“The central question for educators is whether schools of the future will go on teaching the same curriculum, using computers to do the job better, or whether we’ll see radical change in what is taught and what is learned in schools. In my address I shall suggest that the education system will not be able […]
“Children, of course, come into the world as very powerful, highly competent learners, and the learning they do in the first few years of life is actually awesome. A child exploring the immediate world does that pretty thoroughly in an experiential, self-directed way. But when you see something in your immediate world that really represents
“Children get the knowledge they need, when they need it, from networks of friends, hot lines and, when they are old enough, magazines and the Internet. A first step toward building a new relationship with kids is to join them in their exploration of new ways to learn. In addition to giving us their trust,
“I have had a lot of flack from people who read this column (and other things I have written) as advocating taking the hard work and discipline out of learning. I don’t blame them. I am a critic of the ways in which traditional school forces kids to learn and most attempts to introduce a
“The cost of making computers is falling rapidly. Today a very good educational computer could be manufactured for a thousand dollars. By the end of this decade a very very much more powerful computer will cost only a few hundred dollars. Thus the cost of supplying each child with a personal computer would be a
“So, too, the mega-change in education that will undoubtedly come in the next few decades will not be a “reform” in the sense of a deliberate attempt to impose a new designed structure. My confidence in making this statement is based on two factors: (1) forces are at work that put the old structure in
“Although few members of this community make a direct connection with feminism, there is a convergence of intellectual values — a “revaluation of the concrete.” These challenges to the dominant epistemology are intellectually assertive and politically self-conscious. A third challenge most often presents itself as neutral and technical. It is a challenge from within computation,
“Many reformers have tried to jigger the school system, to improve it by making small changes in the hope that it would eventually be transformed into a new modern, well functioning system. But I think these reforms are victims of the same illusion that beset Gorbachev in the early days of Perestroika. Reforming School requires
“An examination of computer use in schools today reveals that students’ interactions with computers are largely teacher-directed, workbook-oriented, for limited periods of time, and confined to learning about the machines themselves or about programming languages. Further, computers are located in separate labs and are not integrated into the standard curriculum. “Doing computer” in school is
“I noticed that a lot of the discussion of computers was dominated by questions like, just to take one example, when they do Logo kids get confused about whether “turn” in Logo means turning this way or turning that way. Yes, they do – but that’s a consequence of it being an incidental, of spending