Chinese clampdown on tutoring, social media and games

Some years back Gil, our sons and I travelled in a huge loop around China but especially loved Shaolin, the Temple where they combine Buddhism with martial arts. Almost all modern martial arts originated there. Callum, all these years later, is just about to go to the European Championships in the ITF TaeKwon Do England Team but on that day 10,000 practicing martial arts kids were out in their silks (we were lucky). There were, everywhere, disciplined kids demonstrating their skills, who were attending one of the many schools there. It was spectacular.

Turning my thoughts to the China of today, that discipline has turned it into a superpower. We saw the poverty that existed in the countryside, almost feudal, and who can deny that its great success is in lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty. They did that by using socialist principles to leverage hard working, productive labour but who really paid for this - you and I. We lapped up those cheap goods. Almost every Christmas decoration and present you buy will have come from China. The complaints about low wages and what is called slave labour is a bit rich from those who have iPhones and wardrobes full of rarely worn clothes.

However, that brings me to some strange goings on… a second cultural revolution or clampdown. This has been led by the enigmatic Wang Huning. There’s a brilliant portrait of him here. Wang, like all iconoclasts in the past, is using state control to do some pretty unusual things.

Tech companies 

In addition to a fierce clampdown on large tech companies trying to become monopolies, Alibaba was fined US$2.8 billion, Didi was removed from all app stores.

 

Social media

He’s behind the move to control the tech companies with a ‘Minor Protection Law’, implemented in June; a crackdown on social media use,which means time management, content restriction and consumption limits for minors. 

On Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, owned by same company,with 600 million daily users, if you’re under 14:

• Swipe and you get a compulsory science lesson or Museum exhibit, before you can get back to the fun. It’s a mass nudge campaign.

• Limited to 40 mins a day.

• Mandatory 5 second delay on scrolling.

• Not available 10pm to 6am.

Online gaming

A clampdown on online gamers targets what they see as the decadence of this activity:

• Under 18 gamers can only play on public holidays, Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays from 8pm to 9pm.

• Then there’s censorship in the form of not being able to play games that feature ‘cross-dressing’, ‘gay romance’ and ‘effeminate males’.

• Changing ‘established’ historical narratives is also frowned upon, this includes  ‘politically harmful’ or ‘historically nihilistic’ content.

Online tutoring

This sector has been decimated:

• Private sector tutoring companies have been banned.

• Foreign education companies have come under strict regulatory scrutiny.

• Compulsory state registration controls all education companies and platforms.

• No approval for new off-campus tutoring centers providing core/compulsory education. 

• All must become registered as non-profit institutions.

• Tutoring banned on weekends, public holidays, and winter and summer vacations, which are popular times for off-campus education.

• All new enrollments and payments stopped until registration complete by end of 2021.

This is all backed up with sophisticated tracking.Of course, since the dawn of the internet kids have circumvented restrictions through illegal websites, VPNs and foreign sites. Wonder how your kids got to watch that recent cinema only movie release?

Now we feel repulsed by all of this but for years I’ve seen keynote speakers and so-called liberal and progressive people call for similar restrictions on screen time, gaming and many agree that tutoring ‘games’ the education system in favour of the wealthy. We should use the Chinese clampdown to reflect on what we in the liberal, democratic world really want here.

Then there’s the social credit system, which is widely misunderstood, more on that later in another post

Hegel Bildung and educating for the state

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770 – 1831), a German philosopher, spent three years as a private tutor, seven years as Headmaster of the Gymnasium at Nuremberg, six years as an unpaid lecturer and was a professor where he taught for many years  at the University of Berlin and Heidelberg. Although he had a speech impediment when lecturing, he was liked as a teacher by his students. Hegel never wrote a specific text on education but saw it as an important feature of his personal and political philosophy.

Schools

The state must supervise and determine the education of a child. This role supersedes the various choices and preferences of parents. It is society that must be the prime agent. Schools, unlike family contexts, must mould the learner into civil society, through restraining behaviour to act as a bridge between family and society.

