Chapter II
Cognitive Development
This chapter will discuss the cognitive development according to the theories of Seymour Papert and Jean Piagets. The way these known individuals believed in the existence of human development particularly on the context of cognitive development and the way they differ in thoughts and assumptions. This will also state their contributions and inventions that distribute knowledge on human existence.
Seymour Papert’s believed that within four years a pencil and a pad of paper will be placed in every single classroom of the country so that every child, rich or poor, will have access to the new knowledge technology. He cited the Foobarian country as an example which according to him is a country that has managed to develop a highly sophisticated culture of poetry, philosophy and science using entirely oral means of expression. It occurs to imaginative educators that the new technology of pencils, paper and printing could have a beneficial effect on the schools of the country. Many suggestions are made. The most radical is to provide all teachers and children with pencils, paper and books and suspend regular classes for six months while everyone learns the new art of reading and writing. Meantime the educational psychologists stand by to measure the impact of pencils on learning.
Papert first used this parable in the early days of computers to warn against basing negative conclusions about computers on observations about what happens when computers are used in a manner analogous to that pencil experiment. At that time he ended the story with something like “And not surprisingly, the Foobarians concluded that pencils do not contribute to better learning.” Subsequent events have indeed shown him fears to be well-founded: Conclusions of a Foobarian kind have in fact slipped into the accepted wisdom of American educators. For example, educational experiments in which children’s access to computers and to computer culture was far short of what mould be needed to learn programming have been accepted as proof that programming computers is not an educationally valuable experience for children.
He believed that the use of computers is merely the agent of change in the classrooms. ( Papert, 1997). For him, it is not surprising that people rooted in schools’ concept of how learning should take place resist such restructuring. He said that what is surprising is the logical distortion they resort to in order to persuade themselves that there are powerful objective reasons that make the transformation impossible. He conclude by showing how three of the fallacies encountered in attempting to argue with them are manufactured by schools themselves. First, This kind of work is computer intensive. And giving every child a computer would be far too expensive. This argument for him is nonsense because for him, computers seem expensive because schools put them in the same budget category as pencils. The actual cost of production of a net-based computer powerful enough to support deep change in learning would certainly be less than 0 (and he believe that with a national effort we could bring it down to 0), and its expected lifetime would exceed five years. An annual cost of 0 per year is about 1.5 percent of direct expenditure on public schooling.
Taking indirect costs and the social cost of educational failures into account, it is less than 1 percent. Second, Teachers will not be capable of providing the knowledge when it is needed. Again a school-created obstacle. Allowing students of all ages to work together means that they are themselves a source of knowledge: and besides having free access to networked computers provides an unlimited source of access to knowledge and helpers. Third, This kind of work is so contrary to the accepted idea of school that most teachers and parents will balk. This appears to be a problem only because of the assumption that “the right way” will be imposed on everyone. It ceases to be a problem if one accepts the principle of diversity: Those who want to stay with the old way can do so.
In his new book, The Connected Family, Papert develop the idea that the computers that will be the pivotal force for change will be those outside the control of schools and outside the schools’ tendency to force new ideas into old ways. He stressed that we are already beginning to hear stories about the influence in classrooms of children whose access to home computers and to a home learning culture has given them a high level not only of computer expertise but also of sophistication in seeking knowledge and standards in what constitutes a serious intellectual project. The number of these children will grow exponentially in the next few years. Their pressure on schools will become irresistible. (Papert, 1996)
Also Paperts book on The Children’s Machine: Rethinking School in the Age of the Computer, he said that we are entering the information age. This coming period could equally be called the age of learning: The sheer quantity of learning taking place in the world is already many times greater than in the past. He said that it was not very long ago, and in many parts of the world even today, young people would learn skills they could use in their work throughout life. He emphasized that today, in industrial countries; most people are doing jobs that did not exist when they were born. The most important skill for him is determining a person’s life pattern has already become the ability to learn new skills, to take in new concepts, to assess new situations, to deal with the unexpected. This will be increasingly true in the future:
Furthermore Papert believes that across the world children have entered a passionate and enduring love affair with the computer. What they do with computers is as varied as their activities. The greatest amount of time is devoted to playing games, with the result that names like Nintendo have become household words. They use computers to write, to draw, to communicate, to obtain information. Some use computers as a means to establish social ties, while others use them to isolate themselves. The love affair involves more than the desire to do things with computers. It also has an element of possessiveness and, most importantly, of assertion of intellectual identity. Large numbers of children see the computer as “theirs” — as something that belongs to their generation. Many have observed that they are more comfortable with the machines than their parents and teachers are. They learn to use them more easily and naturally. They are the computer generation.
Although every teacher in training memorizes Piaget’s four stages of childhood development, the better part of Piaget is less well known, perhaps because schools of education regard it as “too deep” for teachers. Piaget never thought of himself as a child psychologist. His real interest was epistemology—the theory of knowledge—which, like physics before Newton, was considered a branch of philosophy before Piaget came along and made it a science in its own right.
Piaget was the first to explore a kind of epistemological relativism in which multiple ways of knowing are acknowledged and examined nonjudgmentally, yet with a philosopher’s analytic rigor. Since Piaget, the territory has been widely colonized by those who write about women’s ways of knowing, Afrocentric ways of knowing and even the computer’s ways of knowing. Indeed, artificial intelligence and the information-processing model of the mind owe more to Piaget than its proponents may realize.
The core of Piaget is his belief that looking carefully at how knowledge develops in children will elucidate the nature of knowledge in general. (Papert, 1999)
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