I am always ready to learn, but I do not always like being taught. — Sir Winston Churchill

First let me say that I am glad Danny Hillis is getting interested in education. We will never be able to change education unless the best and brightest care to start thinking about what is wrong and what can be done. The knowledge web idea is a reasonable started but Hillis misses some key points about what is needed. When we begin to consider how computers can help in education we need to what is wrong with traditional school settings. Is school broken because students lack access to knowledge or to personal tutor? It could be improved by the construction of a dynamic knowledge base to be sure, but why would that be the key issue?

The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education.
— Albert Einstein

I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.
— Mark Twain

Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing worth knowing can be taught.
— Oscar Wilde

At least six things need to be changed in order to create school settings that work for those who have difficulties in traditional school settings.

1. The role of the teacher?

2. The contextualization of what is learned

3. The relevance of what is learned to children's goals

4. The emphasis on success vs. failure?

5. The measurement criteria?

6. The fun

Teachers would be great to have around if they were there only when you needed them. In this, Hillis is right. It is clear why traditional school settings do not operate in this fashion. One cannot expect a classroom of thirty children to each be doing their own thing, asking for the teacher's help as needed. Of course, some schools actually try to do this kind of thing, Montessori Schools for example. But, even those schools give up on this model of education when faced with curricula that must be taught and tests that must be passed. It is the curriculum and the size of the class that binds the teacher, making him or her a provider of information and judge of right answers rather than someone who is there for help as needed. Hillis' tutor is great for the adult student who really cares about physics, but most children are not trying to understand physics, they are trying to understand why someone is making them take physics.

It must be remembered that the purpose of education is not to fill the minds of students with facts... it is to teach them to think, if that is possible, and always to think for themselves.
— Robert Hutchins

People who talk about education have forever been mouthing aphorisms about teaching students to think for themselves. It is the Holy Grail of teaching. Everyone believes it, but very few do much about it. Robert Hutchins transformed the University of Chicago. But he didn't eliminate grades and therefore he didn't eliminate the teacher as an authority figure whose views must be followed. Hillis' tutor would do that and therefore it might actually be consulted by students. But most students are trying to figure out how to please the teacher and get a good grade. They are not like Hillis who is more motivated by truth than by grades one would assume. As long as the teacher makes a judgment about the student, many students will try to please him. It is simple human nature. Then, original thinking goes out the window. For students who feel they cannot or do not want to please the teacher, school becomes tedious and learning becomes quite difficult.

The authority of those who teach is often an obstacle to those who want to learn.
— Cicero

A teacher who is attempting to teach without inspiring the pupil with a desire to learn is hammering on a cold iron.
— Horace Mann

No matter how good a teacher is, they are still guided by the curriculum in which they are teaching. We must get over the idea that students who fail to learn algebra or chemistry or English literature would do so if only they had a really good tutor. We need to understand that there are other things to learn besides these subjects, and that a student who turns off to the traditional curriculum, designed in 1892 for a while different set of students and circumstances, can still lead a happy and productive life if only we would consider giving him or her a more meaningful and relevant educational experience.

Schools are armored against change. But, in the last few years, a chink has appeared in that armor. It may be possible to exploit it. That chink is the internet. But it is not the knowledge contained on the internet that is the real hope here. The problem is not getting the net to contain better knowledge but getting the net to be the source for education not the supplement for education.

Courses have been with us for so long that we simply accept that they have the structure, length, and characteristics that they should have and leave it at that. Web courses can be different than what is there now. They can be different for three reasons. (1) Current courses aren't very good and the new medium exposes their weak underbelly. Listening to a lecture on line is a disaster. (2) The length, material covered, and general methodology in courses was derived from practical considerations that are irrelevant in this new medium. Faculty only can teach so many hours per week. Rooms can only accommodate so many people. Buildings open and close at certain times. None of this matters on line. (3) Its on a computer. This new medium has to change the very nature of how things are presented because it can. Just like movies ceased to be filmed plays quickly enough, on line courses will cease to be on line copies of what was there before.