Education as play he sees as childish as it lowers the sights of education. Even children see it as childish. One must get the learner to strive towards maturity. If not, the result is a form of contempt for one’s elders, a vanity and conceit that makes the child feel falsely superior. The child must eventually learn to break his toys.

Discipline, in particular, matters, as it limits the impulsiveness of the young. The child should not be disciplined by appeal to their reason, as that leaves it to their whim. The child has no intrinsic sense of good and evil, only their own impulses. To appeal to these impulses would be wrong as they will use this to avoid obedient behaviour.

Obedience actually frees the learner to move towards the education of their own minds. He has no time for teaching that bends to the will or individuality of the individual learner, on the basis that, firstly, teachers don’t have the time to do this and secondly that schools must apply universal rules and constraints, not for the development of the individual or spurious originality but the development of the learners themselves in society.

Instruction

He is against the idea of avoiding instruction, as if there is such a thing as critical, philosophical thinking, separate from knowledge of what already exists. One learns to think through understanding what others have thought. Science is a body of hard-won knowledge, that took time and effort to realise. It needs to be learnt and learning is a form of re-thinking this body of knowledge. The idea that the free thinking learner must come up with fully formed knowledge and skills is a foolish idea, as others have done this for that learner. A myth in learning is to think that one must start with the experiences of circles and work towards the general principles of circles. The reverse, he thinks, is preferable, to move from the known and drawn circle and its properties, to the particular instances of circles. Indeed Hegel is particularly critical of the young as being opinion, illusion, half-truth, distortion, and indeterminateness. 

Bildung

The inward looking child must be educated to realise that those dispositions need to be turned outwards towards society. The external authorities of a social order then become internalised.

The learner should not be seen as a solipsistic entity ‘thinking for themselves’ but rather as thinking in tune with others. Thinking or oneself is fine but with a goal in mind, not for the sake of just being an individual. The constant encouragement of argument and disputation leads to impertinence. The goal should be the formative development (Bildung) towards the universality of self-consciousness. The learning process (Bildung) is dynamic in that what is learnt is particular to the culture of the moment, which pushes previous cultural norms to the past. The learner must strive after education and be given role models and examples to strive towards. This changes over time.

Citizen and state

He unequivocally rejects Rousseau, seeing the methods in Emile as ‘futile’. The child must be encouraged to do the opposite and become a citizen of the state and its laws. True individuality, for Hegel, is to become the good citizen of the good state.

Critique

Karl Popper rejected Hegel’s historicism and adulation of the state, blaming his philosophy for the totalitarian ills of the 20th century. He saw Hegel as an intellectual apologist for the absolute rule of Frederick William III. In addition he criticised hegel as the intellectual catalyst for both fascism and communism, his dialectics being used for purposes of genocide. Bertrant Russell was even more scathing, describing almost all of Hegel’s doctrines to be false.

Although Hegel may not have been responsible for the dialectical theory taken up by Marxism, it was responsible for the mudrer of millions in the former Soviet Union, China and Cambodia, including the decimation of the teacher and academic class.

Influence

One can see the influence on Dewey and others who see education as the inculcation of larger beliefs of the state. Isaiah Berlin, on the other hand, saw Hegel as an architect of authoritarianism, in opposition to liberal democracy. The state has certainly played an increasing role in education from this time. There is also the tradition of discipline, moving the child out of the realm of parental influence and play into the more serious development that is Bildung. Whatever the talk of Rousseau and the need for progressive education, it is this vision of education that has endured.

Bibliography

Hegel, G.W.F., 2007. Phenomenology of spirit (pp. 28-38). Duke University Press.

Hegel, G.W.F., 1991. Hegel: Elements of the philosophy of right. Cambridge University Press.

Butler, C., Seiler, C. and Hegel, C.B.G., 1984. Hegel: The Letters. 

