Seymour Papert and Alan Kay, two foundational giants in the world of personal computer interface design in the ‘70s and ‘80s, appeared before the American congress in 1995. Specifically, they were witnesses testifying to the House Committee on ‘Technology in Education.’

They are both huge critics of the way computer education had been rolled out in schools. As an elementary school student in the ‘90s, and a product of the system they’re critiquing, I find this entire chapter in the story of microcomputers extremely enlightening for reasons of personal understanding. Kay says that dropping a Mac (let’s say) in every classroom is like dropping a piano in every classroom. Imagine that. Every classroom in the school gets their own piano, and then every teacher—none of whom, we can assume, are musicians—are given two-week long “piano” classes in September. And then those teachers are supposed to teach music to thirty kids on top of the already-existing curriculum.

Their testimony did offer solutions, however. About an hour and ten minutes into their testimony, Seymour Papert solicits absolute disbelief with a proposal that schools might save money on computer maintenance by having the children, themselves, repair the computers. He is, of course, completely correct when it comes to pedagogy (Papert was a Piagetian psychologist, and had studied kids with computers for two decades by that point). That’s how I learned computers. At the same time, no school could ever implement something so anarchic without changing absolutely everything else about itself—which is what Kay and Papert are demanding here.

My Proposal

If I were magically put in charge of how computers were used in the classroom, here’s how I’d go about it. The students would all get nondescript tablets with high-resolution e-Ink displays, convertible into a laptop with a removable keyboard-case. These machines would, naturally, come installed with some popular Linux distro. The first month of computer class, when they’re not just using the Word processor to type stuff up, would entail learning how to install packages and customize and change everything.

The lesson would be to take control of the system, and change it, and see what happens. Some guiding principles would be in order: don’t let it get out of control and beyond your sense to understand. But if it does, you can always just back up the important files, erase it, and start over.

If and when they start over, they can go back to the same linux distro they started with, or try something new. The only requirement is that they be able to complete all their homework with their machine.

Some kids will be too intimidated to do much at all, and would just use their machines as is. Some kids would go crazy and be constantly needing to start over again and again. Those kids will either learn the innards of their machine very well, or just give up in exasperation and become like the first group.

The differences between MySpace and Facebook, or between Geocities and WordPress Blogs, will illustrate line between chaos and order I’d be trying to guide the students between. MySpace and Geocities, in their regular usage as learned, entailed copying and pasting and editing tons of HTML and CSS files by hand. This resulted in many very strange and ugly and wonderful web designs. It was easy to completely mess it up beyond belief. Facebook and WordPress, in their mandatory/default “simple” usage, all look the same. You really have to be a specialist to make WordPress unique or ugly (although you can be as bland as you’d like!), and Facebook profiles all look the same to everyone.

Hell, even the Windows 98 Plus! desktop themes, (you remember: the space station, Sherlock Holmes, Leonardo da Vinci, Baseball, etc.) were zany and weird, with custom fonts. Now every Windows desktop is identical, with a different colour hue. It’s almost like Microsoft’s Marketing department didn’t want users’ demonstrating their software in the world-wide-showroom of daily use as being butt-ugly.

What would happen when a Windows 98 computer got bogged down by Internet Explorer toolbars and random malware and a broken Active Desktop? When the wallpaper was literally a web page error message? You wouldn’t bother fixing it; you’d just reformat and reinstall windows.

Okay—you want to actually learn what computers are made of? You break them, a lot. And then you try to fix them. And, sometimes, it gets so bad that you reformat and reinstall the operating system. And you try new systems while you’re at it. You go from Ubuntu to Manjaro to Debian to Arch to Gentoo and maybe back again. Maybe you try FreeBSD. Or you go a week with Haiku. And then you slowly realize just how large the landscape software is, and just how programmable these suckers are. They’re infinitely programmable.

You begin to develop your own system, your own set-up, that transcends any particular operating system. The way you like things set up becomes a habit, and each fresh install, after borking the last one, those things get set up the same way.

The way things work right now is that the phones are so locked down you can’t break them. And, well, you wouldn’t want to. If your phone gets compromised, your entire private life is up for grabs! Your banking account and your social media and your email—the stakes are way too high. But, then, now you’re stuck in a cyberspace you don’t control, and thus your phone and computer are not yours.

Your school machine, then, represents your sandbox of learning the real device. And it would provide the sense of potential: a world of controllable machines. Some kids would opt to just use their tablet for all the commercial stuff they’d do on their phones anyway. But they’d be cultured in a classroom where that wasn’t ubiquitous. They’d be exposed to the nature of the computing devices second-hand. That’s better than nothing.

