences have already been consumed by the topic of AI in education when anyone who's ever presented at conferences knows that there's an 8 to 12 month lead time on getting your session on the program. And all of a sudden, again, this thing kind of emerged over Christmas. And by now already, 3/4 of conference sessions are about AI and education. Now, you could also take a long view of this. And I've, I've started rereading some things, but my intellectual brethren who come out of the LOGO community and, and Seymour Papert's work, that was born in the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT.

Yeah.

In the, in the 1960s and '70s. And Papert and Minsky and Cynthia Solomon wrote really thoughtful stuff about the promise of AI. Which is fundamentally different from what's being pitched today. And then you have people like my friend Roger Shank. I just bought a copy of his book, The Cognitive Computer, because I couldn't find the copy I read 30 years ago. And he just passed away. And the obituaries for these pioneers in AI often now say things like, you know, researchers are thinking maybe we should have listened to them. You know, Marvin Minsky was talking a lot before he passed about What if the AI research for the last 30 years has been chasing the wrong objectives? There was an awful lot of government funding backing research into making a computer play Jeopardy.

Yeah.

And the result is kind of, you know, ChatGPT. I mean, he wrote an article after Three Mile Island in the '70s that said it was outrageous that we didn't have a robot smart enough to send into a nuclear power plant to turn a valve. And then almost 30 years later, Fukushima happened, that we still don't have a robot we can send into a nuclear power plant to turn a valve. And so this is kind of a question of, you know, thinking about any system, including education, you know, what if our objectives are wrong? What if the hypotheses we're chasing is wrong? It's okay if we're exploring multiple hypotheses, but if we're only going down one path, there's a very good chance that we're going to squander some opportunities.

Yeah. Yeah. And I saw you call yourself an amateur epistemologist, right? And just that idea of what education is doing, what's its main objective? And that maybe connects back to Stephen Wolfram and, you know, thinking about computation. And do you think that the current conversations that, or the, the way this is moving will have an impact on the types of knowledge that we value or the types of, of ways of interacting with knowledge that we value in education?

Undoubtedly in society, it's not clear that schools will. You know, in 1989, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, hardly a radical organization, said 50% of mathematics has been invented since World War II. So that's like, if it was the case that 35 years ago, half of mathematics had been invented since World War II, that percentage is undoubtedly higher. And yet we still teach the same arbitrary list of stuff to kids and continuously assault teachers for underperforming at the same list of nonsense we've taught since time immemorial. And it's not just that we have new forms of mathematical knowledge that one might be able to explore at the postgraduate level, but there's no reason why year 3s can't be playing with number theory or cellular automata or chaos or fractals. And kids who haven't been all that excited about the traditional educational diet can fall in love with, with wondering about something and looking at patterns. And I mean, this, I'll tell you this, the second grade problem that, that I've been spending a lot of time playing with and that I got Wolfram involved in, and it's very simple, simple set of rules. If A is worth 1 penny or 1 cent and Z or Zed is worth 26 cents, can you think of words in the English language where the sum of the values of each letter equals a dollar?

Okay, nice.

And so kids have fun with that. And when I asked ChatGPT, it completely understood dollar words. It knew the origins of it. It told me the algorithm, and then it gave me 100 words and about 98 of them were wrong.. And I looked at them and I thought, something's not right. So I needed a way to check them so I couldn't have done it manually, pen, paper, and pencil. Now when I throw that slide up in front of classrooms full of kids, most of them go, okay. I'm like, well, what do you think of alfalfa? And then, you know, there's a pause and okay. And then, you know, one kid in 20 will say, eh, there's a lot of A's in that word and A's aren't worth a penny. Yeah. It doesn't smell right. And then, then I show them that I told ChatGPT that it was wrong and it apologized solicitously. And then it gave me another 100 words. And then like, you know, abracadabra came up and, and, and so then I showed them, you know, how I could write a little program in Logo that'll tell me the value of a word. And then if I can find out the value of the word, I could take this whole list of words and check all of them. Or I could ask it to randomly generate words overnight. Well, how do I do that? Just put random letters together. Okay. What's the shortest word we should put together? A lot of kids, that's a hard question.

