The Boy Who Could Change the World

by Aaron Swartz

  Neal W. Finkelstein and Craig T. Ramey, “Learning to Control the Environment in Infancy,” Child Development, 1977, **48**, 806–819.

  And honestly, it makes sense that babies want to figure things out. The world is confusing! It’s filled with strange sights and sounds and smells, a new world of taste and touch. The only way to make sense of any of it is to work at it as best you can, looking at all the new things you see and trying desperately to figure them all out.

  Give a six-month-old a new toy and they will “systematically examine [it] with every sense they have at their command (including taste, of course),” write a leading team of baby researchers. “By a year or so, they will systematically vary the actions they perform on an object: they might tap a new toy car gently against the floor, listening to the sound it makes, then try banging it loudly, and then try banging it against the soft sofa. By eighteen months, if you show them an object with some unexpected property, like a can with a mooing noise, they will systematically test to see if it will do other unexpected things.”*

  The Scientist in the Crib.

  They apply such dedication to everything in their world. Soon they begin to learn faces—to distinguish between their mom and other people—and what those faces mean. They learn baby physics—when a car rolls behind a screen they know exactly when to look for it to come out the other side—and get surprised when it comes out faster or slower than it should. They listen to what people say—the baby talk we all naturally lapse into around little kids helps them detect vowels—and learn to imitate those noises for themselves. In short, little kids are curiosity machines.

  In one experiment, the researchers put a toy slightly out of reach and then gave the babies a rake they could use to get the toy. At first the kids reach for it, then they look at their parents pleadingly to get it for them, but then they quickly set about figuring it out for themselves—and eventually realize they can use the rake to do so. Their faces light up with that joy of discovery. They reach out, fumble, but eventually get the toy and pull it to them.

  But that’s not enough—it’s not just about getting the toy. “[They] forget all about the toy after a trial or two. They often deliberately put the toy back far out of reach and experiment with using the rake to draw it toward them. The toy itself isn’t nearly as interesting as the fact that the rake moves it closer.”

  “It’s not just that we human beings can do this; we need to do it,” the researchers write. “We seem to have a kind of explanatory drive, like our drive for food or sex. When we’re presented with a puzzle, a mystery, a hint of a pattern, something that doesn’t quite make sense, we work until we find a solution. In fact, we intentionally set ourselves such problems, even the quite trivial ones that divert us from the horror of airplane travel, like crossword puzzles, video games, or detective stories. As scientists, we may stay up all night in the grip of a problem, even forgetting to eat, and it seems rather unlikely that our paltry salaries are the sole motivation.”

  Think back to the “secure home base” experiments [ . . . ]. When put in a strange situation, the toddlers are terrified—they cling to their mothers for support. But soon enough, their curiosity gets the better of them. They begin, at first tentatively but soon with abandon, to explore the rest of the room. The explanatory drive is so powerful it can even overcome fear.

  And it doesn’t go away as they get older. In one experiment with kids ages 4 to 10, the kids were given a variety of problems to work on—some easy, some hard. Obviously the kids didn’t work on problems that were too hard for them, but they also didn’t pick the problems that were too easy. They sought out the problems that were just right for them—providing a little bit of a challenge, but not so much that they were impossible. Unless they were rewarded, that is—when they were given rewards for solving puzzles, they headed straight back for the easy ones.*

  http://www.jstor.org/pss/1129110.

  Anyone who’s been around preschoolers knows they don’t need to be motivated to learn. “Rarely does one hear parents complain that their pre-schooler is ‘unmotivated,’” notes one child psychologist.† Instead, the parenting books are filled with just the opposite complaint: all their preschoolers do is ask them why, why, why. “Why are we getting into the car?” “Why are we going to the grocery store?” “Why is all the food kept at the grocery store?” “Why do people use money to buy things?”‡

  (James Raffini 1993.)

  http://family.go.com/parentpedia/preschool/milestones-development/preschool-asking-why/.

  It’s almost kind of annoying, really. So we ship them off to school.

  It is difficult for most to recall what school was really like. If we did well, we focus on the positive memories and do our best to ignore the rest. If we did poorly, we try to block out the memory of the indignities we suffered. It’s not a place we’re usually eager to revisit. But, for a moment, try to imagine it: torn away from your family, shipped off daily to a strange and uncomfortable place, thrown into a sea of unfamiliar faces, each scared in his or her own way and often taking it out on you.

  But what strikes me most when I revisit the classrooms I grew up in is how small they seem now. In my memory, the teachers are giants and the rooms were designed for other giants like them. The desks were big and dangerous contraptions, the blackboards seemed endless, the desks and tables imposing figures.

  But that was my world: day in and day out, those giants controlled my life, those children were my only companions. And what happened in these classes? I did not get to explore or experiment as I did at home. I did not learn things the way I had learned them the rest of my life—through trial and error, through experience and experiment. No, school was the place for Real Learning and, I was told, Real Learning was Work.