Report to Niethammer. Online here https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/letters/1812-10-23.html

Krug Don't make us think

Steve Krug has a background in writing computer manuals. He saw that this was not the solution to most problems and moved on into usability design. He has had a huge influence on web design through his best-selling book Don’t Make Me Think (2000). He also provided a method for quick and effective testing in his second book Rocket Surgery Made Easy (2009). The huge success of these books meant that user interface design was taken more seriously in terms of good practice and the need for testing with real users. Interface design, or UX design, has gained importance as part of general online learning design.

Interface design

Krug asks a simple question, ‘How do we really use the web?’ We glance, scan and muddle through. We don’t read pages, we scan them, choose the first reasonable option, and because we’re lazy, we meander through content. This is important and, if excesses in design are to be avoided, it has to be understood when designing web sites and online learning. His theory is based on real practice and positive results on real web sites. Krug’s first law of usability is to strive to make things self-evident or self-explanatory, hence the title ‘Don’t Make Me Think’.

Users and learners want the interface to be an unthinking act, easy and unobtrusive. The more they think, the more likely they are to stop and go elsewhere. Forget instructions. People don’t read them and don’t want them. He recommends that we design out the need for a tutorial or instructions.

Design recommendations

Sensitive to the needs of the internet as a medium in itself, he emphasises the importance of the Home page. This leads to reflection on the importance of the ‘Big Picture’, namely the essential purpose of the site or online learning programme. He recommends tag lines that capture the essence of a site or web experience. Mission statements he hates, as they rarely tell you the real story and usually miss the Big Picture. 

Navigation hierarchies

Taking his lead from newspapers, always an interesting source for screen design, he recommends carefully designed hierarchies. He hates navigation that breaks down when you get past the second level. The solution, he thinks, is persistent global navigation at the same position on every page with a home button and tracking. He loves fixed menus. He also makes the useful distinction between navigation, utilities (print, search and so on) and content. It is always a payoff between ‘wide and deep’ hierarchies. 

Be conventional

Following on from Norman and Nielsen, he stresses conventions. Don’t play fast and loose, make things easy and consistent. Use conventions, such as shopping carts, standard video controls and icons. This is sound advice. Conventions are more than just objects of convenience, they are part of the grammar of interface design. Designers often refuse to use conventions as they crave creativity and innovation – this, in his view, is rarely useful. Pages should also be broken up into carefully defined areas, clickable areas should be obvious and every attempt made to minimise ‘noise’, again a Mayer and Clark principle in online learning.

Half the number of words and half again

True to his belief that screen readers are different from readers of print, he has strong views on writing for the screen. Less is more and so he exhorts designers and writers to omit needless words. In his own words, “Half the number of words and half again”. 

Search

Krug was among the earliest evangelists for search on websites. Search is a window into the collective mind of your users. It tells you what people really want, look for and what is most likely missing.

Interface design in online learning

In interface design, as Steve Krug says in the title, the point is NOT to make people think. In learning, the whole point is to make people think. Yet many of his recommendations are applicable across learning experiences. His advice on drastically reducing text has been confirmed in research by Mayer and others in online learning design. The importance of search has also come to the fore in Learning Experience Platforms used for learning in the workflow.

Krug’s prescriptions are even more important in online learning than in web design, as learning’s great enemy is cognitive overload and dissonance. If learners have to work hard to understand, navigate and read online learning, they have less sustained attention for retentive learning. Most online learning, like most offline learning, is too long winded and needs to be seriously edited to avoid cognitive overload. Keep navigation simple and consistent, use de facto conventions, avoid deep hierarchies and write for the screen not the page. And don’t forget to test – a few iterations with experts.

Usability testing

His second book Rocket Surgery Made Easy, shows how to do modest, low budget testing. His starting point is that designers can’t see the mistakes they make as they get too close to the design and as the navigation has come from their own heads, they lack objectivity. You need other fingers and eyeballs, guided by experts, using voiced testimonies. 