Mm-hmm.

And someone will say 4 letters. Well, then you're gonna have words like zzzz. So, okay, 5-letter words. So we'll put together 5-letter words. We'll ask the computer to work all night and generate thousands or tens of thousands of words. Now, how do we know which ones of those are in English? Well, it turns out I don't have access to a dictionary in any of the programming languages I was typically working in. So I could copy and paste the list into Microsoft Word, which does a pretty good job actually.

Okay.

Except that it only shows me the English words won't be underlined. So you're looking for a needle in a haystack there. Turns out literally in one expression in Wolfram Language, you can have it generate all of the dollar words in the English language. And then say, oh, and by the way, what percentage of that list of dollar words, which percentage of all words in English language does that represent? It can literally do it in 2 lines of code. And, and so that's kind of breathtaking. So now it's like, well, why wouldn't we learn the syntax to be able to interrogate giant models of, of data in, in such a way? And, and those tools are not, and those tools are freely available as well. Yeah. So for all this, All this rhetoric about computational thinking or all this, you know, it's all this make-believe stuff when, when real experiences are readily available. Yeah.

But do you worry that it's because of how fast it's moved in terms of its capacity? I mean, you know, I'm technically not particularly able. I've heard people saying who are phenomenal programmers, et cetera, saying that they don't really know what's going on inside the large language models. There's some kind of alchemy. Happening there, right? And so do you worry that for young people thinking about— because if you've kind of grown from, you know, the BBC Micro or whatever through the, you know, through the decades and understood how these things work, do you worry that there's an increasing amount of distance between just those kind of basic inner workings of computational language and coding and that kind of thinking that is required to just with the basics of the language in that kind of math land that you were talking about. And then there's no access to that now because the tools are so sophisticated that it's just, there's no incentive for them to go so far back and understand those basics.

No. And only because, only because we haven't tried. You know, there's this sort of disingenuous trope that's going around these days. There's two of them. One is the people profiting from AI saying, oh, it's very scary. The follow-up question is, like what? And how? What's the worst-case scenario? It's going to write a bad 5-paragraph essay? I mean, seriously, I really want to know what—

The paperclip maximizer. That's the thing that everybody goes to, right? Oh, the paperclip maximizer. That's going to be the end of humanity.

Yeah, yeah, right. And so there's that fallacy. Then the second trope that I'm hearing with increasing frequency is, You know what the most popular programming language in the world is?

English.

English. So you've heard it, but that's a bunch of malarkey as well, because, okay, first of all, all programming languages are in English. The syntax might change. Let's say it is going to see change. You can communicate an idea to the computer and get a result. You might even build design software that way. Very quickly, you're going to have to debug something.

Yeah.

Very quickly, you're going to have to say, I don't want it like that. I need it like this. Even if it's just cosmetic. And at that point you're programming. So let's go back to the writing example, right? I don't know why you teach poetry to kids. I know we wanna have beauty in their lives and all that kind of stuff, right? But if you're looking at education through a vocational lens, which I never do, but most people do, then why did we decide that every kid should haiku, right? You know, who was in the meeting where that was determined? And you know, there's a billion and one arbitrary things we teach the kids. But if you ask ChatGPT to write a poem for you, and if you have even the slightest hint of curiosity or self-esteem, you're then going to ask it to improve it in some way.

Yeah.

