“We don’t know how to make an alternative intellectual diet for children. We do not have this experience, it is not what our researchers in education are trained to do, nor even our teachers. And this is something we need to put more resources into and this we need to see as a goal.” Papert, […]
“Just as pendulums, paints, clay, and so forth, can be “messed around with,” so can computers. Many people associate computers with a rigid style of work, but this need not be the case. Just as a pencil drawing reflects each artist’s individual intellectual style, so too does work on the computer.” Papert, S. & Frantz,
“As long as schools confine the technology to simply improving what they are doing rather than really changing the system, nothing very significant will happen” Papert, Seymour. (1998). “Technology in schools: to support the system or render it obsolete?” accessed (2004) at The Milken Family Foundation website.
“Because in our popular culture the informational side of the computer is the side that is most familiar and most useful, it has the tendency to strengthen that side of our education system. Now that’s good to strengthen it, but it’s also had the effect of pushing the balance over, away from the constructional side.”
Papert has been criticized for taking video games seriously–and for soliciting a $3 million grant from Nintendo to develop learning tools that look and feel more like video games than schoolbooks. The three-year project ended last year, but Papert makes no apologies for it. “Change in education isn’t just going to come from ivory-tower academics,”
“Any adult who thinks one of these games is easy need only sit down and try to master one,” he writes. “Most are hard, with complex information–as well as technique–to be mastered.” Video games empower children “to test out ideas about working within prefixed rules and structures in a way few other toys are capable
“I was observing a child working with a C.A.I. program for multiplication. There was something strange going on. I had seen the child do several multiplications quickly and accurately. Then I saw him give a series of wrong answers to easier problems. It took me a while to realize that the child had become bored
“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)
“I am talking about a revolution in ideas that is no more reducible to technologies than physics and molecular biology are reducible to the technological tools used in the laboratories or poetry to the printing press. In my vision, technology has two roles. One is heuristic: The computer presence has catalyzed the emergence of ideas.
“For the reformists, the computer will not abolish schools but will serve them. The computer is seen as an engine that can be harnessed to existing structures in order to solve, in local and incremental measures, the problems that face schools as they exist today. The reformist is no more inclined than the revolutionary to