“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 […]
“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
“So a lot of school math was useful once upon a time, but we now have calculators and so we don’t need it. But people say that surely we don’t want to be dependent on the calculator. To which I say, “Look at this thing, these eyeglasses, that make a dramatic difference to my life
“In my view, a key to the current trends of discussion about technology and education is an ironic fact about the imbalance between informational and constructional. Whereas the most qualitatively original contribution digital technology could make to education lies in redressing the imbalance, in fact the imbalance is increased by popular perception that so strongly
“Children who grow up with the opportunity to explore the jungles and the cities and the deep oceans and ancient myths and outer space will be even less likely than the players of video games to sit quietly through anything even vaguely resembling the elementary-school curriculum as we have known it up to now.” Papert,
“The phrase “computer literacy” has such a devalued meaning by now that its almost impossible to rescue it. Ive been using the term “technological fluency.” I dont think we have language yet for talking about the kind of knowledge people have about or through these new technologies. Say someone is fluent in French. This doesn’t
Papert wrote the following in the second issue of Wired Magazine back in 1993! “I see then a pattern of intellectual development that I shall oversimplify by casting it in three distinct phases. The first phase is one of universally successful learning. All children show a passion for interactive exploration of their immediate world. The
“Literacy refers not just to being able to read, but to having taken in a whole culture around reading, a culture which usually comes through reading. With multimedia, the role of the written word may become much less important. In the future I suspect we will be less likely to associate people who are educated