Pea Speech | Cuban Speech | Audience Questions | Home
Master of ceremonies: Thank you both very much. I thought I would start off by listing some questions for you just to elicit some conversation amongst yourselves and with the speakers. I'll let you know where I'm going with this so that you can be thinking about it, and then after we've been through this, we'll throw it open for general questions. My first question will be for those of you funding ed technologies, what challenges or dilemmas are you facing, generally, and any challenges around teacher professional development in particular? For those of you who are not funding ed technology but may be considering it, what are your concerns? And for those of you who are investing in technology, what have you found; I'm wondering what have you found to be the most essential questions to ask of applicants? In the spirit of sharing amongst ourselves, what, based on experience, haven't you asked that later on you wished that you had?
So I thought I would start off with: For those of you funding ed technologies, are there any challenges or dilemmas that you're facing, generally, around teacher professional development that you would appreciate hearing from either speaker or from each other? Okay, go ahead.
Woman: I think one of the biggest challenges is how different the children's experience of technology is from the adults' experience of technology. I agree with you completely that the adults are often dealing from motivations of fear and greed. I think the kids are driven much more by motivation of joy and curiosity and innovation and I sometimes think if we could just get teachers out of the room for a while and let the kids play, they would show us how to use the technology effectively in classrooms in ways that the adults can't imagine, and so my concern is, how do we loosen up the grown-ups? How do we get them to be much more playful in their approach to the technologies?
Master of ceremonies: Anyone in the audience or either speaker, how would you respond?
Larry Cuban: Well, I don't accept the premise of the question. Just anecdotal stuff that I've seen when I go into schools and when I read is that if kids are left alone, they'll play games, and the novelty effect of the machines and software soon wears off. So the kind of-and forgive me, we won't see each other again, so I can say this-but the romantic notion, if only adults would disappear and kids would do that, is a romantic notion. It's not the function of having compulsory attendance. Schools serve multiple purposes and technology is not one of the things that it's supposed to serve. It's supposed to build citizens. It's supposed to help kids get jobs eventually. It's supposed to help with the development of character. It's supposed to individually help in the psychological-social development of kids. So the notion of if only adults would get out of the way, and I'm exaggerating a bit to make this point, is a romantic notion.
Roy Pea: I think we've hit a hot button for me [laughter from audience]. What you will see kids doing with computers alone all depends on what roles the teachers play before they leave the classroom and when they come back, because if you set up an environment where you are having kids pursuing projects and introducing them, not to games, but to tools of various kinds where they can make and build things that are generative by nature and design, and you provide them with examples of what it means to do good work and an audience for presenting it to later, I think adults can then go away and you'll see some extraordinary things happen. And we do regularly in computer clubs, in classrooms, and all over, but they need the audience on the back end. They have to be there getting feedback, being brought around to revision and so forth, but kids need audience for their work instead of just having to regurgitate knowledge that they've been handed by somebody else.
Master of ceremonies: Anyone else want to comment on that particular topic? You had a question?
Woman: Well, another thing that I think we grapple with is the notion in getting engaged with schools in terms of all-around technology, is what sort of models can effectively be sustained once the initial utilization is started and do a bit of model, like PC based, which is individual classroom teachers coming and getting grants. There are things that may happen in classrooms, but how do you sustain a commitment at this level for that technology, or should you really work within a school or within a district and kind of concentrate the effort so it may be more sustainable at that level?
Master of ceremonies: So you're talking about where is your strategy, the classroom or at what level is your strategy?
Woman: Yeah, or how to do the combination, because it does seem like the classroom strategies start getting teacher-leaders identified and supported, but then you've got the issue of in the district, the professional development around integrating technology into the classroom and the whole issues, word, nonverbal.
Master of ceremonies: Issues for any type of reform strategy.
Larry Cuban: Well, the way that I would respond is that, to be consistent with what I said in my remarks, and not only just to be consistent, but because I believe in it, what I said, is that it's not about technology, it's about the kinds of knowledge you want, the kinds of teaching, and the kind of learning, not about technology. Now, I know I'm speaking to the wrong group, but I'm telling you, it's not about technology.
Master of ceremonies: Well, I think, in fact, we realize that and then the question is, where do you get engaged? Is it on the classroom level?