Krug, like Norman and Nielsen, is a strong believer in a specific form of usability testing. Following Nielsen and Landauer he takes the view that a few good, experienced testers and a few iterations are all you need. Forget the large-scale focus groups and massive testing, which suffer from the law of diminishing returns. His practical experience shows that just one, or a few testers early on are more effective than a large number at the end. 

He recommends evidence gathering with a camcorder and facilitator who asks questions and gives tasks, especially ‘Get it’ tasks where you probe the user for their understanding of the point of the experience, how it works and how it is organised. The point of the facilitator is to probe and ask them not only what they’re looking at but what they’re thinking. Listen, keep an open mind and take lots of notes.

An underlying point, made many years before by Dewey and Heidegger is that technologies work best when they hide themselves in things and tasks. Technology is at its best when it is invisible. This is the consistent theme in all good usability theorists and practitioners. The task of the designer, to make the delivery mechanism as invisible as possible.

Krug understands the different roles of specialists in design teams and the tensions that arise between them. His solution is to objectify the debate through testing, not with the mythical average user, but with real users. His is a useful, practical and prescriptive approach to good usability through good design.

Influence

Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think has sold over 600,000 copies. Rather than depend on academic literature, this popular book, in a sense he practices what he preaches. It is readable and does exactly what the user expects, give concrete advice on design and testing. As user design has grown as a practice Krug’s work is still relevant for its lasting recommendations.

Bibliography

Krug, S., 2009. Rocket surgery made easy: The do-it-yourself guide to finding and fixing usability problems. New Riders.

Krug, S., 2000. Don't make me think!: a common sense approach to Web usability. New Riders.

Erikson (1902 – 1994) - Identity crises

Eric Erikson, a German psychoanalyst and psychologist, spent most of his working life in the US. He expanded Freud’s childhood developmental theory, well beyond the first few years of life, into a lifelong development theory of identity, with an emphasis on the adolescent ‘identity crisis’ and the role of the ego.

Eight stages

In essence, Erikson’s advice is that internal conflicts occur at each of his eight stages in life. If one fails to resolve the crises that arise, they can adversely affect the later stages in one’s life.

Stage 1: Trust vs. Mistrust (Oral-sensory, Birth-0-2)

The Oral Sensory Stage, requires the development of trust through the maternal relationship and if this bond is not fulfilled may lead to a sense of rejection or worthlessness.

Stage 2: Autonomy v Shame & Doubt (Muscular-Anal, 2-4)

Autonomy develops as we go through the ‘terrible two’s and we affirm our ability to defy, walk and talk, with an emphasis on toilet training. Here we overcome shame.

Stage 3: Initiative v Guilt (Locomotor-Genital, Preschool, 4-5)

Pre-school involves initiative overcoming guilt through play, imagination and mimicking adults.

Stage 4: Industry v Inferiority (Latency, 5-12)

At school, the child must develop self-identity and self-worth within the context of a new environment, through industry, to overcome a sense of inferiority. Education kicks in here as the teacher must, like the parent, engender a sense of worth.

Stage 5: Identity v Role Confusion (Adolescence, 13-19)

The big one is where roles are confused until identity is established. The tables are turned as we have to rely on ourselves, rather than others for our identity. This can lead to idealism at the expense of realism.

Stage 6: Intimacy v Isolation (Young adulthood, 20-24, or 20-40)

We’re into adulthood where intimacy overcomes isolation through love, friendship and possibly marriage.

Stage 7: Generativity v Stagnation (Middle adulthood, 25-64, or 40-64)

One develops a career and purpose in life, as well as taking on the role of a parent and carer. One’s sense of purpose can stagnate into regret or be generative.

Stage 8: Ego Integrity v Despair (Late adulthood, 65-death)

One looks back with either a sense of disappointment, even despair, or a positive outlook with a sense of worth and wisdom, as one face s death.

