How Children Learn
Q: I want to ask a big question. I want to know how children learn.
Seymour Papert: Oh, that’s a baby. Kids learn by following their own interests; by exploring. They learn because they’ve got an instinct to learn and they follow it. How do grownups manage to learn? Somehow they escape school’s attempt to strangle their instinct to learn and replace it with a habit of being taught.
Q: If we gravitate toward situations in which everybody is permitted to learn and develop at their own pace, what would be the point of standards?
Seymour Papert: I don’t think there need to be universal standards. I do think that if you do a specific job, you will need to have certain skills and that demonstrating these skills will always be necessary to get the job you want. But there is quite a movement now to allow people to present a portfolio of things they’ve done as a way of demonstrating their skills instead of simply saying which tests they’ve passed. As new ways of learning develop, we will have to develop more and better ways of understanding what you have to know in order to do the thing you want to do in the world.
Q: What do we know about how children learn that we didn’t know ten or twenty years ago?
Seymour Papert: The growing diversity of media has shown us more ways children can learn, and that in this way we’ve gained a greater appreciation of the diversity of ways in which learning can happen. Children who seem poor at one kind of learning, like school, for example, might be very good at a different kind of learning.
The idea of multiple intelligences, though quite faddish, has helped us to accept diversity more and to realize there are many different ways of thinking, learning, and developing ideas. This means we can recognize and value the abilities of many more people who were previously regarded as untalented and ungifted. We’re expanding our recognition of human potential, and with that, the range of human potential.
Seymour Papert Related Stories:
- Time Travelers
- Blocks, Sand, LEGO, and Computers
- The Gifted and Talented Kids Who Couldn’t Weigh a Giraffe
- Genuine Multimedia
- How Children Learn
- Seymour Papert Quotes
Source:
Papert, S. (1995). Seymour Papert: Learning through Building and Exploring (The Multimedia Today Interview). Multimedia Today. http://www.multimedia.hosting.ibm.com/mmtoday/magazine/papert-1.html