NETFUTURE

                    Technology and Human Responsibility

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Issue #113     A Publication of The Nature Institute      October 31, 2000
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          Editor:  Stephen L. Talbott (stevet@netfuture.org)

                  On the Web: http://www.netfuture.org/
     You may redistribute this newsletter for noncommercial purposes.

NetFuture is a reader-supported publication.


CONTENTS
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Quotes and Provocations
   Do We Really Want Higher Test Scores?
   Over-justified Toys
   Asian Rice: A "Stunning" Result
   Is Growing Pessimism about the Internet a Cause for Optimism?

About this newsletter


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                         QUOTES AND PROVOCATIONS


Do We Really Want Higher Test Scores?
-------------------------------------

In NF #107 I mentioned a home-schooled boy who resisted all pressures to
read until he was ten years old, and then began to read voraciously on his
own (a common story except where early attempts to force reading set up a
resistance that the child never overcomes).  I commented:

   The idea that earlier is better is one of the strangest notions ever to
   seize hold of parents.  Why not assume that later is better?  Certainly
   it can be easier, with much less stress and alienation on the child's
   part.  Children all have their own rates of development, and it is
   impossible to comprehend all the suffering that results from forcibly
   subjecting them to the standardized schemas of school and labeling them
   accordingly.

This continues to eat away at me.  The whole idea that an accelerated
education is a better education seems little more than a disgusting
reflection of parents' competitiveness.  (This competitiveness, of course,
is encouraged by schools.)

Impatient parents should stop and think a minute about one of the things
distinguishing the human being from animals:  remarkably delayed maturity.
Our highest capabilities evidently have a lot to do with the fact that we
are held back in our development.  Even as adults we can experience
that the inspiration too quickly seized upon, too quickly straitjacketed
within definite form, loses its inner life prematurely.  Its potentials
grow best when it is nurtured for a time in a protected place, slept on,
shaped by all the diverse powers of our organism, given an imaginative
space for transformation.  In our life as a whole, this imaginative space
is called childhood.

The computer is a superb tool for forcing certain kinds of development.
It is wonderfully effective at coercing the fluid imagination into
arbitrary, crystallized forms.  It easily replaces inner activity with
impressively articulated skeletons of algorithmic logic.  It can elicit
from children feats of abstraction worthy of a rocket scientist,
delighting parents who remain unaware that they are witnessing a damping
of creative powers.  Creativity, after all, is the life that overcomes
abstraction; it gives us new images of wholeness worth abstracting from.

Our death-like, context-destroying powers of abstraction are among our
highest, and therefore most dangerous, powers, which is reason enough for
them to come late.  When our more vital, organic, imaginative, and child-
like capacities are not first cultivated to the fullest, then we lose the
means to revivify our abstractions.  Working with these abstractions
becomes like eating sawdust -- a pretty good description for much of the
scientific curriculum today.

Evidence that computer-based learning improves test scores has been hard
to come by.  Even harder for many people, I'm afraid, will be the
realization that higher test scores may just as well signal an educational
failure as a success.  We do not, after all, hope for the birth of a
75-pound baby.  It is equally perverse to push for an adult-like intellect
in a child.


Over-justified Toys
-------------------

You're doubtless aware of the technologization of children's toys.  In
three years the use of electronics in toys has increased from less than
ten percent to more than sixty percent, according to the president of
Mattel's Fisher-Price unit.  Technology, he says, can deliver "all the
things we want for the child and what the child wants for fun and
enjoyment".

In a story last February 17 entitled "The Road to Toyland Is Paved with
Chips: Technology Takes Over the Nursery", the New York Times cited
some of the reasons why high-tech infant and pre-school toys are proving
such a commercial success.  Unsurprisingly, much of it has to do with
parents' desire to help their children "get ahead" and become little
adults.  (See previous article.)

A spokeswoman for the Toy Manufacturers of America, Terri Bartlett,
summarizes the matter with wonderful unconcern:

   "[Children] respond faster, and their senses are heightened, because in
   society everything is coming at them faster."  She added:  "We're all
   into doing more things.  The times they are spending on various types
   of toys is being shortened.  It's like they are multitasking with their
   toys."

It doesn't seem to have occurred to Bartlett that just possibly we ought
to protect the child from some of society's more extreme trends, rather
than view those trends as nothing more than a commercial opportunity.

The Times article mentions a toy called the Babbler whose parts a
baby can strike, making things happen -- the parts light up and babble in
Japanese, French, English and Spanish.  In case you've missed the adult
point, a toy store owner clarifies:  "It's a wonderful cause-and-effect
toy".  Get it? -- strike X and something happens.  That's cause and
effect, which sounds marvelously scientific.