Criticism

He knew Freud’s daughter Anna and took Freud’s basic theory, modified it, with more emphasis on the ‘ego’ and less on sexuality. But Erikson’s schema suffers from being primarily descriptive, with little evidence to back up the underlying pairs of conflicting forces. His evidence is loose and anecdotal, relying too much looking at the lives of a few famous people from the past. His paired conflicts have been criticised as being oversimplifications, dualist in nature, if not moralistic in tone. There is also doubt about the age ranges and whether all of this occurs in such a rigid, sequential order.

Working with Benjamin Spock, he played a role in promoting the idea that children were subject to Freudian influences that mistrust, shame and guilt. This deficit model was to introduce therapeutic tendencies into education and training that last to this day. With the rise of therapeutic solutions, such as mindfulness and unconscious bias, we see a concern with mental deficits that see both children and adults as pathological – in a sense needing cured from their normal thinking and behavior. Judith Harris, in a piece of definitive research showed that this approach was seriously flawed. Identity is not defined by internal conflicts but by genetics, peer pressure and some parental influence. His ‘identity’ theory, in effect, had an identity crisis when it came up against the empirical evidence.

Influence

Erikson has been influential not only among early years’ practitioners but also among those who study adolescence. ‘Identity crisis’ has entered our language as a general term for confusion about the self. Nevertheless, in the end, it is a reframing of the Freudian concept of the ‘ego’, driven forward by dualist conflict. What Erikson does is draw attention to the different needs of people at roughly different stages of their lives. Education and learning are heavily influenced by internal conflicts and external, social pressures. Whether we need Erikson’s precise staged, theoretical framework is another question.

Bibliography

Erikson E. (1950) Childhood and Society

Erikson E. (1958) Young Man Luther. A Study in Psychoanalysis and History

Erikson E. (1968) Identity: Youth and Crisis

Erikson E. (1969) Gandhi's Truth: On the Origin of Militant Nonviolence

Erikson E. Kivnick H. (1986) Vital Involvement in Old Age

Erikson E. Erikson J.M. (1987) The Life Cycle Completed

Coles, R. (1970) Erik H. Erikson: The Growth of His Work. Boston: Little, Brown & Co.

Herbart Individuality and character

Johann Friedrich Herbart (1776 - 1841) was a German philosopher, who studied Kant, was a pupil of Fichte, and far better known as a philosopher than educational theorist. It was only after his death in 1841 that his most famous text General Education became known and popular, so popular that his education system gained global interest. 

Education, he thought, comes up against a particular problem: it is familiar to all, and worse, what they think they know is best for all. So he wanted to place education and the education of teachers on a sound pedagogic footing, grounded in science and the psychology of learning.

Individuality

In General Education (1806) he disagreed with Fichte’s state oriented educational position as laid out in Address to the German Nation. Herbart took the opposite position, seeing education as being apolitical and universal, not in the interest of the state, but an end in itself. For Herbart it was the individuality of the learner, not the state, that should be at the centre of education. The teacher must bring out the many-sidedness, the many interests, of an individual while developing their moral character, all the time seeing the learner as an ‘individual’. The teacher has to get the child interested, to become active, and reach out to learn. Children have individuality but it is character that has to be changed.

Herbart saw education very much as a process of teaching and learning a solid curriculum, so that learners develop but are shaped by that teaching. This led Herbart to determine a method for instruction that kept the process fixed to htat form of development.  

Character

The teacher must see their job as the development of character. This starts with relating new ideas to what the learner can recall and already knows, to stimulate interest. Then relate the interest to something in the real world, an object or something experienced. This can be widened out to other ideas and experiences and on, on adolescents to generalisation and finally useful in life and dealing with life. The unfolding and teaching of character leads steadily and solidly towards intellectual and moral development.

There is, of course, a strong Kantian influence here and character has a moral dimension of being able to identify the good and reject what is evil. This takes place as a process of the awakening of character. It is there but has to be nurtured. There is, of course, the ever-present concept of the ‘will’, something that dominated 19th century German philosophy.