And that conversation about how you want the poem to be better, I would guess, is exactly the objective of teaching children to write poetry. It exactly mirrors or exemplifies the process of writing something creatively because you're engaged in a conversation and a computer is a transitional object that you're actually engaged in a conversation with yourself. Yeah. And a computer is a transitional object in helping you understand your own thoughts about creative expression. So it seems to me like if you wanted to teach kids poetry, then ChatGPT would be a swell place to start. And, and then there's the other piece of this, which is You know, the purpose of computers or tools in general is to make your life easier, and there should be no harm in increasing your productivity or becoming better at something. And again, I'm working on an article. There are a few tools that I use which, if they're not AI-based, they're AI-adjacent, that are kind of magical, that allow me to do things quicker and better than I could have ever imagined. And no one is talking about them. I'm a lot more concerned that kids can't program anything. I mean, there's, there's an awful lot of dysfunction despite all the rhetoric about how digitally native and groovy we are. So I want people to be more thoughtful. I want them to be more expert. I want them to be more creative regardless of which tools we're currently playing with. I mean, one of my favorite smartass tweets ever was, Which should I ignore more, Google Buzz or Google Wave? And it turns out, I don't even remember what those two things did, but there was a period of time where like, you know, everyone was as hyped up about them as they are ChatGPT. Now, obviously, I didn't need to be Nostradamus to know that they didn't matter and ChatGPT probably represents something more significant, but it's just software.

Yeah. It, no, interesting. And can I ask you, I mean, I am really interested in what Stephen is doing with Wolfram Language because, as I understood it, he's trying to use natural language in the intersection with computation to create very, I don't know, seemed very simple approaches that do very, very sophisticated things.

Yeah. Taking this idea that if you've got software that can solve any computational problem and it can do so symbolically on the world's collection of data. You can say divide the number of iPad owners in Minnesota by the number of drivers in Kyrgyzstan, and, and it will do that. Yeah, it just cuts out some of the steps. Yeah, right. Because so, you know, he in some interviews I've seen, you know, he said he challenged his team to, you know, know everything in a library. And then if you know everything in a library and you can perform mathematical calculations, then you can perform mathematical calculations based on known and available data.

Yeah.

You know, but I've been thinking about this, this other problem for teachers. And at some point I'm gonna prob— probably teach a course along these lines, a curriculum development course. We just published a book called the Invent to Learn Guide to the micro:bit. And we, I jokingly say we spent more time on it than the Manhattan Project. And to create a book for educators about using a micro:bit in the classroom, me this wonderful little inexpensive brain board. And it was really important to me to, first of all, explain concepts clearly and in a coherent, uniform fashion, to not be pedantic, to be open-ended, but provided just enough information to be able to go anywhere you want to go, to answer questions that I spent 3 or 4 years saying, for God's sakes, how do those damn things work? And why hasn't anyone documented this? And recognizing that a lot of curriculum materials, and this is clearly the case when we involve technology, go from turn it on to oh shit in 3 pages. That you go from some dumb dumb hour of code puzzle that, you know, you could get your cocker spaniel to perform to something no one's going to be able to do or understand. With nothing in between.

Yeah.

And it seems like there's a lost art in designing the fifth project for students. And I, I think I'm better at it than most, but I can't fully articulate— there's— I have no unifying theory of it. And I think teachers need to develop that skill so that, you know, just like I wonder why kids don't wonder when I put 100 words generated by ChatGPT on the screen and the kids fully understand the dollar words problem and they just look at it and go, okay, without thinking, maybe it's wrong. How do I break this?

Yeah.

If it's wrong, what do I do about it?

What is that? Is that a passivity? I mean, it's kind of, it's something's delivered to them and there's a surface value of like, okay, yeah, I'll just accept that.

Or if I, you know, this too shall pass, I wait it out.

Exactly. Right.

If I don't throw something through the window, then the bell will ring eventually and we can move on to something else.

Yeah.

But you know, the, there's a playfulness to trying to break someone else's software than try to break your own software. And software there is just a metaphor for thinking.

Yeah.

You know, there's a problem in my friend's thinking or, or someone's program, or there's, or there's a weakness in my own and I have to engage in some debugging and make it better. Or I'm engaged in this conversation with the system where My success inspires me to test a larger hypothesis, to embellish, to decorate, to—

Sure.

To ask a deeper question.