Larry Cuban: Well, then, if you realize that, then you're really talking about what are the kinds of learning that you want to encourage? What are the kinds of teaching that you encourage? What are the approaches to knowledge and why? And then seeing there if people do support that, what are the structural conditions, what are the processes in schools that will move you toward that? It's a much more wholistic way of looking at it than the kind of "What's the best entry level, whether it's a classroom or a school or a district? Does the superintendent have to come on board?" Someone has to think through these issues in order to get the kind of productive collaboration people want, but it is about deeper issues such as teaching and learning, and the technology-and this is the hardest part-to try to de-escalate that kind of rhetoric around the technology is literally trying to hold back the waves, which is a poor metaphor for what's going on in Palo Alto and in the Bay Area, so I accept that.
Master of ceremonies: Okay. Yeah, back there.
Man: I have another question about entry points, but in terms of child development. I am concerned because most of the literature that we read about computers in schools sort of glibly talks about K-12. Now, there's a big difference between kindergarten and 12th grade and we know quite a lot today about child development. We know that an enriched, multisensory learning environment is essential for the development of the brain. We also know that body movement and learning through body movement is essential for cognitive development, neural development, and, as has been shown recently, for the development of a healthy immune system, and I wonder, Larry, whether you have, in your studies, come across any reports that have investigated the potential deviation from cognitive and neural development and the development of the immune system which might be caused by excessive computer use at an early age?
Larry Cuban: The quick answer is I haven't looked at that literature that you just briefly mentioned, but in a memo that I wrote to the Center for my report, I did look at preschool and I was struck by a couple of things when I did look at the larger literature. When personal computers first came out in the late '70s, early '80s, the National Association of Early Childhood Education had one of their early statements and was very negative toward the use of computers for some of the reasons that you have raised. The developmental perspective of how children grow in everything, their need for direct experience rather than vicarious experience, and the fear that these machines would preempt chunks of time in nursery and preschool and in kindergarten was most pronounced. But what I noticed in the literature when I went through it recently was that this position had changed, so that the most recent statement that's come out in 1996 from the same National Association of Early Childhood Education provides a very modified and very cautious support for the use of computers.
For that memo that I wrote to your Center, when I go into those schools, what I see, I think, is a fairly constructive way of dealing with that, is that in most nursery schools and kindergartens, they have learning centers. And what they've done is to convert, add a learning center on computers. They'll have two, four, or five computers there and the kids will go there for certain blocks of time because it's so attractive. I mean, the kids-they have a little clock there, a timer, 15 minutes and you've got to move on to something else, a set of rules, turn taking and all that. I was struck by that it lessened my own worries along the lines that you were talking about because early childhood education is so developmentally oriented that there's a built-in brake on that kind of imperative that I don't see in secondary schools and elementary schools. You follow that?
Man in audience: Yes.
Larry Cuban: Now whether or not that mild, cautious optimism is merited, I don't know.
Roy Pea: And you don't see it in advertising.
Larry Cuban: Oh, no. Oh, I collect the ads. I collect ads aimed at little children. I have a folder of them in my file because I think what's going to have to-what happens in the battleground around computers is really the ages 3 to 6. Here you have teachers who are student oriented to begin with, who really set up classes that a lot of reform-oriented folks like Roy would die were senior high teachers to teach in this manner. Debbie Maier's whole approach at Central Park East was to create a kindergarten environment at the high school-cross-disciplinary, integrated team teaching, blocks of time on a subject, all of that. So I think the struggle is really at the preschool and primary grades, for what's going to happen, and I don't know which way it's going to go because I'm concerned about the advertising. I'm concerned about the pervasiveness of the myth that if you don't get a kid on that keyboard at the age of 18 months, no Harvard, no $100,000K a year, none of that! So I worry about that.
Master of ceremonies: Do I understand you to say that the structure of early childhood education is the kind of thing that we are hoping to have and would like to see in other grades, and that we lose something if kids spend more time on computers and don't have that opportunity?
Larry Cuban: I'm not saying that. I'm saying that the adaptation that I've seen so far, and I'm going to be amended by people who are more knowledgeable, is that it's much more confined in early childhood classrooms, from preschool through the early grades, and the reason for that is that teachers are inculcated in developmental approaches to the growth of children. They are very concerned about the psychological, emotional, and social growth of kids because subject matter becomes extremely important as the kids age and the external demands become much more powerful, we see that slipping away very easily through the grades. And most of the reformers from Howard Gardner to Roy Pea to others, what they want to do is to have teachers think like that and believe about kids in that matter, and then create classrooms and schools that way. That's what I think.
Master of ceremonies: Your name just came up. You have anything to say?