  Most classes I was in, most classes I’ve seen since—even at the most progressive schools—were much the same. The teacher sat at the front of the class and talked while the kids sat in front of them and listened. Occasionally there’d be a picture or a diagram or a worksheet, but for the most part it was simply talk. Think of how many hours you spent sitting at those desks—6 hours a day, 180 days a year, for 12 years—listening to those teachers. That’s nearly thirteen thousand hours, probably more time than you’ve spent watching movies or playing sports. How much of it do you remember? I can remember a few snapshots here and there, but as much as I try, I can’t even remember a single sentence I was told. All that talking, and I can hardly recall a thing they said.

  And I guess that’s not a surprise. All those lectures were boring. I’m sure I zoned out for most of them; I’m sure most everybody else did as well. The teachers weren’t oblivious to this, of course—that’s why they’d call on us, punctuating the long hours of boredom with moments of panic and terror. You’d hear your name being called and, suddenly awake, find the eyes of the teacher and the rest of the class all on you—your whole world, watching to see if you’d screw up.

  The radical educator John Holt once asked his class about this:

  We had been chatting about something or other, and everyone seemed in a relaxed frame of mind, so I said, “You know, there’s something I’m curious about, and I wonder if you’d tell me.” They said, “What?” I said, “What do you think, what goes through your mind, when the teacher asks you a question and you don’t know the answer?”

  It was a bombshell. Instantly a paralyzed silence fell on the room. Everyone stared at me with what I have learned to recognize as a tense expression. For a long time there wasn’t a sound. Finally Ben, who is bolder than most, broke the tension, and also answered my question, by saying in a loud voice, “Gulp!”

  He spoke for everyone. They all began to clamor, and all said the same thing, that when the teacher asked them a question and they didn’t know the answer they were scared half to death. I was flabbergasted—to find this in a school which people think of as progressive, which does its best not to put pressure on little children, which does not give marks in the lower grades,
which tries to keep children from feeling that they’re in some kind of race.

  I asked them why they felt gulpish. They said they were afraid of failing, afraid of being kept back, afraid of being called stupid, afraid of feeling themselves stupid. [. . .] Even in the kindest and gentlest of schools, children are afraid, many of them a great deal of the time, some of them almost all the time. This is a hard fact of life to deal with. [70f]

  And it doesn’t let up—even law school students live in fear of the infamous “cold call,” the moment when their professor will expect them to answer an obscure question in front of the whole class. If it has the power to shake these accomplished college grads, imagine how terrifying it must be for powerless, friendless first-graders!

  Fear makes you dumb. Your field of vision literally narrows, you start thinking desperately about the problem at hand—not what you know or what it means, but just whatever you need to say to escape the moment safely. When the teacher asks you a question, there’s no time to try to understand what they’re really saying or how it fits into some bigger picture. It’s not the time to get clarification on some point that’s confused you. And it’s not the time to make an honest mistake and learn from it. It’s about getting the right answer, fast, through whatever means necessary.

  Kids develop amazing strategies for dealing with these situations. They mumble, in the hope that the teacher will hear what they want to hear. They hedge, covering all their bases so it’s harder to accuse them of being wrong. They study the teacher’s face and body language for a clue—quickly correcting themselves if the teacher gives any hint that their answer is wrong. This isn’t about learning, this is about survival.

  Yet schools seem almost perfectly designed to keep kids scared. Even if kids can survive the embarrassment of being wrong in front of their peers, there are other punishments and rewards to keep them focused on answers instead of understanding. Do poorly on a test or an assignment and you get criticized for your failure. It goes down in the record books and gets reported to your parents, who usually chew you out and punish you further. The tests are presented as a race against the clock—no time to think about the bigger picture!—and when those are done, there’s more busywork and drudgery to complete.

  And it doesn’t even stop when the school day ends, as desperate as you are for that blissful moment. No, you get home only to find that you must do homework, the same old busywork all over again. You never get a moment to pause, to think for yourself. Your entire life is monitored—either by your parents at home or a teacher at school.

  There’s never time to stop and ask why. Asking why isn’t your job. If you think the teacher has it wrong, tough luck. There’s no court of appeal. You are wrong, even if you’re right. How is anyone supposed to develop self-respect, let alone self-esteem, in that sort of situation?

  How is one supposed to develop anything? We understand the world by making models, generalizing from the patterns we experience and testing those generalizations against the real world. We learn because something puzzles us—we want to understand what it is or how it works, and we set off on the trail of adventure to figure it out. But there’s no time for this in school. We’re supposed to sit in class, not explore the world. Indeed, we don’t get to explore at all—the real world is kept carefully at bay.

  Instead we’re spoon-fed an endless stream of predigested facts: definitions, names, dates, places, equations—all disconnected from reality and from each other. Instead of learning about the world, we learn random facts and rules. But even those you’re not allowed to care about. When the fifty minutes are up and the bell rings, you have to stop being interested in this and switch over to being interested in that. But curiosity cannot be ordered around via remote control, the channel changed at fifty-minute intervals. The only way to survive is by giving up on curiosity altogether, not caring about the subjects you’re supposed to be learning, just letting it all become a blur.

