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The Daily Papert

Daily words & wisdom of Dr. Seymour Papert

  • “Now I Know Why We Have Nouns and Verbs”
  • 1994 Keynote at National School Boards Conference
  • A Critique of Technocentrism in Thinking About the School of the Future
  • About
  • An Evaluative Study of Modern Technology in Education
  • An Evaluative Study of Modern Technology in Education
  • An Exploration in the Space of Mathematics Educations
  • Bode Miller
  • Child Power: Keys to the New Learning of the Digital Century
  • Computer as Condom
  • Computer as Material: Messing About with Time
  • Computer Criticism vs. Technocentric Thinking
  • Computers in the Classroom: Agents of Change
  • Constructionism vs. Instructionism
  • Constructionism: A New Opportunity for Elementary Science Education
  • Diversity in Learning: A Vision for the New Millennium
  • Does Easy Do It? Children, Games, and Learning
  • Educational Computing: How Are We Doing?
  • Epistemological Pluralism and the Revaluation of the Concrete
  • Event Programming in Logo
  • Ghost in the Machine: Seymour Papert on How Computers Fundamentally Change the Way Kids Learn
  • Hard Fun
  • Ian’s Truck
  • Introduction to Embodiments of Mind by Warren S. McCulloch
  • It Takes a Whole State to Raise its Schools
  • Keynote address – Kids and Computer – What’s a Parent to Do? – MIT, September 1991
  • Keynote address – 1992 New Jersey Educational Computing Conference
  • Keynote address – New Jersey Educational Computing Conference 1990
  • Learning by the Skin of His Teeth
  • LogoWriter Tape 1 (1986)
  • LogoWriter Tape 2 (1986)
  • Looking at Technology Through School-Colored Spectacles
  • MIT Logo Memo Archive
  • My Learning Disability
  • Obsolete Skill Set: The 3 Rs — Literacy and Letteracy in the Media Ages
  • Paper for the President’s Commission for a National Agenda for the 80s
  • Papert Excerpts from an MIT Media Lab Interactive Videodisc (1986)
  • Papert on Logo (c. 1986)
  • Papert On Logo: “New MicroWorlds – Tape 2, Teaching (c. 1986)
  • Papert on Piaget
  • Papert’s Principle
  • Perestroika and Epistemological Politics
  • Preface to The Children’s Machine: Rethinking School in the Age of the Computer
  • Professor Papert Discusses One Laptop Per Child Project
  • Redefining Childhood: The Computer Presence as an Experiment in Developmental Psychology
  • Redefining Childhood: The Computer Presence as an Experiment in Developmental Psychology
  • School’s Out?
  • Semi-annual Constructionism Conference Archives
  • Seymour Papert – Bates College
  • Seymour Papert 2002 Interview
  • Seymour Papert Obituary (1928 – 2016)
  • Seymour Papert Obituary Collection
  • Seymour Papert On Logo: Hurdles – Tape 1 – Grammar (1986)
  • Seymour Papert On Logo: Hurdles – Tape 2 – Names and Variables (1986)
  • Seymour Papert On Logo: Hurdles – Tape 3 – Images of Recursion (1986)
  • Seymour Papert On Logo: Hurdles – Tape 4 – Digging Deeper (1986)
  • Seymour Papert on Logo: New Mindstorms Tape 1 – Resonances (1986)
  • Seymour Papert on Logo: New Mindstorms Tape 2 – Teaching (1986)
  • Seymour Papert on Logo: New Mindstorms Tape 3 – Thinking (1986)
  • Seymour Papert on Logo: New Mindstorms Tape 4 – Styles (1986)
  • Seymour Papert One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) Interview
  • Seymour Papert’s Valedictory Speech Upon Being Named LEGO Professor of Learning Research at the MIT Media Lab
  • Situating Constructionism
  • Some Poetic and Social Criteria for Education Design
  • SUNDAY INTERVIEW
  • Technology in Schools: Local fix or Global Transformation?
  • Technology Works Enterprises Proposal
  • THE CHALLENGES OF IDC: What have we learned from our past? A conversation with Seymour Papert, Marvin Minsky, and Alan Kay
  • The Future of School
  • The Future of School
  • The Gears of My Childhood
  • The Learning State
  • The Lessons of Logo
  • The Lessons of Logo
  • The Parent Trap
  • The Wonderful Discovery of Nothing
  • Tomorrow’s Classrooms?
  • Two Wrongs Don’t Make a Right but Three Rights Do Make a Left
  • Vision for Education: The Caperton-Papert Platform
  • What is Logo? And Who Needs It?
  • Where’s the Elephant?
  • Why School Reform Is Impossible
  • About Seymour Papert
  • Print Archives
  • Multimedia
  • Ways to Help
  • Technology in Schools: Local fix or Global Transformation?
  • Logo as Trojan Horse: Rethinking Logo Philosophy in the Context of a Real School Experience
  • Seymour Papert on ABC Radio – Sunday Profile
  • Seymour Papert’s American Prospect Speech
  • Seymour Papert on Online Learning and Universities
  • Seymour Papert’s CUE Keynote (May 2000)
  • Let’s Tie the Digital Knot
  • Misconceptions about Logo
  • Multimedia

March 13, 2012

2000s, Computers, Constructionism, Epistemology, Learning, Logo, School Reform, Teaching / By gary

“I guess this week the question to ask in Maine is, “Why should every 7th and 8th grader have a laptop computer?” Well, the short answer is, “Every 7th grader should have a laptop computer because everybody should have a laptop computer.” And why? Again the short answer is, “Well, I have one. I could begin to do a quarter of the things I do without it. Everybody I know, with very very very few exceptions – engaged in serious creative intellectual work – writers, artists, historians, mathematicians… They have and use these things. So, it seems obvious that it’s today’s prime instrument for intellectual work.

Now, you might not think that the work of kids is intellectual. If you don’t think that, that’s why we are in such trouble. It is. It ought to be. So they ought to have this instrument.

Having said that, we turn to the longer answer. Including, “Why is it that anyone would resist this? Why would it occur to anyone to deprive them of this intellectual tool since many of the people who want to deprive them of this intellectual tool themselves would protest vehemently if we tried to deprive THEM of their computers?”

Well, my long answer starts with, “Why there is such conservatism about school?” And I am going to say that I diagnose the situation about schools and all of the trouble that schools are in, in a very simple way. Society has moved very fast. School has moved very sluggishly, if at all. The gap between school and society increases and increases and increases. Kids are highly aware of this gap. School is out of synch with the world they’re in. They don’t buy into the idea that school is what prepares them for the real world, because it just doesn’t match the real world that they see.”

Papert, S. (2000) “Technology and Education in the New Millennium” a lecture delivered at Bates College on March 16, 2000.

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