Roy Pea: Sure, for 6 years I was a floor up from the Bank Street School in New York and worked with kids there all the time, where it's organized in just this way that Larry describes and had been for 60 years (although in a different location than the upper West Side, down in Greenwich Village originally), so, no, I'm quite in line with Larry on this one. And I have a 5-year-old daughter, and she doesn't spend much time on computers. There are things that she enjoys, surely, but I think that this notion that it's one more arena for play rather than a form of preparation. I mean, I've given a number of talks to preschools where I helped emphasize for groups of parents that the "pre-" in "pre-school" means before and not preparation, because there really is way too much of a push for hot housing of kids, and computers are now used as the new guilt vehicle for doing that and I think that's a destructive direction.
Master of ceremonies: Yes.
Woman: I am sitting here and I kind of wear several hats here. I'm at a community college and I do the technology and educational training for teachers who are going through their certificate program and I'm also the director of a nonprofit and we've been doing research with computers in education for about 15 years, and we have developed some software. Since the issue of advertising has come up, I thought it might be interesting to think about how some educational software is developed and we haven't talked very much about software, but the problem of advertising goes back to the problem of publishing software: The companies that are publishing educational software really rely on retail sales. When the product is produced, it's called an educational software product. Ninety percent of their sales are to the retail market and not to the school market, and so, naturally, they put their investment in what's going to sell in the market and the consequences for all of us is that a lot of us are not going to approve of them and that there's big hype about these products on the market. Dustin Houston, who's a ___________ California now _______, comes from ________. He has written a very interesting paper that some of you may be interested in, talking about the difficulties of publishing and actually creating, designing and creating good educational software. As computers have become more complicated, the process of developing is more complicated, so you almost have to be a movie producer. You have to have voice talent, you have to have graphics, you have to have art, you have to have animation, you have to have programmers, and, obviously, it's extremely expensive and getting more expensive, so naturally the bottom line is the issue for the publishers, and they cut the expenses on psychology or educational pedagogy or whatever in order to sell the product. Dustin Houston has made a plea in his paper that foundations consider supporting the development of good software, because the tools are not useful without good software. And so that was one thing I wanted to say.
I wanted to also mention that we have done considerable research and the federal government is doing research with a product we developed called _______ and we have used that research on 2nd-graders, because in the preschool question that 1st- and 2nd-grade question and in both studies, they have found that that boosts reading skills ________ and their phonics skills and so on. There is evidence that well-designed software can be very useful and these children do stay in at recess because they enjoy working on the computers, not just for playing games, but for actually accomplishing and developing useful skills.
Master of ceremonies: Thank you for your insights. Any comments from either speaker? Okay, any other questions? Yes.
Man: I had a quick question. We were talking earlier about the entry point of classroom technologies, what would be best. I think you both mentioned in your talks that teachers are really crucial to technology in the classroom. I'm wondering from both of your perspectives, do you think that we're training teachers adequately to get used to doing it right, technical environments for technology in the classrooms, or do we need to focus the curriculum that we're using to credential teachers and begin it that way?
Roy Pea: In answer to your two questions: (1) No. (2) Yes. And there are hard challenges around that. At Northwestern University, I was dean of the School of Education and Social Policy for a number of years. We had teacher professional development programs in that context, teacher programs, and 20 faculty devoted to integrating learning sciences, cognition, instruction, software design, research on learning in classrooms with such tools. Here's the dilemma: we could have funded and built the best lab in the United States for teaching teachers about advanced technologies and effective uses in instruction, and these would then largely be things that they would then not find when they went into schools. So there's a real kind of horizon issue.
A model that I started before I left and that's being continued by the new dean, Penny Peterson, involves working in partnerships with K-12 schools. The partnership will provide kinds of reciprocal support between the K-12 schools and the graduate school of education, so, on the one hand, they have all kinds of experience that the faculty, frankly, often don't, being a bit more theoretically inclined, for the real issues around everything from classroom management to really having to deal with the tradeoffs of all these desiderata of good instruction the faculty believe in. And yet, at the same time, the faculty can help them in thinking through next-generation approaches to learning and teaching and assessment and the like.
So I think there are ways to create systems, but they break down boundaries and create new kinds of partnerships, and I think that's going to be a secret to preparing the next generation of teachers. The traditional model of the stand-alone school of education with its method courses separate from its content courses and lots of other things we can critique is a real problem, and if it doesn't get its act together, other things will step in in its stead, things like Teach for America. Lots of states are creating alternative certification programs because, especially in inner cities, there are huge crises. Chicago is a case in point, where, basically, in summer boot camps, people are being tossed into the schools and I don't think that's going to be a solution.