What should a web course be? For starters the concept of course is all wrong. A course is of arbitrary duration. Horses run courses set up at pre-established standardized distances at various racetracks. Students are not horses. Students need to accomplish tasks and having accomplished them they should move on to the next task. Students are not horses. They needn't run through courses. They need to practice whatever skills they are being taught in a realistic environment. Such an environment is the kind of "course" that should be on the internet.

To put education on line, one needs to think about the experiences that students need to prepare for. Here is where Hillis' idea can be very valuable. As we design new experiences for kids we will need on line tutors who can help guide students through those experiences. Some of these tutors can be pre-packaged and automated. The best and brightest of our teachers can be used as a source for creating such tutors. The best expertise in the world can be captured and made available to a program that is smart enough to figure out who needs what story or suggestion at what time and get it to him. If that is what Hillis means by the knowledge web, I am all for it. It is an idea whose time has come. But it will only be of value if it fits within a new conception of what needs to be taught and who certifies who has learned what. Within the current school system it would be of little value.

New on line curricula need to be built that can utilize existing teachers and existing materials and new materials created for the knowledge web that support new kinds of experiences that students will be living. To put this another way, we can build learn-by-doing curricula by making teachers into Socratic tutors and creating realistic tasks for students to do. Those tasks should come from the real-life situations that they might be called upon to do. In this context the knowledge web would be invaluable as a means of creating an educational system that is relevant to the students within it.

When books were moved to classrooms, they were not simply read to the assembled students. (Actually they were at the beginning, hence the word lecture.) New teaching methodologies evolved that were more appropriate to classrooms and books became supplemental materials for teachers. Different media require different methods.

On line education needs to mean the creation of a complex learning environment where there are mentors available and realistic roles to learn. We need to create such environments as a significant part of the knowledge web.

More than thirty years ago, my daughter Esther was learning French in the Princeton High School and I visited one of her classes. I was surprised to observe that the children in the class spoke French better than the teacher. A few years later, Esther made her first visit to France and stayed a few days with some French friends of mine. My friends could not believe her when she told them that she had never been to France before and had learned all her French at the Princeton High School. How was that possible? It was possible because the school had a Language Lab with tape-recorders and tape-decks. These simple old-fashioned analog devices allowed kids to listen to native French speakers, to record their own efforts to imitate the native speakers, and to improve their command of French by matching the imitation to the original. Used in this way, a dumb tape-recorder and tape-deck could do a better job of teaching French than a human teacher.

During the subsequent thirty years, as digital technology became available and computers proliferated in our schools, the question often occurred to me: why do we not use digital technology to teach other subjects as successfully as we used analog technology to teach French? Many attempts have been made to use computers as teachers. My grandchildren now spend long hours sitting in Computer Labs at school and working their way through packages of educational software at home. The educational software has certainly helped them to learn reading and typing and elementary arithmetic. But they did not learn these skills noticeably faster than their parents who learned them from books such as The Cat in the Hat and Green Eggs and Ham. At a more advanced level, the advent of educational software has signally failed to produce a generation of teen-agers more attuned to scientific and mathematical thinking than their parents. In spite of massive efforts to make science and mathematics attractive with interactive programs and elegant graphics, the majority of our students remain scientifically and mathematically illiterate. The minority who assimilate the intellectual riches that computers have to offer are similar to the minority who in earlier times became addicted to science by building radios or collecting beetles.

