1 Evolving Educational Pedagogy in Developing Nations Barry Kort, Rob Reilly M.I.T. Media Laboratory {bkort, reilly}@media.mit.edu Abstract The developing countries of the world face many major social challenges, among these challenges is education. It seems that the tendency would be to merely transport current educational pedagogy to these developing nations. But the existing pedagogy primarily fosters the development of ruled-based thinking, which will not suffice given the demands of the current day. Thus a new model for education is in order; one that will address the need: for life-long learning, for learning-how-to-learn, for being able to apply knowledge to unfamiliar circumstances. Developing nations, as many nations of the world do, need new educational pedagogies to foster change to meet new challenges. However developing nations need more than this, they need build, not just rebuild the infrastructure. This creates a situation where bold ideas need to be spawned as old ideas, in many cases, do not exist. Thus in developing nations there is a unique opportunity to: a. build an infrastructure from the ground up, and, b. deploy a novel educational pedagogy without having to confront a well established, well entrenched, infrastructure. This paper offers a novel metamodel for education, which goes beyond the development of rule-based thinkers, to evolve model-based reasoning skills an a model for focusing the intent of education itself. Taken together these two aspects of our novel model for education will provide a new basis for education and for the development of deep reasoning skills within various curricular areas, which will provide the needed tools for those who will confront the coming global village and live in the global community. 1. Introduction The education establishment, including most of its research community, remains committed to the educational philosophy of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and so far none of those who challenge these hallowed traditions has been able to loosen the hold the educational establishment has on how children are taught. - Seymour Papert, The Children’s Machine Recent technological advances have created a digital divide that has touched the lives of a certain segment of the world’s population but has yet to touch the lives of the vast majority of people on this planet. For example, schools in the ‘wired world’ have vast resources at their fingertips; schools not in the ‘wired world’ have little in the way of modern-day educational tools. But much to their credit, the ‘have-not’ schools are open and receptive to assistance from those who ‘have’ and are willing to share. In 1950 US Army General Douglas MacArthur brought Dr. Edwards Deming to Japan to (re)build their infrastructure by introducing the theory of quality assurance and quality control.