April 9, 2012
“You can lead a kid to Euclid, but you can’t make him think.” Papert, S. (1996) The Connected Family: Bridging the Digital Generation Gap. Atlanta: Longstreet Press. Page 187.
“You can lead a kid to Euclid, but you can’t make him think.” Papert, S. (1996) The Connected Family: Bridging the Digital Generation Gap. Atlanta: Longstreet Press. Page 187.
“More than 20 years ago, I was working on a project at the Muzzey Junior High School in Lexington, MA, which had been persuaded by Wally Feuerzeig to allow a seventh grade to “do Logo” instead of math for that year. This was a brave decision for a principal who could not have known that
“I find an interesting toe-hold for the problem in which I called the playful facet–the element of tease inherent in the idea that it would be particularly oxymoronic to convey the idea of constructionism through a definition since, after all, constructionism boils down to demanding that everything be understood by being constructed. The joke is
“My goal in life which has been my major activity over the last 10 years, has been to find ways children can use this technology as a constructive medium to do things that no child could do before, to do things at a level of complexity that was not previously accessible to children.” Papert, S.
“I do not suppose that all children were ever given full access to the ideas of any society. But at least in times of slower change, an equilibrium could be maintained between what society needed its members to know and the learning opportunities it offered (deliberately or mostly not) to its children. Since there is
“Many aspects of School block teachers from the fulfillment of functioning in a class as co-learners.” Papert, S. (1993) The Children’s Machine: Rethinking School in the Age of the Computer. NY: Basic Books. Page 67.
“In Mindstorms (Papert, 1980), I asked (choosing one out of a vast number of possible examples) why the quadratic equation of the parabola is included in the mathematical knowledge every educated citizen is expected to know. Saying that it is “good math” is not enough reason: The curriculum includes only a minute sliver of the
“Hard can become easy if you just represent things differently. Papert, S. (1996) The Connected Family: Bridging the Digital Generation Gap. Atlanta: Longstreet Press.
“Unless I am missing Tyack and Cuban’s point, this account is in the spirit of Tinkering Towards Utopia and in fact, exemplifies one of the major principles in its presentation of the generic life-cycle of reforms: The reform sets out to change School but in the end School changes the reform. One may at first
“Almost all parents think that it is a good thing for their kids to do something called “learning math” and are therefore in the market for software that will “teach kids math.” So far, so good. But what is not so good is that their ideas about what math is, and why the kids should