May 18, 2012

“On the Cost of Computation in Schools A final word about the cost of doing all this. Turtles. music boxes. computer controlled motors and the like are less expensive than teletypes. Displays are slightly more expensive but becoming rapidly cheaper. So if. computers are being used in a school, there is no good economic argument  [...]

April 19, 2012

“Why then should computers in schools be confined to computing the sum of the squares of the first twenty odd numbers and similar so-called ‘problem-solving’ uses? Why not use them to produce some action? There is no better reason than the intellectual timidity of the computers in education movement, which seems remarkably reluctant to use [...]

April 11, 2012

“Being a mathematician is no more definable as “knowing” a set of  of mathematical facts than being a poet is definable as knowing a set of linguistic facts. Some modern math ed reformers will give this statement a too easy assent with the comment: Yes, they must understand, not merely know. But this misses the [...]

April 10, 2012

“There has been very litter interaction between the elementary curriculum reform movement and the conceptual, theoretical wings of computer science. We believe that by opening the dialogue we may be unleashing an intellectual force of great power; for education might the area of research and application needed for certain germinating ideas in the theory of [...]

December 13, 2011

“In 1971 Channel 5, a local Boston TV station, produced a program on children in new learning situations and included a segment on Logo. Here is that segment. My one regret is that Seymour was not talking with a child during the filming. By the way I am indebted to youTube and one of its [...]

November 28, 2011

“I end by mentioning two less specific “firsts” with which “Teaching Children Thinking” should be credited. At that time the concept of computers in education was synonymous with CAI (computer assisted instruction). I believe that “Teaching Children Thinking” was the first published paper to suggest that the child could be in charge of the machine [...]

November 21, 2011

“Some of my colleagues are disappointed that School manages to so dilute the ideas or so circumscribe their impact that they can be “integrated” into an essentially unchanged system. I have learned to see things differently through my Piaget-trained eyes. At the core of Piaget’s theory of development is the process he calls assimilation: when [...]

November 16, 2011

“With the wisdom of hindsight, it seems clear now that the difficulties encountered by such curriculum reform as the New Math were aggravated by the reactions of parents and teachers to the new things the children were learning. The parents often perceived the new math as strange, as alien to them; they often responded to [...]

November 14, 2011

“Although printed in 1970, “Teaching Children Thinking” was conceived in 1968 and bears the signs of the heady atmosphere of that time. Across the society change was in the air, deeply rooted assumptions were being challenged. On a smaller and less active but not less radical scale challenges to taken-for-granted ideas about children, about education [...]

October 25, 2011

“Let’s go back to Dewey for a moment. Intellectual growth, he often told us, must be rooted in the child’s experience. But surely one of the fundamental problems of the school is how to extend or use the child’s experience. It must be understood that “experience” does not mean mere busy work: two children who [...]