What then are we to think of Danny Hillis's Aristotle? Certainly the experiment is worth trying. Aristotle will have enormous advantages compared with any existing educational software. He will be a combination of teacher and psychiatrist, understanding and listening to the student as he teaches. He will be hooked up to a web of other Aristotles and other students, pooling his problems and his wisdom with theirs. He will be learning from experience and constantly improving his skills as a teacher. He will undoubtedly achieve spectacular successes with the minority of students who catch fire and blaze intellectually under his tutelage. But so far as the majority of students are concerned, I am skeptical. I think of my own student, Mr. F. Mr. F. was my first student, and I gave him lavish quantities of time and attention. He was a Chinese immigrant at the University of Cambridge, and he needed to pass Part One of the mathematical tripos examination in order to go further. Part one was an easy exam, popularly known as Little-go. Students who had passed the Higher Certificate exam in mathematics in high-school normally skipped Little-go and studied for Part Two of the tripos. But Mr. F. had not been at an English high-school, and so he had to study for Little-go. I worked with him for many hours each week, struggling through old exam problems and text-books. As was the custom in those days, he paid me ten shillings an hour for my time. He was willing and I was patient, and we worked together as good comrades. I honestly believe that Aristotle could not have been a better teacher than I was. But all our endeavors were in vain. When the day came for Mr. F. to sit for his Little-go exam, he failed to answer a single question. When I listen to the conversation of the kids in my grandchildren's schools today, I still hear not infrequently the voice of Mr. F.

Another question arises when we contemplate the future of Aristotle. What will happen if Aristotle is successful? The historic Aristotle let loose upon the world a young military genius who led his armies over Europe and Asia and Africa, looting cities and destroying kingdoms. We do not know whether the historic Aristotle is to be blamed for the death and destruction wrought by his pupil. But we should at least make sure that our future Aristotles do not instill into their pupils the capacity and the desire to conquer the world. Perhaps it would be safer to go back to analog devices such as tape recorders and tape-decks.

I like this vision, and indeed it is getting closer to becoming possible. It would be wonderful to support (not replace!) teachers in a way that would enable each child to learn at her own pace, in her own way.

But there are so few things that are facts, compared to the large number of things that require interpretation... And the joy of learning is really to figure things out new things...

Danny does refer to this to some extent, but only briefly. So I'm not disagreeing with him; I'm simply trying to provoke him to write more about the possibility of discovering new things rather than teaching known ones.

The second question is how to get all this information into the system, peer-reviewed, etc. etc. As Danny points out, that will work best with a variety of business models. I take the paper as an attempt to get this encouraged bottom-up by making more people—teachers, parents, software developers and the like—aware of what is possible. it's going to require a lot of different efforts, a lot of people trying hard to be dominant and contributing a lot as they strive to do so...

I think that this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined here alone.
— President John F. Kennedy at a dinner honoring American Nobel Prize winners, April 29, 1962

Edge is a place with an immense density of talented, prized and noble thinkers. But for any one topic, it may well have to be a lone individual that will take charge and unfold a plan. I commend Danny for taking the obvious premise and running with it to a wishful place, one that is hopeful, meaningful and.... full of gigantic hurdles!

It is easy to take shots at that, and very relevant reasonable objections have already been brought from the surreal Reality Club. But, it may also be the plight of the single mind, dining alone, to bring these thoughts to a new direction, start something, try something, move forward.

OK: The obvious premise: Education is seriously flawed, so is the school system and the tools within both.

And hence the promise: It is very necessary, important, worthwhile and feasible using the technology of the coming decades to create new structures of information and new ways to create, edit, display and usethem.

Coincidentally (or maybe not) I have been working on a set of ideas, theories, and actual tools for the last three years myself in a project codenamed "TD" that are focused on exactly that—the Gordian Knot as I perceive it: We are surrounded by complex information, there need to be new ways to deal with that. New ways to show the data, to sort it, and get real use of it. Extreme simplicity, (nothing to do with the corner of graphics toys that some of you may have painted me in). Education is not the immediate target for my work, but a very meaningful area to apply the solutions. I may be suicidal enough to throw TD out in front of the Edgecrowd and get reality clubbed over the head soon, but this is not the time for that.

