Sixth International School On Mind, Brain And Education
2011 August 3-7
Education in the
Digital Era
Directors: Antonio M. Battro and Kurt W. Fischer
Program officer: María Lourdes Majdalani
Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina
The Meno experiment: from ancient Greece to one laptop per child
In his celebrated dialog with Meno, Socrates gave a remarkable lesson of geometry, the first record of a pedagogical method in history. We show that educated adults and adolescents of the XXIst century respond as Meno’s slave. This demonstrates that the Socratic dialog is built on a great intuition of human reasoning, providing a striking demonstration of universality across time and cultures. I present results of simultaneous wireless Near Infrared Spectroscopy recordings of teacher and student performing the dialog and incorporation of the dialog in a country-wide, educational program based in the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) program.