Then there's the Intelli-Table developed by Microsoft and Fisher-Price.
It "promises to teach children who press its buttons about colors,
letters, numbers and musical concepts -- the last with animal sounds, like
the baaing of sheep, set to snippets of a Mozart sonata".

It's hard to comment on patent nonsense; where do you find a toe-hold for
rational response?  People who are obviously failing to see the child are
not likely to see the point of any defense of the child.

Nevertheless, I will venture to note that there's not much a child can do
-- whether it is stubbing a toe or lifting an arm -- that does not teach
whatever needs teaching about cause and effect.  After all, there's no
shortage of things that "happen", even in the most toy-deprived child's
life.  Recognition of cause and effect is ultimately grounded in the
experience of mastery over our own bodies and limbs; simple toys for which
the child must create the uses -- blocks, sticks, leaves, stones --
are as useful for this purpose as anything else.  And they are much
healthier for the child.

The real fact of the matter is as obvious as can be:  the Babbler serves
primarily to conceal cause and effect, substituting something
altogether arbitrary and rather more like magic.  Why in the world should
touching one particular part of this device result in a sudden outburst of
babbled Japanese?  The "causal mechanism", not to mention the sense of it
all, is completely hidden from the child.

Much the same goes for those Microsoft-inspired buttons that teach
children about "colors, letters, numbers and musical concepts".  The
toddler does not need musical concepts; he needs musicality in his
life -- and not arbitrary snippets of sheepish and Mozartean sounds, but
music that arises coherently out of the encircling human context.  And if
you still want cause and effect, let the music express the current mood
and goings-on between child and parent, not the inane selections of an
engineer in a remote cubicle.

In general, we should see a red flag whenever adults set out to "teach"
infants and very young children.  About all we can realistically hope for
is to learn from all the amazing things children accomplish during these
years, most of which have eluded our most sophisticated efforts at
understanding.  The child learns to speak, not because we "teach" him, but
because we enter into and share his world in the most intimate way.  Our
lives together become a speaking, and this alone is what enables the child
to speak.  We could usefully take this as the model for all learning.

Related articles:

** "When Childhood Should Rule" in NF #80.

** "Dangerous Baby Walkers, Dangerous Software" in NF #96.

** "Toddlers as Geometricians" in NF #80.

** "The Most Powerful Tools Are Unbearably Simple" in NF #80.



Asian Rice: A "Stunning" Result
-------------------------------

In a massive Chinese experiment, a major rice disease was reduced by
ninety-four percent.  How? -- by using the latest pesticides and
genetically modified crops?  No, but by rejecting the principle of
monoculture and returning to more natural contexts.  As the New York
Times reported:

   In a stunning new result from what has become one of the largest
   agricultural experiments ever, thousands of rice farmers in China have
   doubled the yields of their most valuable crop and nearly eliminated
   its most devastating disease -- without using chemical treatments or
   spending a single extra penny.

   Under the direction of an international team of scientists, farmers in
   China's Yunnan Province adopted a simple change in their rice paddies.
   Instead of planting the large stands of a single type of rice, as they
   typically have done, the farmers planted a mixture of two different
   rices.  With this one change, growers were able to radically restrict
   the incidence of rice blast -- the most important disease of this most
   important staple in the world.  Within just two years, farmers were
   able to abandon the chemical fungicides previously widely used to fight
   the disease.  (August 22, 2000)

The experiment, covering 100,000 acres and involving tens of thousands of
farmers, was reported in the August 17 issue of Nature.  A commentator
in that journal, Martin S. Wolfe, notes that "monoculture is convenient;
it is easier to plant, harvest, market and identify one variety of crop
than several".  This, of course, is the fragmented, blindered sort of
agricultural efficiency that technology so readily propels us toward -- an
efficiency that has forgotten its own larger purpose, which is to promote
healthy contexts for living.

Wolfe points out some of biodiversity's benefits, as highlighted by the
work in China:

** A more disease-resistant crop, interplanted with a less resistant crop,
can act as a physical barrier to the spread of disease spores.

** "An increase in the complexity of the pathogen population may also slow
the adaptation of the pathogen" to the crop mixture due to competition
among the pathogens.

** Of the two varieties of rice used in the Chinese experiment, the taller
variety was the one more susceptible to blast.  But, when planted in
alternating rows with the shorter variety, the taller rice enjoyed
sunnier, warmer, and drier conditions, which appeared to inhibit the
fungus.

