“The institution of School, with its daily lesson plans, fixed curriculum, standardized tests, and other such paraphernalia, tends constantly to reduce learning to a series of technical acts and the teacher to the role of a technician.” Hill, D. (1993) Inventing the Future. In Education Week January 12, 1993. Accessed at http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/1994/01/12/16papert.h13.html
“If you need to know whether drug X reduces blood-pressure, you may fairly safely draw a negative conclusion from a “treatment model” experiment in which hospitalized patients were given X and no change in blood-pressure was observed. On the other hand, you would not deduce that drug Y does not increase fertility from the simple
Note: This is a future vision for education, not a report on the present… “School is a place where students learn largely by working on projects that come from their own interests — their own visions of a place where they want to be, a thing they want to make or a subject they want
“Teachers were once among the most respected members of their communities — often the most respected. This position is slipping as schools deteriorate and lose their social function. Some visions of the role of technology in education, for example, the image of the best teacher as a distant teacher, further undermine respect for teachers and
“Incremental change can be self-defeating; it’s not a step on the way to the big change. A silly example: suppose that the inventor of the refrigerator found that the only way to persuade people to buy them would be to make a refrigerator that could drop the temperature by just one degree. Now that thing
“Unless I am missing Tyack and Cuban’s point, this account is in the spirit of Tinkering Towards Utopia and in fact, exemplifies one of the major principles in its presentation of the generic life-cycle of reforms: The reform sets out to change School but in the end School changes the reform. One may at first
“I think that Al Gore and Bill Clinton are doing an incredibly mischievous thing, as is everybody who is propagating the idea that these NetDays, in putting one computer in every classroom connected to the Internet, is a good thing. Now of course it’s a good thing… there’s no question that it is a good
It takes intellectual chutzpah to be serious about replacing “using technology to improve education” by a similar sounding statement with a very different meaning: “inventing new visions of education in the context of a digital world.” And it takes personal chutzpah to face down members of the Education Establishment when they sneer (or worse, smile)
“Some sectors of human activity such as medicine, transportation and communications were transformed beyond recognition during the twentieth century. Compared with such megachange the practices of school have been virtually static. There are in principle two diametrically opposed visions of the role of new technologies in education. In one vision the technology is a means
“Part of learning is getting information. Somebody stands in front of the classroom and preaches, and information is somehow flowing into people’s heads, or so it is said. But that’s only one part of education. The other part, which Dewey would have emphasized, is about doing things, making things, constructing things. However, in our school