April 28, 2011

“It [education] is analogous to a market-driven economy. Like Darwinian evolution, numerous interplays allow many results to organically emerge. How do we intervene in this divergent, organic, apparently chaotic system?

As in a “free market” the government doesn’t tell us how many nails to produce, but it does intervene in the economy; the FDA doesn’t tell us what to eat, but it intervenes.

For example, there was no such thing as environmentalism until a conceptual revolution occurred in the ’50s. Learning needs a similar conceptual shift, called for now the “Learning Environment.”

There is nobody who has a job in education that is analogous to the environmental agencies’ jobs. We need this.

Schools are only part of the learning environment. The line between what is concerned at the home and at the school is disappearing. Until recently parents never had a thought about how math should be taught, for instance.

But now, there are software products that say “here’s how to learn math without even knowing” (which is wicked idea, and should be banned by an educational protection agency).”

* [education] was inserted by DailyPapert.com for purposes of clarity

Moore, A. (1998) Seymour Papert quoted in archived article, Targets Hit, Targets Missed — Seymour Papert, chronicling his speech at the October 1998 Camden Technology Conference (now PopTech). The actual video of the event has been lost to the Web.

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