Martin Banks, Personal Computer World 01/84 - checked

January 1984

Whence upon a time, somewhere out there in the dim and distant future, a small child will come up to its parent-person (all sexist expressions and denominations having been expunged from the language) and say: 'Deah pah rent per san, ma eyeee havva ba nan aaaaH?'

To this, the parent-person will look askance at the small child and say, 'eh?'.

The time will have at last dawned when there is no longer any common ground for normal, verbal communications between what constitutes the old and passe (typified by said parent-persons the world over) and the new, dynamic and trendy. Small persons will be talking a strange kind of monotonic, monosyllabic anguish (sorry, English) that us older mortals - trained as we were in verbal interaction with someone who spoke something approaching something understandable by every one else - will be unable to comprehend.

These small persons will have acquired this strange language not from school, where most of us picked up at least the more 'fundamental' aspects of our communicative capabilities, but from little plastic boxes of various sizes and colours. These boxes will by that time have become to these small persons surrogate parent-persons to whom they will look for all sorts of necessary and unnecessary help and advice.

The boxes, as if you didn't know, are all these 'talking' computers, machines which,through a variety of techniques, synthesise the human voice and speak words that can be understood.

Speech synthesis is, in my 'umble opinion, one of the best things to come out of the application of new technology. It is, however, also one of the worst. Now I know this may look like another classic case of Banksey facing in two directions at once, but I feel I can justify such Beeblebroxianism.

It is one of the greatest things (speech synthesis, I mean) because it can be used in a variety of extremely important ways that are of great benefit to personkind. For example, there are a large number of applications in boring things like industry where the capability of a computer control system to enunciate clearly and, perhaps more important, rapidly a problem, danger or similar area of concern to a human operative can prove to be no less than a life-saver. There are applications where the use of speech as an instructional tool to humans can be beneficial. The list is endless.

One entry on this list will be education. Indeed, it has to be on the list for it has already become one of the most popular applications of speech technology. It is here that my Beeblebroxianism starts coming into play, for I really do have my doubts about some of this.

At face value, the use of speaking boxes for education has a great.deal of merit. Because they are driven by computers, which are themselves morons, they can be instructed to take a child methodically through its learning paces in a way (subject to programming, of course) that can be fun, inspirational and rewarding. Dammit, the kids seem to like being taught by these things.

This is all well and good, up to a point. My problem is that I wonder just where that point ought to be. The reason I feel that there is a problem at all stems from the fact that if these boxes are so popular with the kids, and if they do, as they seem to do, a reasonable job in educating children in the fundamentals of arithmetic, grammar, sentence construction and the like, there will be a strong temptation for parent-persons to opt out. This will be either from choice (more time to spend doing the washing, mending the car, doing the pools, going down the pub, etc) or from rejection by the kids because the parent-persons were more boring than the machines, anyway.

Whatever the reason, such a trend is both sad and potentially harmful. It is noticeable, for example, how most parents will at some time refer to the way their children have changed since going to school. The 'pernicious' influence of teachers and other children markedly alters the horizons and perspectives of their 'one-and-only', and often that alteration is permanent.

Exactly the same effects can be achieved with more automated teaching environments, and the effect can be that much greater because the 'environment' can be brought home and set up in a bedroom or living room. These teaching machines carry with them an onerous responsibility on both the parents who buy them and (hopefully) oversee their utilisation, and on the manufacturers and programmers who constructed the machines in the first place.

The responsibility on the parents is that they do not succumb to the temptations that such teaching machines present. It would be very easy indeed to buy a specialised teaching system or concentrate on education software for a general purpose home computer, and assume that the best was being done by the children.

It would become an easy matter to restrict the overseeing of children to the level of ensuring that they were not wasting time playing Space Invaders, and taking no further interest beyond that point. It would be a very tempting prospect; many parents are already happy enough to opt out of a fair proportion of their responsibilities given half a chance. Human nature is, after all, human nature.

Now, it is difficult for most people to query the educational content of the material that children are thus given. At the simplest levels of education (2+2=4, etc) there often seem to be as many theories on how best to present the material as there are educationalists working in the field. At the higher levels, many parents probably wouldn't know the answers any better than the kids, so could not value-judge the efficacy of the education.

This holds true for all forms of education, be it in school with human-type teachers or at home with a computer or education machine. With some of the education machines, however, there are areas that could and should be overseen by the parents, especially where the machines use pseudo-human techniques of interaction.

As such machines go at present, extremely clever though they are to the completed adult, they fall far short of what we should be wanting for our children. The voices that emanate from these boxes are, to date, serious emasculations of what passes for the English language.

Technology is going to be used increasingly to create ever-more powerful and comprehensive educational systems. This in turn is going to give more parent-persons the opportunity to opt out of the responsibility (to use an old-fashioned word) of participating in their off-spring's education. If such opting out ever proves at some future date to have been a great mistake its discovery, as happens with all the best mistakes, will be too late.

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