BRUNSWICK — Angus King Jr. credits the convergence of an “authentic genius” from Blue Hill, an unexpected surplus of state revenue and the political will to affect Maine’s future for what he sees as the early success of the Maine Learning Technology Initiative (MLTI).

“My theory was very simple: If Maine was this island of highly educated, digitally literate people, we increase our standard of living and create opportunities that would move us forward.”— ANGUS KING JR.

Today, he says, the program is an emerging model for the future of education in a digital world.

“We are literally leading the world in digital education,” King said in an interview at his home in Brunswick. “We’re the experts. That doesn’t mean we know everything, but we know more than most because we did it sooner and on a larger scale. It’s been one of the most successful projects in the world.”

As one of the world’s leading experts on technology’s impact on how children learn, Seymour Papert of Blue Hill convinced Maine’s educational policymakers of the power of providing a laptop computer to every student. Papert, now 79, is a founder of the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the inventor of the LOGO computer language.

“All governors and all politicians are chasing the same things, which are jobs and opportunity,” he said. “But I didn’t know what the jobs were going to be when the current crop of kindergartners graduated from high school. I had no idea. … What I did know, looking 20 years out, was that, whatever the jobs will be, they will involve more education, technology and using technology to find information and to solve problems. Therefore, if our kids were the most educated and technologically competent, we win.

“My theory was very simple: If Maine was this island of highly educated, digitally literate people, we increase our standard of living and create opportunities that would move us forward.”

King sought the advice of Seymour Papert, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) professor who had retired to Blue Hill after a long and distinguished career of studying how children think and learn. A founder of MIT’s Media Lab and the inventor of the LOGO computer language, Papert accepted King’s invitation to lunch at the Governor’s mansion in 1998.

“It’s safe to say that he was, and is, the world’s leading expert on digital education and the interface between education and computers,” King said. “He’s an authentic genius.”

At the time of that meeting, King said, Maine’s public schools averaged one computer for every five students.

“As part of our conversation, I asked him: ‘What if we could find some money somewhere and make it 1-to-3, instead of 1-to-5?’ He said: ‘It wouldn’t matter.’ And I said: ‘What if we could do 1-to-2?’ And he said: ‘It wouldn’t matter.’ And I was surprised. And then he said: ‘It is only when it is 1-to-1 that the power occurs.’

“But that was a pipe dream,” King said. “We didn’t have the money.”

(Editor’s note: Papert, 79, is now recovering in Bangor from brain injuries he sustained in December after being struck by a motorcycle as he crossed a busy street while participating in a conference in Vietnam. As a result, he could not be interviewed for this story.)

About two years later, King received word from the Department of Revenue that the state’s 1999-2000 budget year would end with an unanticipated surplus of as much as $70 million.

“It was entirely unexpected, and there were no earmarks on it because nobody knew it was coming,” he said. “I decided we should do something within education that would make a real and lasting difference.”

That surplus, which wound up being $50 million, became the source of the seed money needed to develop the MLTI. That process involved nearly a year of research and planning by a 17-member task force that included Seymour Papert.

Laptops or Chainsaws?

Throughout those months, King engineered the political arm-twisting required for legislative approval of a program that became a lightning rod for those not convinced that spending nearly $10 million a year to provide Internet access to 12-year-olds statewide was a good idea.

King recalls one letter from a parent who suggested that chain saws were a better alternative than laptops in terms of preparing students for future jobs in Maine.

“At least he understood that what we were providing our kids was a tool,” King said. “The difference is that what you can earn with a chain saw tops out at about 15 bucks an hour. What you can earn with a laptop tops out at Bill Gates.”

King recruited Bette Manchester, the techno-savvy principal of the Mount Ararat Middle School in Topsham, to oversee the planning and implementation of the MLTI. He said she understands the importance of training teachers in the techniques and technologies of digital education.

“In retrospect, by far the most important decision we made was to spend a considerable amount of time, money and effort on training the teachers,” King said.

 To ensure that funding for professional development would be available, King, Manchester and others involved persuaded the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to make a $1 million grant for training teachers in the techniques and technologies of digital education.

“It enabled us to do a really first-class job,” he said. “I think preparing the teachers, more than any other single factor, is the reason the Maine project has been probably the most successful in the world.”

Only the Beginning

Five years into implementation of the MLTI, King characterizes it as a work-in-progress that is being fueled by the enthusiasm of the classroom teachers on the project’s front lines. Those teachers, he said, are no longer “the sage on the stage” but the “guide on the side.”

“If you think about it, teaching has essentially been conducted in the same way since the Middle Ages: smart person stands in front of a class and imparts knowledge to people who don’t have it. It’s a pretty straightforward model and exactly how it was done in England in 1500.

“The laptop and the access to information that it provides is a really disruptive technology. It’s a different model. It’s teacher as a coach or a guide. Instead of giving the students information, you’re giving the student the tool to find the information and helping them figure out what to do with the information once they get it. And how to do that is being invented right now by teachers all over Maine. That’s where the really cool stuff is happening.

“The key to this whole thing is the teachers. I’m sure if you looked hard enough, you would find teachers who hate this. I’m not about to suggest that this has been wildly successful in every classroom in every middle school in every community in Maine. Where it is successful it comes down to the willingness of teachers to do things differently, which is why the emphasis on professional development is so important.

“This is new stuff. We think we’re pretty cool and are doing great stuff, but, in reality, we’re at the primitive end of this development.”

Now 63, King says he stays busy these days helping his wife, Mary, raise the couple’s two teenagers. He’s also teaching a “Leaders and Leadership” class at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, where for the past four years he has held the position of “distinguished lecturer.”

King is also busy applying his law degree and his entrepreneurial skills to a long list of projects that range from developing software that encourages teachers to create and share digital content for classrooms to planning a wind farm in western Maine.