Seymour Papert
When again, you know that in real life everything is projects and you, whatever you do, it’s part of a process. You’re trying to achieve a purpose. And it extends over time. Life itself is a project bringing up a child, furnishing a house, making a meal. And this is different from what we do in school most often, where we give you ask a question and you get an answer.
Problem solving in school usually means somebody gave you a problem and then you gave the answer. That problem was not part of a purposeful project where you solved it in order to do something else. I think that makes a huge difference and that makes for a lot of what’s so artificial in school and where children so often don’t really see the purpose.
They don’t because it doesn’t have a purpose. The, in the specific activity, you asked to do something which you just was on somebody else’s agenda. Somebody else gave you this. Do you do it? Whereas if you’re trying to achieve a result, you’ll meet many problems along the way. And you will solve problems, but maybe you won’t solve the problem.
Maybe you’ll say, that’s too hard. I’ll achieve the purpose some other way. And that’s a more interesting approach. ’cause it’s more like what happens in real life and it’s more personal. So I think this is the essence of what I think of as project oriented. Learning that you are learning in a situation where you are always trying to achieve a purpose that’s beyond the immediate action that you’re doing or the immediate problem that you’re solving.
It’s always in the context of, where’s this going? And I think that making things meaningful is not only better in a kind of moral sense, I think that encouraging people to do meaningless activities is absolutely dangerous from a moral, ethical point of view. ‘Cause then they start doing mindless things and you get stories like, we did atrocities because we were carrying out audit.
So I think it’s morally bad, but I think also if cognitively that when you are doing something as part of a purpose that you’ve accepted and you own that purpose, you see much more meaning in it, and you’re focused on the meaning and you learn much more deeply. Now, one other dimension is that.
I think that the experience of being in a long project where you wanna work on something that’s gonna take you weeks maybe, or months or years or that from that in itself, there’s a certain kind of important learning that is often missing or usually missing in the traditional school setting.
And that is learning how to handle. Something that’s extended over a long period of time. And so that’s another aspect of project that we can incorporate this time element into it.