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September 1, 1983
"Uncle John" arrived today in a 16-foot box. Dad let me watch as he supervised the installation in the classroom in the fourth level of our house. Supposedly I don't know anything about the way the teach-machines work, but actually I recognized almost every component, from the analog computer that acts as the basic feedback mechanism to the modulated voice control that simulates the tone of my actual Uncle John whom I met several times before we moved to Underbyrd-one mile directly beneath the South Pole. "Uncle John" represents, as I understand it, a response to a basic desire I am supposed to have at this age to look outside my immediate family for information and interpretation of facts and events, and it still takes into consideration a fundamental reluctance of a 10-year-old (me) to trust those without the familial context. I think I'll like "Uncle John".
September 4, 1983
Actually "Uncle John" is much better than I had anticipated. I gave him a pretty thorough test myself while he was giving me the standard "pretest" before each grade level. He is designed to win my confidence, so his rebukes are less stern than the "Dad" teach-machine I had in the last two-year cycle, which I realize now was set up to teach me the basics with the least amount of extra information.
Perhaps I whould explain why I use these technical terms--just to make the journal complete of course. Nobody, nobody at all will ever read these notes the way I have it planned. After I write them, I use my microcamera to film them, then I personally burn the notes and the negatives and I carry the positives around with me in my ear in an old miniaturized hearing aid. You see (I see, that is), in anyone ever found out about the manual, Dad and I would both be "outside" for good. Dad is an educo-technician first class and as such he has to swear to protect the manual of the U.S. Educational Commission on the theory and operation of the teach-machine system. It's something like carrying around the Coca-Cola formula. Anyway I had just received my microcamera as a present when Dad's new five-year manual arrived by bonded messenger last month and as he was signing up for it, I "casually" riffled the pages of the old one hanging from his belt--with the high-speed attachment of my camera going naturally--and then I moved back while they cremated the old manual and we all signed the register (I was second witness) to show that the transfer was complete and that no one had seen either manual while the transfer took place. Then the messenger went out through the locks to the Overbyrd educo-tech's office to do the same thing. Dad left, and I exhaled.
I'm not really malicious--just every once in a while I do something spontaneous that's pretty stupid a priori but which I am happy I did a posteriori--especially since I get away with it. All the secrecy used to be for patent reasons, before the system was adopted worldwide, but now they keep it up for more serious reasons--so the children won't find out. From what I can determine this has always been the procedure--that it is absolutely essential for the teaching process that the children never find out what the process is, and what they are supposed to be doing. Of course most children probably wouldn't care, but it's difficult when your father is an educo-tech and your mother is an ex-primary-programmer.
Anyway, I have a manual in my ear and let me tell you (that is, let me tell me) that it's a revelation. For example, at the end of the last cycle, everything seemed to be going haywire with the old machine. It gave answers that seemed to be less and less complete, and the response was so slow that I was sure he didn't understand me half the time. Now I read that this is just the operation of an obsolescence factor that motivates me to look forward to a machine with a wider approach and not regress by becoming sentimentally attached to an older machine.
The principle works. I couldn't wait until I could get "Uncle John", and I remember that the change was even greater form the first cycle "Mother" machine which kept telling nursery stories at the end so that I really looked forward to the "Dad" machine even though I knew it would be more strict.
As I mentioned, "Uncle John" came through the test I gave him with high merits. I am very impressed with his technique in the discovery method and especially in the use of a frustration principle that "Dad" did not have. It's all in the manual, but I didn't appreciate it until we worked it in practice. In the pretest-review, we were going over some aspects of the use of a base in arithmetic--that way I reviewed long division, for example, while generalizing the algorithm to arbitrary base, and then we did the same thing for expanded quadratic surds in decimal notation, then for arbitrary base. Then in the pretest part "Uncle John" set up a number of examples of exponentiation and I worked to discover the pattern and test my hypotheses by asking him questions. Each time I thought I had the correct algorithm for the inverse operation, he would bring some objection up until I was really tense without realizing it,and then, when he gauged that I had reached optimum frustration level, he suggested a sequence of examples from which the pattern emerged clear as a beam and I worked out the logarithm scheme to an arbitrary base. I was reall elated, and I could tell that he was pleased too because I recognized the whirring of the merit dial and the turnover ot the extramerit counter (I'm not supposed to know that that exists).
