Bill Kerr wrote:
In his dissertation on the history of the Dynabook John Maxwell asks "what is a powerful idea, anyway?" and also argues that there has been a decline of powerful idea discourse
I don't know that I argued that there is an overall decline (though there may be)... my point was that the powerful idea discourse -- the "non-universals" -- is just pathologically divorced from discussions of IT in education. So Web2.0 gets talked about for its own sake, as do office productivity and web research. But the core orientation that people like Kay and Papert advocated has been lost in the ensuing din.
However, I'm also left feeling a bit unsure of the status of the "non universals" list, eg. how complete is it? have people argued about it and disputed it?
I think the non-universals are by their very nature disputed and disputable, and incomplete. They originate with people, and are thereby politically situated and charged. They require an active cultural committment. The dispute over evolution is such an interesting case: here is an extremely powerful idea, the implications of which are still being worked out, and this is fundamentally threatening to all sorts of people, on levels which are deeply and historically embedded and which take centuries to sort themselves out.
Where I end up is that all the stuff about "how people learn" is kind of beside the point compared with the curricular importance of powerful ideas. This is the real value of education. But it's politically safer to do work on learning styles and assessment methodologies than to focus on the importance of something like evolution in the curriculum.
- John Maxwell Canadian Centre for Studies in Publishing Simon Fraser University jmax@sfu.ca
squeakland@lists.squeakfoundation.org