Curator’s Note: Thanks to the Internet Archive, I found this long-lost article by Dr. Papert written for the March 1981 issue Creative Computing magazine. (Creative Computing played a major role in my adolescent development as I learned to program through 7th-12th grade). Enjoy the first of many excerpts to be shared from this article. – […]
“So, too, the mega-change in education that will undoubtedly come in the next few decades will not be a “reform” in the sense of a deliberate attempt to impose a new designed structure. My confidence in making this statement is based on two factors: (1) forces are at work that put the old structure in
“Although few members of this community make a direct connection with feminism, there is a convergence of intellectual values — a “revaluation of the concrete.” These challenges to the dominant epistemology are intellectually assertive and politically self-conscious. A third challenge most often presents itself as neutral and technical. It is a challenge from within computation,
“Many reformers have tried to jigger the school system, to improve it by making small changes in the hope that it would eventually be transformed into a new modern, well functioning system. But I think these reforms are victims of the same illusion that beset Gorbachev in the early days of Perestroika. Reforming School requires
“From the perspective of the 1990s, it appears bizarre or downright reactionary that Mindstorms makes no reference to gender or multiculturalism. I have become convinced that recognizing the androcentric nature of traditional ways of knowing will play a central role in producing change in education. A political reason for this conviction is feminism’s strength as
“I noticed that a lot of the discussion of computers was dominated by questions like, just to take one example, when they do Logo kids get confused about whether “turn” in Logo means turning this way or turning that way. Yes, they do – but that’s a consequence of it being an incidental, of spending
“The essence of Piaget was how much learning occurs without being planned or organized by teachers or schools. His whole point was that children develop intellectually without being taught!” “Papert misses ‘Big Ideas’ of the good old days in AI” MIT News. July 10, 2012. Retrieved on March 3, 2014 from http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2002/papert.html. The Daily Papert
“The word educology reminds us that we need a theory of education. One might say theories already exist. There is educational psychology; there is a theory of instruction; there are courses on the theory of how to administrate schools. But these are not theories of education as a whole. They are theories of small aspects
“These children are engaged in something that traditional school seldom offers: serious projects that involve working on hard technical problems for many hours a day, every day for several weeks. In the course of doing so, they come into contact with a wide range of technical, scientific and mathematical knowledge, some of which may be
“Indeed, I would argue that anything that could be implemented in a school context without extensive use of digital technologies could not be fully true to the progressive ideal that children should be able to acquire knowledge by using it in activities in which they have a personal interest.” Papert, S. (1998) “Whose Finger is