“Part of learning is getting information. Somebody stands in front of the classroom and preaches, and information is somehow flowing into people’s heads, or so it is said. But that’s only one part of education. The other part, which Dewey would have emphasized, is about doing things, making things, constructing things. However, in our school […]
“I think if your concept of school is what school is as you’ve seen it in the past, well what else would you do with the computer except put it in there? But why is there no discussion about whether school could be very different, and how different it could be? Now, very different can
In honor of Valentine’s Day… “Closely related to appropriation is another word, love. Einstein said, “Love is a better master than duty.” This is often forgotten in many of the modern theories of education. Take cognitive science, for example. I don’t think the people who gave it that name meant any harm, but in psychology,
DON’T: get hung up monitoring your kids’ every mouse click DO: begin to share their joyful experience of discovery Papert, S. (1995) The Parent Trap. Time Magazine. November 13, 1995. p. 34.
“The central issue of change in education is the tension between technicalizing and not technicalizing, and here the teacher occupies the fulcrum position.” “My paradoxical argument is that technology can support megachange in education as far-reaching as what we have seen in medicine, but it will do this through a process directly opposite to what
“It is not surprising that people rooted in schools’ concept of how learning should take place resist such restructuring. What is surprising is the logical distortion they resort to in order to persuade themselves that there are powerful objective reasons that make the transformation impossible.” Papert, S. (1996). Computers in the Classroom: Agents of Change.
On the NCTM Standards….. “I think they [the Standards] are going in the right direction but they are incredibly conservative, from my point of view. But again, I’d make reservation that if one has to work within the framework for schools as they are and curriculum as it is, maybe there isn’t very much room
“I contrast this with a sex education class I witnessed in a school. Teacher produces a diagram showing the plumbing of human genitalia and gives a lesson full of physiological information. I could almost hear him ticking off in his mind the “content” that has to be “covered” in the lesson plan. Meechai didn’t teach
It is this freedom of the teacher to decide and, indeed, the freedom of the children to decide, that is most horrifying to the bureaucrats who stand at the head of current education systems. They are worried about how to verify that the teachers are really doing their job properly, how to enforce accountability and