Can I ask you, do you think that's a very particular type of thinking though, that doesn't always appeal to large groups of people? I mean, I was thinking that when I was listening to Stephen Wolfram, is that they're proceeding almost like everything can be computed, right? Everything in the world, poetry, you know, the weather, Yeah, just everything we interact with somehow, if we had enough time or enough compute power, can, can be computed into constituent parts with causal relations, et cetera, et cetera. Some people don't buy that, right? Whether it's true or not, it's not, it's kind of not the point. Some people just don't buy that that is an interesting way to interact with a dynamical system, living system that is the world, right?

Well, sure, it could be reductive and it could be wrong, but so what? I, I think that, but there is a so what, isn't there?

I mean, the, the so what is like, it's quite significant to some people, right? It's like there's an ontological importance that of that so what I would say.

I'm equally concerned that we live in a time and a society in which so few of my fellow humans had a note played on the tenor saxophone by Wayne Shorter caused them to weep. Yeah, well, exactly.

That's kind of what I'm talking about, right? Is that like that wonder and that awe and that like—

I mean, but I don't find those separate. I don't find those distinct. You know, the great thing about scientists like we've been talking about, and I don't profess to be one billionth of as smart as Stephen Wolfram, is if he's completely wrong he will laugh and go and say, oops, and go onto something else.

Yeah.

And there's this kind of an improvisational quality, even though there's a passion, a great deal of experience and expertise associated with it. I mean, another way of saying it is, I wrote this in an essay that ruffled some feathers, but it occurred to me once that I had the great good fortune of spending time in the company of some of the world's most important mathematicians. I know Wolfram a little bit. I spent some time with John Conway and Seymour Papert and my friend Brian Silverman. And not once did any of them ever make me feel stupid, but plenty of math teachers did. And my math teachers didn't have the sort of playful human love for the subject that they have for it. Papert used to talk a lot about, you know, quoting Einstein, who— love is a better master than duty, or Xenophon, that nothing beautiful can ever be forced. And I, and also that if you make simple things easy to do, you make complexity possible.

Yeah.

So I think, you know, fundamentally the purpose of school is to introduce children to things they don't yet know they love and to give them a sense of what greatness looks like, feels like, tastes like, so that they can aspire towards that. Yeah. And so I think the sort of— I'm fighting against the malaise and mediocrity of, I could just wait this out and there'll be a new topic on Monday, as opposed to, I can't sleep because this problem is driving me nuts.

Yeah.

And I want to get to the bottom of it. And like I mentioned at the beginning, you know, I want to live in a world where kids wake up in the middle of the night with a burning desire to get back to school to work on some project that matters to them, and where their teachers wake up and ask, how do I make this the best 7 hours of a kid's life?

Yeah.

If we're concerned about the viability, the future viability of schooling, I don't think there's any alternative to that. We have to identify why did a kid show up? How do they gain greatest benefit from being co-located in the same space at the same time? Yeah. And, and I feel badly when people are robbed of curiosity and wonder and yeah, beauty and joy. And I don't think those are, I, I, I think it's a uniquely kind of probably American, but Western anti-intellectual view of math and science as being sort of cold and inhuman. And, you know, there's probably a good reason why so many mathematicians are really gifted musicians.

We sort of miss the obvious connections that are readily available in front of us, that I think they see a similar abstract beauty and joy and satisfaction There's almost a kind of an unsaid or sometimes explicitly said assumption that you have to go through the kind of boring trudge of, you know, the basics and all these kind of horrendous mediocre terms of just, you know, in order to get to that space where you can, now you can play, now you're a master, now you can kind of be the virtuoso and blah, blah, you know.

And we're just robbing kids of all kinds of experiences. You know, there's no field trips, there's no play corner, there's no telephone in the back of the room where you pretended to make conversations. There's no newspapers being delivered. There is no music teachers. There's no drama. The books are being taken off the shelves. I mean, we're in a— there's a lot of not cool stuff happening that's causing a lot of terror among teachers. And, you know, the two things that I've been thinking a lot about lately is You know, one, we've turned primary school into some sort of community college or vocational training where, you know, every 15 minutes someone rings a bell and you move on to something else. When I studied to be a primary teacher, you had to learn how to play the piano a little bit. You had to learn how to teach math and music and science and social studies and hopefully together and develop manipulatives and design project prompts. Yeah. Now you go to the first grade literacy specialist and the second grade math expert as if those are things.