** The rice experiment yielded a clear "yes" to the question whether
expanding the area of mixed plantings multiplies the benefits.  (This, by
the way, emphasizes how remarkable it is that organic farming has
performed so well in the few studies of its economic viability relative to
conventional farming.  A one-hundred-acre organic farm surrounded by
thousands of acres of monoculture must cope with the resulting imbalances
in the larger landscape -- imbalances likely to inundate the organic crops
with single disease agents or insect pests.  That is, the organic farmer
not only has to pay his own way, but also has to pay for his neighbor's
sins.  As more farms are converted to organic methods, the performance
should get even better.)

** A kind of immunization occurs when crops are exposed to a diversity of
pathogens (disease organisms).  Upon being attacked by a less virulent
pathogen, a plant's immune system is stimulated, so that it can then
resist even a pathogen that it would "normally" (that is, in a
monoculture) succumb to.

This last point reminds us that our notions of disease susceptibility
ought to be kept flexible.  Susceptibility is not a fixed trait of a crop
variety, but rather is relative to the conditions of cropping.  Many
existing susceptibilities are, to one degree or another, artifacts of the
crop's extreme isolation from anything like a natural or supportive
context.  This context includes not only other plants, but also the
complex, teeming life of the soil -- life that is badly compromised by
"efficient" applications of fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides.

(Our society ought to declare war on the term "efficiency", which
almost without exception signals a blindness to larger, contextual
concerns.  In fact, when you look closely, you see that this blindness is
just about the whole point of the term.)

If mixing varieties of a single crop proves beneficial, so also, Wolfe
notes, does mixing different crops.  This kind of diversity encourages a
matching diversity of diet, and it militates against the dominant trend
toward increasingly "pure" monocultures -- first single crops, then single
varieties, and now single, genetically engineered traits.  Wolfe suggests
that "even organic farmers underuse diversity, as they also have been
indoctrinated in the simplicity of and seduced by the universality of
monocultures".

You know that the backlash against the arrogance of the genetic engineers
of food has reached serious proportions when Nature -- probably the
world's most prestigious scientific journal -- gives play to these words:

   Mixtures of species [such as corn and beans, or grains and legumes]
   .... can provide near-complete nutrition for animals and humans alike,
   without recourse to expensive and uncertain forays into genetic
   engineering.  (Wolfe)

This, you will remember, was exactly the point of "Golden Genes and World
Hunger" in NetFuture #108.

Related articles:

** "Golden Genes and World Hunger" in NF #108.

** "When Technology Is Smoke and Confusion" in NF #83.

** "Finding Wholeness in a Pile of Manure" in NF #79.



Is Growing Pessimism about the Internet a Cause for Optimism?
-------------------------------------------------------------

Have you noticed the minor epidemic of disillusion that has been on public
display lately?  I mean, in particular, disillusion about the Internet and
the promise of digital technologies.  At the very least you could say that
it has become much more respectable to question technological "solutions"
in popular media.

For example, the Alliance for Childhood's September release of its report,
Fool's Gold: A Critical Look at Computers in Childhood (see NF #111)
provoked a massive response far beyond the Alliance's most ambitious
hopes.  From the New York Times to the San Francisco Examiner, from
U.S. News & World Report to Newsweek, from MSNBC to CNN, from Education
Week to eSchool News -- and in extensive international coverage as
well -- the reportage was largely respectful of the Alliance's concerns.
As an Op-ed piece by Joanne Jacobs in the Montreal Gazette put it:

   Perhaps the techno-pushers can argue persuasively that putting more
   computers in classrooms is the most cost-effective use of school funds.
   OK.  But they should have to make their case.

The recognition that a case needs to be made is a great advance over the
previous state of affairs!

On a different front, Bill Joy's article in Wired earlier this year
also helped to legitimize technology criticism, while igniting a firestorm
of debate about the dangers of biotechnology, artificial intelligence, and
nanotechnology.  A few other developments:

** The third Internet and Society Conference at Harvard University
produced a lot of news coverage like this:

   "There's almost a backlash right now, sort of an enormous hangover and
   a retreat from the kind of giddy euphoria" that dominated the early and
   mid-1990s view of the Net's possibilities, Lotus Development Corp.
   founder Mitch Kapor said in a speech he dubbed "the confessions of a
   recovering technological utopian."

   A decade ago, in the years after he discovered an early e-mail
   community in the San Francisco Bay area, "I made a number of speeches
   in which I said the Internet was going to make everything better.  As
   we know, that didn't exactly happen."  (Boston Globe Online,
   June 1, 2000)

** The same news story contained this:

   Pattie Maes, an associate professor in the Media Lab at the
   Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said she once believed the Net
   would usher in four world-changing trends:  leveling the playing field
   for small businesses to compete against the large, bringing "power to
   the people," offering highly personalized information, and serving as
   the "collective mind" of curious humans everywhere.

