Isaac Asimov wrote a short story in the 1950s called “The Fun They Had.” It was about a brother and sister in the year 2157 discussing a rare find: a book. They had never seen a book before. All their learning was at home, on a computer. They didn’t know what a human teacher was. Their mechanical teacher “taught” them and graded their responses.
Margie went into the schoolroom. It was right next to her bedroom, and the mechanical teacher was on and waiting for her. It was always on at the same time every day except Saturday and Sunday, because her mother said little girls learned better if they learned at regular hours.
The screen was lit up, and it said: “Today’s arithmetic lesson is on the addition of proper fractions. Please insert yesterday’s homework in the proper slot.”
Margie did so with a sigh. She was thinking about the old schools they had when her grandfather’s grandfather was a little boy. All the kids from the whole neighborhood came, laughing and shouting in the schoolyard, sitting together in the schoolroom, going home together at the end of the day. They learned the same things, so they could help one another on the homework and talk about it.
And the teachers were people…
The mechanical teacher was flashing on the screen: “When we add the fractions 1/2 and 1/4…”
Margie was thinking about how the kids must have loved it in the old days. She was thinking about the fun they had.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Diane, as a great fan of Asimov (and someone who has read almost all his novels and short stories), I remember that one. Every teacher, parent and child should email the story to Bill Gates so he understands that teaching is a human experience. Computers are great tools today for research and for reinforcing “rote” concepts already learned. That’s it.
Did he mention that the kids of the well-off had real teachers and “fun”? Margie must have been from a poor or middling family.
Well, at least Margie and Tommy had mommies who were home to make sure they “went to school.” Maybe their mommies gave them a hug once in a while.
“Laurene Powell Jobs, widow of Apple Inc co-founder Steve Jobs, is the lead investor who funded the buyout of News Corp’s money losing digital education business Amplify earlier this year.
A representative for Powell Jobs’ organization, the Emerson Collective, confirmed the investment in Amplify but would not specify how much of the company Powell Jobs would own or the amount paid for it.
The company’s top management, including its new Chief Executive Larry Berger, picked up a minority position in the Brooklyn-based company as part of the deal.
Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp said Sept. 30 that it had sold Amplify to a management team backed by a group of private investors for an undisclosed sum. The identity of the investors was not revealed at the time.”
So is this something that should be revealed when Jobs new ed org travels the country promoting “transformed” high schools? Is there already a model in mind for US high schools, one that involves extensive use of technology and online learning?
This is really cozy, these private sector/public sector relationships:
“Ms. Powell Jobs has assembled a team of advisers led by Russlynn H. Ali, who worked in the Obama administration’s Education Department as the assistant secretary for civil rights. Ms. Ali, who for the last several years has overseen education grants at Emerson, will serve as the primary public face of the campaign. Michelle Cahill, who has spent more than three decades in education, including as a senior adviser to Joel I. Klein when he was the New York City schools chancellor, has culled much of the research used on the website. ”
How much lobbying of former colleagues goes on between the private sector ed reformers and the public sector ed reformers based on this revolving door? Does this influence have anything to do with the fact that we’re seeing a huge marketing push for online learning among ed reformers in punditry and the government?
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/laurene-powell-jobs-backs-amplify-230518326.html
Read “The Feeling of Power” by Asimov…. about the relearning of the “lost” art of computing without a computer.
This made me laugh:
“The governors and state legislatures in many states will likely face an onslaught of proposals from unions, school administrators and others seeking to leverage the new flexibility states will have under the new law,” said Charles Barone, education policy director at Democrats for Education Reform, a nonprofit group. “On the heels of everything else they’ve been facing on Common Core . . . comes a whole new wave of potential changes on how to rate and intervene in schools.”
The head of an ed reform lobbying groups omits ed reform lobbying groups from those who lobby state legislatures.
This stuff is laughable. Look at any of the big ed reform lobbying groups and you’ll find people who went directly from government to lobbying government. I can think of five from the Obama Administration alone. The former chair of Ohio’s ed committee in the statehouse went DIRECTLY from promoting charter schools in the legislature to employment as a charter lobbyist. The Ohio Dept of ed just hired in the other direction- they hired a former for-profit charter school lobbyist to oversee policy for public schools, last week. This is after they just finished a big publicity push vowing to clean up the corruption and capture in “the choice sector”.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/the-fight-over-k-12-education-moves-from-congress-to-the-states/2015/11/20/74b877d4-8fc4-11e5-baf4-bdf37355da0c_story.html
Chiara
Charles Barone is a prime example of a person who went from working in government to a cushy job in the Ed deform sector. Before taking over the DC leadership role for the hedge fund guys called DFER, he was education advisor to Rep. George Miller, an architect of NCLB and a DFER favorite. DFER held a fundraiser for Miller and named him as one of its heroes. He defended NCLB long after everyone else recognized it was a disaster. And he was Nancy Pelosi’s education adviser.
The hardest part for me is I;m really depending on the local school board and school administrators to resist some of these ed reform private sector/public sector sales pitches and gimmicks and do their own due diligence.
The problem with that is our school board is part time and our administrators are busy running schools. There’s a real mismatch in sophistication and specialization and TIME they can allot between the professional ed reformers selling this stuff and the people who are charged with making decisions on whether to buy it. Couple that information/sophistication mismatch with the constant national “failing schools” drum beat and the pressure to raise test scores and you have a kind of perfect storm environment for bad local decisions.
Get the school board members to sign up for my blog
If they ran for the office, they should care enough to be informed
In CA, there’s Local Control Accountability Plan Consultation group and committees that help sketch out what gets used, how the plan comes together, and recommend to the board.