Right?

And if, and if you're a first grade literacy expert, you should be just as embarrassed as putting innovator or AI and education expert in your LinkedIn bio. Yeah, that's great. That means you read as well as a 6-year-old does it. Congratulations. And the result of this is connections aren't being made. Connections between disciplines, connections between people. People, teachers don't know their— people don't know their kids very well. And, and I'll just give you a, a whimsical example of You know, I use the example of when, when I was a kid, the telephone company would put a phone in the back of the room and you could, you know, make fake calls to your friends. I have a grandson in Shanghai. He just turned 7. He got an iPad for his 7th birthday, and out of the blue, we got a FaceTime call from him, which was quite exciting because we no longer had to, you know, schedule the weekly FaceTime chat that was like Involved multiple government agencies and then, and then very quickly descended into a bad episode of The Benny Hill Show. And, you know, now if he wanted to talk to his grandparents, he could just call us. So that's like a good thing.

Yeah.

And while he was FaceTiming us for the first time, I started texting him and he looked at this thing like, what is this magic?

You're right.

Yeah. And was just blown away by the idea that you could send a text message. Okay, cool. A few days later, I'm playing tennis. And he rings me and I hit, you know, dismiss because I'm playing tennis. And on the way home, I call him back and I find out later he picked up immediately. We had our conversation. What I didn't know was he was talking to my wife when I called and he just hung up on her and took my call. Like, Grandma dead, Grandpa good. And then you think, oh, there's some tacit implicit knowledge stuff that's missing here.

Yeah, right.

Like, hey, Grandpa's calling, can we wrap this up? Or can I— yeah, so like that, no clue. So, you know, there's plenty of stuff that kids don't know that, you know, that they should learn through spending time in the company of interesting adults that can be modeled for them.

Yeah.

But, you know, this is all about, I think, enhancing our humanity, not diminishing it. And for those, those people who are concerned that You know, we're gonna lose something. I mean, what, how much worse could things get?

Yeah. I mean, I've seen your writing about just how, about tennis actually, one of your blog posts about tennis, which I remember about basically just about how overrated the instruction is. But it's like if everything's being instructionized, you know, and we're trying to now take, keep up with the technology and just turn that into a whole new set of instructions. Yeah. It's just taking all the meaning and soul out of everything, right?

Right. I mean, you know, if you're okay with curriculum and external assessment, then you have no right to criticize generative AI because you've already standardized human development. Exactly. The things that bring me the most joy and beauty and passion and purpose in my life are the very same things that I was exposed to in a public middle school in the mid-1970s. Which was, you know, rich musical experiences, and I learned to program computers for the first time. And my educational experience was largely horrific. It's not clear that anyone's is much better than that, but there were always— there was always a reason to show up, and it was probably not the stuff that's particularly valued by school. And there were always teachers that I had a collegial relationship with, even when I was a very little kid.

Do you think that's— I mean, are they just timeless truths that it will— it was ever thus and it will always be ever thus, wherever technology comes comes and goes. But fundamentally, those things will, you know, there's a lot you have to just, just deal with about your educational experience through school. And so, you know, suck it up, take out the good bits, find the meaning, find the passion, find the beauty where you can, you know. Is that—

yeah, yes. But those of us who know better need to do better. And if we won't stand between the kids and the madness, who will? Yeah, I'm alarmed by the growing trend of some kid testifying before a school board or a state legislature saying, "Stop banning books, stop dunking on gay kids, stop denying us of a fair and inclusive portrayal of history." Then thousands of teachers share this TikTok clip about this heroic student speaking up for what's right. Where are the adults? Yeah, where are the adults? Why are we using the kids as a human shield for this? We need to speak up on their behalf. That's our responsibility. You know, in the case of education, we're the ones who are licensed to make decisions based on the welfare of children. We have some obligation to, to use our voices to, to do the right thing, you know. And, and a lot of it's just easy. Just smile at a kid, just be nice to them, ask them how their day was, sit and have lunch with them. Yeah, there's, you know, I, I got invited to a colleague's kid's bar mitzvah. I don't even know the person that well, and the bar mitzvah was delayed a couple years because of the pandemic. And it was, it was uniquely Los Angeles experience. The bar mitzvah was in a Mexican restaurant, and it started with the kid playing a drum solo. And I thought, that's a little precious, but are you interested in this? And he said yes. So I started taking him to concerts with me. And if you ask his parents, that act alone has changed everything in this kid's trajectory. In his countenance, in his behavior, in his interests, in his, you know, energy level and his passion. It's not that hard.