All I wanted to state there is, (nod to Esther Dyson) "it's going to require a lot of different efforts, a lot of people...contributing a lot as they strive to do so". I for one would like to be one of them.

Some further reflections on the piece:

The trouble between premise and promise often lies in entirely unexpected areas, the difficulties may not be technical, or financial, but have to do with "the forces at work", "the nature of humans", subtle properties of the problems that just don't show up on the Gantt charts.

For Danny, there has been a precedence there. The premise: everyone is chasing the next record breaking von Neumann clockspeed until it hertz. The promise: parallel computing will free us.

This is exactly the puzzle: Danny was right and wrong and right. He was right in the initial premise, he turned out to be wrong with Thinking Machines at the time. ("the forces at work", "the nature of humans", etc, etc. He can very likely give you a great account of the final days of the company and the product...and the "subtle properties of the problems".)

And yet, of course, Danny was right again, in the longer If you have not seen it yet, Playstation3 (actually 4) will have 64 cells to achieve Teraflop performance. Whether its Grid Computing or Reconfigurable Computing, a lot of it is pointing to where Danny wanted to go. He may have been just a tad early.

This point applied to the new venture is: Danny may be right, wrong and right again. Surely he is right in the starting assumption that these areas are hugely deficient and worthy of innovation. And he may be right in the long range assumption that over a span of a decade or three...everythingwill have changed. The question is: can he minimize the losses of the middle period, being wrong about how much it takes, how many, for how long, it will require?

And there I agree with many of the voices here: the Hard AI path proposed adds a large set of extra burdens to the already daunting task of building a real Knowledge Web. The beauty in Aristotle would not need to be an all-knowing-and-understanding Turing winner, but simply being able to deal with information at all in such a fluid manner. In other words: never mind the automatic Hard AI nature of the tutor to get any data and present it appropriately, it is just the data itself that would be amazing if only it existed.

At present, and within The Zeroes decade, there is no such thing.  Google may find keywords from billions of pages within fractions of seconds...but then it dumps them in a rather silly list which takes hundreds of seconds to make sense of, scroll, page, examine. And much of it is pure content junk, a lot of it is paid-for junk. Truly getting useful results from any search engine is actually a fine art form in itself. (But far be it for me to complain though, I craved these tools forever.). It is not hard to state the obvious: there should be much less emphasis on memorizing facts and figures, but rather teach how to find them, how to use all available options and tools.

And it starts even earlier than that with a basic desire to learn, a willingness and interest in learning. How does one instill that in kids ... ( I have 3 ). Without having a problem, they cannot show any appreciation of a solution. Without having a question, all answers given are just unwanted input for them, filtered away. In one ear, out the other We all know the harsh reality of that. "It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education" said Albert, and I couldn't agree more. I had nine years of Latin. What a waste.

We are all here just the choir you are preaching to, we all are deeply in love with knowledge. For us, the Knowledge Web would be a truly miraculous tool.

I can't wait to see what concrete examples he has up his sleeve. IsAristotle in alpha testing?

I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones.
— John Cage

Danny's idea has indeed appeared before, and the reason why is because it's what we yearn for, what we desperately need. AI may not quite be ready to take on everything Danny suggests, so why not a set of gradually improving interim systems? By now, most adults know how we learn best and thus we can supply some of the missing intelligence. We can say show me a picture, or provide me with some analogies; we can ask about the authority of the source. Though I use it far more than I ever dreamed, the current web does not let me interact this way. So why not have adults who want and need to learn new things beta-test an incomplete, imperfect automated tutor? Sign me up!

We may not know everything about how a given mind learns, but after 30 years of serious research in cognitive psychology, we know far more than we once did. Tragically, precious little of this has migrated into mainstream teaching, but that's another story.

Procrastination has allowed me to see other people's responses to Danny's proposal. I'm surprised at how much skepticism it has evoked, even claims that it could probably never be done. My goodness, I think Edge needs to poll a younger group.