“Just as pendulums, paints, clay, and so forth, can be “messed around with,” so can computers. Many people associate computers with a rigid style of work, but this need not be the case. Just as a pencil drawing reflects each artist’s individual intellectual style, so too does work on the computer.” Papert, S. & Frantz, …
Educators should “start clearing their heads about notions that computers are expensive. Every child should have a computer like an Apple II.” Mr. Papert noted that New York City schools spend more than $30,000 on a student over the course of his 13 years of public schooling. If the computer were priced at its manufacturing …
”Why is it that children have to do 98,000 repetitions of this?” Mr. Papert said, pointing to an addition problem. “One reason is that they don’t know what they’re looking at. They need an object to think about other things with.” (Seymour Papert) Euchner, C. (1983) Seymour Papert’s ‘Microworld’: An Educational Utopia in Education Week. …
“We have described what we consider to be an example of truly educational computing — active, exploratory, student-directed learning involving the use of the computer. Through programming languages such as LOGO, computers allow our students, within certain limits, to perform tasks that are difficult or even impossible to achieve with other materials. We emphasize that …
“Much of what the child learns we don’t even notice.” Papert, S. (1984). Computer as Mudpie. Intelligent Schoolhouse: Readings on Computers and Learning. D. Peterson. Reston, VA, Reston Publishing Company. Note: A higher-quality version of this article will be uploaded shortly.
“Precisely these criticisms have often been made by humanists. If they have failed to put schools right what can a “technologist” do? This: take away the cause of the problem. The anti-social nature of school undoubtedly has roots in the class structure of society and in the nature of the Freudian unconscious. As long as …
“I know. I think schools generally do an effective and terribly damaging job of teaching children to be infantile, dependent, intellectually dishonest, passive and disrespectful to their own developmental capacities. I think that the examples I have given of learning in a computational environment provide a glimpse of a context for learning in which socialization …
“The girl who said to her teacher “I want to do that” and the first grader who said to the third grader “show me how to do that” are just two out of hundreds of documented examples of children refusing the “infantalization” inherent in most contemporary schooling. These children refused to do what children are …
“I am talking about a revolution in ideas that is no more reducible to technologies than physics and molecular biology are reducible to the technological tools used in the laboratories or poetry to the printing press. In my vision, technology has two roles. One is heuristic: The computer presence has catalyzed the emergence of ideas. …
“For the reformists, the computer will not abolish schools but will serve them. The computer is seen as an engine that can be harnessed to existing structures in order to solve, in local and incremental measures, the problems that face schools as they exist today. The reformist is no more inclined than the revolutionary to …