“Across the globe there is a love affair between children and the digital technologies. They love the computers, they love the phones, they love the game machines, and – most relevantly here – their love translates into a willingness to do a prodigious quantity of learning. The idea that this love might be mobilized in …
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. – …
“We need chutzpah to face down those people who say “ Hey who are we to say technology should dictate what children learn, that technology should dictate the curriculum. No! Technology should be the tool for implementing the curriculum. It’s other people who dictate it. Who do you think you are to say what children …
“So there are other ways, through this computer system that have opened up, that enable somebody to get knowledge when you need it. Now this leads to, not only to a radically different idea of what kind of knowledge it is, because there’s nothing numerical and nothing about fractions in the description of the parabola …
“In Mindstorms (Papert, 1980), I asked (choosing one out of a vast number of possible examples) why the quadratic equation of the parabola is included in the mathematical knowledge every educated citizen is expected to know. Saying that it is “good math” is not enough reason: The curriculum includes only a minute sliver of the …
“It is close to 40 years since I fell in love with the idea that a technologically rich environment could give to children who love ideas access to learning-rich idea work, and to those who love ideas less the opportunity to learn to love them more. But many ideas are more easily loved than implemented. …
“We do have to think also about content, we do have to think about making another kind of intellectual diet for children, we have to think about them understanding this technology in a deeper way than simply being able to use it, however magical and wonderful and that may be, for access of knowledge and …
“It is impossible to predict what the school of the future will be. History always outsmarts the futurists. But it is easy to predict what it will NOT look like. I am sure that the practice of segregating children by age into “grades” will be seen as an old-fashioned, and inhumane, method of the “assembly …
“We do have to think also about content, we do have to think about making another kind of intellectual diet for children, we have to think about them understanding this technology in a deeper way than simply being able to use it, however magical and wonderful and that may be, for access of knowledge and …
“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 …