This category describes the time period in which Papert published or spoke the specific quote
“Children get the knowledge they need, when they need it, from networks of friends, hot lines and, when they are old enough, magazines and the Internet. A first step toward building a new relationship with kids is to join them in their exploration of new ways to learn. In addition to giving us their trust, […]
“In The Children’s Machine I told a learning story about how I helped a student in the “resource room”—which is where they send the kids who are supposed to have learning disabilities—of a public school in one of our big cities. I was able to guess why this kid was looking all around him with
“I have had a lot of flack from people who read this column (and other things I have written) as advocating taking the hard work and discipline out of learning. I don’t blame them. I am a critic of the ways in which traditional school forces kids to learn and most attempts to introduce a
“The cost of making computers is falling rapidly. Today a very good educational computer could be manufactured for a thousand dollars. By the end of this decade a very very much more powerful computer will cost only a few hundred dollars. Thus the cost of supplying each child with a personal computer would be a
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
“An examination of computer use in schools today reveals that students’ interactions with computers are largely teacher-directed, workbook-oriented, for limited periods of time, and confined to learning about the machines themselves or about programming languages. Further, computers are located in separate labs and are not integrated into the standard curriculum. “Doing computer” in school is