Pippy and Calculate - Evolution Solution

[Ivan Krstić]

On Sep 7, 2007, at 5:14 PM, Albert Cahalan wrote:
> Dear my. I'm all in favor of supporting the bright kids, but that
> suggestion sounds like grade 12 honors at minimum.

Based on what? Preconceived notions of kids' capabilities as funneled  
through modern assembly-line education systems?

You've got to stop thinking this way.

There were virtually no widespread public systems of education until  
the industrial revolution. Once they came about, they came about with  
a purpose: creating skilled industrial workers. Creativity and  
pushing the limits of individual ability were very much not on the  
agenda, and in a sense, they couldn't be: learning was a strictly  
unidirectional process, teacher conveying knowledge to pupils, and  
with only a limited amount of time to do so each day. If you were  
more capable than you were expected to be in this kind of system, you  
were out of luck. Harnessing your creativity and intelligence wasn't  
economically useful, and thus couldn't be used to justify extraneous  
financial expenditure by the system to provide you with additional  
learning. The scarcity of access to information that one could use to  
learn on one's own made sure that, short of this additional time with  
a teacher that you couldn't get, you had very few options to try and  
work around the status quo.

That's broken. The reason the XO has the potential to change the  
equation in unimaginable ways is because it decouples teaching and  
learning, thus fundamentally eroding this brokenness. Suddenly, you  
can have your cake and eat it too -- if your *teaching* system is  
great, the XO can happily take the passenger seat and become an  
invaluable sidekick to the teacher running the show. But hey, if you  
don't have a teacher AND you're interested, or you simply want to  
learn more than you're taught, you're no longer out of luck. You get  
to learn as much as you want, and in whichever way you want --  
without having to adhere to someone else's idea of what your  
capabilities are.

I'm here today doing what I'm doing because I was allowed to install  
Linux when I was 9. It took me two weeks to get a working machine. By  
10, I wrote my first (horrible, never submitted, but entirely  
working) kernel patch to support a SCSI drive that wasn't working  
properly. Those 100 lines took three months to write. If someone said  
"what? Linux and a compiler? You don't get to play with that until  
you're grade 12 honors at a minimum," I wouldn't be where I am. It's  
that simple.

So, about the original suggestion about making the code behind the  
math operations viewable, I think it's a fantastic one. It leverages  
the onion model -- expose simplicity by default, but make complexity  
easily available for those who care. Don't limit those who want more,  
but don't force anything on those who don't. If that's how most  
software was built, our industry would be in far, far better shape  
than it is.

--
Ivan Krstić <krstic at solarsail.hcs.harvard.edu> | http://radian.org