Master of ceremonies: I'd like to hear from some of you who are not funding in technology and might be considering it. What are your concerns or questions? I know there may not be too many of you here in the room. Kim, do you have any?
Kim Ford: Well, I think that question on sort of, not only preparation of teachers, but maybe back to Larry's earlier comment about what we ought to be doing is helping teachers, helping create the kind of teaching and learning that we want to happen in the classrooms. I think that calls for ___________ technology in the classrooms for the kids, but do you have any suggestions for how we can do a better job of creating those _________ resources?
Roy Pea: Just two quick remarks, and I'll distribute this to my colleague, Mark Schlager, on the second half of your question. I see a big challenge to be undergraduate subject-matter preparation for teachers. The subject matter matters! A lot of us are seeing faculty in universities as being the least willing to take on innovations in how they teach. In the sciences or mathematics or history, it's still lecture/demonstration. A lot of things that are happening at the precollege level with teachers engaged in innovative, learner-centered reforms that have been influenced a lot by scientific research on improved models for learning and teaching are not happening at the college level. And there are real incentive problems there because faculty are generally not rewarded for changes in instruction. So it would be great if we can get the colleges of education doing things, but subject matter faculty remain a problem, for teachers are going to teach biology the way that they were taught biology, and if they're taught it in a way that is not productive, they're going to carry it right into the classroom. So that's a big barrier. But, in terms of models for in-service, TAPPED IN provides a crucial new direction-Mark, would you like to say something about that?
Mark Schlager: The thing that we're seeing in professional development is that a lot of activities going on are disconnected. You have separate programs devoted to preservice, first-year teachers, and in-service teachers with no continuity from the perspective of the teachers' professional growth. Lots of professional development courses on how to use technology, on problem-based learning, on inquiry-based learning, all in isolation from each other--no way to share experiences and resources. We need better mechanisms for enabling teachers to work together, for really exceptional materials and teaching practices to spread and scale-up. We're trying to foster that in a sustainable online community of teachers, staff developers, teacher education programs, and other education professionals from many different organizations representing different education reform concepts and approaches, to give them a place and tools to form lasting professional relationships with their peers throughout their careers.
Master of ceremonies: For those of you who are investing in technology, what have you found, in addition to Larry's questions, to be the most essential questions to ask of applicants for funding? Is there anything you wished, or that you know now that you didn't know when you first got in this biz that you'd like to share? Kim.
Kim: I had an amendment to Larry's third question, is that software, hardware, software and Internet connections are __________. What about these ________? ____ totally left out of the equation for making a tradeoff for you want to do ________. Is there an appropriate ________? [Sound keeps fading out.]
Master of ceremonies: Okay. Either of you want to comment on what you've seen that is good professional development for existing teachers in the classrooms, not ones that are going through the system?
Roy Pea: Sure. In this project called CoVis, or Learning through Collaborative Visualization (http://www.covis.nwu.edu), we initially worked with a small group of teachers in the Chicago area and several years later started working with upwards of 100 teachers, many of them from inner-city schools in Chicago and New Jersey, and in terms of models, I mean, the one thing I would say quickly that we learned is the importance of having them learn the ways that you're hoping they'll have students learn. So that involves having them using the new technologies to do projects, not "training them to use the technologies," but having them do what you hope that the learners are going to do, so they can participate in a firsthand way in what it is that we're hoping will happen with learners, and that's a key thing. I mean, the worst thing is a graduate course in constructivism that's taught by lecture.
Larry Cuban: Let me just add to that. Kim, you probably know about this already. The best that I've seen is a book by Judith Sandholtz, Kathy Ringstaff, and David Dwyer that grew out of the ACOT experience. They had this professional development system located at the school in which teachers would literally go through that for a week or more. I went to Portal School in Cupertino to see some of that in action, and I was very impressed with it, because it's sustained, it responds to the issues that teachers face on a daily basis, and it takes the enormous enthusiasm that groups of teachers have about wanting to have their kids learn more and profit more from this kind of a strategy of using technology, and helps them in very concrete. I was very impressed with it.
Master of ceremonies: Great. Yes, Rita?
Rita: I had a question for Larry on the strategy you were talking about in the computer labs, can you tell us more about recent ________ behavior and why ________?
