TITLE: Education as a Way to Create Better Adults
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: June 17, 2016  2:55 PM
DESC: 
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BODY:
In
<A HREF="http://www.drdobbs.com/article/print?articleId=240003442&siteSectionName=architecture-and-design">
   this Dr. Dobbs interview</A>,
Alan Kay reveals how he became interested in education as a
life's work: as a teenager, he read the issue of <EM>Life</EM>
magazine that introduced
<A HREF="http://time.com/3638432/behind-the-picture-the-liberation-of-buchenwald-april-1945/">
   Margaret Bourke-White's photos from Buchenwald</A>.
Kay says:

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
 That probably was the turning point that changed my entire
 attitude toward life.  It was responsible for getting me
 interested in education.  My interest in education is
 unglamorous.  I don't have an enormous desire to help
 children, but I have an enormous desire to create better
 adults.
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

This desire has caused Kay to explore how children think and
learn more deeply than most people do.  Our greatest desires
sometimes lead us down paths we would not otherwise go.

For some reason, Kay's comments on his enduring involvement
in education made me think of this passage from
<A HREF="http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/03/05/wittgenstein-schoolteacher/">
   a profile of Ludwig Wittgenstein</A>
in the <EM>Paris Review</EM>:

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
 We all struggle to form a self.  Great teaching, Wittgenstein
 reminds us, involves taking this struggle and engaging in it
 with others; his whole life was one great such struggle.  In
 working with poor children, he wanted to transform himself,
 and them.
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

Wittgenstein wanted to create a better adult of himself and so
engaged for six years in "the struggle to form a self" with
elementary school students.  Let's hope that the students in
his charge grew into better adults as well.  As Kay says later
in the same interview, "Education is a double-edged sword.
You have to start where people are, but if you stay there,
you're not educating."
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