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Technology that Takes the Learner into
Account - William Bernhardt
At first glance, most of the materials for learning and teaching created by Caleb Gattegno
seem unexciting. The geoboard is just a wooden square crisscrossed by lines and with nails
sticking up. The crude draughtsmanship and drab colors in the wall pictures for the Silent
Way are far from eye-catching. Even his most famous creations, the color-coded charts for
literacy and language learning, while vivid and striking, completely lack the razzle-dazzle
features that many educators assume are essential to any technology for attracting and holding
the interest of learners.
The appearance, so often confirmed by teachers confronting the charts, pictures, rods, etc., for
the first time, is that Gattegno ignored learners by denying them entertainment and
explanation. How could students possibly become "motivated" by such materials? How could
teachers and students possibly understand what to do without extensive spoken or written
instructions?
The reality behind the appearance is a paradox: that Gattegno showed his concern for learners
by leaving our rather than by putting in. His materials work because they throw the learner
back on his or her own considerable powers and invite us to use everything we have: our
perception, intuition, capacity for action, command of a native spoken language, and so on,
the full list will be very long indeed. They trigger our activity, our mobilization of our own
energy, instead of giving and telling. Of course, this is easy to assert as a claim. But words
will not be sufficient to convince people without first-hand experience that less can actually
be more.
Perhaps we need to turn away from materials as complex as those I have already mentioned
and focus on some of the simplest, and yet extremely powerful, technologies that Gattegno
introduced (or, I should say, re-introduced) into modern education: silence, gesture, and the
pointer.
Silence
That speech can be a powerful technology for education was amply demonstrated by Socrates,
Confucius, and the other ancient masters. And since it could be so easily preserved, in the
form of writing, its importance and utility were in no danger of being ignored. Silence, on the
other hand, is not a "something" that can be written down and preserved in a book and so,
although mentioned by many sages (especially in the east) since antiquity, its role in teaching
and learning remained obscure (unnoticed) for the most part.
Gattegno was perhaps the first educator to focus on the importance of silence as a technology.
For Gattegno, silence became as concrete a tool in his way of working as a pencil, a
chalkboard, or a microcomputer program

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"Silence", as a technology for teaching, can be described in its operations by analogy to a
"toggle switch". Whenever the teacher becomes aware that the learners can grasp whatever
they are working on by non-verbal means, by noticing rather than by listening, the teacher's
speech-making automatisms are instantly switched to "off". If the learners can look and see
that something is so, then there is no need to tell them. It also means that the teacher does not
pre-empt the learners from saying what they could say by anticipating them and saying it first,
or by saying it in your way rather than in their way. However, when a verbal hint is again
required, the same switch toggles back to "on". Mastery of this technology consists in
teaching oneself how to toggle "off" for increasingly longer periods of time and toggle "on"
for the most fugitive of instants.
As in the case of any technology, it is important to ask what purposes "Silence" serves.
Perhaps the most important is that, in contrast to speech, it allows the learners to be
themselves. For when we speak to our students, there is necessarily an assumption on our part
that what we say is appropriate (otherwise, we would say something else) and that we know
what is happening in them. But when we are silent, we acknowledge that we don't know what
is happening within the other(s).
Silence is probably the most unexciting technology that could be imagined. And yet it has
proved incredibly powerful and energizing for the thousands of students who have been
exposed to it through teachers trained in the Gattegno approaches to mathematics, languages,
and literacy in native languages. Further, although the number of teachers who have
wholeheartedly embraced The Silent Way is small, a much larger group has been affected by
the awareness, put into circulation by Gattegno (who else could claim credit for it?) that
students learn more as teachers talk less.
Gesture
This technology, derived from the art of mime, works in concert with silence to trigger
awareness in the learners with minimal support from language. As when an instructor
illustrates by a tiny movement of the fingers that only a little bit of energy is required to make
a certain sound instead of the larger expenditure which would produce a different sound. It's a
technology rather than an art because the various gestures used in the classroom are analogous
to punctuation in writing. They serve to reduce ambiguity and clarify meaning, but without
calling attention to themselves as a performance.
Gattegno himself used both artful, stagy gestures (the eyebrows raised in mock surprise, the
gallic shrug, etc.) and those of the kind I am trying to describe here: purely conventional,
emotionally neutral.
The Pointer
Like the close-up in film, Gattegno used this simple technology to focus the learner's
perception on a pinpoint, or a contrast between one point and another, or the route through a
sequence of points. More versatile than the close-up, it could also move in a panoramic
sweep, bear rhythms, flow with melodies, draw imagined figures in the air.
In fact, the pointer exploits the learner's powers of imagery and intuition, analysis and
synthesis, stressing and ignoring to a degree that film, with its more discrete images, cannot.
Gattegno's reinvention of these three technologies -silence, gesture and pointer- are easily
overshadowed by his original inventions -color-coded charts, "Pop-Up" films for literacy in
native language, the "open book" format for student texts, various microcomputer
applications, etc.- but they are perhaps even more profound in their respect for learners by
virtue of their simplicity and universal applicability. Indeed, it is difficult to conceive of

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instruction in any subject matter, art, craft, or skill where these tools have no application.
Having once experienced the power of these technologies in his or her own classroom, what
teacher could bear to give them up? Having been forced to focus his/her awareness through
their use, what student would prefer listening to and reading verbal explanations?
That the preceding questions are not mere rhetorical flourishes can become clear if we
consider the current success, throughout the world, of computer software which, through an
analogous electronic technology, makes use of silence, visual conventions '"icons"), and a
pointer ("cursor") of sorts. Hundreds of thousands of people have mastered these without
reading a manual (or after throwing it away in disgust) or receiving a lesson. Even if the great
majority of educators are still unaware of these technologies and their applications to the
classroom, the millions of children all over the world who have learned to play "Nintendo"
(and other video games) without any help beyond their own powers of perception and action
demonstrate that the technology is in circulation.
Those educators (and entrepreneurs) who do recognize the potential of video games and
computer software with a "graphic interface" for new educational technology are generally
incapable of making much use of their insight. Lacking awareness of the powers of learners,
they ascribe the appeal of these technologies to entertainment, to their capacity for distraction.
They don't see that the basis of the appeal is something quite different: that I, the learner, am
taken into account. My freedom to focus my awareness on whatever I choose to stress is
granted; my capacity to see for myself what to do before anyone else tells me anything is
acknowledged; my ability to grasp a whole way of working from a few visual details or hints
is respected; my ability to follow a dynamic process when a focal point is provided is
exploited.
Looking at Gattegno's work as a whole, we can see that the constant in all of his materials for
teaching and learning is that they employ technology that takes learners into account. He
showed us that what really matters is not a questions of "high" versus "simple tech" but of
whether can develop tools that truly build on what we are.
© William Bernhardt The College of Staten Island, City University of New York, U.S.A.
The Science of Education in Questions - N° 4 - December 1990
"Technology that Takes the Learner into Account" by William Bernhardt is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.