Yeah. No, but there's a fundamentally human noticing, right? A relational noticing between human beings that as a teacher there, or as an adult, or as a mentor, wherever that relationship is, you can notice something about a child. You can see where their spark is. You can see where they show some interest. And then you, if you can, provide a pathway for that. You've provided some kind of opportunity to for that to be nourished a little bit, and then again and again.

Well, maybe. I mean, the kid might have— the kid might have not liked jazz at all, and then okay, that's fine, and I wouldn't— I'd stop taking him to stuff. But I've never thought about it in, in these terms before. But the reason why I do it is because I love the music so much that I want it to endure. I want to share it with others. I want it to live on. I want future generation to support it. And I don't think that's different from how someone like Stephen Wolfram feels about mathematics.

Yeah, sure. No, absolutely. There's passion and meaning. Yeah. But I don't know, a question, is it indiscriminate for who you would take along or is there a kind of what you're finding a connection with the person? Because I mean, you could take anyone, right? You could take anyone with you to the jazz concert, Is there a reciprocal thing going on where you're noticing that that child is lighting up because of the, you know, like you say, they might hate it.

Well, if you said, if I say to a teenager, you want to go see a jazz concert? Most of them will say, get stuffed. I'm going to wash my hair. So, but you know, what's the conversation like afterwards? And did I want to go to another one? And there's enough adults with enough different interests that if every one of them shared their interests with with a young person who probably would. Now the question is, and this could get me into trouble, like I said before, I think the best thing we could do for kids is to create opportunities for them to spend as much time as possible in the company of interesting adults. The question then becomes, are teachers interesting? Yeah.

And are they given, or maybe, or are they given the space to be interesting? Right? Because you could, I mean, you know, it depends on your definition of interesting, but a lot of people, are very interesting in all sorts of diverse ways, but that, that interestingness is not allowed to show up in the professional environment of this kind of bureaucratized education system.

Yes. And I'm more skeptical about the percentages.

Yeah. Maybe some people are just not that interesting.

I mean, that doesn't mean they couldn't be more interesting, but I mean, is this, this is, you know, there's this chicken egg problem of There is, and they're the outputs of an education system too. You know, everyone, right? And everyone knows of the teacher whose light's on in the classroom till 11:00 PM cutting out letters for the bulletin board. Those folks might be better teachers if they had a hobby, if they went home when the bell rang. And that's sometimes some of the advice that I give when I'm working with teachers or, you know, my next door neighbors are both teachers in the local school district and my, my son had the husband for Year 12 physics. And two interesting things. One is, there was never a single instance where my children beat the teachers home from school. Never in, you know, 20 years of watching my kids go to schools in the district. The next-door neighbors got home way before my kids ever did. Second, when my son had the, the gentleman for physics, I came home from a trip once and my partner said, has Leon told you about the field trips to the car park, to the parking lot? I said, okay, I gotta hear this one. I call Leon in, goes, oh yeah, when we have Mr. M last period of the day, 10 minutes before the bell rings, he says, everyone grab your coats and books and we're going for a walk. And as we hit the faculty parking lot, the bell rings, he gets in his car and drives off. And, and yeah, right, it's hilarious. Except then when you talk to him about his teaching methodology, he made a deal with the kids. I don't take anything home. You don't take anything home. If you do your work in class, you're done. And he was by far not their worst teacher.