Larry Cuban: The research is so sparse and mixed on whether lab-driven strategies in elementary and secondary schools have any merit whatsoever. It seems to end up as to be what's most efficient, given the allocation of resources that a school has, and equity driven in terms of how can we get most of the kids in it? So the lab part, remember the way it was developed at labs was the model of the typewriter. You had a typewriter room, you moved everyone through the equipment, and that was the most efficient way. You'd give everyone a little exposure. So the labs, the computer labs, were built initially on that model because remember the initial access was so limited, there was only so many computers for a large number of people. But there is simply no evidence that I can see that that has any merit other than for efficiency reasons and equity reasons, which are important, no question.
Now in the current situation, because there is much more access to computers where the ratios in some schools have gone down to below 10 students per computer, to put them into classrooms, and right now, that is the current rage, but, of course, that is the hardest nut to crack because teachers themselves are under so much pressure to meet conflicting demands upon them. For example, to use technology on a daily basis within a classroom, you literally have to have an enormous range of software available that fits the curriculum that the district wants you to do. Now, if anyone looks at it from the teacher's point of view, that is an enormous problem. Apart from the issue about whether those six or seven computers are going to work, how many are down that particular day, apart from that, which is what always happens with machines, so to have that kind of-to look at it from the teacher's point of view, it is a major issue, and that's only provided the teacher already has a belief system in place and a repertoire of concrete tactics to do that. So the notion of integrating them into classrooms is a major kind of effort and that seems to be very attractive to people, but when I go into classrooms, I can see again and again how hard it is for teachers who are willing and have the expertise, how hard it is to do because of the lack of particular things. And that's why textbooks remain so popular. You can pick them up, you can take them with you. You can drop them; they don't break. You can open them at any place; you can begin anywhere. I'm not making a kind of a wonderful statement that textbooks are terrific, but I am talking about what does the world look like from the teacher's view who has to face very complex work conditions every day?
Roy Pea: This is really a good example where trends in technology really influence the kind of things that you can say. So, I mean, the shift from stand-alone computing to a client-server model really changes the problem that you just described and, by some accounts, even eliminates it. And the notion of individual educational software titles, which you raised as being very expensive, again, dramatically shifts in a component software environment in which the economics of development and distribution are going to be very, very different from what we've seen today. Also, it will be a big change to bei able to do automatic updates of software over the web rather than having to worry about whole new purchasing cycles, and versioning issues with your software, and shuffling around floppy disks. I mean, these are trends that are going to really change the difficulty of doing this stuff in the classroom and already are, in places where they're experimenting with them.
Woman: Would you speak to the part about the writing _______?
Larry Cuban: Yeah, there's mixed evidence on writing. If you're referring to the IBM, there was an initial, IBM came out with a piece of software early on-
Woman: I'm not talking about software.
Larry Cuban: Oh, just about word processing, something like that?
Woman: Just teaching reading and writing labs-
Larry Cuban: There is just mixed evidence on it. If you look at the research, that's the benefit I have with the help of these grad students to take a look at the research, it doesn't tell you what direction to go. It really doesn't.
Master of ceremonies: I wonder if the speakers might talk on equity issues relating to women and girls and as someone who's pretty low tech herself, of if any of you out there have seen programs that are really successful in getting girls involved? Please.
Man: I just had, yesterday-I work at the Santa Clara Unified School District-this issue in some of their courses. I think it was about 60 or 75 percent male and the instructor mentioned that Carol Clark _________ and has a engineering program that he's trying to get connected to encourage more women to get into at the high school level, but it seemed to be a problem in that.
Master of ceremonies: Any other questions on any topic related to technology? Laura.
Laura: I've got a bigger question. It came from Larry's comment about, I guess my feeling was that you can't underestimate the power of the dogma around the importance of being computer literate. I mean, to just say that is not enough. Well, just an example, I had dinner last night with two teachers and two school volunteers who are former corporate employees, and the conversation got very-it was as if people were speaking different languages and it was only five of us, and it was dinner and so it was casual, but you could tell that the teachers felt, in terms of-especially around, I think it was special ed school to career, there was a lot of-I mean, I found the teachers just becoming silent and feeling like they really had no voice, like they couldn't speak because they weren't really in the work force and they didn't know how to use computers and that the volunteers that had a different type of work setting environment were really pushing, saying "You need to teach them skills; you need to get them ready for work." And it was just a very-I guess my point was that you're saying that this is dogma, where I agree that we should be asking more fundamental questions about teaching and learning, but those conversations are really hard to have and that even bringing people together from two very different places of work and ways of thinking. Do you have any examples of joint projects or thinking where those two groups of people who do speak different languages come together to ask? Is that a question that you're asking?