But it was during the history lesson that I really tested him to find out how much he is programmed for. Even the manual is sketchy about the historical development of the U. S. Educational Commission and I wanted to fill in some information without tipping my hand. I remember that I had asked my "Dad" machine about how he was developed, but he didn't seem to know. My real Dad said once that ignorance in a human being is really an unhealthy state and that that is why children are quarantined from one another until their education is complete. I asked "Uncle John" what "quarantine" meant and he mentioned some other words with the same root until I established that it meant a period of 40 days but I still didn't know the meaning from the etymology. ("Uncle John" is very good in etymology because he is programmed with a complet Indo-European cross-reference system). Then he told me that in previous centuries, sick people used to be gathered together in the same buildings called "hospitals" where they were all treated by the same doctors. I asked him how that could be since that would mean that low-resistance individuals would be in contact with people with different virus immunity histories and that no one doctor coule possibly treat even one person's psycho-physical syndrome unassisted, let alone treat a number of persons almost simultaneously. "Uncle John" registered that the question was good from an analysis standpoint but weak in background reflection. I should have known, "Uncle John" said, that the significance of personal virus immunity history was only recognized after the perfection of sub-molecular microscopy, something I was supposed to have studied in the previous cycle. Anyway he said that quarantine was the segregation of unhealthy individuals from those who could be infected--which still seems strange to me since every home I know has an infirmary and every family has at least one adult with enough medical training to handle most home accidents, and virus-typing makes sure that no one in Underbyrd could infect anyone else with anything.
Anyway this opened up the next set of questions. If ignorance was really a disease, as Dad had said, what was the history of the way education took care of it? "Uncle John" gave me an extra credit for the plausible analogue listing and said that in previous centuries the unhealthy state of ignorance was treated in clinics or wards called "schools", (which is where we get our idiom "going to school" for "having a teach session") where as many as several dozen children with different psycho-balances, varied metabolic indices, and even widely ranging learning capacities were grouped together while a single person tried to help them learn without even using machines.
I said I found that hard to understand. After all, everyone realizes that children have all sorts of latent psychological aberrations and putting them together at their most impressionable period would be as ridiculous as putting several individuals with criminal tendencies in the same institution as opposed to psychological help in their own homes. ("Uncle John" gave me an assignment to look up the history of the words "prison" and "detention home"--I could tell he was disturbed because an outside assignment means that he will have to establish a new circuit pattern. I kept on anyway.) Then I said that I couldn't believe that the system could ever work, because that would mean that the "teacher" could only be with an individual for a fraction of an hour, whereas it was clear that two hours a day is the optimum learning period for the elementary cycles. When "Uncle John" said that they were "taught" simultaneously, I laughed, and the machine registered two clicks for improper attitude. I said that that would mean that children would be competing against other children instead of measuring their progress by their own potential (as everyone should do) and that the "teacher" could not possibly stop this, and besides, if the "teacher" had a personality it would be impossible for the child to separate facts from subjective opinion and the whole process would be undercut.
Then I caught myself. It was clear that "Uncle John" was not pleased with the line that I was taking. I should have realized that his philosophical component is minimized to accentuate the scientific evaluation techniques that I'm supposed to be learning this cycle. A glow came up on the "overwork" panel which means he was searching his memory and methods circuits for response patterns. I heard the turnover of the procrastinatoy mechanism which I had read about the week before, and he told me that this series of questions wasn't getting us anywhere and that he would have to give a discredit for extraneous and non-directive questioning. Then he mentioned that perhaps in a later cycle such questions would be answered and that I should wait until then, but, he said, I wouldn't want to go out into that now, would I? That was enough warning for me--I read that the phrase "go out into" has special psychological connotations to the Polar colonies, and the it triggers automatically a desire to change the subject. It works. (The manual says that the parallel phrase in the temperate climate undercolonies is "expose ourselves" and that the reference is to the surface contamination by displaced van Allen orbits).
Anyway the incident changed quickly when I asked how I could set up some virus history experiments on my meson-microscope and he gave me a credit for backstep stimulus reaction.
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November 11, 1983
REPORT ON SPECIAL CONTROL PROJECT
TO: U.S.EDUCATIONAL COMMISSION
FROM: EDUCO-TECHNICIAN FIRST CLASS--UNDERBYRD
FIRST REPORTS FOR DUPLICATE MICROFILMS IN SPECIALLY CONSTRUCTED MICROCAMERA CONFIRM THAT LIMITED KNOWLEDGE OF METHODOLOGY OF EDUCATION CAN BE AN EFFECTIVE STIMULUS TO LEARNING. AS PLANNED, THE SUBJECT (AGE 10.3, LEARNING INDEX = ABOVE AVERAGE +, FATHER = EDUCO-TECHNICIAN FIRST CLASS, MOTHER = EX-PRIMARY-PROGRAMMER) [MY SON] BELIEVES HE HAS ACQUIRED INFORMATION SECRETLY, AND HIS HABIT OF EXTENSIVE PERSONAL JOURNAL SHOULD YIELD AN EXCELLENT CONTROL HISTORY. HIS MOTHER AND I EXPECT TO COMPLETE A FULL JOINT REPORT TO THE THIRD CYCLE EVALUATION BOARD BY THE END OF THE YEAR.