Teacher training

It was Herbart that consolidated the idea that teacher training should be formalised, based on science and taught in Universities. His work formalised teaching around a system of psychology with a clear methodology, which recognised the individuality of the learner. This focus on teacher training was his lasting legacy. 

Critique

Although his educational theories have their roots in philosophy, in particular German idealism, there is a sense that it is both influenced by but also rejects that influence. He retains the strong moral purpose which Kant saw as important but also hte psychological differences in individuals.

Influence

His educational theory had an immense influence in the 19th century, not only in Germany but also America. There was a Herbert Society in the US and his recommendations were taken seriously and implemented on scale.

Bibliography

Herbart, J.F., 1895. The science of education: Its general principles deduced from its aim and the aesthetic revelation of the world. DC Heath & Company.

Herbart, J.F., 1891. A text-book in psychology: An attempt to found the science of psychology on experience, metaphysics, and mathematics (Vol. 18). D. Appleton.

 

Kant. Moral character

Immanuel Kant (1724 – 1804), the German idealist philosopher, spent his entire life in Koenigsberg. His transcendental idealism is a reaction to the empiricism of David Hume. Rather than experience being formative, space and time are given prior to experience, with experience being the appearance of a reality we cannot directly know, as transcendental things-in-themselves. We impose categories upon the world and senses, the individual and thus the role of reason are restored in Kant’s Copernican reversal. 

As a teacher and Professor he taught a huge range of subjects but the text Lectures on Education, published just before his death in 1803 by his pupil Rink, although attributed to Kant, is actually a series of paragraphs culled and rewritten from his already published work. Nevertheless, these views on education, scattered across his works, constitute a coherent position.

Reason and education

He was influenced by Rousseau, who he often quotes, in particular, the novel Emile. Reason is restored to a position of determining morality and this is important as there is in Kant the unconditional nature of morality and the universalisation of moral principles. This is what shapes his views on learning. Morality comes from reason and not as Hume claimed, sentiment. That is why the child is not yet a moral being. Education, namely reason, must bring them to that position. Education is therefore linked to reason and being able to think and becoming a moral being.

Nevertheless, Kant’s is a very learner-centric view of learning, as the autonomous moral character must eventually come from the individual, not the imposition of morality by society or a religious authority. Although the child must have its needs met through nurture, discipline must be applied to restrain natural impulses. Animal nature is thus turned into human nature. This leads to the development of reason. Schooling is necessary as it exposes the rational child to others with the same developing kral outlook. This is also the place knowledge and skills are acquired, always with purpose and application, always with a moral outlook.

Practical education

Education, for Kant, is therefore the development of moral character as having a good moral character matters in adult life. Obedience is important and education is about structure, schedule and strictness, imposed by parents and teachers upon naturally unruly children. 

He also has a great deal to say on the details of instruction. He is clearly against coddling of babies and children and wants to cultivate the use of memory, combine knowing and doing, avoid fiction when young, encourage games but work is not play. He extols the virtue of social interaction and the Socratic method of instruction. Maxims, rules and school laws should be in place and truthfulness encouraged.

Civilisation

Education is a civilising process that leads us into a single humanity, a rational species that can be seen as one community politically with universal moral and political beliefs, leading to an ever-perfecting humanity and perpetual peace. We are in this sense educated not for the present but the future.

Critique

The goal of moral education, the elimination of evil and the goal of progress towards moral perfection may emerge from Kant’s philosophy but it has a philosophic purity that is far from reality. Morality is not something that seems to be taught through reason but rather felt through an innate need to empathise, sympathise and feel altruistic towards others. To attach a moral dimension to all learning seems at odds with some of its clearly utilitarian needs. Kant’s elaborate philosophy gave birth to his pedagogy but its stark dependence on reason reflects the disassociated, childless bachelor he was.

Influence

While he had an influence in prescribing a moral side and purpose to all education and this was picked up and transplanted into the US by those, such as John Dewey, whose doctoral dissertation was on Kant, his influence has been minimal, nowhere near as much as his philosophy.