  And that’s fine, because it is all a blur. A class in physics isn’t much different from one in biology or grammar. All education becomes memorization. The only difference between the subjects is the kind of stuff you need to memorize—is it animal names or parts of speech? Instead of trying to understand something, you just try desperately to remember it—at least long enough to repeat it back on the test.

  It’s a wonder anyone learns anything.

  Perhaps they don’t. That was the thought that haunted Eric Mazur.

  Now, all the signs said that Eric Mazur was a good teacher—a great one, in fact. He taught at Harvard—the most prestigious school in the country, if not the world. I’ve talked to plenty of Harvard professors and believe me, just that is enough to make most of them feel pretty good about themselves. But even at Harvard, he stood out.

  Take the teacher evaluations the students had to fill out at the end of the course, “the dreaded end-of-semester questionnaire.” Mazur taught introductory physics, and physics was not exactly a popular course with most students. “Most of my colleagues, when they taught this introductory pre-med class, would come close to suicide when they saw the results . . . because these pre-meds were not too kind to their physics instructors. But not so for me—I got 4.5, 4.7 on a 5-point scale.”

  Was Mazur getting good ratings by just making things too easy? For that he looked at the exams. “I could give these students questions that I considered quite complicated—questions that I wasn’t even sure I could do flawlessly under the pressure of an exam. I mean, a stick is lying on a frictionless surface, a puck hits it, the two stick together and start to rotate, now calculate the angle and rotational position as function of time. No problem for most of these pre-meds.”

  There were some warning signs. “For example, some students would write, at the bottom of their end-of-semester evaluation, ‘Physics is boring.’ Even though they gave me [a] high rating, they would write that down. Or, ‘Physics sucks.’ I could never make any sense of it and, therefore, preferred to concentrate on the positive signs and ignore the negative ones.

  “You know, my dentist once told me—and I couldn’t even speak back because I had the thing in my mouth—‘Oh, you’re a physicist. I got an A for physics in college but I really didn’t understand anything.’ It always bothers me when I hear these things and I never know how to react. I never understood what the cause was.”

  Then, in 1990, after six years of teaching, he saw an odd little article in an old copy of the American Journal of Physics. Ibrahim Halloun and David Hestenes, two physicists at Arizona State, had given their students a physics exam, but a very strange one. Most physics exams ask fairly complicated questions requiring a bunch of math to solve, like the one with the stick and the puck. But instead of making their physics exam harder, Halloun and Hestenes decided to make it easier. It involved no jargon or advanced math; indeed, it didn’t require any calculation at all. The questions were so simple and understandable you could even give the test to someone who had never taken physics.

  For physics students, they should be trivial. They didn’t require much more than understanding Newton’s laws. “The first week we describe motion—velocity, acceleration, and so on. The second week you talk about Newtonian mechanics—Newton’s three laws. And then . . . things start to build on top of that.”

  Now, we’ve probably all heard Newton’s laws. Take number three: “For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.” Even English majors are fond of quoting that. Now, maybe we don’t know exactly what it means, but surely physics students should—especially those doing pretty advanced physics at Harvard.

  Well, in their test, Halloun and Hestenes asked students a fairly simple question about Newton’s third law. It’s question number two—and it ended up being the hardest question on the test:

  2.Imagine a head-on collision between a large truck and a small compact car. During the collision,

  (a)the truck exerts a greater amount of force on the car than the car exerts on the truck.

&
nbsp; (b)the car exerts a greater amount of force on the truck than the truck exerts on the car.

  (c)neither exerts a force on the other, the car gets smashed simply because it gets in the way of the truck.

  (d)the truck exerts a force on the car but the car doesn’t exert a force on the truck.

  (e)the truck exerts the same amount of force on the car as the car exerts on the truck.

  Now, by Newton’s third law, the answer has to be (e). The reason the car gets smashed and the truck doesn’t is because an equal force translates into much greater acceleration in the smaller, stationary car. But, of course, most people don’t understand that. (You may not even understand it after my one-sentence explanation.) Like most people, 70–80% of physics students say (a).

  This wouldn’t be such a big problem, except that, for a physics student, this question is incredibly basic. “The whole rest of the semester—another nine weeks or so—builds on top of Newton’s laws. In other words, if you don’t understand Newton’s laws, you can’t really make much sense of anything else in the entire semester.” And yet, in question after question like this, it became clear: the students didn’t understand Newton’s laws.

  “When I read that, it didn’t really register,” Mazur said. “After all, this is high school stuff”—how could university students flunk it? Especially Harvard University students, most of whom had aced AP Physics.

  Knowing that most people wouldn’t believe them, Halloun and Hestenes had repeated the study in all sorts of schools with all sorts of teachers. They tested a physicist who emphasized basic concepts, one who used lots of exciting lecture demonstrations (and won multiple awards), one who teaches problem solving by example, and a new teacher who was unsure of himself and just read straight from the textbook. They couldn’t detect any difference—not even between the award-winning teacher and one who read from the textbook. Measured by a simple test like this, all were equally bad. It didn’t make a difference what the teachers did; the students still didn’t learn anything.