I agree with Diane! ALL school board members should be reading Diane’s Blog!
Asimov was a smart guy.
Asimov’s story makes me think that even with all of our “technological progress,” in many ways human beings are the same as we were 3,000 years ago. We are still fighting over territory, religious convictions, class systems, racism, sexism and on and on. Our hearts are still filled with avarice, jealousy, materialism, the need for power over others, vengeance, hatred, mindless destruction of our planet… It doesn’t matter how much “technological progress” we have. Until we can cultivate a wisdom in how to relate to others and to ourselves and the planet, we will continue to have the problems that we have. Now with the destruction of our ecosystem and the ability to annihilate ourselves in one fell swoop, the stakes are higher than ever.
Yeah, reading Herodotus’s accounts of Persia and Mesopotamia, you realize that there was immense cruelty and fractiousness there for thousands of years –but now that the protagonists have high-powered explosives, the damage that this venerable quarreling can do is so much greater.
I wouldn’t be too hard on the humans. Eradicating avarice and materialism and hatred is a tall order.
I read a ton of Asimov as a teen, and now my teenage son is reading him. One quirky point: Do you realize that the main character does her homework on paper? If the story had been written today, she would have done it on a tablet.
If we put together this work of Asimov and Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 415 with its wall to wall television screens, we’d get an exact description of Billy Genie’s vision of personalized education for the masses.
I teach this story to students of whichever grade level I happen to be working with every year no matter where and no matter their “level”. I also share it with teachers.
The students are always horrified amd genuinely scared. No one asks the kids what they NEED.
Here is an article my husband shared with me, which ties to why the push for technology without any thinking on part of the kids.
http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/you-have-an-iphone-now-do-as-youre-told?utm_source=macobserver&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss_everything
We are both so grateful for your blog and words fail us to express our gratitude for your efforts for the truth. And he is not even an educator! I wish more people who aren’t directly involved in education would start caring about this invisible war on our children. He created this as piece as part of his latest series.
California: Exsanguinate
http://www.jamieberry.com/california-exsanguinate/
Thank you for all you do!
Sincerely,
Annie
I used this story for years with my students as a kick-off to writing and collaboration. It was especially poignant the year the governor of our state wanted to raid the teachers’ pension fund to buy computers for the schools – thousands of DEC Rainbow computers, to be used to bring elementary kids ‘up to speed’ with technology. The plan was soundly defeated as the computers had ALREADY been discontinued. This was the same governor who wanted to have one physics teacher videotape lessons so all schools in the state could just put kids in their respective auditoriums and have them watch the tapes – poof! Instant physics classes!! The idea of actually paying teachers enough so physics teachers could be found apparently was beyond his grasp. Politicians and education are a dangerous mix.
According to the usual unconfirmed rumors, anything by Isaac Isamov will not be, I repeat NOT BE, on any version of Common Core-aligned standardized tests.
😱
Apparently it doesn’t fit the rigorous and gritty mold into which they pour the test items relating to decontextualized informational texts.
Although no official reason has been given, Gates Foundation “studies show” that firing up the grey matter is antithetical to the $tudent $ucce$$ that is the bottom line in rheephorm metrics.
😏
My bad. I forgot that the shills and trolls that visit this blog have a hard time understanding plain English.
“Knowledge makes a man unfit to be a slave.”
Has Mr. Frederick Douglass cleared that up for you now?
😎
Its amazing how astute Asimov and other science fiction authors were when they were envisioning the future. It’s as if they had a crystal ball since so much of what they imagined has contained a foreboding of truth imbedded into the fantasy.
The horror of yesterday’s tales has become today’s reality. It sounds more like an episode of Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone than what children are facing in the education arena in 2015.
This was in a textbook that we no longer have. We used to use it.
Reblogged this on Save Maine Schools.
Remember Hal from “2001: A Space Odyssey”?
Diane,
I have a book of Asimov’s short stories with this one in it. Can’t forget the day I picked it up at a second hand book shop near my dance studio in the East Village. I have lent that book to several people and had gone looking for it recently but was unable to locate it.
Thank you! I searched and searched for the title of that story but Asimov was so prolific and my memory was not recalling.
The Fun They Had The Fun They Had The Fun They Had
I won’t forget!
(I think Gates read this one, repeatedly, and then dreamed to make it a reality one day…just not for his kids. They get REAL live teachers.)
Next Gen Science – heard of it? Check out their corporate sponsors. http://www.nextgenscience.org/sponsors
Chiara, maybe those Private Equity Investors are playing here?
Teaching Generation Next https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Xa0BCQHjtW0J:www.taylorprograms.com/images/Teaching_Gen_NeXt.pdf+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us
Who’s behind it? The INTERNATIONAL MONETARY FUND with Wealthy Billionaires Kids and Thomas P
Google: Generation Next — Finance & Development
Result: https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2014/09/25under45.htm
Asimov, Bradbury and Serling saw what was coming down the road and
when I assign a reading or show a Twilight Zone, my students see the connection
of how machines have taken our humanity. And so many “reformers”
have sold out to tech and sold their own souls for big money…Dylan talked
about “Masters of War.” What about “Masters of Tech?”
And there’s this …
http://teaching-abc.blogspot.cl/2014/06/electronic-media.html
Wonderful story. I’ve been teaching it for twenty years. I had no idea how significant it would become when I started.
For something a bit darker, check out “Examination Day”. It was a short story made into a Twilight Zone episode. I show this to my classes, too.
Very powerful…Serling’s Twilight Zones still resonate for students because the
belief in the heart defines our humanity and technology is worthless if it does
help us become more compassionate, more loving, more heroic. As Asimov,
Bradbury, Serling and others knew and we still know.