“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
”Why is it that children have to do 98,000 repetitions of this?” Mr. Papert said, pointing to an addition problem. “One reason is that they don’t know what they’re looking at. They need an object to think about other things with.” (Seymour Papert) Euchner, C. (1983) Seymour Papert’s ‘Microworld’: An Educational Utopia in Education Week.
“We have described what we consider to be an example of truly educational computing — active, exploratory, student-directed learning involving the use of the computer. Through programming languages such as LOGO, computers allow our students, within certain limits, to perform tasks that are difficult or even impossible to achieve with other materials. We emphasize that
“Rationality is a force for the good.” Papert, S. (2007) Seymour Papert Interview – One Laptop per Child (OLPC). Cambridge, MA: One Laptop Per Child Foundation. YouTube video.
“Much of what the child learns we don’t even notice.” Papert, S. (1984). Computer as Mudpie. Intelligent Schoolhouse: Readings on Computers and Learning. D. Peterson. Reston, VA, Reston Publishing Company. Note: A higher-quality version of this article will be uploaded shortly.
“Precisely these criticisms have often been made by humanists. If they have failed to put schools right what can a “technologist” do? This: take away the cause of the problem. The anti-social nature of school undoubtedly has roots in the class structure of society and in the nature of the Freudian unconscious. As long as
“I know. I think schools generally do an effective and terribly damaging job of teaching children to be infantile, dependent, intellectually dishonest, passive and disrespectful to their own developmental capacities. I think that the examples I have given of learning in a computational environment provide a glimpse of a context for learning in which socialization
“Every deep thinker who has looked at our education system, and I think of everyone, from Voltaire, Rousseau, Piaget, Vygostgy, John Dewey, they’ve all focused on one point, that our school is much too focused on information, on getting facts, far to little on doing things, on learning by doing, by action.” Papert, S. (2004)
The Weekly Digest for The Daily Papert (March 14-17, 2011) March 14, 2011 “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
March 18, 2011 – Weekly Digest Read More »
“The girl who said to her teacher “I want to do that” and the first grader who said to the third grader “show me how to do that” are just two out of hundreds of documented examples of children refusing the “infantalization” inherent in most contemporary schooling. These children refused to do what children are