Information Technology and Education: Computer Criticism vs. Technocentric Thinking

Seymour Papert is Professor of Media Technology and Head of the Learning and Epistemology Group, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139. His specializations are mathematics and education. thing more is needed; taste must be justified. Others challenge our opinions and counter with their own, and even personal development eventually requires us to grapple with our reasons. The Logo community faces the challenge of finding a voice for public dialogue. Where do we look? There is no shortage of models. The education establishment offers the notion of evaluation. Educational psychologists offer the notion of controlled experiment. The computer magazines have developed the idiom of product review. Philosophical tradition suggests inquiry into the essential nature of computation. Each of these has intellectual value in its proper place. I shall argue that this proper place is a conservative context where change is small, slow and superficial. The crucial experiment, to take one example, is based on a concept of changing a single factor in a complex situation while keeping everything else the same. I shall argue that this is radically incompatible with the enterprise of rebuilding an education system in which nothing shall be the same. Today, I am sharing with you the result of looking at a very different model for thinking about the dialogue between Logo and the world. This model is a department of thought that adopts the adjective critical in Webster's first sense. I am proposing a genre of writing one could call ' 'computer criticism" by analogy with such disciplines as literary criticism and social criticism. The name does not imply that such writing would condemn computers any more than literary criticism condemns literature or social criticism condemns society. The purpose of computer criticism is not to condemn but to understand, to explicate, to place in perspective. Of course, understanding does not exclude harsh (perhaps even captious) judgment. The result of understanding may well be to debunk. But critical judgment may also open our eyes to previously unnoticed virtue. And in the end, the critical and the creative processes need each other.