“Seymour Papert: I’m introducing a word for that, when I was at school they made us learn Latin, why? Not because we were going to speak Latin but because by learning Latin you would learn to think in a rigorous way. We’d laugh at that. I’d think we’d laugh much too soon. Because the justification […]
“90 per cent of what we teach in school math is irrelevant today. A lot of it is about how numbers are written. It’s the influence of a paper based learning. Yeah you think of all that stuff you spent hours and hours, you write the numbers…. It’s about how you write numbers, it’s not
“Putting flash cards on the screen is not a new way of learning math. It is a polished-up version of the old ways and promotes to greater heights their worst and most mechanical features. Moreover, it is often done in a spirit that I see as dangerously dishonest: Disguising flash cards as a game introduces
“Another way in which computers can be either integrated into or isolated from the learning process has to do less with the computer as an instrument than with computing as a set of ideas. The issue appears very clearly when one contrasts what has come to be called “computer literacy” with the sense of the
“Despite many examples of such excellent work, the isolation of the computer presence must be seen as a kind of immune response of school to a foreign body; whether or not the participants were aware that this is what they were doing, it is clear that the logic of the process was to bring the
“While it’s true that most people in math class don’t learn much math, most kids in French class don’t learn much French. But, we don’t say that they are not “French-ly minded.” We don’t say that they don’t have a head for French because we know that if they grew-up in France, they would learn
“Then there is the sharing of knowledge. Many education reforms failed because parents did not understand or could not accept what their children were doing. Remember the New Math? This time there will be many who have not had the personal experience necessary to appreciate fully the multiple ways in which digital media can augment
“Einstein used the words “so simple only a genius could have thought of it” to describe the theory advanced by pioneering Swiss philosopher and psychologist Jean Piaget that children don’t think like grown-ups. Of course, it does not take a theory or a genius to find children’s utterances cutely surprising or exasperatingly illogical. It took
“How do we make writing become hard fun? One way is to develop for kids “writable” activities that they love to do. The building of robotic devices acquires “writability” because it lends itself to stage-by-stage description. Its writability is further enhanced by the use of word processors and digital cameras. But beyond technology there is
“Passionate love affairs of the young are seldom understood by their elders, and although parents cannot always be specific about their concerns, an unusually wide generation gap feeds fears that children are off in dangerous places. Worrying about bad company in cyberspace has captured first place from worrying about children becoming isolated nerds.” Papert, S.