May 9, 2011

Q: What is the point of having a curriculum?

A: “I think there’s not only no point in it, but that it does incredible harm. It turns the teacher into a technician whose job is to hand out facts, not someone who’s in a human relationship with students, someone whose job it is to help students develop their interests and minds.

There is a looser sense of curriculum, though that there are certain things it is important for people to know, things that aren’t really facts. There are no important facts. What I mean is that an attitude, again, a fluency, is important to be able to use knowledge technologies fluently to access knowledge when you need it the way one can use language fluently. It would be nice to have a word, something like “factuacy,” to put the emphasis on fluency rather than on facts.”

Cody, S. & Greene, C.  (1995) Interview with Seymour Papert entitled, “Learning through Building and Exploring.” In Multimedia Today, v3 n4 p30-39 Oct-Dec 1995.

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