The Lesson of Patience

Quick and easy recovery from some restore partitions which “roll back” changes automatically are not what I’m describing. At least a modern Windows install sometimes requires tracking down weird SATA-controller drivers to get the install-partition set up properly! The parts of the machine—which are different in every instance, but which inherit the same properties from decades of normalization and abstraction—need to be reckoned with, felt out, made part of the embodied experience with the machine. Every computer has a storage partition for the OS and for user documents. Every computer has a particular processor architecture requiring software built for it. They all have package managers which help to pull in dependancies.

These are the base units, the originals, from which all of our high-level computer programming analogizes. Web developers, using JavaScript, treat the browser as a processor, and pull in JavaScript libraries from web-based package managers like NPM to develop website and Electron apps. They’re programming a fake computer built high, high above a real computer that they’re not programming. That, it seems, is what it means to “code” nowadays. It’s not to hack, it’s not to program, it’s not to maintain. And when something breaks, you copy and paste the error into Google.

You can tear down the program you wrote and start over. You can’t tear down the programs someone else wrote and start over. You can’t tear down the code behind every OS, even if it weren’t locked up in Redmond or Cupertino. The human feels helpless infront of such complexity.But if you have the patience and the practice from first-principles of tearing down your own computer and starting over, then there are dimensions to the machine that do not seem to be bottomless. The box in your hand, when you’re installing and setting up your operating system, becomes an assemblage of components. And when you learn those components,—what your physical machine is physically made of—you gain some steady ground to carry around beneath you, and walk upon, wherever you travels online or offline take you in our computer-laden world.

Having recourse, if necessary, to patiently tear down your physical, personal computer to the bottom, and build it back up again, is part of owning and caring for your computer. And being able to rely on yourself to do that means you can always rely on your computer to the extent your certain you’re in control.

And isn’t that sense of sure footing exactly what school ought to be providing people?

Twenty Seven Years Later

Looking over my old notes from when I watched this CSPAN video of Kay and Papert a few years ago, I see a bit of outrage near the end. The two were prescribing some humility to teachers, who might stand back and consider themselves co-learners with the students regarding computers. Around an hour and 37 minute in, they tell some anecdote about an adolescent young man who started his own computer business, and how praiseworthy he is. “He should be here right now!” My notes from the timecode read as follows

UGH FUCK THIS. This is what I hate. I grew up with it. It’s just nomral. It’d be like adults fawning over Danny from Grease, “oh! you know how to fix cars! wow! you’re so smart!” Like, fuck no. Stop covering up your own ignorance by holding people who understand shit you don’t on some amazing, unreachable pedastal and cnofering power and wisdom onto them. Imposter syndrome!

“some amazing level,” I believe it should read. There is, I now think, some problems with this reaction beyond the hasty typing. As a kid, I’d loved to have had some kind of teacher who knew the stuff I didn’t know about computers, who would be able to give me some perspective on where I was at. All I had was praise for being able to do very, very simple and obvious (to me) things. The culture of praising kids for knowing how to do fundamental computer-stuff is absolute poison, in my experience. I avoided it by avoiding nearly all socialization regarding anything to do with computers. The misplaced hopes derived from overvaluations of the technical competencies of children in the ’90s and ’00s by tech-illiterate adults lay, unacknowledged, beneath an overwhelming breadth of social problems today.

Are we in a better spot today? When computer professionals who can’t or won’t fix their own computer are being rewarded for  their “talents” with jobs and degrees and authority to discuss “technology” today, where in society comes the measure? I claim many of the tech experts I see consulted by media are absolute imposters. If you can’t talk shop about physical computers, how can can you claim any authority about everything abstract and ephemeral built atop those physical computers? You could only be describing those things as they appear to be. The way “algorithms” and “AI” are discsesed today sound like film analysis by people pretending not to know that the characters are really actors, or that the special effects aren’t really happening on the soundstage.  That’s how we communicate consumer-grade technology today: to people who can never be assumed to know that it’s all fake.

If the education system exists to sell out children to the machinations of commercial computer software, they’re doing it very effectively. Twenty-seven years ago, Kay and Papert recognized that there were no expertise whatever in the school faculty into-which computers were being rolled out, and so had to prescribe the humility and uncertainty I detested above. But now we’ve an entire generation grown up since then, and surely the time of children-leading-the-teachers in technology usage has come to an end, right?

So, based on what we’ve learned from that great experiment how are adults going to begin teaching the kids?