A nation of children: from immunology to education

Antonio M. Battro, MD, PhD:   Chief Education Officer, OLPC, One laptop per child

http://one.laptop.org/about/people/antonio-battro

A nation of children

Some twenty-six years ago in La Jolla I received a gift from one of the heroes of my generation, a slim book with an intriguing title: Man unfolding and a hand-written dedication “ To Antonio Battro with hope for the unfolding of a nation of children, Jonas Salk”. I still have the photo on my desk with the great physician and virologist in front of a blackboard where I was drawing a map showing my dream about my country Argentina being “saturated” with connected computers. Now I realize that Salk’s wish of a “nation of children” became the OLPC goal: to give every child (and teacher) of the world a good education with the help of a connected laptop.

Saturation and Scaling

Saturation is one of the principles of OLPC: “a laptop for every child (and teacher)” is what makes a “nation of children” small or large. The OLPC model is being implemented today in some forty countries at different levels of saturation and scale. In fact it turned out that Uruguay, our neighbor, reached this ambitious goal before Argentina, becoming the first saturated country of the world with the remarkable Plan CEIBAL www.ceibal.edu.uy. I am glad to add that in Argentina one province, La Rioja, has recently attained also a full saturation for all students and teachers of elementary and secondary schools, www.idukay.edu.ar; www.jcglarioja.com.ar a compelling program for the rest of the country, where the “one to one model” is expanding.

Such an expansion implies different levels of scaling.  A first scale level is the saturation of a city, as in Paraguay the city of Caacupé www.paraguay.educa.py , a second level is a region, as the island of Ometepe in Nicaragua (Figure 2). Both are now fully saturated. These four OLPC examples of increasing levels of scaling: city (Caacupé), island (Ometepe), province (La Rioja) and country (Uruguay) represent four types of  “nations of children”.

And this typology leads us to an “epidemiology” of education. Literally epidemiology is “the study of what is upon the people” and includes in its scope not only the field of health but also the field of education. Both are closely intertwined. In this sense educators can learn a lot from their medical colleagues that are working successfully in very large health programs around the world.

http://portaleducativofzt.org/

Immunology and education

In his book Jonas Salk gave an inspiring analogy between immunology and education in his chapter “Immunologic and psychological phenomena” :

“A familiar immunologic phenomenon is that referred to as passive as compared with active immunization. It is possible to induce a temporary effect of immunity by transferring antibodies from one host to another; but long-term immunizing effects can be induced only by the active participation of the host in developing his own antibodies as a consequence of his own interaction with the antigen” (p. 26, my emphasis).

After establishing these essentials facts of immunology Jonas Salk refers to the facts of learning:

“This not dissimilar to the individual who acts passively to what he is told but who has not, through engagement learned in a way that would result in understanding and hence in the more durable effect of active experience. Thus it would appear that the process of “learning” in immunology, or in psychology, is something that involves active effort, that what is learned is significant and effective in proportion to the effort expended. Thus a good antigen given in adequate dosage and on an appropriate schedule to a reactive individual will result in a substantial antibody response. The effect of this will persist a long time. The analogy to the educational process needs no further amplification” (p. 26, my emphasis).

Towards an epidemiology of education

It is clear that the difference between active and passive immunization is similar to the well-known distinction between active and passive learning. OLPC is fully engaged in an active constructivistic (Piaget) and constructionistic (Papert) approach to education.  In the same vein Salk talked about “ finding ways and means of engaging the mind constructively and finding ways of thinking about the mind so that its workings can be known sufficiently to engage it in the evolutionary schema” (p.112, my emphasis).

Jean Piaget showed that learning is constructed by well-defined stages.  The learning and developmental processes have their own timing depending on the age of the student, child or adolescent.  This is what constructivism implies, for instance in the realm of logic: “the formal obligation of constantly transcending the systems already constructed to assure non-contradiction converges with the genetic tendency to pass constantly the already achieved construction by fillings the gaps” (Battro, 1973). Today this timing can be monitored, assessed and modified by the use of neurocognitive technologies (Battro, Fischer & Léna, 2008).

And conversely, the immunological analog of the stages in developmental psychology could be the vaccination schedule, the series of vaccinations with the corresponding timing of all doses. And this can be done at a global scale. Once you have produced an effective vaccine you should vaccinate everyone at risk. The first vaccine-preventable disease targeted for eradication was smallpox and the World Health Organization, WHO, coordinated with success the global effort to eradicate this disease. In the same sense the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, UNESCO, could be considered the educational counterpart of the health policies of WHO in the world. Among the UNESCO goals we find the promotion of the universal access to information and communication technologies, and the elimination of the digital gap. OLPC, among other institutions, is working for that. We urgently need a “digital vaccine”… against ignorance…

In this context we can say that OLPC goal of saturation is the equivalent of the vaccination of a whole population. In a sense, OLPC provides a kind of “vaccination” to elicit self-sustainable knowledge in each student during a continuous educational campaign with a well-defined schedule. The theory of constructionism developed by Seymour Papert (1980), following the constructivism of his mentor Jean Piaget, is now having a global impact because of the extended use of new digital tools “to learn how to learn”, a most needed skill in our digital era (Fig. 3).

Fig 3. Seymour Papert at the OLPC offices in Cambridge, Mass when the first XO laptops arrived, November 2006.

To these two psychological frameworks we can add today the epidemiological framework of education. In fact one of the most important achievements of OLPC was to show that children teach in very effective ways in a digital environment (Battro, 2010). The horizontal dimension of teaching among peers and the vertical dimension of children teaching adults, is a key support of the OLPC mission. A new and formidable “teaching power” has appeared which multiplies many times the efficiency of any current pedagogical system. A new epidemiology of education is now in action.

References

Battro, A.M (2010). The teaching brain. Mind Brain and Education..4, 1, 28-33.

Battro, A.M. (1972). Piaget dictionary of terms. With a preface of Jean Piaget. (Edited and translated by E. Rutschi-Herrmann and S. F. Campbell). New York: Pergamon Press.

Battro, A.M, Fischer, K.W & Léna, P.J (Editors ) (2008) The educated brain. Essays in neuroeducation.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Papert, S. (1980). Mindstorms. Children, Computers and Powerful Ideas. New York: Basic Books.

Salk, J. (1977). Man unfolding. New York: Harper & Row.