Bibliography

Kant, I., 2017. Kant: The metaphysics of morals. Cambridge University Press.

Smith, N.K., 2011. Immanuel Kant's critique of pure reason. Read Books Ltd.

Lectures on Education https://oll.libertyfund.org/title/davids-kant-on-education-uber-padagogik#preview

Erasmus Humanist educator

Desiderius Erasmus (1466 – 1536) after whom the EU student mobility sche was named, was a truly European figure, having worked in the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, France and England. He is a pan-European figure, the ‘prince of Humanism’ who marks the end of slavish scholasticism and played a role in the Reformation that got his entire corpus prohibited by the Catholic Church. He also marks a change in attitudes towards learning, where the word ‘humanistic’ is entirely appropriate. His unpleasant experiences at various schools ‘torture chambers’ led him to reflect deeply on their failures and he wrote extensively throughout his life, not only on what should be taught but how it should be taught, with particular sensitivity towards the learner.

Humanist teacher

Many of his most famous works have the sensitivity of the humanist teacher. His Adagia (1500), 800 proverbs in Latin, were typical of the moral teaching of the day, taking ancient wisdom and reforming them for modern times. In Praise of Folly (1511), written in England, provocatively, under the cloak of satire, attacked the abuses of the organised religion, the Catholic Church, monasticism and many other secular conceits. 

Works on education

Copia: Foundations of the Abundant Style (1512), written while at the University of Cambridge, is a textbook on rhetoric or style, teaching technique for both the spoken and written word. This combination of pedagogy an emphasis on rhetoric and style is typical of his education writings.

In The Right Method of Instruction (1511) Greek and Latin are seen as an indispensable foundation for education, yet not through hemmering home rules of grammar but by reading and practice. It is Greek literature that he holds as offering the most in terms of content. Note taking is essential, so have a notebook at hand and write, in your own words, in a manner that is concise and easy to learn and recall, so he disapproves of the practice of taking down a lecture just as it is delivered. Memory has three aspects: full understanding of the subject, logical ordering of the contents and repetition to ourselves. You must test your memory vigorously, and minutely. He also recommends learning aids such as charts, tables and diagrams. Finally, try to teach what you know. This puts your own knowledge to the test. On teaching, he refers back to his Adagia for topics to speak or write upon. There is the move up from the basics through argumentative essays to original composition.

On Education for Children (1529) is his testament to the power of education. He goes to great lengths to encourage early education. One must draw out (e-ducare) good traits and behaviours while discouraging the bad. You become what you read so he strenuously recommends ancient texts, as opposed to argumentative scholastic sophistry, chivalric literature or the myths of King Arthur. He implores parents to educate their children. For the parent and teacher he is dismissive of rote-learning, the importance of play and the avoidance of punishment.

There is even a work on child behaviour, On Civility in Children (1530),  a treatise addressed to a boy on how to deport oneself, avoiding the faults of others. In The Education of a Christian Prince (1532) he puts an emphasis on seeing learners as individuals. A good teacher is gentle and avoids corporal punishment. 

Critique

While a man who challenged the norms of his age he was also very much a man of his age, with an intense zeal for Greek, Latin and ancient writings. To be fair he wanted the Bible to be available in all languages as he saw the message of Christ as universally enlightening. This laying down of Green and especially Latin has also, arguably, had a lasting influence that has lasted past its relevance and usefulness.

Influence

As a towering intellectual his influence on European culture has been huge, marking as he did a profound shift towards humanism. This was the time of the Reformation and he also played a role in this movement, albeit as an observer, as although he agreed with Luther, he disagreed with his methods. He was a scholar not a politician or reformer. His name lives on in the EU Erasmus programme, a scheme for the mobility of students and international study. 

Bibliography

Erasmus, D., Roterodamus, E. and Barker, W.W., 2001. The adages of Erasmus. University of Toronto Press.

Erasmus, D., 2019. Collected works of Erasmus. University of Toronto Press.

