May 22, 2012
“The learning culture of your home will sooner or later have to make connections with learning cultures outside.” Papert, S. (1996) The Connected Family: Bridging the Digital Generation Gap. Atlanta: Longstreet Press. Page 15.
1990s
May 17, 2012
“Everyone knows computers help children learn. But I was coming to understand that most parents will do better at sharing and enhancing their children’s learning if they take a hard look at their own learning’. Many need to work at their learning habits; most, even those who are adept at using computers should learn new
May 16, 2012
“Demoting reading from its privileged position in the school curriculum is only one of many consequences of Knowledge Machines. A child who has grown up with the freedom to explore provided by such machines will not sit quietly through the standard curriculum dished out in most schools today. Already, children are made increasingly restive by
May 15, 2012
“Building and playing with castles of sand, families of dolls, houses of Lego, and collections of cards provide images of activities which are well rooted in contemporary cultures and which plausibly enter into learning processes that go beyond specific narrow skills. I do not believe that anyone fully understands what gives these activities their quality
May 8, 2012 (Rare Discoveries Week)
“So there are other ways, through this computer system that have opened up, that enable somebody to get knowledge when you need it. Now this leads to, not only to a radically different idea of what kind of knowledge it is, because there’s nothing numerical and nothing about fractions in the description of the parabola
May 8, 2012 (Rare Discoveries Week) Read More »
April 30, 2012
“Culturally shared negative attitudes toward teachers are nour ished by personal experiences. As a rebellious child I saw teachers as the enemy. Then, with time, these feelings merged with a theoretical position which had the illogical consequence of further demonizing teachers by identifying them with the roles that School forced on them. I disliked School’s
April 18, 2012
“I have noted elsewhere (Papert, 1996b), that School’s math can be characterized by the fact that its typical act is making marks on paper. Explorations in the Space of Mathematics Education develops this idea by imagining an alternative mathematical education in which the typical activity begins with and consists of creating, modifying, or controlling dynamic
April 17, 2012
“Nineteenth century researchers seeking to improve transportation stumble on the idea of a jet engine and propose to use it to augment the power of horses pulling stage coaches. Researchers of a rival school ridicule the idea of using technology to solve the problem and suggest that the better way is to train the coachmen.
April 16, 2012
“I give talks about this sort of thing to educators and at the end they say, “Well exactly how is the computer going to help me teach fourth-grade math?” And that’s exactly the wrong question — there’s not going to be a “fourth-grade.” There’s not going to be a separate math class. There’s not going
April 12, 2012
“School as we’ve known it is based on an assembly-line model. And the assembly line was a great invention when Henry Ford made it. And the school might have been a great invention when it was made, but it is an assembly-line model. You come into school, you’re in the first grade, in the first