   "I can't exactly say that all these visions have become reality," Maes
   said.  "Maybe they are becoming delusions."

** An Economist editorial (Aug. 19-25, 2000) cited Nicholas
Negroponte's claim that children of the future "are not going to know what
nationalism is", and Michael Dertouzos' claim that digital communications
will bring "computer-aided peace" which "may help stave off future flare-
ups of ethnic hatred and national break-ups".  After noting similar claims
about radio, the editorial went on:

   Sadly, Rwanda's Radio Mille Collines disproved the idea that radio was
   an intrinsically pacific force once and for all.  The mistake people
   make is to assume that wars are caused simply by the failure of
   different peoples to understand each other adequately.  Indeed, even if
   that were true, the Internet can also be used to advocate conflict.
   Hate speech and intolerance flourish in its murkier corners, where
   governments (as France is now discovering) find it hard to intervene.

The editors also dispute the notion that the Internet will reduce energy
consumption and foster equality.  It concludes:  "Despite the claims of
the techno-prophets, humanity cannot simply invent away its failings.  The
Internet is not the first technology to have been hailed as a panacea --
and it will certainly not be the last".

** Bob Davis of the Wall Street Journal wrote a story entitled "The
Internet in Schools: A Crusade Backed by Scant Data or Results":

   But from the political rhetoric, one might suppose that Internet access
   would be a transforming experience in schools once limited to pen-and-
   pencil-era technology, setting their students up to do much better in
   the work force someday. So far, though, despite the huge national
   commitment to wiring the nation's schools, there isn't much hard
   evidence that either computers or the Internet actually have helped
   close gaps in scholastic achievement.  (June 19, 2000)

** Influential commentator, Walter Mossberg, says, "It's hard to think of
an industry that has a hype machine as phenomenal as the high-tech
industry. My job is to be the anti-hypester."  In a profile of Mossberg
for the Washington Post, Howard Kurtz cites Mossberg's credo:
Computers are crap and the rest of us shouldn't take it any more.

I'm not sure what comfort to take from all this.  I would be much more
optimistic if the disillusion led to widespread analysis on a slightly
deeper level, where people asked:  What is it that made us susceptible to
such false expectations -- and even now makes us repeat our mistakes with
regard to the next generation of innovations?  (There are undoubtedly
various answers to this.  On one level, I think, the proper answer has to
do with the mechanistic style of thinking that has taken such deep hold of
us, reinforced by our more or less continuous interaction with machines.)

I would also be more optimistic if it weren't for the example of
television.  Finally, after several decades of television, our culture has
reluctantly arrived at a rough consensus that "the tube" really does
poison society in various ways.  Yet this conviction seems to have little
bearing on the poisonous effects.  Politics is not less damagingly
influenced by television today than in earlier decades, and the same can
be said for recreation, sports, family interaction, education, and
children's physical health.

Cultures of pessimism and even dislike can arise without any serious
reform of the practices scorned.  Machines seem to have a wonderful
ability to paralyze our wills, or to make us feel helpless.  This is why
one other news item may provide slightly more hope:

** The Wall Street Journal ran a story entitled, "In Backlash Against the
Wired World, Silicon Valley Fringe Pulls Plug at Home".  It dealt with
various high-tech executives and employees who have attempted to simplify
their personal lives -- all the way down to the electricity-less living of
the CEO of Respond.com.  According to Carol Holst, program director of
the nonprofit Seeds of Simplicity, "a large number of high-achievers are
sick of the rat race".  Half the four hundred attendees at a February
simplicity conference in Silicon Valley were dot-com executives.  The
Journal reports that,

   To distance themselves from the tech blitz, these part-time unwired
   ones are devising elaborate escape schemes.  Alay Desai, the 30-year-
   old chief technology officer of a Santa Clara, Calif., start-up called
   Stario.com (www.stario.com), doesn't have a computer or phone in his
   spartan apartment.  The only objects are a small TV set and a sleeping
   bag.  He refuses to buy a Palm organizer or a pager.  Mr. Desai's one
   concession is a cell phone, which he acquired, he says, when "my
   business partners couldn't get hold of me, so one of them went out and
   bought me one."  His colleagues say they still can't reach him because
   he turns the phone off at home or just doesn't answer.

Now, if all those executives can just bring themselves to carry their new
ideals into the workplace .... Then the real revolution will begin.

(Thanks to Michael Corriveau, Aaron Renn, and Fred Tompkins.)

SLT

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                          ABOUT THIS NEWSLETTER

Copyright 2000 by The Nature Institute.  You may redistribute this
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Steve Talbott :: NetFuture #113 :: October 31, 2000

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