Musk. Neuralink's Brain-Machine interfaces and Starlink

Elon Musk has many strings to his bow but one is of particular interest to learning, started in 2016 - Neuralink. An array of thin fibres has been developed that can be inserted into the brain so that data can be read, analysed and turned into actions. Significant progress has been made and, with the release of the Pager monkey video in April 2020, where neural activity was decoded to play a computer game. This has opened up debate around invasive (and non-invasive) technology for learning. The idea of plugging the brain into learning experiences is one small step closer.

Brain-machine interface

Research in this area has been going on for over 100 years, since the 1920s. More recently brai implants have had great success in 

In  a video showing a nine year old primate, called Pager, playing a computer game. At first it plays the game with a joystick, rewarded by a banana milkshake through a tube. It learns the game and plays well. The joystick is then unplugged and the primate plays only through the fibre array of 2000 fibres, each about one twentieth the width of a human hair, inserted into its brain, in the region known to control hand and arm movements. Pager even continued to play the game with its mind ignoring the joystick. The intentional data from the fibres is interpreted by AI and it continues to play the game well. The efficacy of the array was obvious. 

It’s initial use is targeted at paraplegics, quadriplegics, stroke victims and those with locked-in syndrome, who will be able to control their own movements and interact with the world. The control of wheelchairs and exoskeletons are obvious applications. Epilepsy and the monitoring and prevention of seizures is also being researched along with other neurological disorders such as deafness and blindness. They also have mental illness in mind, such as ADHD, addiction and depression. 

Beyond this a general application is control of computers at the speed of thought. This wireless interface short-circuits the clumsy use of ‘meat’ fingers and thumbs. This causally links the brain directly with all online resources. The goal is to give people communication capabilities via text of speech synthesis.

Learning

Once the brain is linked to the internet all learning resources are available but with a frictionless interface. This is obviously useful for those with disabilities but it reduces the cognitive load of traditional interfaces for everyone. This in itself should make learning quicker. Brain to device to internet opens up the possibility of more direct access to learning opportunities not only by those with disorders but all learners.

More than just access, if a feedback loop is possible, personalised learning could be made available with immediate formative assessment and feedback through adaptive learning systems. AI not only reads what you do and know, it provides support and opportunities to learn how to overcome any problems you have in learning. The future development of such systems is now underway.

Starlink

Musk has also launched thousand of low-level satellites called Starlink (a division of SpaceX) to provide low-cost 5G internet at any spot on the planet. The plan is to launch 42.00 satellites by 2027. The possibility of delivering quality online learning to anyone, anytime, anyplace may be realised by this initiative. You need a satellite dish and terminal and these have already been shipped to a large number of paying customers. 

Critique

There are those who think this approach has real limitations and that all talk of reading intentions beyond motor skills is misleading, never mind interpreting semantic thoughts through language. Some think that invasive technology is too risky, certainly for mass adoption and rely on electroencephalography (EEG) or reflected laser light to read neural activity. The problem with these non-invasive methods is that the data is limited and messy.

There is also the problem with the specific nature of these devices. It is not clear that they apply to more than specific uses or can even develop with the patient’s progress. There is also the speed of reaction problem. Such devices may be fine for deliberate action but to slow for fast reactions and decisions. Machine learning may help such devices adapt to patients and this work is already having some success. 

Influence

Neuralink has set the pace in this field with proven progress. There are other invasive techniques, such as stents in major blood vessels and others such as Kernel are using non-invasive techniques to send light into the brain and read what comes back. This is a fast moving area that holds promise as human-machine brain interfaces develop. The possibilities have been explored in Clark’s AI for Learning (2020).

Bibliography

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Ya-bAYri84

https://neuralink.com/

https://www.starlink.com/

Forbes article https://www.forbes.com/sites/gabrielasilva/2021/04/13/how-machine-learning-will-enable-technologies-that-anticipate-what-the-brain-thinks/?sh=505af8d75253

Starnet https://www.cnet.com/home/internet/starlink-satellite-internet-explained/