“After World War I Piaget moved to Zurich to attend Carl Jung’s lectures on experimental psychology, and then to Paris to study logic and abnormal psychology. Working with Théodore Simon in Alfred Binet’s child psychology lab, he noticed that Parisian children of the same age made similar errors on true-false intelligence tests. Fascinated by their […]
“This praise for the concrete is not to be confused with a strategy of using it as a stepping-stone to the abstract. That would leave the abstract ensconced as the ultimate form of knowing. I want to say something more controversial and more subtle in helping to demote abstract thinking from being seen as “the
“I’m going to pick on one little corner of school, namely mathematics. I am a mathematician, so it is easy for me to talk about math, but what I have said applies to everything. Now in mathematics the dominating feature is the content. I recently did a little research on what discussion there is in
My old friend, Ihor Charischak, shared this four minute clip in which Seymour Papert addresses the “suicidal” tendencies of teacher training and calls for more thought to being given to the “art of learning.” “When they went to school, the first thing they [children] had to learn was to stop learning and to begin being
“An answer to the dilemma is suggested by looking back at the first years of a child’s life, when a volcano of learning takes place with nobody “putting the kid right” or “telling the real explanation.” Why doesn’t the learning of these toddlers run wild? Although they do come to hold beliefs in words or
September 27, 2011 Read More »
“The ridiculous situation where supply and demand exist but cannot meet comes from the commitment to uniformity in schools. In most countries the uniformity works at a national level: A ministry of education would have to decide to adopt the new idea. In the United States there is a decentralized system that allows each town
September 26, 2011 Read More »
“Q: But there are statistics to show that in most cases technology in schools doesn’t work. A: The statisticians ask a silly question and get a silly answer. Of course “technology doesn’t work.” Technology doesn’t do anything. People do. Statistics that lump together technology implementations across the board — averaging the good with the bad
September 22, 2012 Read More »
Video of Seymour Papert on “Idea Aversion” from 2009 interview One of theses clips should play on your device!
September 20, 2011 Read More »
In 1990, Louise C. Orlando of Teaching and Computers, a long defunct magazine, asked Seymour Papert what most would consider a softball question based on a contemporary education craze of that period. Interviewer: What do you think of cooperative learning? Papert: I think it’s very bad when students are forced to work in groups. But,
September 19, 2012 Read More »
“The scandal of education is that every time you teach something you deprive a child of the pleasure and benefit of discovery.” Papert, S. (1996) The Connected Family: Bridging the Digital Generation Gap. Atlanta: Longstreet Press. page 68.
September 15, 2011 Read More »