Sure. But as you said, you've got to have that thing that lights you up, right? And if you make space in your life for those things that light you up, you're going to be a more interesting and more kind of connected person with the people you're around. Right.

There's even something to be said for inventing the field trip to the parking lot.

That's serious creativity. Yeah.

That's the— if I had a teacher who said something like that, that he's my best friend immediately. I, you know, game admires game.

Love it.

Exactly.

Yeah.

That wasn't someone just sort of sleepwalking through their life.

Yeah.

You know, so I think, you know, you know, being present, you know, if we talk about the future of education, there's probably much more likely structural changes. Like, you probably won't be spending 7 hours a day, 5 days a week in the place. There's, you know, all that kind of stuff. You know, there's plenty of evidence that people aren't going back to the office, or they're not going back to the office full-time. And it only goes to reason that if you don't have to get up before dawn to commute somewhere, it won't be long before you're tired of, you know, waking your kid up and dragging them somewhere.

Yeah, right. No, absolutely. But, but I think, I mean, what I'm taking from what you're saying is this, there's a kind of fundamental human interrelationship between interesting and kind of provoking, engaged, alive human beings to inspire, you know, the other people around them. And that the need for that is not gonna go away. Whatever technology is around, that's, that's the glue that holds it all together.

No, no, no. School has to be, you know, I used to say the only reason I sent my kids to school was band. It was the only thing we didn't have at home. If you're really concerned about the future of education, you should be doubling, tripling, quadrupling down on the kinds and qualities of experiences that the kids couldn't have through a screen.

Yeah, exactly.

I mean, it's, it's, it's disingenuous to be blaming screens for our problems. You know, I, I have a slide with the Lorax on it that says, I speak for the screens, for the screens have no tongues. Lots of what we did during the pandemic was so atrocious from an educational perspective that we dug ourselves a hole that we're now blaming the screens for. The screens were kind of innocent bystanders. And us policing whether kids were wearing uniforms in their bedrooms or Bitmoji classrooms or asking 6-year-olds to be on Zoom for 5 hours at a time, or, you know, or hybrid instruction. We could, you know, we had one group of kids who was going to school and one kid— group of kids that were remote. Exactly. A rational system would've said, Hey, you know what, Tim, you do the remote kids. Gary, you do the kids who are showing up. And then everything would have been fine. But instead we put an iPad in the back of the room to watch.

I know.

So, so we did, we did all this atrocious stuff and we can, we don't, we don't have to ascribe blame for it. It's just a fact. You know, I know how to teach online in a constructivist fashion. I'm really good at it. What I saw wasn't that. It was at the beginning, actually, in some ways where people were just trying to take care of one another. But then after they had time to plan, they kind of came back with, with really terrible medieval, you know, ideas for how to teach. So now, now we're talking about, you know, teen depression and we're blaming screens. Now there, there may be some correlation, but I, I think it could be remedied by having other kind of joyous activities that are available. And no one, no one wants to seem to make that leap. Mm-hmm. You know, even the, even the fact that, You know, I only heard one discussion about education in the media during the entire pandemic that made any sense to me. Chris Hayes of MSNBC and Michelle Goodwin of the New York Times were talking about if, if school has three primary functions of childcare, socialization, and academic instruction, we could have done two of the three safely throughout the entire pandemic. And we chose the one that we couldn't do. You know, I live in Los Angeles and in fact most of the world, it wouldn't have been an issue if you had dropped kids off at school and had them play outside all day for 3 years. The results probably would've been a lot better than what Zoom school was.

Exactly. I know. I so appreciate talking to you, Gary. Thank you so much. And it, I mean, it just, what I'm hearing again is like now this focus on AI and generative AI and ChatGPT is none of that's gonna bring the joy and the purpose and the meaning and the tinkering back into education. The only thing that can do that fundamentally is engaged human beings, right?

And democracy and, and not being gullible. And that requires different kinds of experiences and access to expertise and materials that are frankly, you know, in my part of the world under threat. We're banning books.

Yeah, right. Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, thank you.

This is my pleasure.

Amazing.

All the best.

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