Larry Cuban: Well, you can't really generalize about teachers. There are 2.5 million teachers. Even if you want to do the crude way of dividing the teachers into parts, there's a certain percentage who are going to be early adopters of any innovation that comes along because they want to renew themselves. There's a certain percentage at the other end saying, "I'm just counting the days." And then there's the large middle group that can go either way depending on the support they receive and so on, like that. So I don't know with your friends, where they are, but they could be silent for a number of reasons, not the only one that you gave. But it strikes me that one of the first steps is to say that it is dogma and not truth and you tell me how many people do speak out? Now, you can reject it, but at least to have a dialogue about what it is that people accept as truth, and let me give you just a couple of examples and they may not apply to your question, which is "How do you get people to talk with one another?"
The first step that I have as both a human being and as a teacher is that you are skeptical of what people say is true, and that's why I say it's dogma. But, for the sake of example, how long does it really take to learn how to use a keyboard or to learn how to use it in any particular industry? How long does it take? A month, 2 months, 3 months to learn anything at an entry level? Corporations do it all the time. When they relocate and they have a work force that has not had a high level of education, they train people in a couple of months to do the work on computers. There's enough literature on that. So why do you need 12 years of constant exposure to technology? That's a reasonable question to ask. I think there are reasonable rebuttals to my question, but at least you're going to have that kind of a dialogue that does not exist today. You get Clifford Stoll writing about Silicon Snake Oil and it's a wonderful polemic. It's lovely and, you know, I clapped at certain pages and then frowned at other pages and winced at even other pages, but to talk in the middle range with highly intelligent, educated people, you know, you can question dogma; this is democracy; it's okay to do that; you're not going to lose your job, but you name me how many superintendents, school board members, teachers, and principals will raise skeptical questions outside of a bar, a private dinner, or close friends? Very few. It's not that they're intimidated, it's what we all do when we're surrounded by kinds of statements that everyone believes.
So the first part is literally to raise questions and begin this kind of a debate about it, because I think when voice-activated software becomes so cheap, so pervasive and keyboards go away, people will say, "What the hell did we spend all that money and time and all that for keyboarding?" I think what's going to happen is that when the economy, not when, if the economy takes a downturn and money is not going to be available to schools as it is available now, you're going to hear much more questioning about "Why are we spending all of this money on technology?" And the dogma will be questioned then. I think it's important to raise these questions when the rivers of money are flowing now.
Master of ceremonies: I think Roy has a rebuttal.
Roy Pea: Well, the interesting thing about dogma is that it's belief without argumentation or evidence and, while for some people the belief that technology is needed for the jobs of the future may be dogma, we do need to look at the evidence. And I see strong data there. For example, I spent the last 2 days in Washington at the National Academy of Sciences, where there was a meeting of science, technology, policy, and U.S. innovation policy experts looking both nationally and internationally at the data around where economic growth has been coming from, and technology considered broadly-information technology, materials science, I mean a variety of types of technology is, by all the speakers, the single most important factor in economic growth. And there are considerable worries and there are careful workforce analyses from NSF and other places about the already dire shortage of scientists and engineers that will generate the next generation's innovations that are going to enable the U.S. to be competitive in terms of this technology driver for economic growth. So it's not an idle threat. There was a lot of talk about China and their organization of research parks on the model of the U.S. and a lot of large technology companies that have been doing intelligence work around where the innovations are coming from and shifts in foreign investment in American R&D laboratories. So these aren't idle points. So I just want to push that, Larry, because there really are education issues here and I'm not just talking about preparing, you know, a few hundred thousand engineers and computer scientists. This has to do with the citizenry at large.
Master of ceremonies: I know you have to go.
Larry Cuban: Roy's last comment, I'm afraid I have to go and teach, so I will have to leave after the comment, but it strikes me that Roy's point, although the tail end of it was precisely what I was going to say, when you look at the work force of the United States of America, the percentage of engineers and computer programmers in all the claims right now are infinitesimally small. Number one, there are 44 million students. The goals of the public school system on most of those, the goals of the public school system are not to prepare people for work alone. That's not the goal, and so you have millions of kids who are not going to be engineers, who are not going to be computer programmers, who are not going to be software designers, and we have to think in that broader way, too. I'm sorry, I really have to leave.
[End of session.]
Back to Tapped In